The last time somebody tried this was the Library of Alexandria which required the dictates and commands of several kings. Even then they had to pay money to the Athenians to get some documents.
Knowledge is power. Power isn't easily shared.
Unfortunately, I can't read TFA because it's behind a paywall, so I'm not really sure what the article is complaining about.
However, it should be noted that Google actually DID convince a number of major libraries (like Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, etc.) to share huge amounts of their material. I remember the discussions among librarians when this idea was first being floated, and nobody thought they'd ever get major research libraries with huge amounts of old books to go along with it -- but they did.
So, while "knowledge is power," Google made great strides in getting big, old, rich libraries to make lots of their information available to the public.
Thus, to my mind, Google Books is still a HUGE resource. They managed to digitize and index a ridiculous number of obscure books, particularly from the 1800s and early 1900s. (There's earlier stuff too, but it's not as comprehensive or indexed as well, largely due to issues in recognizing old fonts and letter variants.)
For anyone interested in any kind of historical information, this is a goldmine unlike anything ever available in the history of humanity, even the Library of Alexandria. You want to know when or how some concept emerged in the 1800s or early 1900s? You can do a full text search of thousands of obscure books and pinpoint exactly how an idea emerged, was first discussed, and then spread. Heck, I've even made use of it to find when and how certain kinds of foods emerged, or when kitchen equipment became standardized.
A decade ago this kind of research required hours or days in one of the few libraries with large and comprehensive collections of old books. Now, I can usually get at least a rough answer to even incredibly obscure historical questions within a few minutes and a couple tailored searches.
That in itself is nothing short of an amazing accomplishment. Add all of the old resources that are still valuable -- we used to depend on Dover Edition reprints of old classic textbooks or standard classic works of both non-fiction and fiction. Now you can download almost any major book you want from before 1920 or so as a searchable PDF for free. You want a classic old textbook on math or Latin or mechanics or whatever? There are literally hundreds of them available, thanks to digitization brought to you by Google Books.
And then there are all the newer books -- I agree that there are lots of annoying books with no preview, but Google Books was the first place to bring you a full-text search to so many recent books, often with a preview of a few pages.
Again, for someone doing research on just about anything, this was absolutely amazing when I first began using it a lot 5-6 years ago. A decade ago, I'd need to go to the library and find a book, then scan through the index or page through it to see if it had relevant information. Half of the time now I can just do a full-text search on thousands of related books on the topic and often get a preview of the relevant pages instantly in one place.
The real unfortunate problem, to my mind, is the "abandoned" works on Google Books, books that aren't old enough to be in the public domain, but for which there's no clear rights holder available or easy to contact. The are huge numbers of great resources from the 1920s up to the present day which I can only get a "snippet view" of, if that. That's also a HUGE hole, but it doesn't detract from the achievement of what Google Books has done.
Just as one other random anecdote -- I first realized the true power of Google Books about 5 years ago. Part of my research touches on history of science, and I was working through some odd calculations in a 17th-century treatise. I was briefly
laissez-faire has been the status quo for networking at MIT for decades. The attitude seems to be that "policies" just get in the way. I was a sys admin there a long time ago, there were no firewalls, no nothing. We didn't have DHCP. We got IP addresses for the systems and we hardcoded them. Of course it was a mess.
Yes, and much of that is still the same. MIT has the entire 18.x.x.x block. There are plenty of direct IP addresses to give out to every single computer on campus, and I believe that's still the case.
If you have a look at the Ars Technica story on this report, they identify major components of the ranking, which include things like:
Network security: a score based on the number of vulnerable services running directly exposed to the Internet, based on a scan that audits version numbers of exposed software and open ports on those systems correlated with a database of known exploits, according to SecurityScorecard Chief of Research Alex Heid.
Hacker chatter: a score based on the frequency with which the school was mentioned in hacker forums, and amount of user credentials, e-mail addresses and other breached data circulating on those forums over the observed period.
Password exposure: the degree to which students, faculty, and employees are using weak passwords). This score was in part based on the user credential data discovered in hacker chatter."Our signals and sensors found 6 credentials for accounts associated with student and employee email discovered in 4 data leaks," SecurityScorecard reported.
In other words, they dropped MIT to the bottom of the list because they have most computers and systems on actual IP addresses connected directly to the internet, and because hackers apparently talk a lot about hacking into MIT. (Well, duh!) Oh... oh my goodness -- they found SIX (count 'em SIX!) credentials for user accounts on the internet!!
Now, what does this actually mean in terms of ACTUAL security? Well, the scorecard also notes:
And saving MIT from an overall failing grade, however, were the school's A grades in Web application security, the health of its DNS records, and the quality of its endpoint security.
In other words, they actually secured their applications and systems. They're just downgraded mostly because every student-owned Raspberry Pi with an actual real IP address counted against their score and because hackers apparently like talking about hacking into MIT.
Except, of course, if every computer is actually exposed directly to the internet, then every computer is responsible for its own security -- which means that hacking into one system does nothing to compromise MIT's larger IT structure... it just gets access to one student's computer or whatever. And frankly, most people at MIT are smart enough to secure their own systems.
Does this "report" detail any actual breaches to major systems or data at MIT? It doesn't sound like it. So what precisely is the security flaw here? Giving direct internet access to thousands of students and faculty (along with the freedom that goes with that)?
I don't know what things are like there right now, but as of a few years ago, the sysadmins at MIT would generally just keep an eye on weird network traffic and events, and if your system was doing something bad, you'd just get your access shut down temporarily (and receive a notice telling you what was going on and what you needed to do to restore access).
I realize that you probably will never read this, Bill. But I've seen your posts on here for years, and while I've disagreed with you many times and at other times appreciated your insightfulness, this post... well, I've just lost all respect for you.
I don't give a crap what some piece of paper says -- I just care if someone can do a job. I've met liberal arts majors who are the smartest people I know, and I've met science/eng/tech majors who are so dumb that I marvel how they could ever have finished a degree. And vice versa. If I see a liberal arts major who appears to have the skills, I'm interested -- whatever their background. And frankly, I'm already interested in someone who chooses an unusual college major anyway, because they strike me as a potentially more interesting person who might have the foresight to actually CARE about something, rather than just checking the box for, "Uh, business major" or whatever. People who have some sort of initiative and an ability to make a choice (even a less common one) have already shown me that they have initiative to do something most other college majors can't... which is to care about something intellectually. If I'm hiring someone for a job that needs to THINK at ALL, I want someone with a prior history of thought.
Sure -- I'm not denying that there are plenty of liberal arts majors who are idiots out there. But I would never summarily reject someone for that or claim that all such degrees count as much as a high school diploma.
Currently the "Commodity Promotion, Research, and Information Act of 1996," I believe. Some programs also have state oversight.
I can understand making it mandatory to join an oversight board or reporting data to the FDA.
That's one of the intentions -- the commodity "checkoff" programs are regulated by the USDA and are partly about ensuring consistency in product policy.
But I hope the government isn't requiring companies to join advocacy groups. That's a small step away from mandatory lobbying.
These "checkoff" programs perhaps made more sense a few decades ago when smaller farms were still common. The idea was that no small farmer had the resources by himself to have an advertising campaign to promote milk or egg or pork consumption or whatever. And voluntary programs (hence the name "checkoff" -- they originally required producers to "check off" if they wanted to participate) had the "free rider" problem -- if 50% of egg producers contributed to generic "Incredible, Edible Egg!" marketing, the other 50% of producers got this promotion of their product effectively for free.
The justification here is that these "commodities" are often marketed generically, without reference to the specific producers -- thus, they should all contribute equally to ensure consistent product demand. And SCOTUS has upheld such policies as constitutional, as long as they are part of a "larger regulatory framework." If these checkoff programs are solely about advertising, then they can be unconstitutional. But they are also supposed to be about product research, ensuring consistent and accurate public information about commodities, promotion through various channels (not just consumer advertising), etc. And they are expected to play by very specific rules regulated by the USDA in any advocacy -- which is the big deal with the Egg Board here, because they violated these rules.
Anyhow, one other thing to note is that Congress requires there to be a referendum vote from the producers every three years to continue or terminate any of these checkoff programs, so if the egg producers decide that they no longer want this program, they can vote to terminate it.
Obviously there are some legal questions here, and SCOTUS has had mixed rulings over the years. But the general idea dates back to a time when agriculture was a major part of the U.S. economy, and ensuring consistent supply and demand was essential to prevent major problems with the U.S. food supply.
The AEB is a taxpayer funded organization, so yes, running PR, misleading advertising campaigns, and undermining a private company, with my tax dollars is inappropriate.
Except the American Egg Board is NOT a "taxpayer funded organization." It is a checkoff organization, which means that it gets its funding from producers of eggs.
The government connection is that the USDA oversees these organizations and regulates them to ensure that they adhere to certain business practices (including not criticizing other food, the issue in the present case).
So, unless you have bought eggs, you have contributed ZERO DOLLARS to the AEB. Not a single cent of your taxes has gone to their "misleading advertising campaigns."
That said -- "checkoff" programs have been attacked by some in recent years because of their mandatory contribution to sell commodity products.
So, ShanghaiBill, if you sell eggs for a living, I can understand if you want to complain about the AEB taking money out of some of your profits. But even then it's a bit misleading to say that they are taking your "tax dollars."
*sigh* This discussion is so pathetic unless there's some actual evidence of manipulation or fraud on Hampton Creek's part.
Well, in TFA, there is a link to an article describing precisely that.
I don't think there's some sort of big conspiracy or even intentional act to trick the average consumer into buying "Just Mayo" when the consumer really wanted eggs.
I wouldn't call it a "big conspiracy" -- it's just a company trying to sell a product. You call your product "Just Mayo" and put a picture of an egg and a plant on the front. You get the vegan crowd who has heard of your product, plus you might sell more product to people looking for "healthy" or "natural" mayo.
The vegan market, while growing, is still quite small. (Polls and estimates generally put the proportion of vegans in the U.S. at less than 1%.) The number of people who buy regular mayonnaise is probably a couple orders of magnitude larger. You could probably sell more product to normal mayo seekers trying to find "natural" mayo than you could sell to dedicated vegans.
It's not a grand "conspiracy." It's a marketing decision -- one that is potentially deceptive, if you actually believe the mayonnaise should have a standard definition. The FDA generally has limitations on what can and can't go into certain foods, to avoid situations where a consumer thinks he/she is getting X, but it's actually Y or a severely diluted form of X mixed with crap.
Really, if that's the real complaint, then the Egg Lobby should have pushed the FDA to demand better labeling.
(To be clear, NONE of this excuses the actions of the Egg Board, which seems deplorable. But that doesn't mean there isn't some deception going on on both sides.)
That sounds more like incompetence than malice, or excessive cautiousness...
Vegans won't eat eggs, and will avoid products which contain them.
A lot of products are advertised as "may contain traces of nuts" when they usually dont, the companies are over cautious incase there is a trace of nuts and someone has a severe reaction.
While that's a nice story, that's NOT what GP was talking about. As detailed in a previous Guardian article, the company calls its product "Just Mayo" and has a picture of an egg on the label. The FDA has (rightly) accused them of false advertising, because they (1) imply their product is mayonnaise with their name, but doesn't contain necessary ingredients for the normal definition of mayo, (2) include ingredients that are not allowed in products claiming to be mayonnaise, (3) show a picture of an egg and plant on the label, leading to an impression that the product contains eggs and is likely a "natural" version of mayo, and (4) also implies on the label that their product is "heart-healthy" while not meeting the FDA standard for such labeling.
We have food definitions for a reason. It prevents you from going to the store and buying a thing labeled "ground beef" and getting a bunch of ground-up cat mixed with oats and tofu. There are definitions for mayonnaise, too.
I have no problem if this company wants to sell a vegan product similar to mayonnaise -- that's great. Maybe it's tasty or healthier -- great. But they should either choose a name that clearly indicates it is NOT traditional mayonnaise and/or have an explanation on the label indicating explicitly how it differs from traditional mayo.
Instead, this company wants to try to mislead customers into thinking they are buying a "more natural" and "pure" version of actual mayonnaise ("Just Mayo") by using a deceptive label.
This is definitely not "incompetence." It's clearly deliberate.
The problem is a fraud on the public. Advocating a position that is based on who pays you, without regard to reason or truth or the benefit to mankind, without so much as a notice of your bias, causes massive amounts of harm to the public by sustaining inefficient practices.
It is perhaps the single most harmful activity to society a person can engage in--it wastes other people's lives. It perpetuates the spread of misinformation.
Yes, yes, yes. Thanks for your rant -- and I agree with you.
On the other hand, if you RTFA, you'll find out that both sides in this fight are trying to mislead.
Another Guardian article (linked in TFA) details how the product information violates standards of mayonnaise definitions without explanation on the label, choosing to call itself "Just Mayo" and featuring a picture of an egg on the label.
Another article linked in TFA interviewed former employees and describes shoddy science and misleading claims by the company, including things like claiming shelf-life longevity before the product had actually been tested that long, putting in ingredients (like preservatives) that violate its other advertising and claims, mislabeling ingredients to make the product look more "natural" and less "processed," etc. In sum:
Over time, though, the former employees came to believe that the company was less concerned about the science and more about delivering a product as fast as possible to meet whatever contract was due, which disappointed many of the former employees we spoke with.
"The entire time I was there we weren't aware of how it emulsified," a former employee said, referring to the eggless mayonnaise. "We weren't able to prove how it works. Josh liked to convey this notion that we had a great understanding of the science."
Another former employee said: "It was supposed to be a science research company, and it's not a science research company, and that's a very big disappointment."
So, if you're going to go around yelling about "frauds on the public," let's be clear what we're talking about here. Both sides are trying to mislead to make profits. Both sides are misusing "science" for their own agendas.
Is it deplorable? Yes. Is it new or even that noteworthy? Not really.
The main concern about this whole incident from the actions of the pro-egg folks is that some of their funding comes from the government. Your rant may be well-intentioned, but it's basically a fact of life in the corporate world. I think GP is correct to point out that if we're criticizing the SCIENCE, we should present the SCIENTIFIC flaws (and misleading statements/policies) of both sides, of which there are many.
But the only reason to single out the pro-egg side as "more guilty" here is because of the connection to government. That's the legitimate concern here.
And it is fundamentally contrary to the ideals of Nerds, Geeks, and those who believe in the potential of science and information to help mankind get out of the mess we've made of our world and our societies.
Yes, and if we had a story for every company that was putting out misleading propaganda about its products, we might as well turn Slashdot into a business news site, because we'd have dozens if not hundreds of stories like this every day. I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize it, but acting like these practices are somehow unusual or even noteworthy (other than the connection to the government) is a bit weird.
From the given descriptions, I can make no prediction as to how the flavor of one would differ from the other. The description contains only differences that I would expect from two booze tasters tasting the same booze, or from one booze taster tasting the same booze twice but thinking it's different. Or perhaps someone could translate it to English for me?
First off, I will say that I agree to some extent with your implicit skepticism. There have been a lot of double-blind tests that have shown tasting rates, even by professional judges, to be highly flawed.
That said, have you ever tried to describe the difference in taste of two different whiskies to someone else? You need to come up with some way of characterizing the taste -- and while I often am skeptical of these long descriptions, I frequently find that there's something in the flavor profile that often matches my experience pretty well -- "Wow... yeah, I actually DO taste the 'toffee' " or "The 'plum' note really does stand out here." These things are particularly notable when you're sampling a number of different drinks at the same time.
Also, note that these tastings were done blind, and there were three glasses with two having the same whisky, so there were several ways to discount those characteristics which were apparently just "random" variance with "one booze taster tasting the same booze twice but thinking it's different" or whatever.
Anyhow, there's no way to "translate" this exactly, because it's already English. To me, these descriptions tell me that I'm likely to hate the space sample, which sounds positively awful -- "antiseptic smoke, rubber, and smoked fish" are all things that generally are BAD qualities in a scotch nose. Do you want to drink scotch that smells like rubber and fish? "Antiseptic" is a clue that the taster probably thought the alcohol notes were out of balance. There's also the word "curious" in "curious perfumed note" which again hints that something seems out of place or weird. The actual primary taste sounds okay, though very fruity, but the aftertaste again sounds horrible: "intense" is rarely a good thing in aftertastes, and when you pair it with more "antiseptic" and "rubber" -- it sounds to me that whoever drank this stuff HATED it.
The earth sample, on the other hand, has a nice nose, perhaps bourbon-like from the description. The "antiseptic" is downplayed in the taste (though it probably has a little "burn" given the mention), and the "long lingering aftertaste" is not "intense" but rather a blend of "gentle" and "creamy" pleasant flavors like smoke and fudge.
In short, you might think these are similar descriptions, but the basic effect I get is that the earth-based sample was fairly balanced and pleasant overall, with perhaps a little bit of "bite," but the space sample was wildly out-of-balance and, frankly, terrible. I know some people who like "extreme" whiskies that taste pretty weird, and maybe they'd like the space sample. But I imagine the more interesting conclusion (if anything, from such a small, short study) is that space aging can change which notes are brought out in whisky, and perhaps some sort of combination of aging processes could result in something better. But this study was fairly limited.
We see Google in so many places that most people don't know that (financially) they're an ad company. All of the other businesses feed back into their money making line of business.
Exactly. And this goes beyond Youtube. It even includes search. Many people think of Google as a "search engine" whose goal is to deliver the best results. It isn't. Perhaps it was 15 years ago when they were still fighting for dominance, but now having good, efficient search is only a secondary concern -- they mostly are an ad-delivery system.
Which is the probably one of the reasons why Google search has gradually gotten significantly worse over the past 5-8 years. (At least in returning precise search results... obviously in other ways Google has expanded the types of things you can search for, etc., which again increases the amount of ads they can send you.) It is NOT in their best interest to allow you to perform precision searches that take you immediately to the best match for what you want. It IS in their best interest to get you to spend as much time as possible on their site to view more ads. Obviously, they can't go too far or else people will rebel or switch to another search engine. But if they keep making things incrementally worse while raising their stats on adviews, it's a win-win for them.
Or one who doesn't run a yellow light even though he could stop safely.
It's important to note that 75% of states have so-called "permissive yellow" laws that allow motorists to "run a yellow light." The law in most states is that you can actually enter an intersection when the light is yellow (and, in fact, it's generally safer to do so rather than stopping suddenly). If you are in an intersection when the light is red in these states, you have not committed a violation, as long as you entered when the light was yellow and you clear the intersection as quickly and safely as possible. It's only a minority of states that criminalize entering an intersection on a yellow light (a policy that many traffic safety engineers don't encourage, unless the yellow is preceded by a blinking green or something).
Anyhow, I don't know where you live, but I've met many people who think everyone should obey "restrictive yellow" policies when they actually live in states that have a "permissive yellow" law.
At the same time, motorists kill thousands of people per year in the US alone and are most often at fault when a bicyclist gets hurt.
Your linked article doesn't actually provide useful statistics on determining whether motorists or cyclists are more likely to be "worse drivers." All your link says is that:
With adult cyclists, police found the driver solely responsible in about 60%-75% of all cases, and riders solely at fault 17%-25% of the time.
That implies that when an accident occurs, the motorist is more often at fault. But it does NOT mean a larger percentage of motorists are likely to cause accidents compared to cyclists. To make that determination, you'd need to know the proportion of cyclists and motorists on roads.
To give an extreme example, imagine a situation where there are 1000 motorists on the road for every cyclist in a particular area where they encounter each other. If motorists and cyclists were equally safe in driving, then cyclists should only be responsible for about 0.1% of accidents. If cyclists are instead responsible for 17-25% of accidents (as in your link), then the percentage of "bad cyclists" is likely at least an order of magnitude (or even two orders of magnitude) higher than the percentage of "bad motorists" in these interactions, even if motorists are at fault more of the time.
Basically, if you use the stats in your link, you'd need the ratio of motorists to cyclists to be less than about 5:1 in order for the motorists to be demonstrably "worse" demographically than cyclists in causing these accidents. There aren't many cities where cyclists travel over 20% of the number of miles that cars travel on streets, so it's still likely (based on your link) that cyclists are demonstrably more likely to cause accidents, taken as a percentage of cyclists as a whole.
To be clear -- I'm NOT at all excusing motorists, whom you are correct to point out need to be more vigilant because they are driving far more dangerous machines which are much more likely to cause serious injury. I absolutely agree that motorists have a greater responsibility to be careful, and many aren't. But if you're trying to figure out who are "worse" in obeying traffic laws and ending up in accidents proportionally, you need more information to make a determination.
We don't expect pedestrians to follow the same laws as cars. Let's not pretend that cars and bikes aren't on different footing.
Funny with the pun (intentionally or not).
But in all seriousness, we actually DO have pretty strict regulations in most municipalities regarding pedestrians and what they are limited to do on roads and when. Although many pedestrians ignore them, they do so at their own peril. (And the U.S. is different from some other countries in expectations for pedestrians: jaywalking is fairly accepted and crossing at a "Do Not Walk" sign is frequently tolerated. Try doing such things in, say, Germany, and you will at a minimum get dirty looks from old ladies and potentially even get a ticket. There are good reasons for pedestrians to obey most of the "rules of the road" too.)
And for good reason. There's a set of expectations about how everyone will behave and where it is reasonable for people/bicycles/cars will be.
Quite simply, roads are dangerous places, with loads of multiple-ton metallic hunks flying around at high speed. Most of the rationale for cyclists to obey the "rules of the road" is for their own safety, just as for pedestrians. So, you're correct that cyclists can't do as much damage or whatever if they mess up, but rules are not just to prevent people from killing or injuring other people -- they are often accepted conventions that help prevent EVERYONE from getting killed or injured by setting up reasonable expectations.
The problem with setting up a different official set of rule for some vehicles, even bicycles, is that what will ultimately happen is that those cyclists will end up in unexpected places at unexpected times... which increases the chances of collision EVEN IF everyone else is reasonably trying to obey the rules. (I've seen many such situations arise where a cyclist zooms through a red light when a car suddenly pulls out from an unexpected place, and the car has a reasonable expectation that no one will be in the intersection. Sometimes this is a result of obstructed views or close parked cars or difficult traffic situations or whatever... but they all increase chances of unintentional collisions.) And cyclists are even more at risk than pedestrians when they break the rules because (1) they tend to ride on the road more often than pedestrians and (2) they can get themselves to an unexpected location more quickly and suddenly.
There may well be SOME places where it might be desirable to modify rules for cyclists. But I think those situations are less frequent than cyclists would like, if we actually compare the likely impact of such modifications on overall safety (rather than impatience, which is usually the motivation for most cyclists, who'd prefer to cut corners and run lights because it just gets them to a destination faster.)
Uh, just about anytime a cyclist has to make a left turn at an intersection with the potential for more than one lane. And while some cyclists are conscientious enough to signal when they do this, most seem to just take a quick look around and cross without a signal. This seems fine for them, except when it isn't -- like when a car is coming out of somewhere they didn't think of looking.
It's the same rule as for cars: signals help tell where you're going, and that's probably the MOST useful when cars come out of places you don't think of looking... which is the reason to use them even when you don't see others around.
Right hand turns are executed from the right shoulder where they usually ride and left turns are from a standstill if there is any traffic.
What does this have to do with GP, who was asking how often cyclists signal? It doesn't matter if they are turning right from a cycling lane -- they should still signal. I used to walk to work in a place where lots of cyclists would come by, and I can't tell you how many times I was almost run over by a cyclist who would speed through a red light and either cross the intersection or make a right hand turn at full speed without signalling.
Again, signals are most important for situations where you don't notice the people who need them. Trying to excuse the fact that cyclists don't use signals because "well, usually they fall into these specific cases..." just doesn't work. By that logic, most cars should never have to use signals either, which is clearly illegal... and for good reason.
Yeah I know "I saw this one biker go blah bi de blah blahh". The thing is, if a cyclist is careless they'll get run over. If a motorist is careless they'll run over the cyclist.
Yes, and the unfortunate lesson from this is that cyclists have to be MORE vigilant and more conscious of the "rules of the road" than motorists, because they take a greater risk if anyone does something wrong. We can try to police motorists who break the rules, but the reality is that people make mistakes... and as a cyclist you need to realize who has the power to kill you, whether they are acting rationally or in "good faith" or not.
Your post reads like someone complaining that wolves could attack and kill humans, so humans should be excused for not paying attention to where wolves might be or for stupid behaviors that end up getting them injured or killed. And maybe that's true, but that's obviously the wrong lesson -- the reality is that the wolves are there, and it's stupid to not do your best to protect yourself, to avoid putting yourself in a situation where you could be hurt or killed.
I've seen cars hit cyclists, I've seen cyclists hit cars, I've seen cyclists hit pedestrians... it all happens and various people are at fault. One thing that does NOT help is just saying, "Oh, I don't need to signal or obey the 'rules' because somebody else should be."
This was tried, it led to the Civil War. The south, more than anything else, wanted strong states rights and weak federal government. The north disagreed and it ended up in war.
This isn't really true. In the antebellum U.S., both the South and the North tended to favor the federal government when it suited their interests and to favor "states' rights" when it suited other aspects of their interests.
For example, the South favored states' rights for Western territories to decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery or not, but they favored the federal government when it came to protecting the rights of slaveholders to take their slaves into free states or when it came to enforcing the Fugitive Slave Acts (which were explicitly authorized by the Constitution).
Meanwhile, the North favored the federal government when it came to enforcing limits on slavery, e.g., in the Missouri Compomise, but it favored states' rights when it came to passing laws and even nullifying acts of Congress that tried to enforce pro-slavery elements (like Fugitive Slave laws) in free states.
Some Southern states actually explicitly mentioned the non-enforcement of Fugitive Slave Acts of Congress in their acts of secession -- essentially, the argument was that the Northern states were failing to adhere to the Constitution and the federal government. Thus, the North had already broken its federal compact with the South, thereby justifying secession. See, for example, the South Carolina Declaration of the Causes for Secession (from the first state to secede):
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the general government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these states the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the state government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constitutional compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.
There's this Southern myth that the Southern states wanted "states' rights" but the North wanted a "strong federal government." In reality, each side wanted both federal and state powers to enforce their interests. Ultimately, of course, the Civil War came about over the questionable legality of a certain potential "state right," i.e., the right to secede, which the South wanted to assert. But in other cases, the South was happy to use the federal government to further its own ends -- and it did so for decades leading up to the Civil War.
Today search is ALMOST ENTIRELY SHIT. It is used because shit is king.
If you think that, you don't remember Alta Vista, which had millions of links to "Page not Found" and in the search results had multiple listings to the same (often broken) page.
I remember AltaVista well and broken links in many search engines in the 1990s. But just because search engines don't direct you to broken links as often anymore doesn't mean they're better.
Now, rather than millions of broken links, search engines direct me to millions of websites that don't contain my search terms and often have nothing to do with what I'm searching for.
Is that really much of an improvement? Actually, I think it's worse -- because it takes me a fraction of a second to see a 404 error and go back and try a different hit. But when a search engine directs me to mostly links that have nothing to do with my search terms, it can take me many seconds of skimming to discover that a particular hit is bogus.
Google probably reached its optimum usefulness a little over 10 years ago. Ever since, it has gradually tried to become more like "Ask Jeeves" and less useful for people who actually have serious research to do. First, you had Google offering corrections to misspellings (a useful feature), but then those would replace your actual search. Then you had dropping of the default "AND" operator that made Google efficient and useful at the beginning. Then they dropped the "+" operator a few years ago. Then they broke double quotes and verbatim search to various unpredictable degrees. And now whenever I search for obscure terms, by default Google tries to replace them with what it thinks are "synonyms" (but which often aren't, or which I don't want). So I stopped using Google for many of my default searches a few years back... and there's really nothing out there that rivals the efficiency and precision of Google ca. 2000.
Bottom line: If you're a moron who can't spell, can't bother to think about what words might actually appear in what you're looking for, and likely don't even really have a clue what you're even looking for -- well, today's search is much "better" for you. Granted, 90+% of people are probably like this, so that's why Google targets the "lowest common denominator." If you're actually looking for a serious SEARCH engine, it's not Google anymore.
What's the AM ratio? 1000 to 1 or maybe worse. >20M guys is a decent sample size for the "claiming to be attached looking to cheat" demographic. Women didn't fall as easily for it, despite their access being free!
Umm, I know this is a crazy thing to say, but if you RTFA you'd discover that that 1000:1 claim about male:female active users was completely bogus. The author of the article had no clue what she was talking about and came to crazy conclusions based on incomplete information.
(Personally, I believed the media could fall for it, but the other day when this was on Slashdot, I couldn't fathom how anyone could take these arguments seriously. Men and women are different, but actual studies on cheating generally don't show even a 2:1 male:female ratio, let alone a 2000:1 ratio. The idea that the stats were like that on perhaps the most prominent internet site targeted toward cheaters? Come on... that ratio just sounds entirely bogus... and I called it out the other day here too -- though admittedly my theory was a bit different because I assumed the author actually had a bit of a clue about the tech she was critiquing before publishing something so obviously crazy.)
TFS doesn't explain this, but the 1000:1 ratio or whatever is just the ratio of men vs. women on Ashley Madison who had interactions with the bots. And that ratio is likely quite biased toward men because the vast majority of bots (>99%) were designed to interact with men.
And why would it be biased in this way? Probably because the actual number of male:female accounts is something like a 5:1 ratio or whatever, so they did want to create more interaction possibilities to keep the men around and paying.
But there were still millions of women who likely signed up for the site, though apparently (if TFA is now correct in its interpretation of the data dump) there's no way to tell how many of any of the accounts -- male or female -- were "active" vs. people who just logged in once or whatever. (There's only reasonably good evidence that a few thousand or maybe tens of thousands of the female accounts were actually bogus -- but not >99.9% of the millions of them, as the earlier Gizmodo article claimed.)
The 1000:1 claims are just nonsense, as any rational person with a knowledge of stats and basic survey information about men and women would realize immediately.
We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.
Excuse me if the following sounds a bit exasperated, but you do realize that people actually communicated informal messages to each other written form BEFORE texting, right?
People wrote letters and postcards, and they've been doing this for centuries. People wrote office memos and short notes to loved ones, either left in a box for someone to pick up or perhaps carried by courier to the recipient. Once the telegraph was developed, people sent telegrams and paid by the length of the message, so they often managed to communicate extraordinary emotions in a few lines of text. (I have the telegrams sent between my grandmother and grandfather when my mother was born during WWII and my grandfather was overseas. You can easily get the emotions they were experiencing from the short texts; it's quite moving, actually.)
I don't think you realize the extent that people used memos and couriers in the days before telephones, or the extent that people wrote informal postcards to each other or short letters on a regular basis to keep relatives and friends abreast of ongoing events. Mail used to even be delivered multiple times per day in many places in the U.S.
While handwritten notes sometimes could include graphical symbols, most people didn't make a lot of use of them, because text is so efficient at conveying ideas.
And we already have symbols to express written emotion and tone -- they're called punctuation. Even a "non-professional writer can manage" to use them. The main ones are ! and ?, but you can also convey quite a variety of emotions through combinations: !! vs. !? vs. ?! vs. ??, or even things like (?) or (!), etc.
A little personal anecdote: a few years back, I happened upon some letters sent between my grandparents during WWII. Actually, both of my grandfathers served overseas during WWII, and I have letters from both of them. A few things to note:
(1) They didn't seem to need emojis to express a considerable range of thoughts, ideas, and emotions. (It's very moving to read some of their letters.)
(2) They possessed a better grasp of written grammar, usage, and style than most college undergraduates I've taught. They still made errors, but I assume the fluidity of their writing is due to lots of practice in casual written communication (as was incredibly common back then).
(3) They weren't professional writers. In fact, one had attended school to 6th grade and the other had attended only until 4th. (This was also fairly common in the U.S. before WWII.) Yet they somehow got enough out of "grammar school" back then to be able to communicate in writing on a level comparable to at least a high-school graduate today.
I've seen enough examples of letters written by other relatively lower-class soldiers in wars (in documentaries, etc.) to know that my grandfathers weren't outliers either.
And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.
"Smileys" are/were somewhat different. Most "smileys" were used in place of actual facial expressions: a grin, frown, wide-eyed look of surprise, wink, etc. There's no direct verbal equivalent to these facial expressions, but they could of course be simply represented as *wink* or [grin] or whatever too, utilizing only a couple more characters.
The set of easily recognizable facial expressions is relatively small. Even if we include common and nearly universal body language gestures like nodding, shaking the head, and "thumbs up," we might only need a dozen or so such representations to convey expression/gesture.
Hate speech absolutely does not violate US law. Inciting to violence against them, sometimes (again, if credible); Ranting until you go horse about the evils of Muslims or gays or Canadians, no. You have every right to hate whatever groups you want and talk about it every chance you get - Hell, you can even do it while running for president!
It depends on what you mean by "does not violate US law." If you mean, "You can't be convicted for a crime on the basis of hateful speech ALONE," then you're sort of correct.
But hate speech is commonly used to enhance sentences for other crimes by converting them into "hate crimes." So, there can be clear legal consequences to hate speech, depending on the circumstances -- including ending up in prison for significantly longer.
Now, we can argue semantics here about how hate crime laws work. But the basic fact is that IF you use hate speech, it can cause you to serve significant prison time. Generally, you also need a related crime to trigger such a penalty, but it's effectively an extra penalty for the motivation behind a hate crime, which is often supported by evidence of hateful speech.
Bottom line: hate speech doesn't violate US law unless you use it while violating another US law. In that latter case, it most definitely can trigger significant criminal penalties, above and beyond what would normally be appropriate for a given offense.
I'm late to the party here, but just happened to be reading through this thread...
What really convinced people was how simply it explained planetary motion (as opposed to the impossibly complex epicycles of the Ptolemaic system)
Except we're talking about Galileo here, who believed in circular orbits, as did Copernicus. Circular orbits still require significant numbers of epicycles as corrections, so these systems are not necessarily simpler mathematically.
Kepler of course proposed elliptical orbits, which did simplify the math considerably, but Galileo summarily rejected that possibility.
combined with the discovery of Jupiter's moons, which, while not in itself a proof of the Copernican system, was proof that not everything revoled around the Earth.
And that's one of the reasons that many (probably most) scientists who cared about this began to take the Tychonic model of the solar system seriously, which still posited that the universe as a whole revolved around the earth, but other bodies like the Sun and Jupiter might have their own satellites.
At the time of Galileo's trial, there weren't that many scientists who yet took a Copernican model as reality, and probably even fewer who knew of and agreed with Kepler. Aside from the parallax problem, there were a lot more difficulties with the heliocentric theory in terms of science of that day, and Galileo's ways of explaining away objections was usually to attack people who disagreed and call them idiots while offering up nonsensical arguments of his own. (His main proof that the earth was in motion, for example, involved a theory of tides that required only one high tide per day at noon. Obviously this contradicted empirical evidence, and everybody could easily recognize it, but that was the best proof Galileo had... in the face of millennia of previous scientists and arguments about why the earth was at rest.)
Obviously his persecution and trial was terrible. But there were lots of obstacles to accepting his theory at that time.
Here's an interesting statistic: Ty Cobb has the highest batting average in Major League Baseball history. He is, put simply, the best batter in the history of the world. What was his batting average? 0.366 Let that sink in.
Here's another interesting statistic: the significance level generally agreed upon for many psychological studies is a minimum of 0.95. Assuming we don't have any other sources of error, bias, etc., that means we should end up with roughly 5% or less of studies that can't be replicated.
Instead, the numbers are more like >60% of studies can't be replicated.
It doesn't matter what Ty Cobb's batting average was, or whether he failed most of the time. Obviously most experiments will probably fail most of the time. The issue is when you have published articles that usually require a minimum statistical threshold.
Thus, what matters is that many scientists have statistical procedures in place that are supposed to guarantee that the false positive rate is less than 5%. But those statistical procedures do no such thing -- and yes, that does mean there's a REAL and pervasive problem in research methodology when the standard for determining a "successful" study is this screwed up.
(Obviously, anyone who knows anything about stats realizes that the naive use of p values, etc. is out of hand and leads to really misleading results, even absent deliberate p hacking and other manipulation or bias. This present study is just proof that the naive statistical use in many studies is much less useful than most scientists think.)
That seems possible, and perhaps even likely. But the Gizmodo story overlooks something.
From your link:
There are definitely other possible explanations for these data discrepancies. It could be that the women's data in these three fields just happened to get hopelessly corrupted, even though the men's data didn't. Or maybe most of those accounts weren't deliberately faked, but just represented real women who came to the site once, never to return.
There's an obvious missing alternative possible explanation here -- The hackers could have tampered with the data.
This hack is notable because of its specific target of embarrassing and destroying the reputation of the company. Erasing or tampering with very specific database fields that make it look like Ashley Madison was perpetrating a complete fraud... well, that's certainly a convenient way to provide the final knife blow to any credibility the site or its management might have had.
Don't get me wrong -- I have no doubt that the site likely fabricated thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of female profiles, perhaps as initial enticement to get the site going in the beginning (since female numbers obviously are going to be less, as on any dating site). But the Gizmodo analysis wants us to believe that the ratio of active male:female members was something like 1000:1 or greater. Men and women certainly are different, but it's a little hard to believe that they're THAT different.
I'd say it's at least POSSIBLE that this data has been altered or tampered with by hackers who clearly have a specific moral agenda. This kind of tampering -- if it happened -- would effectively further their agenda to discredit the company. But perhaps it also serves other purposes... certainly there's been speculation that this moral attack was motivated by a personal affront or something. Perhaps the hack was partly motivated by someone specifically angry about a situation involving men cheating. Erasing data from most of the female accounts makes the men look even more desperate and pathetic than before, while simultaneously making the women look more "innocent."
I don't much care either way. But the reality is that the only data being used to support these claims has passed through hackers who clearly have their own agendas. Thus, we should be suspicious about apparent trends in that data which also conveniently further the hackers' moral agenda.
Not saying my hypothesis here is true, or even that it's likely. But it shouldn't be completely ignored as a possibility.
As a cable channel, the FCC has little to no jurisdiction...
I really hate to interrupt a good pedantic grammar rant, but a "dangling participle" needs... well... a participle, i.e., a verb form that modifies another word.
The phrase "As a cable channel" has no verb and no participle. If it instead said "Being a cable channel,..." then you might be more justified in your complaint about a dangling participle.
But "As a cable channel" is a misplaced modifier or a dangling modifier, specifically a prepositional phrase. No participles were harmed in the creation of that sentence.
Also, watched a fireworks show in Ottawa in August and the three teens sitting in front of us pretty much watched the whole thing through their phones recording it. How asinine is that?
Pretty typical for tourism these days. People walking around bumping into things while taking photos and recording stuff rather than actually experiencing the world.
Years ago, I lived in Rome for a short time. I got to observe idiots wandering around like this every day. I think I took less than a dozen photos the entire time I was there. If I want photos of all the gorgeous things around me, I can buy a book with professional photographers taking things from angles and with lighting I couldn't hope for. But the experience of walking on the exact same paving stones in the Roman Forum where Caesar and Cicero once walked thousands of years ago -- I just sat down there and contemplated where I was in awe.
That memory is important to me. Having a video or photo of my feet and some stones would not help me remember how I felt, and I doubt I would ever look at it. And if I were just wandering around worried about focusing my camera on all the stuff I could see, I doubt I ever would have even thought about those stones beneath my feet... and yet that was one of the most powerful feelings I took away from my trip.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time somebody tried this was the Library of Alexandria which required the dictates and commands of several kings. Even then they had to pay money to the Athenians to get some documents.
Knowledge is power. Power isn't easily shared.
Unfortunately, I can't read TFA because it's behind a paywall, so I'm not really sure what the article is complaining about.
However, it should be noted that Google actually DID convince a number of major libraries (like Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, etc.) to share huge amounts of their material. I remember the discussions among librarians when this idea was first being floated, and nobody thought they'd ever get major research libraries with huge amounts of old books to go along with it -- but they did.
So, while "knowledge is power," Google made great strides in getting big, old, rich libraries to make lots of their information available to the public.
Thus, to my mind, Google Books is still a HUGE resource. They managed to digitize and index a ridiculous number of obscure books, particularly from the 1800s and early 1900s. (There's earlier stuff too, but it's not as comprehensive or indexed as well, largely due to issues in recognizing old fonts and letter variants.)
For anyone interested in any kind of historical information, this is a goldmine unlike anything ever available in the history of humanity, even the Library of Alexandria. You want to know when or how some concept emerged in the 1800s or early 1900s? You can do a full text search of thousands of obscure books and pinpoint exactly how an idea emerged, was first discussed, and then spread. Heck, I've even made use of it to find when and how certain kinds of foods emerged, or when kitchen equipment became standardized.
A decade ago this kind of research required hours or days in one of the few libraries with large and comprehensive collections of old books. Now, I can usually get at least a rough answer to even incredibly obscure historical questions within a few minutes and a couple tailored searches.
That in itself is nothing short of an amazing accomplishment. Add all of the old resources that are still valuable -- we used to depend on Dover Edition reprints of old classic textbooks or standard classic works of both non-fiction and fiction. Now you can download almost any major book you want from before 1920 or so as a searchable PDF for free. You want a classic old textbook on math or Latin or mechanics or whatever? There are literally hundreds of them available, thanks to digitization brought to you by Google Books.
And then there are all the newer books -- I agree that there are lots of annoying books with no preview, but Google Books was the first place to bring you a full-text search to so many recent books, often with a preview of a few pages.
Again, for someone doing research on just about anything, this was absolutely amazing when I first began using it a lot 5-6 years ago. A decade ago, I'd need to go to the library and find a book, then scan through the index or page through it to see if it had relevant information. Half of the time now I can just do a full-text search on thousands of related books on the topic and often get a preview of the relevant pages instantly in one place.
The real unfortunate problem, to my mind, is the "abandoned" works on Google Books, books that aren't old enough to be in the public domain, but for which there's no clear rights holder available or easy to contact. The are huge numbers of great resources from the 1920s up to the present day which I can only get a "snippet view" of, if that. That's also a HUGE hole, but it doesn't detract from the achievement of what Google Books has done.
Just as one other random anecdote -- I first realized the true power of Google Books about 5 years ago. Part of my research touches on history of science, and I was working through some odd calculations in a 17th-century treatise. I was briefly
laissez-faire has been the status quo for networking at MIT for decades. The attitude seems to be that "policies" just get in the way. I was a sys admin there a long time ago, there were no firewalls, no nothing. We didn't have DHCP. We got IP addresses for the systems and we hardcoded them. Of course it was a mess.
Yes, and much of that is still the same. MIT has the entire 18.x.x.x block. There are plenty of direct IP addresses to give out to every single computer on campus, and I believe that's still the case.
If you have a look at the Ars Technica story on this report, they identify major components of the ranking, which include things like:
Network security: a score based on the number of vulnerable services running directly exposed to the Internet, based on a scan that audits version numbers of exposed software and open ports on those systems correlated with a database of known exploits, according to SecurityScorecard Chief of Research Alex Heid.
Hacker chatter: a score based on the frequency with which the school was mentioned in hacker forums, and amount of user credentials, e-mail addresses and other breached data circulating on those forums over the observed period.
Password exposure: the degree to which students, faculty, and employees are using weak passwords). This score was in part based on the user credential data discovered in hacker chatter."Our signals and sensors found 6 credentials for accounts associated with student and employee email discovered in 4 data leaks," SecurityScorecard reported.
In other words, they dropped MIT to the bottom of the list because they have most computers and systems on actual IP addresses connected directly to the internet, and because hackers apparently talk a lot about hacking into MIT. (Well, duh!) Oh... oh my goodness -- they found SIX (count 'em SIX!) credentials for user accounts on the internet!!
Now, what does this actually mean in terms of ACTUAL security? Well, the scorecard also notes:
And saving MIT from an overall failing grade, however, were the school's A grades in Web application security, the health of its DNS records, and the quality of its endpoint security.
In other words, they actually secured their applications and systems. They're just downgraded mostly because every student-owned Raspberry Pi with an actual real IP address counted against their score and because hackers apparently like talking about hacking into MIT.
Except, of course, if every computer is actually exposed directly to the internet, then every computer is responsible for its own security -- which means that hacking into one system does nothing to compromise MIT's larger IT structure... it just gets access to one student's computer or whatever. And frankly, most people at MIT are smart enough to secure their own systems.
Does this "report" detail any actual breaches to major systems or data at MIT? It doesn't sound like it. So what precisely is the security flaw here? Giving direct internet access to thousands of students and faculty (along with the freedom that goes with that)?
I don't know what things are like there right now, but as of a few years ago, the sysadmins at MIT would generally just keep an eye on weird network traffic and events, and if your system was doing something bad, you'd just get your access shut down temporarily (and receive a notice telling you what was going on and what you needed to do to restore access).
I realize that you probably will never read this, Bill. But I've seen your posts on here for years, and while I've disagreed with you many times and at other times appreciated your insightfulness, this post... well, I've just lost all respect for you.
I don't give a crap what some piece of paper says -- I just care if someone can do a job. I've met liberal arts majors who are the smartest people I know, and I've met science/eng/tech majors who are so dumb that I marvel how they could ever have finished a degree. And vice versa. If I see a liberal arts major who appears to have the skills, I'm interested -- whatever their background. And frankly, I'm already interested in someone who chooses an unusual college major anyway, because they strike me as a potentially more interesting person who might have the foresight to actually CARE about something, rather than just checking the box for, "Uh, business major" or whatever. People who have some sort of initiative and an ability to make a choice (even a less common one) have already shown me that they have initiative to do something most other college majors can't... which is to care about something intellectually. If I'm hiring someone for a job that needs to THINK at ALL, I want someone with a prior history of thought.
Sure -- I'm not denying that there are plenty of liberal arts majors who are idiots out there. But I would never summarily reject someone for that or claim that all such degrees count as much as a high school diploma.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." --George Bernard Shaw
Who makes this mandatory?
Congress.
Currently the "Commodity Promotion, Research, and Information Act of 1996," I believe. Some programs also have state oversight.
I can understand making it mandatory to join an oversight board or reporting data to the FDA.
That's one of the intentions -- the commodity "checkoff" programs are regulated by the USDA and are partly about ensuring consistency in product policy.
But I hope the government isn't requiring companies to join advocacy groups. That's a small step away from mandatory lobbying.
These "checkoff" programs perhaps made more sense a few decades ago when smaller farms were still common. The idea was that no small farmer had the resources by himself to have an advertising campaign to promote milk or egg or pork consumption or whatever. And voluntary programs (hence the name "checkoff" -- they originally required producers to "check off" if they wanted to participate) had the "free rider" problem -- if 50% of egg producers contributed to generic "Incredible, Edible Egg!" marketing, the other 50% of producers got this promotion of their product effectively for free.
The justification here is that these "commodities" are often marketed generically, without reference to the specific producers -- thus, they should all contribute equally to ensure consistent product demand. And SCOTUS has upheld such policies as constitutional, as long as they are part of a "larger regulatory framework." If these checkoff programs are solely about advertising, then they can be unconstitutional. But they are also supposed to be about product research, ensuring consistent and accurate public information about commodities, promotion through various channels (not just consumer advertising), etc. And they are expected to play by very specific rules regulated by the USDA in any advocacy -- which is the big deal with the Egg Board here, because they violated these rules.
Anyhow, one other thing to note is that Congress requires there to be a referendum vote from the producers every three years to continue or terminate any of these checkoff programs, so if the egg producers decide that they no longer want this program, they can vote to terminate it.
Obviously there are some legal questions here, and SCOTUS has had mixed rulings over the years. But the general idea dates back to a time when agriculture was a major part of the U.S. economy, and ensuring consistent supply and demand was essential to prevent major problems with the U.S. food supply.
The AEB is a taxpayer funded organization , so yes, running PR, misleading advertising campaigns, and undermining a private company, with my tax dollars is inappropriate.
Except the American Egg Board is NOT a "taxpayer funded organization." It is a checkoff organization, which means that it gets its funding from producers of eggs.
The government connection is that the USDA oversees these organizations and regulates them to ensure that they adhere to certain business practices (including not criticizing other food, the issue in the present case).
So, unless you have bought eggs, you have contributed ZERO DOLLARS to the AEB. Not a single cent of your taxes has gone to their "misleading advertising campaigns."
That said -- "checkoff" programs have been attacked by some in recent years because of their mandatory contribution to sell commodity products.
So, ShanghaiBill, if you sell eggs for a living, I can understand if you want to complain about the AEB taking money out of some of your profits. But even then it's a bit misleading to say that they are taking your "tax dollars."
*sigh* This discussion is so pathetic unless there's some actual evidence of manipulation or fraud on Hampton Creek's part.
Well, in TFA, there is a link to an article describing precisely that.
I don't think there's some sort of big conspiracy or even intentional act to trick the average consumer into buying "Just Mayo" when the consumer really wanted eggs.
I wouldn't call it a "big conspiracy" -- it's just a company trying to sell a product. You call your product "Just Mayo" and put a picture of an egg and a plant on the front. You get the vegan crowd who has heard of your product, plus you might sell more product to people looking for "healthy" or "natural" mayo.
The vegan market, while growing, is still quite small. (Polls and estimates generally put the proportion of vegans in the U.S. at less than 1%.) The number of people who buy regular mayonnaise is probably a couple orders of magnitude larger. You could probably sell more product to normal mayo seekers trying to find "natural" mayo than you could sell to dedicated vegans.
It's not a grand "conspiracy." It's a marketing decision -- one that is potentially deceptive, if you actually believe the mayonnaise should have a standard definition. The FDA generally has limitations on what can and can't go into certain foods, to avoid situations where a consumer thinks he/she is getting X, but it's actually Y or a severely diluted form of X mixed with crap.
Really, if that's the real complaint, then the Egg Lobby should have pushed the FDA to demand better labeling.
Uh, the FDA did take action.
(To be clear, NONE of this excuses the actions of the Egg Board, which seems deplorable. But that doesn't mean there isn't some deception going on on both sides.)
That sounds more like incompetence than malice, or excessive cautiousness...
Vegans won't eat eggs, and will avoid products which contain them.
A lot of products are advertised as "may contain traces of nuts" when they usually dont, the companies are over cautious incase there is a trace of nuts and someone has a severe reaction.
While that's a nice story, that's NOT what GP was talking about. As detailed in a previous Guardian article, the company calls its product "Just Mayo" and has a picture of an egg on the label. The FDA has (rightly) accused them of false advertising, because they (1) imply their product is mayonnaise with their name, but doesn't contain necessary ingredients for the normal definition of mayo, (2) include ingredients that are not allowed in products claiming to be mayonnaise, (3) show a picture of an egg and plant on the label, leading to an impression that the product contains eggs and is likely a "natural" version of mayo, and (4) also implies on the label that their product is "heart-healthy" while not meeting the FDA standard for such labeling.
We have food definitions for a reason. It prevents you from going to the store and buying a thing labeled "ground beef" and getting a bunch of ground-up cat mixed with oats and tofu. There are definitions for mayonnaise, too.
I have no problem if this company wants to sell a vegan product similar to mayonnaise -- that's great. Maybe it's tasty or healthier -- great. But they should either choose a name that clearly indicates it is NOT traditional mayonnaise and/or have an explanation on the label indicating explicitly how it differs from traditional mayo.
Instead, this company wants to try to mislead customers into thinking they are buying a "more natural" and "pure" version of actual mayonnaise ("Just Mayo") by using a deceptive label.
This is definitely not "incompetence." It's clearly deliberate.
The problem is a fraud on the public. Advocating a position that is based on who pays you, without regard to reason or truth or the benefit to mankind, without so much as a notice of your bias, causes massive amounts of harm to the public by sustaining inefficient practices.
It is perhaps the single most harmful activity to society a person can engage in--it wastes other people's lives. It perpetuates the spread of misinformation.
Yes, yes, yes. Thanks for your rant -- and I agree with you.
On the other hand, if you RTFA, you'll find out that both sides in this fight are trying to mislead.
Another Guardian article (linked in TFA) details how the product information violates standards of mayonnaise definitions without explanation on the label, choosing to call itself "Just Mayo" and featuring a picture of an egg on the label.
Another article linked in TFA interviewed former employees and describes shoddy science and misleading claims by the company, including things like claiming shelf-life longevity before the product had actually been tested that long, putting in ingredients (like preservatives) that violate its other advertising and claims, mislabeling ingredients to make the product look more "natural" and less "processed," etc. In sum:
Over time, though, the former employees came to believe that the company was less concerned about the science and more about delivering a product as fast as possible to meet whatever contract was due, which disappointed many of the former employees we spoke with.
"The entire time I was there we weren't aware of how it emulsified," a former employee said, referring to the eggless mayonnaise. "We weren't able to prove how it works. Josh liked to convey this notion that we had a great understanding of the science."
Another former employee said: "It was supposed to be a science research company, and it's not a science research company, and that's a very big disappointment."
So, if you're going to go around yelling about "frauds on the public," let's be clear what we're talking about here. Both sides are trying to mislead to make profits. Both sides are misusing "science" for their own agendas.
Is it deplorable? Yes. Is it new or even that noteworthy? Not really.
The main concern about this whole incident from the actions of the pro-egg folks is that some of their funding comes from the government. Your rant may be well-intentioned, but it's basically a fact of life in the corporate world. I think GP is correct to point out that if we're criticizing the SCIENCE, we should present the SCIENTIFIC flaws (and misleading statements/policies) of both sides, of which there are many.
But the only reason to single out the pro-egg side as "more guilty" here is because of the connection to government. That's the legitimate concern here.
And it is fundamentally contrary to the ideals of Nerds, Geeks, and those who believe in the potential of science and information to help mankind get out of the mess we've made of our world and our societies.
Yes, and if we had a story for every company that was putting out misleading propaganda about its products, we might as well turn Slashdot into a business news site, because we'd have dozens if not hundreds of stories like this every day. I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize it, but acting like these practices are somehow unusual or even noteworthy (other than the connection to the government) is a bit weird.
From the given descriptions, I can make no prediction as to how the flavor of one would differ from the other. The description contains only differences that I would expect from two booze tasters tasting the same booze, or from one booze taster tasting the same booze twice but thinking it's different. Or perhaps someone could translate it to English for me?
First off, I will say that I agree to some extent with your implicit skepticism. There have been a lot of double-blind tests that have shown tasting rates, even by professional judges, to be highly flawed.
That said, have you ever tried to describe the difference in taste of two different whiskies to someone else? You need to come up with some way of characterizing the taste -- and while I often am skeptical of these long descriptions, I frequently find that there's something in the flavor profile that often matches my experience pretty well -- "Wow... yeah, I actually DO taste the 'toffee' " or "The 'plum' note really does stand out here." These things are particularly notable when you're sampling a number of different drinks at the same time.
Also, note that these tastings were done blind, and there were three glasses with two having the same whisky, so there were several ways to discount those characteristics which were apparently just "random" variance with "one booze taster tasting the same booze twice but thinking it's different" or whatever.
Anyhow, there's no way to "translate" this exactly, because it's already English. To me, these descriptions tell me that I'm likely to hate the space sample, which sounds positively awful -- "antiseptic smoke, rubber, and smoked fish" are all things that generally are BAD qualities in a scotch nose. Do you want to drink scotch that smells like rubber and fish? "Antiseptic" is a clue that the taster probably thought the alcohol notes were out of balance. There's also the word "curious" in "curious perfumed note" which again hints that something seems out of place or weird. The actual primary taste sounds okay, though very fruity, but the aftertaste again sounds horrible: "intense" is rarely a good thing in aftertastes, and when you pair it with more "antiseptic" and "rubber" -- it sounds to me that whoever drank this stuff HATED it.
The earth sample, on the other hand, has a nice nose, perhaps bourbon-like from the description. The "antiseptic" is downplayed in the taste (though it probably has a little "burn" given the mention), and the "long lingering aftertaste" is not "intense" but rather a blend of "gentle" and "creamy" pleasant flavors like smoke and fudge.
In short, you might think these are similar descriptions, but the basic effect I get is that the earth-based sample was fairly balanced and pleasant overall, with perhaps a little bit of "bite," but the space sample was wildly out-of-balance and, frankly, terrible. I know some people who like "extreme" whiskies that taste pretty weird, and maybe they'd like the space sample. But I imagine the more interesting conclusion (if anything, from such a small, short study) is that space aging can change which notes are brought out in whisky, and perhaps some sort of combination of aging processes could result in something better. But this study was fairly limited.
We see Google in so many places that most people don't know that (financially) they're an ad company. All of the other businesses feed back into their money making line of business.
Exactly. And this goes beyond Youtube. It even includes search. Many people think of Google as a "search engine" whose goal is to deliver the best results. It isn't. Perhaps it was 15 years ago when they were still fighting for dominance, but now having good, efficient search is only a secondary concern -- they mostly are an ad-delivery system.
Which is the probably one of the reasons why Google search has gradually gotten significantly worse over the past 5-8 years. (At least in returning precise search results... obviously in other ways Google has expanded the types of things you can search for, etc., which again increases the amount of ads they can send you.) It is NOT in their best interest to allow you to perform precision searches that take you immediately to the best match for what you want. It IS in their best interest to get you to spend as much time as possible on their site to view more ads. Obviously, they can't go too far or else people will rebel or switch to another search engine. But if they keep making things incrementally worse while raising their stats on adviews, it's a win-win for them.
Or one who doesn't run a yellow light even though he could stop safely.
It's important to note that 75% of states have so-called "permissive yellow" laws that allow motorists to "run a yellow light." The law in most states is that you can actually enter an intersection when the light is yellow (and, in fact, it's generally safer to do so rather than stopping suddenly). If you are in an intersection when the light is red in these states, you have not committed a violation, as long as you entered when the light was yellow and you clear the intersection as quickly and safely as possible. It's only a minority of states that criminalize entering an intersection on a yellow light (a policy that many traffic safety engineers don't encourage, unless the yellow is preceded by a blinking green or something).
Anyhow, I don't know where you live, but I've met many people who think everyone should obey "restrictive yellow" policies when they actually live in states that have a "permissive yellow" law.
At the same time, motorists kill thousands of people per year in the US alone and are most often at fault when a bicyclist gets hurt.
Your linked article doesn't actually provide useful statistics on determining whether motorists or cyclists are more likely to be "worse drivers." All your link says is that:
With adult cyclists, police found the driver solely responsible in about 60%-75% of all cases, and riders solely at fault 17%-25% of the time.
That implies that when an accident occurs, the motorist is more often at fault. But it does NOT mean a larger percentage of motorists are likely to cause accidents compared to cyclists. To make that determination, you'd need to know the proportion of cyclists and motorists on roads.
To give an extreme example, imagine a situation where there are 1000 motorists on the road for every cyclist in a particular area where they encounter each other. If motorists and cyclists were equally safe in driving, then cyclists should only be responsible for about 0.1% of accidents. If cyclists are instead responsible for 17-25% of accidents (as in your link), then the percentage of "bad cyclists" is likely at least an order of magnitude (or even two orders of magnitude) higher than the percentage of "bad motorists" in these interactions, even if motorists are at fault more of the time.
Basically, if you use the stats in your link, you'd need the ratio of motorists to cyclists to be less than about 5:1 in order for the motorists to be demonstrably "worse" demographically than cyclists in causing these accidents. There aren't many cities where cyclists travel over 20% of the number of miles that cars travel on streets, so it's still likely (based on your link) that cyclists are demonstrably more likely to cause accidents, taken as a percentage of cyclists as a whole.
To be clear -- I'm NOT at all excusing motorists, whom you are correct to point out need to be more vigilant because they are driving far more dangerous machines which are much more likely to cause serious injury. I absolutely agree that motorists have a greater responsibility to be careful, and many aren't. But if you're trying to figure out who are "worse" in obeying traffic laws and ending up in accidents proportionally, you need more information to make a determination.
We don't expect pedestrians to follow the same laws as cars. Let's not pretend that cars and bikes aren't on different footing.
Funny with the pun (intentionally or not).
But in all seriousness, we actually DO have pretty strict regulations in most municipalities regarding pedestrians and what they are limited to do on roads and when. Although many pedestrians ignore them, they do so at their own peril. (And the U.S. is different from some other countries in expectations for pedestrians: jaywalking is fairly accepted and crossing at a "Do Not Walk" sign is frequently tolerated. Try doing such things in, say, Germany, and you will at a minimum get dirty looks from old ladies and potentially even get a ticket. There are good reasons for pedestrians to obey most of the "rules of the road" too.)
And for good reason. There's a set of expectations about how everyone will behave and where it is reasonable for people/bicycles/cars will be.
Quite simply, roads are dangerous places, with loads of multiple-ton metallic hunks flying around at high speed. Most of the rationale for cyclists to obey the "rules of the road" is for their own safety, just as for pedestrians. So, you're correct that cyclists can't do as much damage or whatever if they mess up, but rules are not just to prevent people from killing or injuring other people -- they are often accepted conventions that help prevent EVERYONE from getting killed or injured by setting up reasonable expectations.
The problem with setting up a different official set of rule for some vehicles, even bicycles, is that what will ultimately happen is that those cyclists will end up in unexpected places at unexpected times... which increases the chances of collision EVEN IF everyone else is reasonably trying to obey the rules. (I've seen many such situations arise where a cyclist zooms through a red light when a car suddenly pulls out from an unexpected place, and the car has a reasonable expectation that no one will be in the intersection. Sometimes this is a result of obstructed views or close parked cars or difficult traffic situations or whatever... but they all increase chances of unintentional collisions.) And cyclists are even more at risk than pedestrians when they break the rules because (1) they tend to ride on the road more often than pedestrians and (2) they can get themselves to an unexpected location more quickly and suddenly.
There may well be SOME places where it might be desirable to modify rules for cyclists. But I think those situations are less frequent than cyclists would like, if we actually compare the likely impact of such modifications on overall safety (rather than impatience, which is usually the motivation for most cyclists, who'd prefer to cut corners and run lights because it just gets them to a destination faster.)
How often do you thing a cyclist changes lanes?
Uh, just about anytime a cyclist has to make a left turn at an intersection with the potential for more than one lane. And while some cyclists are conscientious enough to signal when they do this, most seem to just take a quick look around and cross without a signal. This seems fine for them, except when it isn't -- like when a car is coming out of somewhere they didn't think of looking.
It's the same rule as for cars: signals help tell where you're going, and that's probably the MOST useful when cars come out of places you don't think of looking... which is the reason to use them even when you don't see others around.
Right hand turns are executed from the right shoulder where they usually ride and left turns are from a standstill if there is any traffic.
What does this have to do with GP, who was asking how often cyclists signal? It doesn't matter if they are turning right from a cycling lane -- they should still signal. I used to walk to work in a place where lots of cyclists would come by, and I can't tell you how many times I was almost run over by a cyclist who would speed through a red light and either cross the intersection or make a right hand turn at full speed without signalling.
Again, signals are most important for situations where you don't notice the people who need them. Trying to excuse the fact that cyclists don't use signals because "well, usually they fall into these specific cases..." just doesn't work. By that logic, most cars should never have to use signals either, which is clearly illegal... and for good reason.
Yeah I know "I saw this one biker go blah bi de blah blahh". The thing is, if a cyclist is careless they'll get run over. If a motorist is careless they'll run over the cyclist.
Yes, and the unfortunate lesson from this is that cyclists have to be MORE vigilant and more conscious of the "rules of the road" than motorists, because they take a greater risk if anyone does something wrong. We can try to police motorists who break the rules, but the reality is that people make mistakes... and as a cyclist you need to realize who has the power to kill you, whether they are acting rationally or in "good faith" or not.
Your post reads like someone complaining that wolves could attack and kill humans, so humans should be excused for not paying attention to where wolves might be or for stupid behaviors that end up getting them injured or killed. And maybe that's true, but that's obviously the wrong lesson -- the reality is that the wolves are there, and it's stupid to not do your best to protect yourself, to avoid putting yourself in a situation where you could be hurt or killed.
I've seen cars hit cyclists, I've seen cyclists hit cars, I've seen cyclists hit pedestrians... it all happens and various people are at fault. One thing that does NOT help is just saying, "Oh, I don't need to signal or obey the 'rules' because somebody else should be."
This was tried, it led to the Civil War. The south, more than anything else, wanted strong states rights and weak federal government. The north disagreed and it ended up in war.
This isn't really true. In the antebellum U.S., both the South and the North tended to favor the federal government when it suited their interests and to favor "states' rights" when it suited other aspects of their interests.
For example, the South favored states' rights for Western territories to decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery or not, but they favored the federal government when it came to protecting the rights of slaveholders to take their slaves into free states or when it came to enforcing the Fugitive Slave Acts (which were explicitly authorized by the Constitution).
Meanwhile, the North favored the federal government when it came to enforcing limits on slavery, e.g., in the Missouri Compomise, but it favored states' rights when it came to passing laws and even nullifying acts of Congress that tried to enforce pro-slavery elements (like Fugitive Slave laws) in free states.
Some Southern states actually explicitly mentioned the non-enforcement of Fugitive Slave Acts of Congress in their acts of secession -- essentially, the argument was that the Northern states were failing to adhere to the Constitution and the federal government. Thus, the North had already broken its federal compact with the South, thereby justifying secession. See, for example, the South Carolina Declaration of the Causes for Secession (from the first state to secede):
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the general government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these states the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the state government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constitutional compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.
There's this Southern myth that the Southern states wanted "states' rights" but the North wanted a "strong federal government." In reality, each side wanted both federal and state powers to enforce their interests. Ultimately, of course, the Civil War came about over the questionable legality of a certain potential "state right," i.e., the right to secede, which the South wanted to assert. But in other cases, the South was happy to use the federal government to further its own ends -- and it did so for decades leading up to the Civil War.
Today search is ALMOST ENTIRELY SHIT. It is used because shit is king.
If you think that, you don't remember Alta Vista, which had millions of links to "Page not Found" and in the search results had multiple listings to the same (often broken) page.
I remember AltaVista well and broken links in many search engines in the 1990s. But just because search engines don't direct you to broken links as often anymore doesn't mean they're better.
Now, rather than millions of broken links, search engines direct me to millions of websites that don't contain my search terms and often have nothing to do with what I'm searching for.
Is that really much of an improvement? Actually, I think it's worse -- because it takes me a fraction of a second to see a 404 error and go back and try a different hit. But when a search engine directs me to mostly links that have nothing to do with my search terms, it can take me many seconds of skimming to discover that a particular hit is bogus.
Google probably reached its optimum usefulness a little over 10 years ago. Ever since, it has gradually tried to become more like "Ask Jeeves" and less useful for people who actually have serious research to do. First, you had Google offering corrections to misspellings (a useful feature), but then those would replace your actual search. Then you had dropping of the default "AND" operator that made Google efficient and useful at the beginning. Then they dropped the "+" operator a few years ago. Then they broke double quotes and verbatim search to various unpredictable degrees. And now whenever I search for obscure terms, by default Google tries to replace them with what it thinks are "synonyms" (but which often aren't, or which I don't want). So I stopped using Google for many of my default searches a few years back... and there's really nothing out there that rivals the efficiency and precision of Google ca. 2000.
Bottom line: If you're a moron who can't spell, can't bother to think about what words might actually appear in what you're looking for, and likely don't even really have a clue what you're even looking for -- well, today's search is much "better" for you. Granted, 90+% of people are probably like this, so that's why Google targets the "lowest common denominator." If you're actually looking for a serious SEARCH engine, it's not Google anymore.
What's the AM ratio? 1000 to 1 or maybe worse. >20M guys is a decent sample size for the "claiming to be attached looking to cheat" demographic. Women didn't fall as easily for it, despite their access being free!
Umm, I know this is a crazy thing to say, but if you RTFA you'd discover that that 1000:1 claim about male:female active users was completely bogus. The author of the article had no clue what she was talking about and came to crazy conclusions based on incomplete information.
(Personally, I believed the media could fall for it, but the other day when this was on Slashdot, I couldn't fathom how anyone could take these arguments seriously. Men and women are different, but actual studies on cheating generally don't show even a 2:1 male:female ratio, let alone a 2000:1 ratio. The idea that the stats were like that on perhaps the most prominent internet site targeted toward cheaters? Come on... that ratio just sounds entirely bogus... and I called it out the other day here too -- though admittedly my theory was a bit different because I assumed the author actually had a bit of a clue about the tech she was critiquing before publishing something so obviously crazy.)
TFS doesn't explain this, but the 1000:1 ratio or whatever is just the ratio of men vs. women on Ashley Madison who had interactions with the bots. And that ratio is likely quite biased toward men because the vast majority of bots (>99%) were designed to interact with men.
And why would it be biased in this way? Probably because the actual number of male:female accounts is something like a 5:1 ratio or whatever, so they did want to create more interaction possibilities to keep the men around and paying.
But there were still millions of women who likely signed up for the site, though apparently (if TFA is now correct in its interpretation of the data dump) there's no way to tell how many of any of the accounts -- male or female -- were "active" vs. people who just logged in once or whatever. (There's only reasonably good evidence that a few thousand or maybe tens of thousands of the female accounts were actually bogus -- but not >99.9% of the millions of them, as the earlier Gizmodo article claimed.)
The 1000:1 claims are just nonsense, as any rational person with a knowledge of stats and basic survey information about men and women would realize immediately.
We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.
Excuse me if the following sounds a bit exasperated, but you do realize that people actually communicated informal messages to each other written form BEFORE texting, right?
People wrote letters and postcards, and they've been doing this for centuries. People wrote office memos and short notes to loved ones, either left in a box for someone to pick up or perhaps carried by courier to the recipient. Once the telegraph was developed, people sent telegrams and paid by the length of the message, so they often managed to communicate extraordinary emotions in a few lines of text. (I have the telegrams sent between my grandmother and grandfather when my mother was born during WWII and my grandfather was overseas. You can easily get the emotions they were experiencing from the short texts; it's quite moving, actually.)
I don't think you realize the extent that people used memos and couriers in the days before telephones, or the extent that people wrote informal postcards to each other or short letters on a regular basis to keep relatives and friends abreast of ongoing events. Mail used to even be delivered multiple times per day in many places in the U.S.
While handwritten notes sometimes could include graphical symbols, most people didn't make a lot of use of them, because text is so efficient at conveying ideas.
And we already have symbols to express written emotion and tone -- they're called punctuation. Even a "non-professional writer can manage" to use them. The main ones are ! and ?, but you can also convey quite a variety of emotions through combinations: !! vs. !? vs. ?! vs. ??, or even things like (?) or (!), etc.
A little personal anecdote: a few years back, I happened upon some letters sent between my grandparents during WWII. Actually, both of my grandfathers served overseas during WWII, and I have letters from both of them. A few things to note:
(1) They didn't seem to need emojis to express a considerable range of thoughts, ideas, and emotions. (It's very moving to read some of their letters.)
(2) They possessed a better grasp of written grammar, usage, and style than most college undergraduates I've taught. They still made errors, but I assume the fluidity of their writing is due to lots of practice in casual written communication (as was incredibly common back then).
(3) They weren't professional writers. In fact, one had attended school to 6th grade and the other had attended only until 4th. (This was also fairly common in the U.S. before WWII.) Yet they somehow got enough out of "grammar school" back then to be able to communicate in writing on a level comparable to at least a high-school graduate today.
I've seen enough examples of letters written by other relatively lower-class soldiers in wars (in documentaries, etc.) to know that my grandfathers weren't outliers either.
And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.
"Smileys" are/were somewhat different. Most "smileys" were used in place of actual facial expressions: a grin, frown, wide-eyed look of surprise, wink, etc. There's no direct verbal equivalent to these facial expressions, but they could of course be simply represented as *wink* or [grin] or whatever too, utilizing only a couple more characters.
The set of easily recognizable facial expressions is relatively small. Even if we include common and nearly universal body language gestures like nodding, shaking the head, and "thumbs up," we might only need a dozen or so such representations to convey expression/gesture.
But as you say, emojis are no lo
Hate speech absolutely does not violate US law. Inciting to violence against them, sometimes (again, if credible); Ranting until you go horse about the evils of Muslims or gays or Canadians, no. You have every right to hate whatever groups you want and talk about it every chance you get - Hell, you can even do it while running for president!
It depends on what you mean by "does not violate US law." If you mean, "You can't be convicted for a crime on the basis of hateful speech ALONE," then you're sort of correct.
But hate speech is commonly used to enhance sentences for other crimes by converting them into "hate crimes." So, there can be clear legal consequences to hate speech, depending on the circumstances -- including ending up in prison for significantly longer.
Now, we can argue semantics here about how hate crime laws work. But the basic fact is that IF you use hate speech, it can cause you to serve significant prison time. Generally, you also need a related crime to trigger such a penalty, but it's effectively an extra penalty for the motivation behind a hate crime, which is often supported by evidence of hateful speech.
Bottom line: hate speech doesn't violate US law unless you use it while violating another US law. In that latter case, it most definitely can trigger significant criminal penalties, above and beyond what would normally be appropriate for a given offense.
What really convinced people was how simply it explained planetary motion (as opposed to the impossibly complex epicycles of the Ptolemaic system)
Except we're talking about Galileo here, who believed in circular orbits, as did Copernicus. Circular orbits still require significant numbers of epicycles as corrections, so these systems are not necessarily simpler mathematically.
Kepler of course proposed elliptical orbits, which did simplify the math considerably, but Galileo summarily rejected that possibility.
combined with the discovery of Jupiter's moons, which, while not in itself a proof of the Copernican system, was proof that not everything revoled around the Earth.
And that's one of the reasons that many (probably most) scientists who cared about this began to take the Tychonic model of the solar system seriously, which still posited that the universe as a whole revolved around the earth, but other bodies like the Sun and Jupiter might have their own satellites.
At the time of Galileo's trial, there weren't that many scientists who yet took a Copernican model as reality, and probably even fewer who knew of and agreed with Kepler. Aside from the parallax problem, there were a lot more difficulties with the heliocentric theory in terms of science of that day, and Galileo's ways of explaining away objections was usually to attack people who disagreed and call them idiots while offering up nonsensical arguments of his own. (His main proof that the earth was in motion, for example, involved a theory of tides that required only one high tide per day at noon. Obviously this contradicted empirical evidence, and everybody could easily recognize it, but that was the best proof Galileo had... in the face of millennia of previous scientists and arguments about why the earth was at rest.)
Obviously his persecution and trial was terrible. But there were lots of obstacles to accepting his theory at that time.
Here's an interesting statistic: Ty Cobb has the highest batting average in Major League Baseball history. He is, put simply, the best batter in the history of the world. What was his batting average? 0.366 Let that sink in.
Here's another interesting statistic: the significance level generally agreed upon for many psychological studies is a minimum of 0.95. Assuming we don't have any other sources of error, bias, etc., that means we should end up with roughly 5% or less of studies that can't be replicated.
Instead, the numbers are more like >60% of studies can't be replicated.
It doesn't matter what Ty Cobb's batting average was, or whether he failed most of the time. Obviously most experiments will probably fail most of the time. The issue is when you have published articles that usually require a minimum statistical threshold.
Thus, what matters is that many scientists have statistical procedures in place that are supposed to guarantee that the false positive rate is less than 5%. But those statistical procedures do no such thing -- and yes, that does mean there's a REAL and pervasive problem in research methodology when the standard for determining a "successful" study is this screwed up.
(Obviously, anyone who knows anything about stats realizes that the naive use of p values, etc. is out of hand and leads to really misleading results, even absent deliberate p hacking and other manipulation or bias. This present study is just proof that the naive statistical use in many studies is much less useful than most scientists think.)
He ran a fraud:
That seems possible, and perhaps even likely. But the Gizmodo story overlooks something.
From your link:
There are definitely other possible explanations for these data discrepancies. It could be that the women's data in these three fields just happened to get hopelessly corrupted, even though the men's data didn't. Or maybe most of those accounts weren't deliberately faked, but just represented real women who came to the site once, never to return.
There's an obvious missing alternative possible explanation here -- The hackers could have tampered with the data.
This hack is notable because of its specific target of embarrassing and destroying the reputation of the company. Erasing or tampering with very specific database fields that make it look like Ashley Madison was perpetrating a complete fraud... well, that's certainly a convenient way to provide the final knife blow to any credibility the site or its management might have had.
Don't get me wrong -- I have no doubt that the site likely fabricated thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of female profiles, perhaps as initial enticement to get the site going in the beginning (since female numbers obviously are going to be less, as on any dating site). But the Gizmodo analysis wants us to believe that the ratio of active male:female members was something like 1000:1 or greater. Men and women certainly are different, but it's a little hard to believe that they're THAT different.
I'd say it's at least POSSIBLE that this data has been altered or tampered with by hackers who clearly have a specific moral agenda. This kind of tampering -- if it happened -- would effectively further their agenda to discredit the company. But perhaps it also serves other purposes... certainly there's been speculation that this moral attack was motivated by a personal affront or something. Perhaps the hack was partly motivated by someone specifically angry about a situation involving men cheating. Erasing data from most of the female accounts makes the men look even more desperate and pathetic than before, while simultaneously making the women look more "innocent."
I don't much care either way. But the reality is that the only data being used to support these claims has passed through hackers who clearly have their own agendas. Thus, we should be suspicious about apparent trends in that data which also conveniently further the hackers' moral agenda.
Not saying my hypothesis here is true, or even that it's likely. But it shouldn't be completely ignored as a possibility.
Today's grammar lesson: dangling participle
As a cable channel, the FCC has little to no jurisdiction...
I really hate to interrupt a good pedantic grammar rant, but a "dangling participle" needs... well... a participle, i.e., a verb form that modifies another word.
The phrase "As a cable channel" has no verb and no participle. If it instead said "Being a cable channel,..." then you might be more justified in your complaint about a dangling participle.
But "As a cable channel" is a misplaced modifier or a dangling modifier, specifically a prepositional phrase. No participles were harmed in the creation of that sentence.
Agree 100%. Awesome post.
Also, watched a fireworks show in Ottawa in August and the three teens sitting in front of us pretty much watched the whole thing through their phones recording it. How asinine is that?
Pretty typical for tourism these days. People walking around bumping into things while taking photos and recording stuff rather than actually experiencing the world.
Years ago, I lived in Rome for a short time. I got to observe idiots wandering around like this every day. I think I took less than a dozen photos the entire time I was there. If I want photos of all the gorgeous things around me, I can buy a book with professional photographers taking things from angles and with lighting I couldn't hope for. But the experience of walking on the exact same paving stones in the Roman Forum where Caesar and Cicero once walked thousands of years ago -- I just sat down there and contemplated where I was in awe.
That memory is important to me. Having a video or photo of my feet and some stones would not help me remember how I felt, and I doubt I would ever look at it. And if I were just wandering around worried about focusing my camera on all the stuff I could see, I doubt I ever would have even thought about those stones beneath my feet... and yet that was one of the most powerful feelings I took away from my trip.