I don't see how changing to stats would change this substantially.
It won't. In fact the main point of my post is that a shift to stats won't make things better, unless we fix other things. I didn't really get around to explaining why I think stats would be a good alternative class to offer for SOME high school students rather than algebra II, which is a separate issue. (Basically, there I agree with many other posts here that some intuitive understanding of statistics is really important to make sense of any real-world data, which people are more likely to encounter on an everyday basis than the need to solve a logarithmic equation symbolically for example.)
It's been half a century and perhaps I misremember, but I think a course built around Darrell Huff's "How To Lie With Statistics" might be a lot more useful to most High School Students than a standard mathematical treatment. And it'd certainly be a lot less mind-numbing.
Agreed. Is our goal to teach abstract symbolic manipulation poorly to students who don't care, or should we instead focus on actual numeracy and conceptual understanding that could be applied directly to the real world?
This sort of revolution has been happening a bit in high-school physics curricula already, with the "conceptual physics" movement that started about 25 years ago. The idea is NOT to "dumb down" physics, but rather to focus classroom time on ideas that will be most useful to certain types of students. For those who are bound for college in math, science, engineering, etc., the numerical rigor of "traditional physics" is important in high school.
For other students, the conceptual approach focuses on clear logic and empirical thinking, rather than getting bogged down in algebra. There's still math and certainly a lot of data collection in hands-on experiments, but the math is kept to rather simple equations -- with a strong emphasis on making sure students thoroughly understand how the equations work, rather than just doing exercises in symbolic manipulation.
I taught conceptual physics courses in high school for a couple years (along with standard physics and AP level). I was skeptical of the idea at first, but now I believe it's a great alternative for many students. And the rigor level can be quite high: the kinds of problems I often gave on tests would have likely stumped students taking a more traditional algebra-based physics course -- because they focused on deeper understanding of certain concepts in a completely different way.
Anyhow, if our goal is to produce high school graduates with numeracy and an intuitive understanding of mathematical concepts, we might be better off having "conceptual statistics" be an alternative path in high school for some students. I know most of us here "think in math" (and particularly abstractions like algebra, calculus, algorithms, etc.) pretty fluently, but most people don't -- but that doesn't mean those people can't often develop good intuition about how numbers work in the world.
He suggests dropping Algebra II as a requirement. The first two statistics courses I took in college had only Algebra I as a prerequisite.
As someone who actually taught Algebra II in high school (years ago), and who taught it one year in a lower-class mostly minority school district, I'll offer a few observations:
(1) I think a stats course would be a great alternative for many students compared to a second year of algebra.
(2) Algebra II was in fact a barrier for many students. There was a high rate of students failing and dropping the course. (At that time, in the state I was teaching, it wasn't strictly required for graduation -- but it was strongly recommended.)
(3) However, the problems with algebra II often start with teaching in algebra I. The algebra I and "pre-algebra" classes tend to be the "dumping ground" in many school districts for less qualified teachers. Teachers with real math degrees often were required to take stuff a lot more complicated than high school, and they often find it barely interesting to teach calculus or pre-calculus. So, in most places the qualified teachers who understand math often teach those upper-level courses, and the random coaches and people who barely passed the math certification test end up teaching algebra I. (There are serious teacher shortages in many places in the US, particularly for secondary math and science.)
(4) As an algebra II teacher, I was confronted with many students who had had a substitute teacher in algebra I for a large portion of the year. The district simply couldn't find qualified teachers to fill those classrooms. The students knew nothing. The previous algebra II teacher (a really smart woman) quit in the middle of the year, because she recognized this and wanted to either (a) send the students back to algebra I since they shouldn't have passed in the first place or (b) require many of the students to come in for mandatory tutoring outside of school hours. She wanted to help the students and was willing to take her own personal time to fix this problem. But the administration said neither was possible under state law, since the students already "had credit" for algebra I. After fighting the battle for a while, she quit.
(5) In many states, algebra teachers are forced to make stupid curriculum choices due to state-mandated curricula. I haven't looked at the new Common Core approaches and what they require, but I can tell you from my experience that we often were required to spend a ridiculous time on stuff that might have been useful for scientists and engineers headed for college in the 1950s, but these skills were much less relevant with modern calculators and computers.
(6) In general, most state curricula have tended to emphasize symbolic manipulation over real-world application (which often comes with true understanding). I was forced to spend many weeks going over how to put conic section equations into standard form, but there was nothing in state guidelines asking teachers to spend time on much more relevant real-life stuff, like applications of basic exponential equations to calculating loan terms or mortgages, investments, etc. When at some point I realized that only 2 of the 140 students I was teaching that year knew what the term "compound interest" meant, I actually abandoned the state standards for a couple weeks because I thought it was my moral responsibility to teach these kids some actual skills that could be useful in personal finance -- this would likely be the last class that many of them would ever take in their lives.
(7) Given the poor teaching and introduction to basic abstractions like variables that students receive in pre-algebra and algebra I in many schools, the only way to "teach algebra II" is learning stupid abstract algorithms for symbolic manipulation, which are generally forgotten a few weeks later. The understanding of basic algebra is often so poor that you really can't teach algebra II on a deep level
We need much more subtle classifications, and people who no longer pose any danger to society should not have to register.
To some extent, I agree. But, perhaps more importantly, we need to abolish automatic required registration based on the name of the crime, which is very common in the U.S. That's the thing that results in the injustices you mention, lumping all sorts of people together. Usually, these laws have broad language and are passed by legislators who don't care about whether they ensnare the wrong people or whether the policies may actually be effective. (We have recidivism stats collected from MANY studies on all sorts of crimes, and they should be used -- in addition to individual psychological assessments -- to determine who gets listed.)
Being forced to register on such a list should be viewed as an additional rehabilitation measure, just as supervised parole is. It should require a judgment from a judge to put you on the list, not be automatic solely based on the name of the listed crime. And it should require periodic reconsideration, at least every year, to make a determination whether listing is still required.
Otherwise, from my perspective, it's effectively a lifelong punishment, sentenced without due process.
Before I begin, let me say that I'm not sure the implementation of the "right to be forgotten" is the right one, and I do agree that it unfairly singles out Google. On the other hand, that doesn't mean the principle that polices are trying to get at is faulty.
I also don't know anything about this specific Japanese case or whether the "right" deserves to be invoked in it.
No, it was not a 'right' then, as there was nothing in the law to provide it, nor was it considered an unstated right assumed by society.
It's likely true that there was no such right back when people would wander from village to village, but there are legal precedents in European countries that go back at least a few decades. France has recognized a "droit d'oubli" since the 1970s, and the UK passed the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act of 1974 which prohibited many criminal convictions from being considered for legal or personal purposes (e.g., job applications) after a certain period of time following release. Many other countries have had official policies allowing records to be expunged after a certain period of time in some cases, or laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination of former prisoners in many situations.
And the concept has a much longer history. You only need to look to one of the most famous French novels of all time, Les Miserables, whose whole story was based around the injustice in a system that forced a convict (Jean Valjean) to carry around a document after his release stating that he had committed a crime. The decision to try to abandon that past led to a life being pursued by a detective, seeking to bring him back to justice.
One of the reasons that story resonates is because it criticized an old French policy that was later abolished because of the harm it did in tracking convicts and forcing them to be identified wherever they went.
Why target google searches alone? Shouldnâ(TM)t someone need to go through the police records, newspaper archives (and any microfiche for places still using that at the time of the offense), magazines, comedians routines, and song lyrics (if the crime was public enough) - and any recordings thereof â" to eliminate the references? As per 1984, youâ(TM)re going to need a whole department working 24/7 to censor or rewrite all the data there ever was if youâ(TM)re really pushing for âforgottenâ(TM) status.
You miss the point. The point is NOT to erase the past. The point is to not let one act in the past perhaps unjustly overshadow the rest of a future life. Top hits on Google in major media, for example, tend to remain top hits on Google. If for some reason you were unlucky enough to get negative media attention at some point, your name will likely produce those top hits no matter what else you do afterward -- unless you manage to do something else which gains equivalent media attention.
No one's talking about erasing official public records or censoring media archives. The question is whether the top hit for you for your entire life should remain whatever arbitrary thing some newspaper printed about you. (And yeah, media can sometimes be wrong too -- often if someone is ultimately found innocent or even if charges are dropped, the initial story about the "accused" sticks around as highly promoted "front page" material, while the "charges were dropped" lands in a tiny paragraph on page 10, if it appears at all.)
Really though, this isnâ(TM)t about a right. Itâ(TM)s about restriction of rights. What advocates of this restriction are really trying to do is eliminate access by society at large to public records.
Who is arguing for that? Most of the arguments I've heard are about search engine results. If you bother to go to a public archive, you should be able to access public records -- and if you feel the need
That's sort of true. That's the absolute minimum age for allowable sexual activity under the law.
So this guy was abusing children 12 and under.
[Citation needed]
It's more complicated than a single age. (See, for example, here and here.)
Basically, local laws may apply. There are lots of local "corrupting a minor" statutes. Depending on prefecture, the actual age of consent for sexual activity with an adult is usually 16 or 18. And any activity with a minor under 18 could constitute some sort of criminal offense.
And it is why she's basically being given the Democrat nomination. She won 6 out of 6 coin tosses and won 7 out of 7 high card draws. Consider the odds of that happening.
(.5^13) x 100 = 0.01% chance of that happening.
Well, first there was only ONE high card draw, which some conservative news sources added to the supposed 6 coin tosses to claim a 7-for-7 victory TOTAL for Clinton.
However, even that is wrong. The 6 coin tosses thing was an erroneous early report put out by an Iowa paper. There were more coin tosses than that, and the Bernie Hillary split appears to be roughly 50/50 as you'd expect.
I'm definitely not a Hillary supporter, and I detest the smear campaigns the Clinton campaign has got many of their friends in the media to run. But facts are facts, and you are making things up. (Or, more likely, following the talking points of conservative media without investigating their validity.)
What you wrote implies that the car had pulled into a de facto lane or parking area or perhaps a shoulder of the road. The car was far enough to the side to be out of the main traffic lane and for other cars to pass -- that's what you said. So regardless of whether it was a marked lane or not, the car was effectively pulled off in another de facto lane. Cars reentering traffic from a stop after pulling off to the side also don't have the right of way, regardless of whether they're in another lane, on the shoulder, whatever.
Unfortunately, police who screw up usually can't be fired, and are insulated from any consequences by the legal system.
Yes, this is really problematic. I really can't understand why police are often granted general immunity from negligence, etc. in a democratic form of government.
I can understand that exemptions should be made in case of emergencies. Sometimes police responding to or dealing with an emergency need to be granted immunity from negligence that comes about by accident in a tense situation. Otherwise, you'll have cops hesitating to do what is necessary to protect public safety in emergencies, etc.
But that shouldn't be true in general. If a cop is randomly driving around town or patrolling and runs over someone and kills them (in a non-emergency situation), they should go to prison, like anyone else. Unfortunately, I would also note that accidental pedestrian strikes by motorists are often not prosecuted as much as they should be... this isn't just a problem with police.
Cops can straight up murder someone and receive no punishment.
Technically, that's not true. Murder requires intent to kill, and it cannot be a "justifiable" homicide.
If a police officer randomly targets someone and deliberately kills him/her with no provocation, they should be charged with murder -- and will be if the investigation is honest. (Yes, I know in practice that police are often corrupt and try to "protect their own," but legally, a cop is responsible in a situation like this.)
The problems tend to come in more in the ambiguous cases, where there's some provocation or threat, and police did not attempt a less lethal solution even where one could have handled the situation. These are arguments about "judgment calls" that unfortunately tend to usually favor the police.
Even more disconcerting, from my perspective, are cases that involve negligence or reckless disregard for safety. In most of those cases, police are generally granted straight-out immunity, even if their actions resulted in someone's death. Technically, these are NOT "murder," but usually some form of manslaughter or negligent homicide from a legal perspective. But police are rarely held accountable for such actions.
Actual murder, though, with proven intent? If you have that, even a cop can be convicted and punished accordingly.
I can see reasons why police should be exempt in SOME circumstances (e.g., emergencies, as opposed to random driving around town or patrolling). That's the problem with the law here: there should be no general exemption, but rather something more specific than "in the course of the person's duties."
Computers are always faster and better at dealing with large quantities of data. For example, if I want to search a book-length text, my computer can instantly find all strings matching a given pattern. Obviously, a human could do this too, but it would take a while, and if rushed, the human might miss some.
But I don't think we'd say that a simple search for a string indicates "intelligence" in the AI sense, no matter how much faster or more accurate a computer might be at doing it.
Undoubtedly you're correct that humans probably wouldn't be able to identify even 10% of random photos in random cities. But the question raised by the findings here is whether the "AI" has achieved that statistic just because it's doing something rather trivial and just has the ability to work more quickly and with a larger database (like the text-search analogy above).
Or, is the "AI" actually doing something more "intelligent" and sophisticated?
To answer that latter question, we'd be better off trying a comparison with a human who had lived in 3 or 4 cities over a span of a few recent years. (Better yet, choose a human who is likely to have traveled a lot around that city and probably is quite familiar with surroundings in various parts, like a taxi driver or something.) Will the computer algorithm here perform better than the human in selecting the correct cities for photos under those conditions?
If so, then we can get closer to saying there's a rather sophisticated "AI" here that might be "better than human" in this general pattern recognition task, rather than just a computer with access to more data than a human can hold in memory at once.
I think there ought to be a system where we can bank extra days if we don't want to use them and let them roll over into the next year or maybe two years later. That way, if we're having a good year we can extend it by a week or two, and if we're having a bad year we can end it early.
Yeah, the Ancient Romans tried that system. Originally, months began with the new moon, and the high priest was tasked with declaring when that happened. (The day was the Kalends of the month, meaning "called out," since it was the day the new month was announced by the priest -- it's where we get our word "calendar.)
Anyhow, calling out the new moon was a bit of an imprecise business, since when is that last sliver gone and when does the new one begin? It's a bit of a judgment call. High priests were known to take bribes to delay the Kalends or move it up a day.
In the later Republic, the various month lengths were more standardized and no longer depended on the moon. But they didn't add up to a year exactly (355 days), so every so often they'd need an intercalation to introduce an extra month, named Terminalia, which happened after the 23rd of February. (Why did it happen then? Probably because that was toward the end of winter and not much tended to be going on business-wise, so it wasn't disruptive to commerce or other cycles to have the calendar messed up then.)
Anyhow, the priest could get a bigger bribe for inserting or not inserting the intercalation MONTH in a particular year. If your friends are in office, they get a longer year; if your enemies are in office, they get a shorter year. You get the picture. (Also, the Romans had a lot of superstitions around particular days and months of the calendar; doing an intercalation in a pivotal year of war or something could be problematic from a luck perspective.)
Anyhow, this crap got the calendar so messed up that eventually Caesar came in and had to create the so-called "Year of Confusion" (46 BC), which was 445 days long, just to get the seasons aligned correctly again.
So, yeah -- I'd advise against this sort of calendar tampering. Bad stuff happens. Heck, Caesar died only a couple years later, which maybe goes to show the Roman superstitions on intercalation were right. (or not...)
Remember, you are a member of your state first....THEN you are a member of the United States.
At least..that's how it was set up.
No, it wasn't, you were always a citizen of the United States, and only fools thought they were a member of a state first and foremost. Such fools were also the ones who caused the worst war on American soil.
They weren't "fools." That's the entire reason why it's called the "United STATES," rather than some new country with a single name. Before the Civil War, they were a collection of quasi-autonomous jurisdictions that agreed mainly to come together for the explicit purposes (and only those) emphasized in the Constitution.
And you had these "fools" on both sides defying that federal government. One of the main complaints of the Southern States (read their Articles of Secession) was the failure of the Federal Government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts (which were explicitly part of those Constitutional powers required for the Federal Government). Many Northern States refused to adhere to the Constitution in this case, on the grounds that their individual statehood allowed them to refuse to be bound to immoral acts. After various states effectively nullified the 1793 Act -- thereby placing states' rights above Constitution -- Congress passed the 1850 Act, which many Northern states then defied.
Of course we can argue in hindsight that the Northern states were morally correct to do so, but they did so because they believed their state sovereignty allowed them to violate a Constitutional mandate from the U.S. government. Thus, a few years later, when a Republican president was elected without a single vote in most Southern states, the South argued they too could refuse the authority of the federal government (which had failed them, when the Northern states refused to adhere to the Constitution).
The Civil War was fought to resolve the open question of whether people were "members of a state first and foremost." It's only hindsight that allows you to think of everyone who disagreed before the war -- on both sides -- as "fools."
Remember, you are a member of your state first....THEN you are a member of the United States.
At least..that's how it was set up.
This is very true, and it's something that's almost completely forgotten today. It's the reason why Charles Francis Adams -- grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams -- a man who led black Union troops in the Civil War, and a president of the American Historical Association, could argue in 1902 that Robert E. Lee should be given a statue in Washington, D.C.
Why? Because Lee first-and-foremost saw himself as a Virginian, and he was literally defending his country in his "native state" of Virginia (a "patriot" in the sense of "patriotism" from the Latin patria referring to "fatherland") from Northern states invading potentially sovereign Southern ones. (I'm not agreeing with Adams's argument here, just noting what he says.)
Nowadays we make fun of quaint Southerners who speak of the "War of Northern Aggression," and we seek to tear down vestigial confederate monuments. Perhaps we should, given that they have become largely symbolic of slavery alone for many people.
But Charles Adams is an actual voice from the time of the Civil War and before -- a Northern voice, from someone who had supported the African-American cause. And his essay describes the radical transformation of views on the sovereignty of states that happened during and after the Civil War.
Obviously we view things differently today, and for many people it's hard to understand such a perspective in today's politically divisive climate. But the individuality of states was central to the original conception of the United States.
That would provide end users with exactly what we want - a well maintained, well supported, operating system whose desktop is actually modern and usable rather than trendy and terrible.
This is ironic, since the whole reason I tried Mint in the first place several years ago was because I was tired of Ubuntu being "trendy and terrible," while Mint appeared to supply a "well-maintained, well-supported, operating system whose desktop is actually modern and usable."
I'm not defending Mint. But I find this very funny, given how broken Ubuntu typically was a few years back and how they seemed to jump on any unstable crappy bandwagon to do the new trendy thing. ("Yeah, look at my wobbly windows! I can't play any media without the entire sound system breaking because Ubuntu went ahead with an experimental system that doesn't work yet, but look at my wobbly windows!")
Let them pick a mother stranger to further reduce the risks.
I really think this is unnecessarily sexist. It feeds into this collective social fear these days that any man who dares to talk to a young child might be a pedophile.
Part of the problem is that sexual abuse of children by women is estimated to be grossly underreported, and estimates vary from a few percent up to 40% of abuse happens from women. Boys are particularly at risk. It's also often harder for kids to know whether they are abused, frankly -- because women are much more likely to be in situations where it is somewhat normal for them to touch kids. Mothers tend to do "bathtime" more than fathers, they tend to help with dressing and undressing, etc. Babysitters tend to be female, as do older nannies. Kids are therefore used to having such women touch them (even occasionally private parts), while for many men to even get into a situation where they could grope a kid, it would already have to be very weird.
For these and even more reasons, it's often harder for children to clearly know when something "wrong" has occurred with a female in a common situation, compared to being randomly groped or undressed by an adult male. Hence, the difficulty in estimating abuse by women.
Couple that with the fact that society tells us that women are NOT child molesters, and it makes it much less likely that kids will come forward. And older boys are even socialized to believe that such contact with older women is to be lauded.
Example of social biases: When I was in high school, a coach in a neighboring district had apparently dated a girl on his team. Apparently no sexual contact happened, but he was nevertheless publicly shamed in the newspaper and fired -- rightly so, for his abuse of power. Meanwhile, in my own high school, a female guidance counselor was actually caught literally having sex in the high-school auditorium with a male student. Apparently the "relationship" had been going on for several months, back to when it would have been statutory rape. The guidance counselor was quietly dismissed, with no charges, and the only reason I know about it is because I had a friend whose parents knew someone in administration. Years later, I ran into a good friend of the male student in question and asked about it -- yeah, the friend knew about it, and frankly, when his friend told him, they just basically went around high-fiving each other because he had "bedded" a hot adult woman.
While this anecdote doesn't really apply to social expectations of young kids, it points out the disparate perspectives we have when women might do inappropriate things with male children.
Regardless, beyond the instructions to "seek out a mother" playing into social stereotypes which have led men to be fired from elementary school positions and daycare jobs for no apparent reason, I have real doubts that the advantage is significant. A distressed kid in a public place is very unlikely to happen to walk up to the one guy who both happens to be a pedophile AND is super-prepared so he can magically whisk the kid out into his van without anyone noticing. If your kid is lost on a lonely road in the middle of nowhere, I suppose it might be worthwhile for the child to play the odds and get in a car with a woman rather than a man. But short of that extremely unlikely scenario, I don't know the advice is necessary -- especially given the negative stereotypes around men it engenders (no pun intended).
Yes, most people would be fine helping a lost child but they might not notice as most people go on with their day to day somewhat oblivious to their surroundings while a predator is actively looking and scanning the crowd and therefore are much more likely to notice them because they are looking for them.
If only people spent as much time worrying about rather mundane things that injure and even kill lots of kids, rather than developing strategies to avoid random rare "predators."
Don't get me wrong -- abuse of children is horrible, and it should be prevented. But your scenario is incredibly rare. Kids die every day because they weren't strapped into car seats correctly, or because their smoke detectors weren't kept up by the parents in their house, or because they were handed a plastic bag to play with, or whatever.
I'm not saying "predators" aren't worth worrying about. But on the list of terrible things that could injury or kill your child, they're pretty far down the list. And despite your speculation, people DO notice a distressed child. Heck, almost every other week these days there's a story about some neighborhood busybody who calls up the cops because she sees a child playing in the park alone or because an 11-year-old is sitting in the car while her mom went into the store for a couple minutes. These aren't even children in distress, and people are calling police to arrest the parents for neglect. And you somehow think "predators" are something to worry about.
FACT: It's more likely that your young child will be "abducted" from you under a false or misleading accusation by CPS about your "neglect" than it's likely that your child will be actually abducted by a random stranger "predator."
Those are real stats... look up the numbers, if you don't believe me.
1. How do you propose funding websites, if not with ads?
I remember the internet before ads like today were widespread. 'Twas a nicer, cleaner place (though quite a bit uglier in terms of fonts, colors, etc.). I know I don't speak for most people, but I'd personally be perfectly fine if 99.9% of the internet died, and the only thing left were websites put up by people who just wanted to say something -- not because they were trying to suck money out of every click.
But aside from all of this - there are plenty of ways for people offering truly UNIQUE content to make money off of it. If you're just aggregating crap you could find anywhere and generating clickbait, then yeah... you're probably out of luck.
2. There's no reason for ad bidding to take more than a few milliseconds. If it takes longer, then the intermediary supplying the ad has broken software. I'm pretty sure this is a complete non-issue.
Uh, I think you missed the parent's point. It's not just speed -- it's unnecessary bandwidth. Most of the pages I visit tend to have primarily text as content. If the actual text only takes up a few kilobytes, why do I need to download megabytes of data to read it? On a decent computer with a high-speed connection, that's might still work (though it's completely unnecessary). But on a tablet or phone it could be a pain and make everything slow.
I could explore the web of the 1990s with a computer that had 1/1000th of the RAM I have today and a significantly slower processor, and yet my page loads today seem as slow (and even slower) than they were back then on a broadband connection. Part of that is browser bloat. But it's also webpage bloat -- and a lot of that is ads.
Sometimes I think widespread broadband is one of the worst things that happened to the internet. Back in the days when most people were on dial-up, the web was optimized for speed, because every extra kilobyte was adding up the seconds for the page to render. Browsing on broadband was awesome.
When the ad's go back to editorial approved ad's hosted and run by the companies providing the content no on will be able to block the ads. But this will mean the companies accepting the advertising have to take responsibility for the crap advertising they accept.
Not only that, but the ads might actually then be somewhat relevant to the site you're on, particularly if it's a smaller site run by someone or a group of people who actually agree to endorse a particular product.
Right now, unless you run a bunch of cookie and script blockers, the experience is this strange echo chamber on much of the internet. "Why do I keep seeing ads for the same exact product I just bought on Amazon two weeks ago? I already bought one: I don't need more. But they keep showing me these irrelevant ads." And on less reputable sites, you just get generic crap targeted at your demographic.
With ads chosen by a specific site, you might have a chance of getting ads that actually reflect your interests, rather than some crappy ad algorithm that keeps trying to sell you what you bought three weeks ago. If you visit a tech site, you might -- shockingly -- see ads for tech products. (Just like the old magazines! Other products a tech reader might be interested in! Amazing!) If you go to a cooking blog, you might see ads for cookbooks or equipment endorsed by the blogger. What a concept!
I know I may get some flak from the anti-ad people for saying stuff like this. Personally, I'd prefer a world with no ads. I'd rather go back to the internet of 20 years ago, and have 99% of it die off, rather than have ads. But I realize that's not a reasonable choice that most of the public wants. At least having ads approved by site owners would have the potential to be somewhat better... and it would also tell you something about the site owner and priorities if they decided to run too many ads without paying attention to their malware or content or whatever.
Asking an insurance company if something might increase risk is like asking a tobacco company if cigarettes prevent cancer. Huge monetary incentive there.
There are a few major problems with this comparison. First, insurance is a competitive marketplace in most areas, so customers do "shop around." If one company has a reputation for offering rates 10-20% lower than every one else in an area, that sort of thing "gets around," and people switch. (If you own a home, you probably receive offers almost weekly in the mail for this sort of thing.)
Second, home insurance is a product that most people NEVER use for its intended purpose. That's why in many areas you often pay only a few hundred dollars per year to insure a house that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. You don't need to look at actuarial tables to do the math there -- most people will never cash in on home insurance policies, and that's generally a good thing.
But think about what that means for a second: that means there's no way for customers to evaluate the product except on a cost basis. Just about all home insurance companies have equal (generally trending somewhat negative) reviews, if you go looking online. And most people will never actually use the product, so the only thing they tend to shop for is cost, rather than "quality" or "service" or whatever.
Which means that home insurance companies have a strong incentive to keep prices somewhat low. And if the market became artificially inflated as you assume, any other company who had actuarial tables that indicated they could still make a profit at significantly lower cost could come in and take those customers away.
Of course insurance companies make a profit. But as long as there's more than one company willing to offer you a quote on your house, chances are they are somewhat basing it on their actual risk. And if there's only one company willing to offer you insurance, well, that's proof in itself that the risk on your property is probably extremely high.
What's the point of caffeine if it only makes you perform normally? I drink caffeine to perform better than normal.
Well, this is only possible if you're not an addict. If you drink caffeine regularly, the best it will do for you is get you back to baseline ("normal"), not exceed it.
I'm the grandson of Polish jews that came to Argentina. Everybody knows, I've heard that from my family a dozen times, that the Poles were mostly antisemitic, they happily joined the nazis and they even happily stole the property of the escaping jews. I've heard that some people coming here at the time burned their Polish papers because of that.
As with all such generalizations about a group of people, it's complicated. For many centuries, Poland was the home to the largest Jewish community in Europe because of their policy toward religious tolerance. That changed with the partitions of Poland, where imperial powers (e.g., Russia) started targeting Jews.
And if you read that article (which is very long), you'll see what was going on in the first half of the 20th century was complicated too. Poland was still home to the largest Jewish community in Europe at that time, and many Jewish people were highly respected. But anti-Semitism was on the rise again in many countries, including Poland.
My condolences to your family, who must have suffered terribly. But on the whole, it's not clear that Polish people were significantly more anti-Semitic than the rest of Europe at this time.
And now this museum is focused in some chauvinist correction than in remembering the real horrors of the time.
I absolutely agree that the horrors should NOT be ignored. On the other hand, well... there's this. As you'll learn there, not only did Polish people likely save a half-million or more Jewish lives during that time, but these Polish people were victims of numerous massacres when they were punished for trying to protect Jews -- estimates are that up to 50,000 Polish people lost their lives just trying to do this.
So, yeah -- were there bad Poles who betrayed Jews the Nazis, etc.? Of course. Were there also ones who helped Jewish people at the risk of their own lives? Yeah, a lot of those too.
History is complicated, and little good generally comes from stereotyping or vilifying an entire group of people. Hopefully the irony here is not lost.
Just to be clear, when I said "suffered some form of attack," I was referring to the various types of programs, individual killings, etc. -- the "victims" I was referring to were generally killed.
Also, I based my numbers on your link, but I was just trying to point out that lots of people were apparently being killed at this time. Jewish people were targets, undoubtedly, but it was a very violent era.
It's not a lie, Polish mobs were literally killing survivors of the concentration camps.
Yes, you are correct. And these acts of violence are deplorable.
Just to try to get a sense of the magnitude, from your link: "Jews constituted between 2% and 3% of the total number of victims of postwar violence in the country," and that number seems to come to 1000-2000 victims, according to your link.
According to this, at the post-war peak, the Jewish population was somewhere around 180000-240000. Which means roughly 1% of the Jewish population suffered some form of attack during this period. Meanwhile, that same link notes the postwar population of Poland was about 24 million. That means the Jewish population was a little less than 1% of the overall population.
Using these stats (that Jews suffered 2-3% of overall attacks), that means that they were roughly 2-4 times more likely to be attacked than other people in Poland.
So, it's safe to say that Jewish people were targeted more than others. It's also safe to say that post-war Poland was a particularly violent and bad place to be (for everyone).
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I don't see how changing to stats would change this substantially.
It won't. In fact the main point of my post is that a shift to stats won't make things better, unless we fix other things. I didn't really get around to explaining why I think stats would be a good alternative class to offer for SOME high school students rather than algebra II, which is a separate issue. (Basically, there I agree with many other posts here that some intuitive understanding of statistics is really important to make sense of any real-world data, which people are more likely to encounter on an everyday basis than the need to solve a logarithmic equation symbolically for example.)
It's been half a century and perhaps I misremember, but I think a course built around Darrell Huff's "How To Lie With Statistics" might be a lot more useful to most High School Students than a standard mathematical treatment. And it'd certainly be a lot less mind-numbing.
Agreed. Is our goal to teach abstract symbolic manipulation poorly to students who don't care, or should we instead focus on actual numeracy and conceptual understanding that could be applied directly to the real world?
This sort of revolution has been happening a bit in high-school physics curricula already, with the "conceptual physics" movement that started about 25 years ago. The idea is NOT to "dumb down" physics, but rather to focus classroom time on ideas that will be most useful to certain types of students. For those who are bound for college in math, science, engineering, etc., the numerical rigor of "traditional physics" is important in high school.
For other students, the conceptual approach focuses on clear logic and empirical thinking, rather than getting bogged down in algebra. There's still math and certainly a lot of data collection in hands-on experiments, but the math is kept to rather simple equations -- with a strong emphasis on making sure students thoroughly understand how the equations work, rather than just doing exercises in symbolic manipulation.
I taught conceptual physics courses in high school for a couple years (along with standard physics and AP level). I was skeptical of the idea at first, but now I believe it's a great alternative for many students. And the rigor level can be quite high: the kinds of problems I often gave on tests would have likely stumped students taking a more traditional algebra-based physics course -- because they focused on deeper understanding of certain concepts in a completely different way.
Anyhow, if our goal is to produce high school graduates with numeracy and an intuitive understanding of mathematical concepts, we might be better off having "conceptual statistics" be an alternative path in high school for some students. I know most of us here "think in math" (and particularly abstractions like algebra, calculus, algorithms, etc.) pretty fluently, but most people don't -- but that doesn't mean those people can't often develop good intuition about how numbers work in the world.
He suggests dropping Algebra II as a requirement. The first two statistics courses I took in college had only Algebra I as a prerequisite.
As someone who actually taught Algebra II in high school (years ago), and who taught it one year in a lower-class mostly minority school district, I'll offer a few observations:
(1) I think a stats course would be a great alternative for many students compared to a second year of algebra.
(2) Algebra II was in fact a barrier for many students. There was a high rate of students failing and dropping the course. (At that time, in the state I was teaching, it wasn't strictly required for graduation -- but it was strongly recommended.)
(3) However, the problems with algebra II often start with teaching in algebra I. The algebra I and "pre-algebra" classes tend to be the "dumping ground" in many school districts for less qualified teachers. Teachers with real math degrees often were required to take stuff a lot more complicated than high school, and they often find it barely interesting to teach calculus or pre-calculus. So, in most places the qualified teachers who understand math often teach those upper-level courses, and the random coaches and people who barely passed the math certification test end up teaching algebra I. (There are serious teacher shortages in many places in the US, particularly for secondary math and science.)
(4) As an algebra II teacher, I was confronted with many students who had had a substitute teacher in algebra I for a large portion of the year. The district simply couldn't find qualified teachers to fill those classrooms. The students knew nothing. The previous algebra II teacher (a really smart woman) quit in the middle of the year, because she recognized this and wanted to either (a) send the students back to algebra I since they shouldn't have passed in the first place or (b) require many of the students to come in for mandatory tutoring outside of school hours. She wanted to help the students and was willing to take her own personal time to fix this problem. But the administration said neither was possible under state law, since the students already "had credit" for algebra I. After fighting the battle for a while, she quit.
(5) In many states, algebra teachers are forced to make stupid curriculum choices due to state-mandated curricula. I haven't looked at the new Common Core approaches and what they require, but I can tell you from my experience that we often were required to spend a ridiculous time on stuff that might have been useful for scientists and engineers headed for college in the 1950s, but these skills were much less relevant with modern calculators and computers.
(6) In general, most state curricula have tended to emphasize symbolic manipulation over real-world application (which often comes with true understanding). I was forced to spend many weeks going over how to put conic section equations into standard form, but there was nothing in state guidelines asking teachers to spend time on much more relevant real-life stuff, like applications of basic exponential equations to calculating loan terms or mortgages, investments, etc. When at some point I realized that only 2 of the 140 students I was teaching that year knew what the term "compound interest" meant, I actually abandoned the state standards for a couple weeks because I thought it was my moral responsibility to teach these kids some actual skills that could be useful in personal finance -- this would likely be the last class that many of them would ever take in their lives.
(7) Given the poor teaching and introduction to basic abstractions like variables that students receive in pre-algebra and algebra I in many schools, the only way to "teach algebra II" is learning stupid abstract algorithms for symbolic manipulation, which are generally forgotten a few weeks later. The understanding of basic algebra is often so poor that you really can't teach algebra II on a deep level
We need much more subtle classifications, and people who no longer pose any danger to society should not have to register.
To some extent, I agree. But, perhaps more importantly, we need to abolish automatic required registration based on the name of the crime, which is very common in the U.S. That's the thing that results in the injustices you mention, lumping all sorts of people together. Usually, these laws have broad language and are passed by legislators who don't care about whether they ensnare the wrong people or whether the policies may actually be effective. (We have recidivism stats collected from MANY studies on all sorts of crimes, and they should be used -- in addition to individual psychological assessments -- to determine who gets listed.)
Being forced to register on such a list should be viewed as an additional rehabilitation measure, just as supervised parole is. It should require a judgment from a judge to put you on the list, not be automatic solely based on the name of the listed crime. And it should require periodic reconsideration, at least every year, to make a determination whether listing is still required.
Otherwise, from my perspective, it's effectively a lifelong punishment, sentenced without due process.
Before I begin, let me say that I'm not sure the implementation of the "right to be forgotten" is the right one, and I do agree that it unfairly singles out Google. On the other hand, that doesn't mean the principle that polices are trying to get at is faulty.
I also don't know anything about this specific Japanese case or whether the "right" deserves to be invoked in it.
No, it was not a 'right' then, as there was nothing in the law to provide it, nor was it considered an unstated right assumed by society.
It's likely true that there was no such right back when people would wander from village to village, but there are legal precedents in European countries that go back at least a few decades. France has recognized a "droit d'oubli" since the 1970s, and the UK passed the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act of 1974 which prohibited many criminal convictions from being considered for legal or personal purposes (e.g., job applications) after a certain period of time following release. Many other countries have had official policies allowing records to be expunged after a certain period of time in some cases, or laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination of former prisoners in many situations.
And the concept has a much longer history. You only need to look to one of the most famous French novels of all time, Les Miserables, whose whole story was based around the injustice in a system that forced a convict (Jean Valjean) to carry around a document after his release stating that he had committed a crime. The decision to try to abandon that past led to a life being pursued by a detective, seeking to bring him back to justice.
One of the reasons that story resonates is because it criticized an old French policy that was later abolished because of the harm it did in tracking convicts and forcing them to be identified wherever they went.
Why target google searches alone? Shouldnâ(TM)t someone need to go through the police records, newspaper archives (and any microfiche for places still using that at the time of the offense), magazines, comedians routines, and song lyrics (if the crime was public enough) - and any recordings thereof â" to eliminate the references? As per 1984, youâ(TM)re going to need a whole department working 24/7 to censor or rewrite all the data there ever was if youâ(TM)re really pushing for âforgottenâ(TM) status.
You miss the point. The point is NOT to erase the past. The point is to not let one act in the past perhaps unjustly overshadow the rest of a future life. Top hits on Google in major media, for example, tend to remain top hits on Google. If for some reason you were unlucky enough to get negative media attention at some point, your name will likely produce those top hits no matter what else you do afterward -- unless you manage to do something else which gains equivalent media attention.
No one's talking about erasing official public records or censoring media archives. The question is whether the top hit for you for your entire life should remain whatever arbitrary thing some newspaper printed about you. (And yeah, media can sometimes be wrong too -- often if someone is ultimately found innocent or even if charges are dropped, the initial story about the "accused" sticks around as highly promoted "front page" material, while the "charges were dropped" lands in a tiny paragraph on page 10, if it appears at all.)
Really though, this isnâ(TM)t about a right. Itâ(TM)s about restriction of rights. What advocates of this restriction are really trying to do is eliminate access by society at large to public records.
Who is arguing for that? Most of the arguments I've heard are about search engine results. If you bother to go to a public archive, you should be able to access public records -- and if you feel the need
In Japan the age of consent is 13.
That's sort of true. That's the absolute minimum age for allowable sexual activity under the law.
So this guy was abusing children 12 and under.
[Citation needed]
It's more complicated than a single age. (See, for example, here and here.)
Basically, local laws may apply. There are lots of local "corrupting a minor" statutes. Depending on prefecture, the actual age of consent for sexual activity with an adult is usually 16 or 18. And any activity with a minor under 18 could constitute some sort of criminal offense.
And it is why she's basically being given the Democrat nomination. She won 6 out of 6 coin tosses and won 7 out of 7 high card draws. Consider the odds of that happening. (.5^13) x 100 = 0.01% chance of that happening.
Well, first there was only ONE high card draw, which some conservative news sources added to the supposed 6 coin tosses to claim a 7-for-7 victory TOTAL for Clinton.
However, even that is wrong. The 6 coin tosses thing was an erroneous early report put out by an Iowa paper. There were more coin tosses than that, and the Bernie Hillary split appears to be roughly 50/50 as you'd expect.
I'm definitely not a Hillary supporter, and I detest the smear campaigns the Clinton campaign has got many of their friends in the media to run. But facts are facts, and you are making things up. (Or, more likely, following the talking points of conservative media without investigating their validity.)
What you wrote implies that the car had pulled into a de facto lane or parking area or perhaps a shoulder of the road. The car was far enough to the side to be out of the main traffic lane and for other cars to pass -- that's what you said. So regardless of whether it was a marked lane or not, the car was effectively pulled off in another de facto lane. Cars reentering traffic from a stop after pulling off to the side also don't have the right of way, regardless of whether they're in another lane, on the shoulder, whatever.
Unfortunately, police who screw up usually can't be fired, and are insulated from any consequences by the legal system.
Yes, this is really problematic. I really can't understand why police are often granted general immunity from negligence, etc. in a democratic form of government.
I can understand that exemptions should be made in case of emergencies. Sometimes police responding to or dealing with an emergency need to be granted immunity from negligence that comes about by accident in a tense situation. Otherwise, you'll have cops hesitating to do what is necessary to protect public safety in emergencies, etc.
But that shouldn't be true in general. If a cop is randomly driving around town or patrolling and runs over someone and kills them (in a non-emergency situation), they should go to prison, like anyone else. Unfortunately, I would also note that accidental pedestrian strikes by motorists are often not prosecuted as much as they should be... this isn't just a problem with police.
Cops can straight up murder someone and receive no punishment.
Technically, that's not true. Murder requires intent to kill, and it cannot be a "justifiable" homicide.
If a police officer randomly targets someone and deliberately kills him/her with no provocation, they should be charged with murder -- and will be if the investigation is honest. (Yes, I know in practice that police are often corrupt and try to "protect their own," but legally, a cop is responsible in a situation like this.)
The problems tend to come in more in the ambiguous cases, where there's some provocation or threat, and police did not attempt a less lethal solution even where one could have handled the situation. These are arguments about "judgment calls" that unfortunately tend to usually favor the police.
Even more disconcerting, from my perspective, are cases that involve negligence or reckless disregard for safety. In most of those cases, police are generally granted straight-out immunity, even if their actions resulted in someone's death. Technically, these are NOT "murder," but usually some form of manslaughter or negligent homicide from a legal perspective. But police are rarely held accountable for such actions.
Actual murder, though, with proven intent? If you have that, even a cop can be convicted and punished accordingly.
I can see reasons why police should be exempt in SOME circumstances (e.g., emergencies, as opposed to random driving around town or patrolling). That's the problem with the law here: there should be no general exemption, but rather something more specific than "in the course of the person's duties."
Compared to a human that's pretty dam good.
Depends on what you're trying to measure.
Computers are always faster and better at dealing with large quantities of data. For example, if I want to search a book-length text, my computer can instantly find all strings matching a given pattern. Obviously, a human could do this too, but it would take a while, and if rushed, the human might miss some.
But I don't think we'd say that a simple search for a string indicates "intelligence" in the AI sense, no matter how much faster or more accurate a computer might be at doing it.
Undoubtedly you're correct that humans probably wouldn't be able to identify even 10% of random photos in random cities. But the question raised by the findings here is whether the "AI" has achieved that statistic just because it's doing something rather trivial and just has the ability to work more quickly and with a larger database (like the text-search analogy above).
Or, is the "AI" actually doing something more "intelligent" and sophisticated?
To answer that latter question, we'd be better off trying a comparison with a human who had lived in 3 or 4 cities over a span of a few recent years. (Better yet, choose a human who is likely to have traveled a lot around that city and probably is quite familiar with surroundings in various parts, like a taxi driver or something.) Will the computer algorithm here perform better than the human in selecting the correct cities for photos under those conditions?
If so, then we can get closer to saying there's a rather sophisticated "AI" here that might be "better than human" in this general pattern recognition task, rather than just a computer with access to more data than a human can hold in memory at once.
I think there ought to be a system where we can bank extra days if we don't want to use them and let them roll over into the next year or maybe two years later. That way, if we're having a good year we can extend it by a week or two, and if we're having a bad year we can end it early.
Yeah, the Ancient Romans tried that system. Originally, months began with the new moon, and the high priest was tasked with declaring when that happened. (The day was the Kalends of the month, meaning "called out," since it was the day the new month was announced by the priest -- it's where we get our word "calendar.)
Anyhow, calling out the new moon was a bit of an imprecise business, since when is that last sliver gone and when does the new one begin? It's a bit of a judgment call. High priests were known to take bribes to delay the Kalends or move it up a day.
In the later Republic, the various month lengths were more standardized and no longer depended on the moon. But they didn't add up to a year exactly (355 days), so every so often they'd need an intercalation to introduce an extra month, named Terminalia, which happened after the 23rd of February. (Why did it happen then? Probably because that was toward the end of winter and not much tended to be going on business-wise, so it wasn't disruptive to commerce or other cycles to have the calendar messed up then.)
Anyhow, the priest could get a bigger bribe for inserting or not inserting the intercalation MONTH in a particular year. If your friends are in office, they get a longer year; if your enemies are in office, they get a shorter year. You get the picture. (Also, the Romans had a lot of superstitions around particular days and months of the calendar; doing an intercalation in a pivotal year of war or something could be problematic from a luck perspective.)
Anyhow, this crap got the calendar so messed up that eventually Caesar came in and had to create the so-called "Year of Confusion" (46 BC), which was 445 days long, just to get the seasons aligned correctly again.
So, yeah -- I'd advise against this sort of calendar tampering. Bad stuff happens. Heck, Caesar died only a couple years later, which maybe goes to show the Roman superstitions on intercalation were right. (or not...)
Remember, you are a member of your state first....THEN you are a member of the United States.
At least..that's how it was set up.
No, it wasn't, you were always a citizen of the United States, and only fools thought they were a member of a state first and foremost. Such fools were also the ones who caused the worst war on American soil.
They weren't "fools." That's the entire reason why it's called the "United STATES," rather than some new country with a single name. Before the Civil War, they were a collection of quasi-autonomous jurisdictions that agreed mainly to come together for the explicit purposes (and only those) emphasized in the Constitution.
And you had these "fools" on both sides defying that federal government. One of the main complaints of the Southern States (read their Articles of Secession) was the failure of the Federal Government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts (which were explicitly part of those Constitutional powers required for the Federal Government). Many Northern States refused to adhere to the Constitution in this case, on the grounds that their individual statehood allowed them to refuse to be bound to immoral acts. After various states effectively nullified the 1793 Act -- thereby placing states' rights above Constitution -- Congress passed the 1850 Act, which many Northern states then defied.
Of course we can argue in hindsight that the Northern states were morally correct to do so, but they did so because they believed their state sovereignty allowed them to violate a Constitutional mandate from the U.S. government. Thus, a few years later, when a Republican president was elected without a single vote in most Southern states, the South argued they too could refuse the authority of the federal government (which had failed them, when the Northern states refused to adhere to the Constitution).
The Civil War was fought to resolve the open question of whether people were "members of a state first and foremost." It's only hindsight that allows you to think of everyone who disagreed before the war -- on both sides -- as "fools."
Remember, you are a member of your state first....THEN you are a member of the United States.
At least..that's how it was set up.
This is very true, and it's something that's almost completely forgotten today. It's the reason why Charles Francis Adams -- grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams -- a man who led black Union troops in the Civil War, and a president of the American Historical Association, could argue in 1902 that Robert E. Lee should be given a statue in Washington, D.C.
Why? Because Lee first-and-foremost saw himself as a Virginian, and he was literally defending his country in his "native state" of Virginia (a "patriot" in the sense of "patriotism" from the Latin patria referring to "fatherland") from Northern states invading potentially sovereign Southern ones. (I'm not agreeing with Adams's argument here, just noting what he says.)
Nowadays we make fun of quaint Southerners who speak of the "War of Northern Aggression," and we seek to tear down vestigial confederate monuments. Perhaps we should, given that they have become largely symbolic of slavery alone for many people.
But Charles Adams is an actual voice from the time of the Civil War and before -- a Northern voice, from someone who had supported the African-American cause. And his essay describes the radical transformation of views on the sovereignty of states that happened during and after the Civil War.
Obviously we view things differently today, and for many people it's hard to understand such a perspective in today's politically divisive climate. But the individuality of states was central to the original conception of the United States.
That would provide end users with exactly what we want - a well maintained, well supported, operating system whose desktop is actually modern and usable rather than trendy and terrible.
This is ironic, since the whole reason I tried Mint in the first place several years ago was because I was tired of Ubuntu being "trendy and terrible," while Mint appeared to supply a "well-maintained, well-supported, operating system whose desktop is actually modern and usable."
I'm not defending Mint. But I find this very funny, given how broken Ubuntu typically was a few years back and how they seemed to jump on any unstable crappy bandwagon to do the new trendy thing. ("Yeah, look at my wobbly windows! I can't play any media without the entire sound system breaking because Ubuntu went ahead with an experimental system that doesn't work yet, but look at my wobbly windows!")
Let them pick a mother stranger to further reduce the risks.
I really think this is unnecessarily sexist. It feeds into this collective social fear these days that any man who dares to talk to a young child might be a pedophile.
Part of the problem is that sexual abuse of children by women is estimated to be grossly underreported, and estimates vary from a few percent up to 40% of abuse happens from women. Boys are particularly at risk. It's also often harder for kids to know whether they are abused, frankly -- because women are much more likely to be in situations where it is somewhat normal for them to touch kids. Mothers tend to do "bathtime" more than fathers, they tend to help with dressing and undressing, etc. Babysitters tend to be female, as do older nannies. Kids are therefore used to having such women touch them (even occasionally private parts), while for many men to even get into a situation where they could grope a kid, it would already have to be very weird.
For these and even more reasons, it's often harder for children to clearly know when something "wrong" has occurred with a female in a common situation, compared to being randomly groped or undressed by an adult male. Hence, the difficulty in estimating abuse by women.
Couple that with the fact that society tells us that women are NOT child molesters, and it makes it much less likely that kids will come forward. And older boys are even socialized to believe that such contact with older women is to be lauded.
Example of social biases: When I was in high school, a coach in a neighboring district had apparently dated a girl on his team. Apparently no sexual contact happened, but he was nevertheless publicly shamed in the newspaper and fired -- rightly so, for his abuse of power. Meanwhile, in my own high school, a female guidance counselor was actually caught literally having sex in the high-school auditorium with a male student. Apparently the "relationship" had been going on for several months, back to when it would have been statutory rape. The guidance counselor was quietly dismissed, with no charges, and the only reason I know about it is because I had a friend whose parents knew someone in administration. Years later, I ran into a good friend of the male student in question and asked about it -- yeah, the friend knew about it, and frankly, when his friend told him, they just basically went around high-fiving each other because he had "bedded" a hot adult woman.
While this anecdote doesn't really apply to social expectations of young kids, it points out the disparate perspectives we have when women might do inappropriate things with male children.
Regardless, beyond the instructions to "seek out a mother" playing into social stereotypes which have led men to be fired from elementary school positions and daycare jobs for no apparent reason, I have real doubts that the advantage is significant. A distressed kid in a public place is very unlikely to happen to walk up to the one guy who both happens to be a pedophile AND is super-prepared so he can magically whisk the kid out into his van without anyone noticing. If your kid is lost on a lonely road in the middle of nowhere, I suppose it might be worthwhile for the child to play the odds and get in a car with a woman rather than a man. But short of that extremely unlikely scenario, I don't know the advice is necessary -- especially given the negative stereotypes around men it engenders (no pun intended).
Yes, most people would be fine helping a lost child but they might not notice as most people go on with their day to day somewhat oblivious to their surroundings while a predator is actively looking and scanning the crowd and therefore are much more likely to notice them because they are looking for them.
If only people spent as much time worrying about rather mundane things that injure and even kill lots of kids, rather than developing strategies to avoid random rare "predators."
Don't get me wrong -- abuse of children is horrible, and it should be prevented. But your scenario is incredibly rare. Kids die every day because they weren't strapped into car seats correctly, or because their smoke detectors weren't kept up by the parents in their house, or because they were handed a plastic bag to play with, or whatever.
I'm not saying "predators" aren't worth worrying about. But on the list of terrible things that could injury or kill your child, they're pretty far down the list. And despite your speculation, people DO notice a distressed child. Heck, almost every other week these days there's a story about some neighborhood busybody who calls up the cops because she sees a child playing in the park alone or because an 11-year-old is sitting in the car while her mom went into the store for a couple minutes. These aren't even children in distress, and people are calling police to arrest the parents for neglect. And you somehow think "predators" are something to worry about.
FACT: It's more likely that your young child will be "abducted" from you under a false or misleading accusation by CPS about your "neglect" than it's likely that your child will be actually abducted by a random stranger "predator."
Those are real stats... look up the numbers, if you don't believe me.
1. How do you propose funding websites, if not with ads?
I remember the internet before ads like today were widespread. 'Twas a nicer, cleaner place (though quite a bit uglier in terms of fonts, colors, etc.). I know I don't speak for most people, but I'd personally be perfectly fine if 99.9% of the internet died, and the only thing left were websites put up by people who just wanted to say something -- not because they were trying to suck money out of every click.
But aside from all of this - there are plenty of ways for people offering truly UNIQUE content to make money off of it. If you're just aggregating crap you could find anywhere and generating clickbait, then yeah... you're probably out of luck.
2. There's no reason for ad bidding to take more than a few milliseconds. If it takes longer, then the intermediary supplying the ad has broken software. I'm pretty sure this is a complete non-issue.
Uh, I think you missed the parent's point. It's not just speed -- it's unnecessary bandwidth. Most of the pages I visit tend to have primarily text as content. If the actual text only takes up a few kilobytes, why do I need to download megabytes of data to read it? On a decent computer with a high-speed connection, that's might still work (though it's completely unnecessary). But on a tablet or phone it could be a pain and make everything slow.
I could explore the web of the 1990s with a computer that had 1/1000th of the RAM I have today and a significantly slower processor, and yet my page loads today seem as slow (and even slower) than they were back then on a broadband connection. Part of that is browser bloat. But it's also webpage bloat -- and a lot of that is ads.
Sometimes I think widespread broadband is one of the worst things that happened to the internet. Back in the days when most people were on dial-up, the web was optimized for speed, because every extra kilobyte was adding up the seconds for the page to render. Browsing on broadband was awesome.
When the ad's go back to editorial approved ad's hosted and run by the companies providing the content no on will be able to block the ads. But this will mean the companies accepting the advertising have to take responsibility for the crap advertising they accept.
Not only that, but the ads might actually then be somewhat relevant to the site you're on, particularly if it's a smaller site run by someone or a group of people who actually agree to endorse a particular product.
Right now, unless you run a bunch of cookie and script blockers, the experience is this strange echo chamber on much of the internet. "Why do I keep seeing ads for the same exact product I just bought on Amazon two weeks ago? I already bought one: I don't need more. But they keep showing me these irrelevant ads." And on less reputable sites, you just get generic crap targeted at your demographic.
With ads chosen by a specific site, you might have a chance of getting ads that actually reflect your interests, rather than some crappy ad algorithm that keeps trying to sell you what you bought three weeks ago. If you visit a tech site, you might -- shockingly -- see ads for tech products. (Just like the old magazines! Other products a tech reader might be interested in! Amazing!) If you go to a cooking blog, you might see ads for cookbooks or equipment endorsed by the blogger. What a concept!
I know I may get some flak from the anti-ad people for saying stuff like this. Personally, I'd prefer a world with no ads. I'd rather go back to the internet of 20 years ago, and have 99% of it die off, rather than have ads. But I realize that's not a reasonable choice that most of the public wants. At least having ads approved by site owners would have the potential to be somewhat better... and it would also tell you something about the site owner and priorities if they decided to run too many ads without paying attention to their malware or content or whatever.
The actuary tables don't lie
Asking an insurance company if something might increase risk is like asking a tobacco company if cigarettes prevent cancer. Huge monetary incentive there.
There are a few major problems with this comparison. First, insurance is a competitive marketplace in most areas, so customers do "shop around." If one company has a reputation for offering rates 10-20% lower than every one else in an area, that sort of thing "gets around," and people switch. (If you own a home, you probably receive offers almost weekly in the mail for this sort of thing.)
Second, home insurance is a product that most people NEVER use for its intended purpose. That's why in many areas you often pay only a few hundred dollars per year to insure a house that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. You don't need to look at actuarial tables to do the math there -- most people will never cash in on home insurance policies, and that's generally a good thing.
But think about what that means for a second: that means there's no way for customers to evaluate the product except on a cost basis. Just about all home insurance companies have equal (generally trending somewhat negative) reviews, if you go looking online. And most people will never actually use the product, so the only thing they tend to shop for is cost, rather than "quality" or "service" or whatever.
Which means that home insurance companies have a strong incentive to keep prices somewhat low. And if the market became artificially inflated as you assume, any other company who had actuarial tables that indicated they could still make a profit at significantly lower cost could come in and take those customers away.
Of course insurance companies make a profit. But as long as there's more than one company willing to offer you a quote on your house, chances are they are somewhat basing it on their actual risk. And if there's only one company willing to offer you insurance, well, that's proof in itself that the risk on your property is probably extremely high.
What's the point of caffeine if it only makes you perform normally? I drink caffeine to perform better than normal.
Well, this is only possible if you're not an addict. If you drink caffeine regularly, the best it will do for you is get you back to baseline ("normal"), not exceed it.
I'm the grandson of Polish jews that came to Argentina. Everybody knows, I've heard that from my family a dozen times, that the Poles were mostly antisemitic, they happily joined the nazis and they even happily stole the property of the escaping jews. I've heard that some people coming here at the time burned their Polish papers because of that.
As with all such generalizations about a group of people, it's complicated. For many centuries, Poland was the home to the largest Jewish community in Europe because of their policy toward religious tolerance. That changed with the partitions of Poland, where imperial powers (e.g., Russia) started targeting Jews.
And if you read that article (which is very long), you'll see what was going on in the first half of the 20th century was complicated too. Poland was still home to the largest Jewish community in Europe at that time, and many Jewish people were highly respected. But anti-Semitism was on the rise again in many countries, including Poland.
My condolences to your family, who must have suffered terribly. But on the whole, it's not clear that Polish people were significantly more anti-Semitic than the rest of Europe at this time.
And now this museum is focused in some chauvinist correction than in remembering the real horrors of the time.
I absolutely agree that the horrors should NOT be ignored. On the other hand, well... there's this. As you'll learn there, not only did Polish people likely save a half-million or more Jewish lives during that time, but these Polish people were victims of numerous massacres when they were punished for trying to protect Jews -- estimates are that up to 50,000 Polish people lost their lives just trying to do this.
So, yeah -- were there bad Poles who betrayed Jews the Nazis, etc.? Of course. Were there also ones who helped Jewish people at the risk of their own lives? Yeah, a lot of those too.
History is complicated, and little good generally comes from stereotyping or vilifying an entire group of people. Hopefully the irony here is not lost.
Just to be clear, when I said "suffered some form of attack," I was referring to the various types of programs, individual killings, etc. -- the "victims" I was referring to were generally killed.
Also, I based my numbers on your link, but I was just trying to point out that lots of people were apparently being killed at this time. Jewish people were targets, undoubtedly, but it was a very violent era.
It's not a lie, Polish mobs were literally killing survivors of the concentration camps.
Yes, you are correct. And these acts of violence are deplorable.
Just to try to get a sense of the magnitude, from your link: "Jews constituted between 2% and 3% of the total number of victims of postwar violence in the country," and that number seems to come to 1000-2000 victims, according to your link.
According to this, at the post-war peak, the Jewish population was somewhere around 180000-240000. Which means roughly 1% of the Jewish population suffered some form of attack during this period. Meanwhile, that same link notes the postwar population of Poland was about 24 million. That means the Jewish population was a little less than 1% of the overall population.
Using these stats (that Jews suffered 2-3% of overall attacks), that means that they were roughly 2-4 times more likely to be attacked than other people in Poland.
So, it's safe to say that Jewish people were targeted more than others. It's also safe to say that post-war Poland was a particularly violent and bad place to be (for everyone).