Indeed. The biggest issue is statistical ignorance, but even people with a decent amount of training in stats can be fooled if they want to find a particular result. Anyhow, whenever things like this come out, everyone always thinks it's about scientists who manipulate data deliberately. While that happens, it's more often just researchers who "try things out" after collecting data and notice a pattern (unintentionally skewing things). If they have to declare methods and statistical tests beforehand, it's harder to make these errors.
A few months back, I happened upon a very useful guide to the problems in modern scientific publication, which can be found partly online here. I ended up buying the print edition, and the sheer number of examples of completely bogus research ending up being accepted in various scientific fields due to erroneous stats and various biases that creep into the publication process... well, it's just shocking. Seriously.
As the book notes, the other problem is that even finding these errors is incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive. I specifically remember one case where a new oncology test was proposed by Duke researchers and seemed to have great results. This case eventually became so infamous that it was reported onin the popular media.
Anyhow, basically they had a couple independent statisticians analyze the work (where they found HUGE numbers of problems in mislabeled data, mistakes in analysis and basic computation, etc., which appear par for the course in many labs, if you believe the studies on this stuff in the book). Ultimately, estimates are that it took TWO THOUSANDS HOURS of work for these independent statisticians to complete their analysis and render a verdict.
And once they did this, the statisticians tried to publish it -- but major journals didn't want it. Groundbreaking results are much more interesting that tedious statistical analysis. The National Cancer Institute caught wind of the problems and initiated an independent review, which found no errors (probably because the review was done by cancer experts, not stats experts, and they hadn't been giving the stats analysis done by the other researchers).
The only reason any of this ever really got much attention is because one of the lead researchers was accused of falsifying some aspects of his resume, which led to people actually going back and questioning his papers.
The book is full of stories like this, though, as well as citations of analyses of how many journal articles in various fields suffer from serious statistical problems.
It's all really scary when you start realizing how much bogus research is out there... most of it completely unintentional, and most of it passing peer review because it follows the field's "standard methodologies."
The cost comment was in reference to the complaint that OPEN journals cost upwards of 3000 dollars to get a single paper published.
That number is highly variable. There are plenty of open-access journals that cost only a few hundred dollars per article for publication, not several thousand. See here, for example. As that article notes, quite a few big open-access publishers admit that their internal costs for publishing are around a few hundred dollars per article.
As to the notion that the scientists are not being paid to audit the papers, then why do the paid journals only have a profit margin of 38 percent?
If I'm getting the papers for free, people are auditing the papers for free, my cost structure is a website, and people are paying me 20k for a subscription to access the journals... then why is my profit margin so low?
I think you are significantly underestimating the amount of administrative work that goes on in sustaining a publishing operation, even an online one. See the first big chart in the link above, which breaks down costs percentage-wise in publication, and see the amount needed for "administering peer review; editing; proofreading; typesetting; graphics; quality assurance... covers; indexes and editorial; rights management; sales and payments; printing and delivery; online user management; marketing and communications; helpdesk; online hosting... " etc.
There's a lot of random overhead required.
The profit margin if what you're saying is true should be closer to 97~99 percent basically meaning the journal has a small staff that matches X scientists with Y papers... and then whatever the web hosting costs which in any of these businesses is basically nothing.
Um... yeah... again, see above.
That said, it's clear that something fishy is going on with commercial publishers. As this article notes, the for-profit publishers seem to charge 2-3 times as much as non-profits, so it seems like they should be making more than 38% profit. I don't know what the explanation is there, other than that I imagine for-profit companies pay upper-level administrators more.
Anyhow, wherever that excess money is going, your weird conspiracy theory that there's some sort of "kickback" scheme to scientists or reviewers or universities just isn't happening.
Peer-reviewed articles is a fairly new thing in science
Well, it's not a new thing -- it dates back at least a few centuries. But it became more "standard" roughly 75 years ago as a way of evaluating quality journals. It may not be very old, but it has a few generations of history behind it, which is enough to become entrenched practice.
and most often than not, and the review process is highly questionable.
While that's true, the standards do vary significantly from journal to journal. Top-tier journals tend to try better to find real experts to do the reviews, and their standards tend to be a bit higher. The bigger issue with peer review is cases where most "peers" within a field are not sufficiently qualified to spot errors. The most common problems are statistical and methodological errors; most peer reviewers will be fine with articles as long as they show "standard practice" in a discipline. Peer reviewers aren't generally expert statisticians, for example -- they are just academics in the same field, and most fields don't have high standards for statistical rigor (and researchers don't generally have a lot of formal statistical training).
Any idiot can write a whitepaper and claim a new discovery, confirm one, etc, but there are a lot of crackpots out there who make dubious conclusions based on their data, fudge their data, etc.
Yes, that's all true. Which is why we need journals with some standards.
So it's not just that your research is published, the value add of these journals is that they have expert staff who peer review your work and ask questions (to test your conclusion) that you yourself may not have thought of, and somebody who isn't an expert in your field of study may not have thought of. If you're an independent researcher then you can't afford to retain the services of more experts than just yourself, so you'll need their publishing services.
Huh? Do you actually know anything about how academic publishing works? Peer reviewers are generally VOLUNTEERS. And they certainly aren't part of the journal's (paid) "staff." They may be part of the editorial board of the journal, but again those are usually unpaid positions that academics take for the prestige. (On the rare occasions where reviewers are paid -- usually only by journals with poor reputations, it not outright disreputable journals -- it's generally just a very small amount to get the reviewer a little motivation to complete the review in a timely fashion.)
Journals do have to pay for publication costs, like copyediting, layout/formatting/typesetting, etc. But those costs these days are minimized as much as possible (often outsourced), and the quality level of copyediting, etc. is often quite low -- even at good journals. The only people generally paid on a journal's "staff" these days are a few (often part-time) assistants who do the grunt work of collecting incoming submissions, preparing those to be sent out to reviewers, gathering everything together for final publication, etc.
In any case, any actual publication costs are generally tiny compared to these excessive subscription fees.
Not only that, but a journal that frequently publishes whitepapers that have withstood scrutiny tend to attract more readers, so if you publish your material, somebody is more likely to take it seriously than if they just found your blog somewhere on wordpress.
Yes, this is true, and there are metrics ("impact factor," etc.) that are published about which journals rank high. Not surprisingly, some of those metrics are compiled by the major journal publishers, which is a serious conflict of interest.
On the other hand, numerous studies have shown that even major journals (particularly outside of "hard science" fields) tend to publish a high percentage of articles with questionable statistics or methodology. Peer reviewers and journal editors tend to go by "standards in the field," rather than insisting on better statistical or methodological rigor. Frankly, most of them probably don't even realize how bad the situation is, since most researchers in various fields do not receive detailed training in statistical analysis (often just one or two graduate courses, or whatever informal stuff they pick up from colleagues and mentors).
Bottom line is that an article even in a very reputable journal often can have significant problems. But that's more a problem of the peer review process and community standards in general, rather than one unique to top journals.
Anyhow, the biggest issue is INERTIA. Scholars depend on journal publications to get tenure and promotions, as well as to maintain their careers and labs. Their career path and list of publications are periodically reviewed by other academics, who obviously tend to evaluate those publications on the basis of what they know and are familiar with -- which means that "performance reviews" by other academics will tend to give more weight to journals that are already established well in the field.
And that ultimately means that it becomes a bunch of circular reasoning -- this journ
You still haven't gotten to the part where it's an actual crime.
You're correct. It doesn't appear to be a crime.
Some idealized notion of crime and punishment that only exists in your head does not count.
What is the crime?
The "idealized notion" isn't in anyone's head -- it's standard part of U.S. culture these days that anyone who is accused of a "sex offense" with an underage person may end up facing severe charges and permanent community ostracization if convicted... lumped together with actual pedophiles, child rapists, child pornographers, etc.
And that's what we're talking about here, because in Minnesota, the age of consent with a person of authority is 18 years old, and this kid was 17 when this happened.
It may not be a crime, but an accusation of someone having inappropriate contact with someone underage is about the worst possible thing you could say publicly about anyone in the U.S. today, guaranteed to provoke a media storm that will ruin someone's life if there's anyone or anything that might lend even the slightest bit of credence to the story. (Even if that evidence ultimately turns out to be false, the bell could not be unrung; the media probably won't retract any coverage of a witchhunt as long as it had the word "alleged" in the stories.)
I'm not at all defending the police trying to intimidate the kid by making false assertions about the law. But kids should realize today that that sort of accusation has the potential to easily end someone's career and ruin someone's life if misinterpreted.
If you find that this is the case, the employees you have aren't very good and perhaps you are better off bringing in a new batch to see if you can get some better prospects. On the other hand, if you have a high turnover rate, you're going to end up lacking the kind of institutional knowledge that makes maintenance of existing code bases much easier or that allows you to refine your products over the years.
While I completely agree with you, and I think it's a good business decision and a good moral decision to hold on to people, the reality is that the economic advantages are not that significant in a cut-throat environment.
And that's what Amazon's entire business model is: be cheaper than everyone else. Buy from us, put your local stores out of business -- you can get anything here, and it's probably cheaper.
Well, take a moment and consider where such a philosophy gets us. In consumer goods, that attitude is what leads to the fact that it's hard to buy products that can be expected to last more than about 5 years. A few decades ago, towns were filled with repair shops -- now, if something breaks, most people throw it out and get another one. We're used to technology going obsolete, sometimes for no apparent reason other than to convince you to buy the newer model.
Now, why do such products work? Because businesses make a trade-off: they can sell you a product designed to last for decades, and you'll never see that customer again. Or, they can give you something that costs a fraction of the other to manufacture, lasts for 3-5 years, breaks, and then you sell them another one.
When people begin to view the world like this, jobs and workers also become "disposable." It's all an economic trade-off, and it becomes increasingly difficult to justify spending "extra for quality," since quality (and loyalty, in the case of workers) is hard to find.
Is it cheaper in the long-term to run a business where you keep workers around for decades and pay them well as they have families and kids while taking home increasingly higher salaries just to maintain some semblance of "institutional knowledge" or whatever?
Or is it cheaper to run those workers until they are near dead after 5 years or so and move on? And does it matter? Will Amazon even be around in 10 or 20 years for those workers? Does anyone really care in this era of random internet business flux, where people are used to switching jobs every 5 years or so anyway? Amazon has no reasonable competitors in its sector. Why does it need to care about quality? All it wants is the lowest possible expenses to have the lowest possible prices to drive everyone else out of the game. That's the short-term goal, and for that it needs short-term, inexpensive workers who will work their asses off.
It just has to be equal to a human driver - and human drivers are not that good.
In a completely rational world, perhaps. We don't live in a rational world. We live in a world where unusual accidents are governed by media hysteria and lawyers.
And what happens with liability for such an accident with an autonomous car? Who is responsible? The driver? The manufacturer? The individual programmers who created the recognition and behavioral subroutines?
Here's the reality -- early adopters of autonomous cars are probably going to be wealthy folks, because like any new technology they'll probably be expensive at the beginning. So, the first time we get something that any lawyer could call an "avoidable" accident, the rich owner, the company, the programmers, etc. will be sued... for LOTS of money.
Whether they win or lose the lawsuit might be irrelevant, because by that time media hysteria will have kicked in, particularly if "the car killed someone." Other potential rich owners won't want to buy the cars anymore, and if the accident is big enough, some politicians might start getting involved in regulation (even completely unreasonable regulation)... and suddenly the adoption of autonomous vehicles will be set back 20-30 years.
Yes, human drivers are often terrible. But there we at least have a specific person to blame. When an autonomous car kills someone, things could get ugly as people try to sort out why this happened.
I always think that engineers involved in these autonomous car projects must live in fear of the "nightmare scenario," which I picture as some autonomous car ending up being involved in an accident where a bunch of kids die in the first few months after the technology becomes available.
It won't matter if the accident seemed "unavoidable" or if the computer made a good choice that might have actually saved more lives. The fact will be that some black box of technology killed kids.
You have one or two things like that happen early on, and adoption of autonomous vehicles will probably be pushed decades into the future.
So the standard isn't "equal to a human driver" -- it's instead a system that is so far superior that it is "above reproach" when it comes time for lawsuits or a hysterical media witchhunt.
As such, he can only use a court to force the infringing party to stop infringing, and can only expect to be paid his demonstrably customary rate for the material. Considering he probably makes a buck or two here and there, at best, for letting YouTube run ads before/on his material, there's no there, there.
Not quite true. Without copyright registration, you are entitled not only to actual damages (e.g., lost sales), but also potentially to any profits made by the infringing party due to the infringement.
So, yeah, he couldn't get punitive damages without registration. But CNN and CBC make money off of their broadcasts, and this guy could be eligible for a cut of whatever broadcast income they made using his video... which wouldn't be billions of dollars, but would certainly be more than a few dollars you suggest.
There's no book nostalgia like the smell of leather-bound editions you have never bought in your life read before the baronial fireplace you have never owned.
And yet... I'll admit to loving old-fashioned bound books. I own some leather-bound books (not a lot -- I'm not really a collector of the leather editions or anything), and there actually is something nice about a well-made book, typeset clearly on quality paper.
I'm not a baron (nor rich), but I do have a fireplace, and yes -- I do sit by it frequently in the winter on a leather armchair with a good book and a glass of scotch. The "leather-bound" aspect of the book is not necessary, but a physical book of some sort *IS* much nicer in the firelight than a glowing screen of a tablet or whatever.
(Actually, well the fire, the comfy chair, and obviously the scotch are really the best parts...)
I often want my technical docs serarchable, because you can't grep a dead tree.
It depends on how you want to search. I agree that for a pure reference work (particularly one you only refer to on occasion), an electronic version is often best.
But for a reference work which I refer to frequently and/or which I tend to read larger sections of rather than just looking for the right paragraph about a particular term -- well, old-fashioned paper still wins hands down for me.
Paper books are much more "browsable," and I'm much more likely to remember where I read something in a paper book, due to the consistent physical structure that can be referred back to. ("It was about 3/4 of the way through... and I remember the passage was on the upper-right corner below an illustration...") They're also quick and easy to annotate, dog-ear, etc. Yes, one can do these latter things with electronic books too, but it's not quite as flexible and dynamic as easily underlining something, circling something else, jotting a few words in the margin, and drawing arrows to an illustration or whatever. To do this with an e-book, I'd need to switch a bunch of different tools, and some of it may be impossible... with paper, I just grab a pencil and I'm good to go.
I admit that a full-text search on books is awesome, but I mostly find it awesome for a book I'll only use once or twice and never care about again. For a book I want to refer to every day, a paper copy still has a lot of potential conveniences.
I completely agree with you that this guy's comments are insulting and don't necessarily make a lot of sense. However...
The whole point of promoting STEM is because Art degrees are waste of time and resources. You may be personally fulfilled getting your Masters Degree in 18th Century French Poetry but it's not going to help make you a productive member of society.
This is unnecessarily narrow-minded as well. First, while college degrees seem largely about "job training" for most folks today, for most of the 1000+ year history of universities, the assumption was that getting a degree was also about "broadening one's mind" and acquiring a breadth of skills that may be useful in various ways.
Someone who has a master's degree in 18th-century French poetry may not find a lot of jobs outside academia that value that very specific field. But there are loads of related skills that could be useful -- mastery of another language has practical use, historical perspective means an ability to think outside of one's current situation (a skill which can be helpful when trying to understand other people and other ideologies and perspectives), poetic analysis requires certain levels of creativity and abstract thinking (particularly outside one's native tongue), understanding rhetorical structure of language can be helpful in crafting everything from good reports to persuasive speeches, etc. And there are even specific benefits perhaps from this particular field: 18th-century France was the home of the so-called Enlightenment, whose philosophy has shaped our modern world, from science to political systems and law. Surely a grasp of some of the background to the place and time which gave birth to our modern pragmatic, scientific culture might be helpful at some point.
I know a LOT of people who have degrees at various levels in the humanities and make very successful careers in various fields. And those experiences they received by pursuing a humanities education often allows them to confront problems with different perspectives than someone with a STEM degree. This is NOT to say that that STEM degrees aren't "creative" -- obviously they can be. But there are different thinking and creative skills developed by different disciplines, and sometimes having someone working from a different set of background assumptions can be really helpful.
Thus, I'm not saying that we should all go out and pursue humanities degrees. But they're not necessarily "a waste of time and resources" either.
Not being a linguist, I would absolutely assume that words and meanings were arbitrary. You keep referring to that as if it's extremely obviously wrong to anybody with common sense. I don't think it is common sense.
Onomatopoeia exists. There are words that bear a resemblance to sounds. Basically, my position (and, I think, the authors') is that such very basic connections can form a foundation for meaning in many words. Yes -- that connection may be lost over long spans of time, but it can be "bootstrapped" that way.
To take the example I made of "sn" -- there's something about that particular combination of sounds which could work well for connecting certain concepts. For example, if I wanted to describe a "snake," the long hiss followed by a sudden cutoff to "n" without an intervening vowel could suggest both the sound of the snake and the sense of suddenness. This quickness of a hissing with a sudden cutoff works well with other "sn" words too (snap, snip, snag, snare, snick, snuff, etc.).
Am I claiming that all of these words are derived from such an onomatopoeic connection? No. Obviously they all have their own etymologies. Am I claiming that these words inherit some sort of "universal" meaning from the "sn"? ABSOLUTELY NOT. What I'm saying is that there might be some aspect of the phonology in the sound of those words which might connect back to some attempt at onomatopoeia or a kind of "sound metaphor" connection (which is not directly imitative of a sound, but rather imitates some sort of sound which can make a metaphorical connection to a related concept).
(This is what the study refers to as "iconicity." )
Or, to make my point another way -- I don't think there's any "inherent" or "universal" connection between the word "snake" and the animal. Obviously. But perhaps some minor aspect of the sound of the word might carry information that aligns better with other characteristics of the snake, compared to other words. For example, I don't think "melody" would be a good word to describe a dangerous snake... in almost any language. The phonemes in "melody" are soft and flowing, so perhaps a culture that worships snakes and values their beauty could use the word "melody" to describe them, but most Indo-European languages would likely not.
Take Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, an example of "nonsense poetry." It begins:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Most of those words aren't English, but they clearly convey some associations. A "slithy" tove sounds very different from if it were a "mimsy" tove, no?
That is to say that there is something in the phonetic structure of "slithy" that would have us guess an association different from other made-up words. It's probably associations with similar-sounding words, but that's my whole point (and the authors') -- if you're making up a new word, you choose a "sound" that is appropriate given associations of that sound. And given the appropriate level of context clues and associations, the potential meanings of that word are limited a bit.
So the position I suggest is I guess not the absolute most version of "choose any name for any concept" -- but I assert that it doesn't take even one step toward the position of any universal meaning or inherent connection between word and object*. I posit that these connections are an emergent behaviour.
And I agree that they are emergent behavior, in the sense that verbal "sound" connections in advanced language are NOT basic onomatopoeia anymore. The point is that once you build a few onomatopoeic connections, you can create sonic metaphorical meaning that might endow even certain vowels or consonants or phonetic units or expressiveness (where words are accented, whether they rise or fall
The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't.
Yeah, the thing is -- the actual study doesn't make any claims about anything being "universal." The only person who used the word "universal" was in the news story linked in TFS, and that person quoted in the news story was "not involved in the study."
In sum, the authors of this study don't make ANY claims that this is uncovering some sort of "universal code."
(Which, I might note, you'd be able to discover easily if Slashdot actually linked to the bloody study directly, as I did above, rather than a crappy news summary.)
Instead, the authors' conclusion is much more subtle and intended to take a "middle ground" approach beyond the two extreme positions in language formation. One extremist position (a kind of Platonic Chomskian ideal) is that meaning is universal and ultimately derived from sort of inherent connection between word and object. The other extremist position (classically associated with Saussure) is that the connection between word and object is completely arbitrary, i.e., that we can choose any name for any concept and it would all work just as well. It's hard to believe, but there are actually plenty of linguists who subscribe to something close to this latter view.
Anyhow, if you truly believe connections between words and meanings are arbitrary (in technical language, the "sign is arbitrary," that is, the connection between signifier and signified is completely determined by linguistic convention), then you run into historical problems concerning the origin of language. You make up weird myths where people went around grunting and pointing and only able to use body language for a while. But then some hominid would vocalize an arbitrary sound and point, resulting in the "arbitrary" connection between sound and meaning.
While this undoubtedly happens, I think anyone with any common sense realizes that actual language conveys a lot of subtle meaning by the SOUND of words, some of which may actually echo the sound of an actual thing, and some of which may be much more subtle, with certain phonemes (e.g., "sn" in English often equals something stealthy or something having to do with the nose), word length, etc. conveying a very general sense of meaning.
Anyhow, that's where this study comes in. The authors (who actually did more than the "charades" study which was clearly uncontrolled; read the link above) try to make a claim that meaning can be conveyed by fairly non-specific verbal cues. That means that the "sign is NOT arbitrary" requiring bootstrapping by having the hominid point at things and grunt first, but rather than language and gestural meaning can develop concurrently, with the expressiveness of possible verbal utterances (shaping the tone of a word, length of a word, etc.) able to carry associations.
In basic terms, what they're saying is quite simple: basic sounds can convey meaning, and thus it's possible to create novel meanings in new words due to associations of those sounds. This may seem to be a really obvious thing, but to people in linguistics who are wed to the "arbitrary sign" theory, it's important research. The study itself summarizes what I've said at the end:
Given the traditional linguistic principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, many scholars have maintained that, in these systems, the vocal channel primarily functions to carry the arbitrary linguistic components of a message, while the visible gestural channel conveys the iconic, non-linguistic components. Stemming from this idea, some have proposed that spoken languages must have originated as iconically grounded systems of manual and other visible bodily gestures, and at some point in human history, arbitrary vocalizations w
Yeah, okay -- I'm wrong. Nevermind. I read the original Presidential Succession Act from the 1790s.
A special election could be called, in theory. But the problem increases in terms of the number of people you need to trust, since your Constitutional passage does explicitly say that Congress needs to replace the President with some "Officer" upon resignation UNTIL an election.
While that "Officer" is in place, it would be possible for Congress to pass another law changing what happens... and frankly if you were a President who basically "blew up" the entire government function of the U.S. unless Congress went along with your demands, my bet would be that whoever was Speaker or whatever would be eager to overturn your crazy laws, perhaps even including your provision requiring a new election.
you should realize there is no provision in the Constitution for holding an election to replace a current, qualified President.
Indeed there is. Article II, Section 1, Clause 6:
In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.
Huh? How do you read this as justifying an election? The commas are weird 18th-century things, so let me be clear about what this passage means: If the President goes away, the VP assumes the duties of the office. If both P and VP go away, Congress can pass a law to determine WHAT OFFICER shall act as President, i.e., immediately. There's no provision for an election at that point. Once SUCH OFFICER has taken upon the duties, he shall execute them until the President can resume the duties OR until a "President shall be elected," i.e., according to the SPECIFIC process which happens every 4 years listed elsewhere in the Constitution.
This passage isn't authorizing Congress to call an election, and it has never been interpreted as such. The manner of Presidential elections is explicitly listed in the Constitution. This passage only says that Congress can pass a law to determine what OFFICER becomes President until the next (Constitutionally-determined) election.
Anyhow, some of this was superseded by the 25th Amendment, which specifies exactly what MUST happen when a President leaves office. That question is now decided by the Constitution itself and is out of the hands of Congress.
The only place where Congress could pass a law to deal with a vacancy would be in a case that is not explicitly covered by the 25th Amendment, for example in the case of simultaneously incapacitation or death of both the President and Vice-President. Right now, what happens in that case is governed by the Presidential Succession Act, which in theory could be altered. But it could only be altered to determine some other OFFICER to succeed to the Presidency, according to the passage you cite. There is no power there mentioned to call a random new election.
Anyhow -- basically, you're wrong. You'd need to either amend the Constitution or change the Presidential Succession Act while having both the President AND the Vice-President resign at the same time. To do so, you'd have to trust that Congress and your VP would be completely on board with this after your election, and chances are not good that all of them would go along with it.
And they have a very good reason for doing so -- tampering with succession to the Presidency is not something to be done on the whim of some random law of Congress, which is why the 25th Amendment was proposed and passed in the first place. A country the size of the U.S. needs a dependable set of principles for determining who is running things at any given time, and calling a random election for sitting Presidents has NO historical or constitutional precedent. Given that the manner of electing a President and its timeline is explicitly specified in the Constitution, you could probably expect any such law passed by Congress (even if it could be done) to be overturned by SCOTUS on the grounds that it violates the explicit instructions for Presidential elections in the Constitution.
The results were really bad. I came to the sad conclusion that there are quite a few people with not much self-respect, who just look for any excuse to blow everything out of proportion and evade all responsibility for their actions (e.g., "why are you screaming to me?", "because you screamed to me before", "I don't care! You cannot scream to me!").
I agree with your general sentiment, though I think the problem may not always be "people with not much self-respect." I think it's really hard to calibrate tone in an impersonal medium like e-mail. You may think you're discussing something in a calm, logical way -- but to the other person whom you're criticizing, all they see is a point-by-point attack on their work. All it takes is a couple little places where the meaning could be misconstrued, and suddenly they can become very defensive.
In these cases, it's often nobody's fault. It doesn't require someone actively seeking to "evade all responsibility for their actions" to feel like a lengthy e-mail telling them why they are wrong might be a little aggressive. It's just human nature to be emotionally invested in what you do and who you are, and when someone gives a long drawn-out explanation of what you screwed up, most people are going to feel a little put out.
It's a truly rare person who can always "step back" and "see the bigger picture" and be magnanimous in responding to detailed criticism. I'm not saying we shouldn't aspire to be that kind of person when it's part of our jobs, but for most people it can be difficult.
But I agree with you that the most important thing is just to try to de-escalate, no matter what the circumstances. And sometimes it's just not productive to engage further at all.
One minor point, REMOVE the email addresses from the "to" and "Cc" lines and then save it as a draft. That prevents accidental sending later (even months later.)
Yes -- this is essential. Or send it to yourself.
Most of the time, it's hard to get email messages right in tone, meaning and intent without a rant in it. Likewise, don't be stupid, that stuff hangs around forever and will be used against you more effectively than the rant could ever be...
I'd go so far as to say that rants in e-mail are NEVER very effective. Well, that's true at least for rants actually directed at the recipient. It may be at least therapeutic sometimes to rant to a 3rd party (though that is also often not a good idea in a professional context, lest your rant ever get back to the person you're ranting about).
Anyhow, there's just no good reason to rant AT someone over e-mail. E-mail is impersonal and too prone to misinterpretation. Even a calm, logical argument can be perceived as aggressive or result in defensiveness in the recipient over an issue where there's already some controversy.
If there's a need to "rant" -- do it in person, or over the phone at least. That way you have a chance to actually have a dialogue with the person or at least see/hear the reactions to your speech. If a misunderstanding arises as you're explaining your issue, you can correct it immediately, rather than having the recipient misunderstand something a few sentences in, and then grow to seething after reading the remaining paragraphs of your ranting. (This isn't productive for anyone.)
Better yet -- simply don't "rant." Rambling on when you're angry is rarely effective at communication. Wait until you're calm; then address the issue. Yes, there are times when a "rhetorical rant" is appropriate -- when you can dramatize your speech deliberately. But that should only be done when you are calm, cool, and collected -- and you make a deliberate decision that the appearance of "ranting" will be helpful in conveying your message.
It rarely is necessary.
I first realized all this as a parent. Sure, you can be the parent who screams at a kid every 10 minutes about whatever and goes on a rant about what they should be doing. But kids will just learn to ignore your screaming, or -- worse -- realize that they can "push your buttons" for attention. Either way, discipline becomes ineffective.
I've only ever raised my voice in anger or frustration as a parent a handful of times. It's just not useful. However, particularly with young children, sometimes they need something to grab their attention about something that is legitimately dangerous -- and that's when you raise your voice... calmly and deliberately, but with the necessary force.
Similarly, it's extremely rare to find a circumstance where an uncivil rant is actually productive. If it actually is necessary, it should only ever be delivered in person and when you're calm enough to plan out exactly what you're saying and the dramatic effects you intend.
Since g and f are non-algebraic functions it's understandable that solving this equation is a bit more complicated than the simplistic arithmetic that your original equation implies.
Your analysis is quite insightful, but I would only add that the "unknown" (or "hard to analyze") effects in your function g are generally much more significant than the "unknown" effects in your function f, though we have a lot of diet literature focusing on f rather than g.
The reality is that conquering the psychology and hunger of weight loss is often the hard part. Choosing types of food that can prevent overeating can help, but the effects of satiety and psychological effects in that case are often greater than the overhyped metabolic effects of various foods.
(I'm not saying metabolic effects aren't real, only that we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about them compared to their likely level of effect for most people. Decreasing calorie intake usually is what we have most control over in the equation, with a distant second for exercise in terms of effect on weight. Our ability to change metabolism based on system inputs is even smaller yet, other than through the direct long-term impacts of changes in E and F, which lead to increased muscle mass (increased BMR) and decreased bodyweight (decreased BMR) respectively.)
You see the diet colas kill the good bacteria while helping bad bacteria to flourish in your gut which means that if you put two otherwise healthy people side by side, have one only drink regular and the other diet?
Actually, that's not what your link says. It cites a study that found that people who drank diet soda over a 10-year period experienced greater weight gain (measured by waist circumference) than those WHO DRANK NO DIET SODA.
The study didn't compare heavy diet soda drinkers to heavy regular soda drinkers -- it compared heavy diet soda drinkers to those who don't drink diet soda (many of whom may not drink a lot of soda at all).
Furthermore, the article repeatedly hammers home a message that high-fructose corn syrup is bad, which is what is found in (most) regular soda, and it includes HFCS in its list of things that lead to greater obesity.
So -- your link actually doesn't claim what you said at all. It says that drinking diet soda apparently doesn't prevent obesity and in fact may contribute to it. But it does NOT say that drinking regular soda is better for you.
Oh, and by the way -- I assume some people will counter that this guy experienced so-called "starvation mode," which somehow magically slowed his weight loss.
While "starvation mode" is a real thing, it mostly occurs at exceptionally low bodyfat levels (below 5-6% for men, below 10% for women). The "stall" many people apparently experience when dieting can be due to a number of factors, from water loss in the first couple weeks or dieting to changing bowel dynamics as one's body adjusts to various stages of diets and processing rates... to decreased calorie requirements at new lower bodysize... to decreased fidgeting, shivering, etc. (which can actually burn hundreds of calories per day in some individuals)... etc., etc. Only a tiny fraction of perceived "starvation mode effects" are actually caused by changes in metabolism, until you get to exceptionally low bodyfat levels.
Anyhow, using the rough approximation of 3500 calories = about 1 pound of bodyfat, his apparent calorie deficit was around 2529 calories per day, which is relatively close to the daily requirement for sedentary adult males for weight maintenance. So, even if there were some "starvation mode" effects, they couldn't have been that large, certainly not more than a couple hundred calories per day or so.
And certainly not enough to claim that he could have been eating a "normal" low carb diet all along and achieved the same weight loss.
When you don't burn that fat as energy, it gets filtered out in other ways - through urine, for example, and even just breathing (why low carb dieters often have bad breath). Yes, low carb dieters can lose 5+ lbs a week without exercising.
While I'm willing to accept there are some significant effects of low-carb diets for some people (probably mostly caused by satiety effects, but also smaller metabolic ones), your statement about "5+ lbs a week" is just nonsense.
I know it's an oversimplification, but a pound of fat does require something around 3500 calories to "burn off." Losing 5 lbs. thus requires around 17500 calories of expenditure. The average sedentary adult requires somewhere around 2000-2500 calories intake per day to maintain weight, which comes to somewhere around 14000-17500 calories per week.
Bottom line -- the only way to have a sustained weight loss of 5+ lbs. per week would be through a diet of complete starvation. Yes, it's true that some people who try a "rapid weight loss" diet for a week or two might see a weight loss of 5-10 lbs., but much of that weight loss is due to decreased water retention, decreased weight of food in bowels (due to less intake), etc. After a week or two, keep measuring their weight, and you'll likely see the sustained loss rate at something closer to 1-2 lbs., maybe 3 lbs./week for a large man who is exercising heavily. Any sedentary individual claiming a SUSTAINED 5+ lb/week weight loss is either absolutely HUGE when the diet starts or is lying.
Don't believe me? Look at the longest sustained zero-calorie fast every recorded: Patient A.B. fasted for 382 days (link to the original medical journal article) and only lost 276 lbs., an average weight loss of 0.72 lb./day, or 5.06 lb./week.
That's a guy who ate NO CALORIES for over a year, and he barely kept up with your supposed claims. And you're telling us that "low carb dieters can lose 5+ lbs. a week without exercising" only by releasing extra calories through urine and breathing?? This guy didn't even have ANY calories to process, and he barely achieved your claimed rate of loss!
It's still a little anachronistic. It's not as direct as a knife in the chest or an axe across the neck. With little in terms of civilization, hanging seems anachronistic.
First off, "little in terms of civilization" is a very relative thing. Northern European tribes during this period may not have been Rome, but they had complex metalworking and tools and a very developed culture.
Death in many societies is very ritualized, particularly if deliberate. Even so-called "primitive" societies often have very complex religious rituals in general. Assuming this death was deliberate (as most hangings are), why would anyone assume that it would have to be "as direct as a knife in the chest or an axe across the neck"? If they had metal tools to do those things, they had a society advanced enough to have all sorts of complex ritualistic behavior -- which, to put it another way, is behavior that's not strictly "necessary" or efficient, but serves important cultural purposes.
But warfare week after week after week takes its toll, and an obscenely large fraction of the population died due to wars.
This could be good for a primitive society . . . less mouths to feed.
"Less mouths to feed" = fewer men to protect you in war.
And fewer men to protect you in war = neighboring tribe comes in, slaughters all the men, and kidnaps and rapes the women, adding "more mouths to feed" to their own tribe, which allows them to win more battles.
There's a good reason why almost all human civilizations developed complex rituals and laws governing sexual relationships, child-rearing, etc. -- the survival of a society traditionally depended on their ability to reproduce and raise more "mouths to feed" to fight wars when necessary.
So, life MIGHT have been very violent back then, but you can't just collect data from modern-day "primitive tribes" and extrapolate because your assumptions might not be valid.
Absolutely true. But then we have these people called "historians" who have this knack for looking at actual written records of the past.
And -- well, at least for just about all of written history, it's pretty clear that things were a heck of a lot more violent in most societies than they are today. Many people love these myths and nostalgia for some "golden age" of the past where men were knights in shining armor paying homage and respect to sweet maidens.
The reality for most peasants (and even many noblemen) was nothing like that -- violent crime from murder to rape was many times anything seen in modern societies.
So it was just a very violent time. The article asks the question but does not even begin to answer it.
Precisely. Despite modern fears about violent crime, etc., just about every historical attempt to estimate violent crime and violent deaths over the centuries has concluded that modern violence happens at a rate FAR LESS than the past.
The summary mentions:
a surprising number seem to have been violently dispatched and deliberately placed in bogs, leading some experts to conclude that the bogs served as mass graves for offed outcasts and religious sacrifices.
Yeah... maybe... maybe not. It could just be that the number isn't as "surprising" as it seems. Most people tend to know about the past through narratives written by the upper classes usually about the upper classes, i.e., people who generally tried to present themselves and their people as "civilized." But the majority of people were in the lower classes in the past (mostly unrecorded) and led lives that would be considered horrific to modern people, including high rates of violence.
Slashdot Mirror
Similar issues have shown up in other fields.
Indeed. The biggest issue is statistical ignorance, but even people with a decent amount of training in stats can be fooled if they want to find a particular result. Anyhow, whenever things like this come out, everyone always thinks it's about scientists who manipulate data deliberately. While that happens, it's more often just researchers who "try things out" after collecting data and notice a pattern (unintentionally skewing things). If they have to declare methods and statistical tests beforehand, it's harder to make these errors.
A few months back, I happened upon a very useful guide to the problems in modern scientific publication, which can be found partly online here. I ended up buying the print edition, and the sheer number of examples of completely bogus research ending up being accepted in various scientific fields due to erroneous stats and various biases that creep into the publication process... well, it's just shocking. Seriously.
As the book notes, the other problem is that even finding these errors is incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive. I specifically remember one case where a new oncology test was proposed by Duke researchers and seemed to have great results. This case eventually became so infamous that it was reported on in the popular media.
Anyhow, basically they had a couple independent statisticians analyze the work (where they found HUGE numbers of problems in mislabeled data, mistakes in analysis and basic computation, etc., which appear par for the course in many labs, if you believe the studies on this stuff in the book). Ultimately, estimates are that it took TWO THOUSANDS HOURS of work for these independent statisticians to complete their analysis and render a verdict.
And once they did this, the statisticians tried to publish it -- but major journals didn't want it. Groundbreaking results are much more interesting that tedious statistical analysis. The National Cancer Institute caught wind of the problems and initiated an independent review, which found no errors (probably because the review was done by cancer experts, not stats experts, and they hadn't been giving the stats analysis done by the other researchers).
The only reason any of this ever really got much attention is because one of the lead researchers was accused of falsifying some aspects of his resume, which led to people actually going back and questioning his papers.
The book is full of stories like this, though, as well as citations of analyses of how many journal articles in various fields suffer from serious statistical problems.
It's all really scary when you start realizing how much bogus research is out there... most of it completely unintentional, and most of it passing peer review because it follows the field's "standard methodologies."
The cost comment was in reference to the complaint that OPEN journals cost upwards of 3000 dollars to get a single paper published.
That number is highly variable. There are plenty of open-access journals that cost only a few hundred dollars per article for publication, not several thousand. See here, for example. As that article notes, quite a few big open-access publishers admit that their internal costs for publishing are around a few hundred dollars per article.
As to the notion that the scientists are not being paid to audit the papers, then why do the paid journals only have a profit margin of 38 percent?
If I'm getting the papers for free, people are auditing the papers for free, my cost structure is a website, and people are paying me 20k for a subscription to access the journals... then why is my profit margin so low?
I think you are significantly underestimating the amount of administrative work that goes on in sustaining a publishing operation, even an online one. See the first big chart in the link above, which breaks down costs percentage-wise in publication, and see the amount needed for "administering peer review; editing; proofreading; typesetting; graphics; quality assurance... covers; indexes and editorial; rights management; sales and payments; printing and delivery; online user management; marketing and communications; helpdesk; online hosting... " etc.
There's a lot of random overhead required.
The profit margin if what you're saying is true should be closer to 97~99 percent basically meaning the journal has a small staff that matches X scientists with Y papers... and then whatever the web hosting costs which in any of these businesses is basically nothing.
Um... yeah... again, see above.
That said, it's clear that something fishy is going on with commercial publishers. As this article notes, the for-profit publishers seem to charge 2-3 times as much as non-profits, so it seems like they should be making more than 38% profit. I don't know what the explanation is there, other than that I imagine for-profit companies pay upper-level administrators more.
Anyhow, wherever that excess money is going, your weird conspiracy theory that there's some sort of "kickback" scheme to scientists or reviewers or universities just isn't happening.
Peer-reviewed articles is a fairly new thing in science
Well, it's not a new thing -- it dates back at least a few centuries. But it became more "standard" roughly 75 years ago as a way of evaluating quality journals. It may not be very old, but it has a few generations of history behind it, which is enough to become entrenched practice.
and most often than not, and the review process is highly questionable.
While that's true, the standards do vary significantly from journal to journal. Top-tier journals tend to try better to find real experts to do the reviews, and their standards tend to be a bit higher. The bigger issue with peer review is cases where most "peers" within a field are not sufficiently qualified to spot errors. The most common problems are statistical and methodological errors; most peer reviewers will be fine with articles as long as they show "standard practice" in a discipline. Peer reviewers aren't generally expert statisticians, for example -- they are just academics in the same field, and most fields don't have high standards for statistical rigor (and researchers don't generally have a lot of formal statistical training).
Any idiot can write a whitepaper and claim a new discovery, confirm one, etc, but there are a lot of crackpots out there who make dubious conclusions based on their data, fudge their data, etc.
Yes, that's all true. Which is why we need journals with some standards.
So it's not just that your research is published, the value add of these journals is that they have expert staff who peer review your work and ask questions (to test your conclusion) that you yourself may not have thought of, and somebody who isn't an expert in your field of study may not have thought of. If you're an independent researcher then you can't afford to retain the services of more experts than just yourself, so you'll need their publishing services.
Huh? Do you actually know anything about how academic publishing works? Peer reviewers are generally VOLUNTEERS. And they certainly aren't part of the journal's (paid) "staff." They may be part of the editorial board of the journal, but again those are usually unpaid positions that academics take for the prestige. (On the rare occasions where reviewers are paid -- usually only by journals with poor reputations, it not outright disreputable journals -- it's generally just a very small amount to get the reviewer a little motivation to complete the review in a timely fashion.)
Journals do have to pay for publication costs, like copyediting, layout/formatting/typesetting, etc. But those costs these days are minimized as much as possible (often outsourced), and the quality level of copyediting, etc. is often quite low -- even at good journals. The only people generally paid on a journal's "staff" these days are a few (often part-time) assistants who do the grunt work of collecting incoming submissions, preparing those to be sent out to reviewers, gathering everything together for final publication, etc.
In any case, any actual publication costs are generally tiny compared to these excessive subscription fees.
Not only that, but a journal that frequently publishes whitepapers that have withstood scrutiny tend to attract more readers, so if you publish your material, somebody is more likely to take it seriously than if they just found your blog somewhere on wordpress.
Yes, this is true, and there are metrics ("impact factor," etc.) that are published about which journals rank high. Not surprisingly, some of those metrics are compiled by the major journal publishers, which is a serious conflict of interest.
On the other hand, numerous studies have shown that even major journals (particularly outside of "hard science" fields) tend to publish a high percentage of articles with questionable statistics or methodology. Peer reviewers and journal editors tend to go by "standards in the field," rather than insisting on better statistical or methodological rigor. Frankly, most of them probably don't even realize how bad the situation is, since most researchers in various fields do not receive detailed training in statistical analysis (often just one or two graduate courses, or whatever informal stuff they pick up from colleagues and mentors).
Bottom line is that an article even in a very reputable journal often can have significant problems. But that's more a problem of the peer review process and community standards in general, rather than one unique to top journals.
Anyhow, the biggest issue is INERTIA. Scholars depend on journal publications to get tenure and promotions, as well as to maintain their careers and labs. Their career path and list of publications are periodically reviewed by other academics, who obviously tend to evaluate those publications on the basis of what they know and are familiar with -- which means that "performance reviews" by other academics will tend to give more weight to journals that are already established well in the field.
And that ultimately means that it becomes a bunch of circular reasoning -- this journ
You still haven't gotten to the part where it's an actual crime.
You're correct. It doesn't appear to be a crime.
Some idealized notion of crime and punishment that only exists in your head does not count.
What is the crime?
The "idealized notion" isn't in anyone's head -- it's standard part of U.S. culture these days that anyone who is accused of a "sex offense" with an underage person may end up facing severe charges and permanent community ostracization if convicted... lumped together with actual pedophiles, child rapists, child pornographers, etc.
And that's what we're talking about here, because in Minnesota, the age of consent with a person of authority is 18 years old, and this kid was 17 when this happened.
It may not be a crime, but an accusation of someone having inappropriate contact with someone underage is about the worst possible thing you could say publicly about anyone in the U.S. today, guaranteed to provoke a media storm that will ruin someone's life if there's anyone or anything that might lend even the slightest bit of credence to the story. (Even if that evidence ultimately turns out to be false, the bell could not be unrung; the media probably won't retract any coverage of a witchhunt as long as it had the word "alleged" in the stories.)
I'm not at all defending the police trying to intimidate the kid by making false assertions about the law. But kids should realize today that that sort of accusation has the potential to easily end someone's career and ruin someone's life if misinterpreted.
If you find that this is the case, the employees you have aren't very good and perhaps you are better off bringing in a new batch to see if you can get some better prospects. On the other hand, if you have a high turnover rate, you're going to end up lacking the kind of institutional knowledge that makes maintenance of existing code bases much easier or that allows you to refine your products over the years.
While I completely agree with you, and I think it's a good business decision and a good moral decision to hold on to people, the reality is that the economic advantages are not that significant in a cut-throat environment.
And that's what Amazon's entire business model is: be cheaper than everyone else. Buy from us, put your local stores out of business -- you can get anything here, and it's probably cheaper.
Well, take a moment and consider where such a philosophy gets us. In consumer goods, that attitude is what leads to the fact that it's hard to buy products that can be expected to last more than about 5 years. A few decades ago, towns were filled with repair shops -- now, if something breaks, most people throw it out and get another one. We're used to technology going obsolete, sometimes for no apparent reason other than to convince you to buy the newer model.
Now, why do such products work? Because businesses make a trade-off: they can sell you a product designed to last for decades, and you'll never see that customer again. Or, they can give you something that costs a fraction of the other to manufacture, lasts for 3-5 years, breaks, and then you sell them another one.
When people begin to view the world like this, jobs and workers also become "disposable." It's all an economic trade-off, and it becomes increasingly difficult to justify spending "extra for quality," since quality (and loyalty, in the case of workers) is hard to find.
Is it cheaper in the long-term to run a business where you keep workers around for decades and pay them well as they have families and kids while taking home increasingly higher salaries just to maintain some semblance of "institutional knowledge" or whatever?
Or is it cheaper to run those workers until they are near dead after 5 years or so and move on? And does it matter? Will Amazon even be around in 10 or 20 years for those workers? Does anyone really care in this era of random internet business flux, where people are used to switching jobs every 5 years or so anyway? Amazon has no reasonable competitors in its sector. Why does it need to care about quality? All it wants is the lowest possible expenses to have the lowest possible prices to drive everyone else out of the game. That's the short-term goal, and for that it needs short-term, inexpensive workers who will work their asses off.
It just has to be equal to a human driver - and human drivers are not that good.
In a completely rational world, perhaps. We don't live in a rational world. We live in a world where unusual accidents are governed by media hysteria and lawyers.
And what happens with liability for such an accident with an autonomous car? Who is responsible? The driver? The manufacturer? The individual programmers who created the recognition and behavioral subroutines?
Here's the reality -- early adopters of autonomous cars are probably going to be wealthy folks, because like any new technology they'll probably be expensive at the beginning. So, the first time we get something that any lawyer could call an "avoidable" accident, the rich owner, the company, the programmers, etc. will be sued... for LOTS of money.
Whether they win or lose the lawsuit might be irrelevant, because by that time media hysteria will have kicked in, particularly if "the car killed someone." Other potential rich owners won't want to buy the cars anymore, and if the accident is big enough, some politicians might start getting involved in regulation (even completely unreasonable regulation)... and suddenly the adoption of autonomous vehicles will be set back 20-30 years.
Yes, human drivers are often terrible. But there we at least have a specific person to blame. When an autonomous car kills someone, things could get ugly as people try to sort out why this happened.
I always think that engineers involved in these autonomous car projects must live in fear of the "nightmare scenario," which I picture as some autonomous car ending up being involved in an accident where a bunch of kids die in the first few months after the technology becomes available.
It won't matter if the accident seemed "unavoidable" or if the computer made a good choice that might have actually saved more lives. The fact will be that some black box of technology killed kids.
You have one or two things like that happen early on, and adoption of autonomous vehicles will probably be pushed decades into the future.
So the standard isn't "equal to a human driver" -- it's instead a system that is so far superior that it is "above reproach" when it comes time for lawsuits or a hysterical media witchhunt.
As such, he can only use a court to force the infringing party to stop infringing, and can only expect to be paid his demonstrably customary rate for the material. Considering he probably makes a buck or two here and there, at best, for letting YouTube run ads before/on his material, there's no there, there.
Not quite true. Without copyright registration, you are entitled not only to actual damages (e.g., lost sales), but also potentially to any profits made by the infringing party due to the infringement.
So, yeah, he couldn't get punitive damages without registration. But CNN and CBC make money off of their broadcasts, and this guy could be eligible for a cut of whatever broadcast income they made using his video... which wouldn't be billions of dollars, but would certainly be more than a few dollars you suggest.
There's no book nostalgia like the smell of leather-bound editions you have never bought in your life read before the baronial fireplace you have never owned.
And yet... I'll admit to loving old-fashioned bound books. I own some leather-bound books (not a lot -- I'm not really a collector of the leather editions or anything), and there actually is something nice about a well-made book, typeset clearly on quality paper.
I'm not a baron (nor rich), but I do have a fireplace, and yes -- I do sit by it frequently in the winter on a leather armchair with a good book and a glass of scotch. The "leather-bound" aspect of the book is not necessary, but a physical book of some sort *IS* much nicer in the firelight than a glowing screen of a tablet or whatever.
(Actually, well the fire, the comfy chair, and obviously the scotch are really the best parts...)
I often want my technical docs serarchable, because you can't grep a dead tree.
It depends on how you want to search. I agree that for a pure reference work (particularly one you only refer to on occasion), an electronic version is often best.
But for a reference work which I refer to frequently and/or which I tend to read larger sections of rather than just looking for the right paragraph about a particular term -- well, old-fashioned paper still wins hands down for me.
Paper books are much more "browsable," and I'm much more likely to remember where I read something in a paper book, due to the consistent physical structure that can be referred back to. ("It was about 3/4 of the way through... and I remember the passage was on the upper-right corner below an illustration...") They're also quick and easy to annotate, dog-ear, etc. Yes, one can do these latter things with electronic books too, but it's not quite as flexible and dynamic as easily underlining something, circling something else, jotting a few words in the margin, and drawing arrows to an illustration or whatever. To do this with an e-book, I'd need to switch a bunch of different tools, and some of it may be impossible... with paper, I just grab a pencil and I'm good to go.
I admit that a full-text search on books is awesome, but I mostly find it awesome for a book I'll only use once or twice and never care about again. For a book I want to refer to every day, a paper copy still has a lot of potential conveniences.
I completely agree with you that this guy's comments are insulting and don't necessarily make a lot of sense. However...
The whole point of promoting STEM is because Art degrees are waste of time and resources. You may be personally fulfilled getting your Masters Degree in 18th Century French Poetry but it's not going to help make you a productive member of society.
This is unnecessarily narrow-minded as well. First, while college degrees seem largely about "job training" for most folks today, for most of the 1000+ year history of universities, the assumption was that getting a degree was also about "broadening one's mind" and acquiring a breadth of skills that may be useful in various ways.
Someone who has a master's degree in 18th-century French poetry may not find a lot of jobs outside academia that value that very specific field. But there are loads of related skills that could be useful -- mastery of another language has practical use, historical perspective means an ability to think outside of one's current situation (a skill which can be helpful when trying to understand other people and other ideologies and perspectives), poetic analysis requires certain levels of creativity and abstract thinking (particularly outside one's native tongue), understanding rhetorical structure of language can be helpful in crafting everything from good reports to persuasive speeches, etc. And there are even specific benefits perhaps from this particular field: 18th-century France was the home of the so-called Enlightenment, whose philosophy has shaped our modern world, from science to political systems and law. Surely a grasp of some of the background to the place and time which gave birth to our modern pragmatic, scientific culture might be helpful at some point.
I know a LOT of people who have degrees at various levels in the humanities and make very successful careers in various fields. And those experiences they received by pursuing a humanities education often allows them to confront problems with different perspectives than someone with a STEM degree. This is NOT to say that that STEM degrees aren't "creative" -- obviously they can be. But there are different thinking and creative skills developed by different disciplines, and sometimes having someone working from a different set of background assumptions can be really helpful.
Thus, I'm not saying that we should all go out and pursue humanities degrees. But they're not necessarily "a waste of time and resources" either.
Not being a linguist, I would absolutely assume that words and meanings were arbitrary. You keep referring to that as if it's extremely obviously wrong to anybody with common sense. I don't think it is common sense.
Onomatopoeia exists. There are words that bear a resemblance to sounds. Basically, my position (and, I think, the authors') is that such very basic connections can form a foundation for meaning in many words. Yes -- that connection may be lost over long spans of time, but it can be "bootstrapped" that way.
To take the example I made of "sn" -- there's something about that particular combination of sounds which could work well for connecting certain concepts. For example, if I wanted to describe a "snake," the long hiss followed by a sudden cutoff to "n" without an intervening vowel could suggest both the sound of the snake and the sense of suddenness. This quickness of a hissing with a sudden cutoff works well with other "sn" words too (snap, snip, snag, snare, snick, snuff, etc.).
Am I claiming that all of these words are derived from such an onomatopoeic connection? No. Obviously they all have their own etymologies. Am I claiming that these words inherit some sort of "universal" meaning from the "sn"? ABSOLUTELY NOT. What I'm saying is that there might be some aspect of the phonology in the sound of those words which might connect back to some attempt at onomatopoeia or a kind of "sound metaphor" connection (which is not directly imitative of a sound, but rather imitates some sort of sound which can make a metaphorical connection to a related concept).
(This is what the study refers to as "iconicity." )
Or, to make my point another way -- I don't think there's any "inherent" or "universal" connection between the word "snake" and the animal. Obviously. But perhaps some minor aspect of the sound of the word might carry information that aligns better with other characteristics of the snake, compared to other words. For example, I don't think "melody" would be a good word to describe a dangerous snake... in almost any language. The phonemes in "melody" are soft and flowing, so perhaps a culture that worships snakes and values their beauty could use the word "melody" to describe them, but most Indo-European languages would likely not.
Take Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, an example of "nonsense poetry." It begins:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Most of those words aren't English, but they clearly convey some associations. A "slithy" tove sounds very different from if it were a "mimsy" tove, no?
That is to say that there is something in the phonetic structure of "slithy" that would have us guess an association different from other made-up words. It's probably associations with similar-sounding words, but that's my whole point (and the authors') -- if you're making up a new word, you choose a "sound" that is appropriate given associations of that sound. And given the appropriate level of context clues and associations, the potential meanings of that word are limited a bit.
So the position I suggest is I guess not the absolute most version of "choose any name for any concept" -- but I assert that it doesn't take even one step toward the position of any universal meaning or inherent connection between word and object*. I posit that these connections are an emergent behaviour.
And I agree that they are emergent behavior, in the sense that verbal "sound" connections in advanced language are NOT basic onomatopoeia anymore. The point is that once you build a few onomatopoeic connections, you can create sonic metaphorical meaning that might endow even certain vowels or consonants or phonetic units or expressiveness (where words are accented, whether they rise or fall
The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't.
Yeah, the thing is -- the actual study doesn't make any claims about anything being "universal." The only person who used the word "universal" was in the news story linked in TFS, and that person quoted in the news story was "not involved in the study."
In sum, the authors of this study don't make ANY claims that this is uncovering some sort of "universal code."
(Which, I might note, you'd be able to discover easily if Slashdot actually linked to the bloody study directly, as I did above, rather than a crappy news summary.)
Instead, the authors' conclusion is much more subtle and intended to take a "middle ground" approach beyond the two extreme positions in language formation. One extremist position (a kind of Platonic Chomskian ideal) is that meaning is universal and ultimately derived from sort of inherent connection between word and object. The other extremist position (classically associated with Saussure) is that the connection between word and object is completely arbitrary, i.e., that we can choose any name for any concept and it would all work just as well. It's hard to believe, but there are actually plenty of linguists who subscribe to something close to this latter view.
Anyhow, if you truly believe connections between words and meanings are arbitrary (in technical language, the "sign is arbitrary," that is, the connection between signifier and signified is completely determined by linguistic convention), then you run into historical problems concerning the origin of language. You make up weird myths where people went around grunting and pointing and only able to use body language for a while. But then some hominid would vocalize an arbitrary sound and point, resulting in the "arbitrary" connection between sound and meaning.
While this undoubtedly happens, I think anyone with any common sense realizes that actual language conveys a lot of subtle meaning by the SOUND of words, some of which may actually echo the sound of an actual thing, and some of which may be much more subtle, with certain phonemes (e.g., "sn" in English often equals something stealthy or something having to do with the nose), word length, etc. conveying a very general sense of meaning.
Anyhow, that's where this study comes in. The authors (who actually did more than the "charades" study which was clearly uncontrolled; read the link above) try to make a claim that meaning can be conveyed by fairly non-specific verbal cues. That means that the "sign is NOT arbitrary" requiring bootstrapping by having the hominid point at things and grunt first, but rather than language and gestural meaning can develop concurrently, with the expressiveness of possible verbal utterances (shaping the tone of a word, length of a word, etc.) able to carry associations.
In basic terms, what they're saying is quite simple: basic sounds can convey meaning, and thus it's possible to create novel meanings in new words due to associations of those sounds. This may seem to be a really obvious thing, but to people in linguistics who are wed to the "arbitrary sign" theory, it's important research. The study itself summarizes what I've said at the end:
Given the traditional linguistic principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, many scholars have maintained that, in these systems, the vocal channel primarily functions to carry the arbitrary linguistic components of a message, while the visible gestural channel conveys the iconic, non-linguistic components. Stemming from this idea, some have proposed that spoken languages must have originated as iconically grounded systems of manual and other visible bodily gestures, and at some point in human history, arbitrary vocalizations w
A special election could be called, in theory. But the problem increases in terms of the number of people you need to trust, since your Constitutional passage does explicitly say that Congress needs to replace the President with some "Officer" upon resignation UNTIL an election. While that "Officer" is in place, it would be possible for Congress to pass another law changing what happens... and frankly if you were a President who basically "blew up" the entire government function of the U.S. unless Congress went along with your demands, my bet would be that whoever was Speaker or whatever would be eager to overturn your crazy laws, perhaps even including your provision requiring a new election.
you should realize there is no provision in the Constitution for holding an election to replace a current, qualified President.
Indeed there is. Article II, Section 1, Clause 6:
In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.
Huh? How do you read this as justifying an election? The commas are weird 18th-century things, so let me be clear about what this passage means: If the President goes away, the VP assumes the duties of the office. If both P and VP go away, Congress can pass a law to determine WHAT OFFICER shall act as President, i.e., immediately. There's no provision for an election at that point. Once SUCH OFFICER has taken upon the duties, he shall execute them until the President can resume the duties OR until a "President shall be elected," i.e., according to the SPECIFIC process which happens every 4 years listed elsewhere in the Constitution.
This passage isn't authorizing Congress to call an election, and it has never been interpreted as such. The manner of Presidential elections is explicitly listed in the Constitution. This passage only says that Congress can pass a law to determine what OFFICER becomes President until the next (Constitutionally-determined) election.
Anyhow, some of this was superseded by the 25th Amendment, which specifies exactly what MUST happen when a President leaves office. That question is now decided by the Constitution itself and is out of the hands of Congress.
The only place where Congress could pass a law to deal with a vacancy would be in a case that is not explicitly covered by the 25th Amendment, for example in the case of simultaneously incapacitation or death of both the President and Vice-President. Right now, what happens in that case is governed by the Presidential Succession Act, which in theory could be altered. But it could only be altered to determine some other OFFICER to succeed to the Presidency, according to the passage you cite. There is no power there mentioned to call a random new election.
Anyhow -- basically, you're wrong. You'd need to either amend the Constitution or change the Presidential Succession Act while having both the President AND the Vice-President resign at the same time. To do so, you'd have to trust that Congress and your VP would be completely on board with this after your election, and chances are not good that all of them would go along with it.
And they have a very good reason for doing so -- tampering with succession to the Presidency is not something to be done on the whim of some random law of Congress, which is why the 25th Amendment was proposed and passed in the first place. A country the size of the U.S. needs a dependable set of principles for determining who is running things at any given time, and calling a random election for sitting Presidents has NO historical or constitutional precedent. Given that the manner of electing a President and its timeline is explicitly specified in the Constitution, you could probably expect any such law passed by Congress (even if it could be done) to be overturned by SCOTUS on the grounds that it violates the explicit instructions for Presidential elections in the Constitution.
The results were really bad. I came to the sad conclusion that there are quite a few people with not much self-respect, who just look for any excuse to blow everything out of proportion and evade all responsibility for their actions (e.g., "why are you screaming to me?", "because you screamed to me before", "I don't care! You cannot scream to me!").
I agree with your general sentiment, though I think the problem may not always be "people with not much self-respect." I think it's really hard to calibrate tone in an impersonal medium like e-mail. You may think you're discussing something in a calm, logical way -- but to the other person whom you're criticizing, all they see is a point-by-point attack on their work. All it takes is a couple little places where the meaning could be misconstrued, and suddenly they can become very defensive.
In these cases, it's often nobody's fault. It doesn't require someone actively seeking to "evade all responsibility for their actions" to feel like a lengthy e-mail telling them why they are wrong might be a little aggressive. It's just human nature to be emotionally invested in what you do and who you are, and when someone gives a long drawn-out explanation of what you screwed up, most people are going to feel a little put out.
It's a truly rare person who can always "step back" and "see the bigger picture" and be magnanimous in responding to detailed criticism. I'm not saying we shouldn't aspire to be that kind of person when it's part of our jobs, but for most people it can be difficult.
But I agree with you that the most important thing is just to try to de-escalate, no matter what the circumstances. And sometimes it's just not productive to engage further at all.
One minor point, REMOVE the email addresses from the "to" and "Cc" lines and then save it as a draft. That prevents accidental sending later (even months later.)
Yes -- this is essential. Or send it to yourself.
Most of the time, it's hard to get email messages right in tone, meaning and intent without a rant in it. Likewise, don't be stupid, that stuff hangs around forever and will be used against you more effectively than the rant could ever be...
I'd go so far as to say that rants in e-mail are NEVER very effective. Well, that's true at least for rants actually directed at the recipient. It may be at least therapeutic sometimes to rant to a 3rd party (though that is also often not a good idea in a professional context, lest your rant ever get back to the person you're ranting about).
Anyhow, there's just no good reason to rant AT someone over e-mail. E-mail is impersonal and too prone to misinterpretation. Even a calm, logical argument can be perceived as aggressive or result in defensiveness in the recipient over an issue where there's already some controversy.
If there's a need to "rant" -- do it in person, or over the phone at least. That way you have a chance to actually have a dialogue with the person or at least see/hear the reactions to your speech. If a misunderstanding arises as you're explaining your issue, you can correct it immediately, rather than having the recipient misunderstand something a few sentences in, and then grow to seething after reading the remaining paragraphs of your ranting. (This isn't productive for anyone.)
Better yet -- simply don't "rant." Rambling on when you're angry is rarely effective at communication. Wait until you're calm; then address the issue. Yes, there are times when a "rhetorical rant" is appropriate -- when you can dramatize your speech deliberately. But that should only be done when you are calm, cool, and collected -- and you make a deliberate decision that the appearance of "ranting" will be helpful in conveying your message.
It rarely is necessary.
I first realized all this as a parent. Sure, you can be the parent who screams at a kid every 10 minutes about whatever and goes on a rant about what they should be doing. But kids will just learn to ignore your screaming, or -- worse -- realize that they can "push your buttons" for attention. Either way, discipline becomes ineffective.
I've only ever raised my voice in anger or frustration as a parent a handful of times. It's just not useful. However, particularly with young children, sometimes they need something to grab their attention about something that is legitimately dangerous -- and that's when you raise your voice... calmly and deliberately, but with the necessary force.
Similarly, it's extremely rare to find a circumstance where an uncivil rant is actually productive. If it actually is necessary, it should only ever be delivered in person and when you're calm enough to plan out exactly what you're saying and the dramatic effects you intend.
Since g and f are non-algebraic functions it's understandable that solving this equation is a bit more complicated than the simplistic arithmetic that your original equation implies.
Your analysis is quite insightful, but I would only add that the "unknown" (or "hard to analyze") effects in your function g are generally much more significant than the "unknown" effects in your function f, though we have a lot of diet literature focusing on f rather than g.
The reality is that conquering the psychology and hunger of weight loss is often the hard part. Choosing types of food that can prevent overeating can help, but the effects of satiety and psychological effects in that case are often greater than the overhyped metabolic effects of various foods.
(I'm not saying metabolic effects aren't real, only that we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about them compared to their likely level of effect for most people. Decreasing calorie intake usually is what we have most control over in the equation, with a distant second for exercise in terms of effect on weight. Our ability to change metabolism based on system inputs is even smaller yet, other than through the direct long-term impacts of changes in E and F, which lead to increased muscle mass (increased BMR) and decreased bodyweight (decreased BMR) respectively.)
You see the diet colas kill the good bacteria while helping bad bacteria to flourish in your gut which means that if you put two otherwise healthy people side by side, have one only drink regular and the other diet?
Actually, that's not what your link says. It cites a study that found that people who drank diet soda over a 10-year period experienced greater weight gain (measured by waist circumference) than those WHO DRANK NO DIET SODA.
The study didn't compare heavy diet soda drinkers to heavy regular soda drinkers -- it compared heavy diet soda drinkers to those who don't drink diet soda (many of whom may not drink a lot of soda at all).
Furthermore, the article repeatedly hammers home a message that high-fructose corn syrup is bad, which is what is found in (most) regular soda, and it includes HFCS in its list of things that lead to greater obesity.
So -- your link actually doesn't claim what you said at all. It says that drinking diet soda apparently doesn't prevent obesity and in fact may contribute to it. But it does NOT say that drinking regular soda is better for you.
Oh, and by the way -- I assume some people will counter that this guy experienced so-called "starvation mode," which somehow magically slowed his weight loss.
While "starvation mode" is a real thing, it mostly occurs at exceptionally low bodyfat levels (below 5-6% for men, below 10% for women). The "stall" many people apparently experience when dieting can be due to a number of factors, from water loss in the first couple weeks or dieting to changing bowel dynamics as one's body adjusts to various stages of diets and processing rates... to decreased calorie requirements at new lower bodysize... to decreased fidgeting, shivering, etc. (which can actually burn hundreds of calories per day in some individuals)... etc., etc. Only a tiny fraction of perceived "starvation mode effects" are actually caused by changes in metabolism, until you get to exceptionally low bodyfat levels.
Anyhow, using the rough approximation of 3500 calories = about 1 pound of bodyfat, his apparent calorie deficit was around 2529 calories per day, which is relatively close to the daily requirement for sedentary adult males for weight maintenance. So, even if there were some "starvation mode" effects, they couldn't have been that large, certainly not more than a couple hundred calories per day or so.
And certainly not enough to claim that he could have been eating a "normal" low carb diet all along and achieved the same weight loss.
When you don't burn that fat as energy, it gets filtered out in other ways - through urine, for example, and even just breathing (why low carb dieters often have bad breath). Yes, low carb dieters can lose 5+ lbs a week without exercising.
While I'm willing to accept there are some significant effects of low-carb diets for some people (probably mostly caused by satiety effects, but also smaller metabolic ones), your statement about "5+ lbs a week" is just nonsense.
I know it's an oversimplification, but a pound of fat does require something around 3500 calories to "burn off." Losing 5 lbs. thus requires around 17500 calories of expenditure. The average sedentary adult requires somewhere around 2000-2500 calories intake per day to maintain weight, which comes to somewhere around 14000-17500 calories per week.
Bottom line -- the only way to have a sustained weight loss of 5+ lbs. per week would be through a diet of complete starvation. Yes, it's true that some people who try a "rapid weight loss" diet for a week or two might see a weight loss of 5-10 lbs., but much of that weight loss is due to decreased water retention, decreased weight of food in bowels (due to less intake), etc. After a week or two, keep measuring their weight, and you'll likely see the sustained loss rate at something closer to 1-2 lbs., maybe 3 lbs./week for a large man who is exercising heavily. Any sedentary individual claiming a SUSTAINED 5+ lb/week weight loss is either absolutely HUGE when the diet starts or is lying.
Don't believe me? Look at the longest sustained zero-calorie fast every recorded: Patient A.B. fasted for 382 days (link to the original medical journal article) and only lost 276 lbs., an average weight loss of 0.72 lb./day, or 5.06 lb./week.
That's a guy who ate NO CALORIES for over a year, and he barely kept up with your supposed claims. And you're telling us that "low carb dieters can lose 5+ lbs. a week without exercising" only by releasing extra calories through urine and breathing?? This guy didn't even have ANY calories to process, and he barely achieved your claimed rate of loss!
It's still a little anachronistic. It's not as direct as a knife in the chest or an axe across the neck. With little in terms of civilization, hanging seems anachronistic.
First off, "little in terms of civilization" is a very relative thing. Northern European tribes during this period may not have been Rome, but they had complex metalworking and tools and a very developed culture.
Death in many societies is very ritualized, particularly if deliberate. Even so-called "primitive" societies often have very complex religious rituals in general. Assuming this death was deliberate (as most hangings are), why would anyone assume that it would have to be "as direct as a knife in the chest or an axe across the neck"? If they had metal tools to do those things, they had a society advanced enough to have all sorts of complex ritualistic behavior -- which, to put it another way, is behavior that's not strictly "necessary" or efficient, but serves important cultural purposes.
But warfare week after week after week takes its toll, and an obscenely large fraction of the population died due to wars.
This could be good for a primitive society . . . less mouths to feed.
"Less mouths to feed" = fewer men to protect you in war.
And fewer men to protect you in war = neighboring tribe comes in, slaughters all the men, and kidnaps and rapes the women, adding "more mouths to feed" to their own tribe, which allows them to win more battles.
There's a good reason why almost all human civilizations developed complex rituals and laws governing sexual relationships, child-rearing, etc. -- the survival of a society traditionally depended on their ability to reproduce and raise more "mouths to feed" to fight wars when necessary.
So, life MIGHT have been very violent back then, but you can't just collect data from modern-day "primitive tribes" and extrapolate because your assumptions might not be valid.
Absolutely true. But then we have these people called "historians" who have this knack for looking at actual written records of the past.
And -- well, at least for just about all of written history, it's pretty clear that things were a heck of a lot more violent in most societies than they are today. Many people love these myths and nostalgia for some "golden age" of the past where men were knights in shining armor paying homage and respect to sweet maidens.
The reality for most peasants (and even many noblemen) was nothing like that -- violent crime from murder to rape was many times anything seen in modern societies.
So it was just a very violent time. The article asks the question but does not even begin to answer it.
Precisely. Despite modern fears about violent crime, etc., just about every historical attempt to estimate violent crime and violent deaths over the centuries has concluded that modern violence happens at a rate FAR LESS than the past.
The summary mentions:
a surprising number seem to have been violently dispatched and deliberately placed in bogs, leading some experts to conclude that the bogs served as mass graves for offed outcasts and religious sacrifices.
Yeah... maybe... maybe not. It could just be that the number isn't as "surprising" as it seems. Most people tend to know about the past through narratives written by the upper classes usually about the upper classes, i.e., people who generally tried to present themselves and their people as "civilized." But the majority of people were in the lower classes in the past (mostly unrecorded) and led lives that would be considered horrific to modern people, including high rates of violence.