Re:Excellent. Now how about High Fructose Corn Syr
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FDA Bans Trans Fat
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· Score: 1
One could argue that HFCS is worse than transfat, but one could ALSO argue that excess consumption of large amounts of most common sugars is worse than transfat.
Look around, and you'll find only one or two studies that seem to show HFCS is significantly worse than, say, table sugar. There are all of these claims about metabolic differences, but they rarely seem to show up in experiments -- you'll find a lot of experiments, in fact, where there's little difference in effects.
I absolutely agree with you that we should decrease HFCS consumption. But I don't agree if your remedy is that we're just going to replace it with sucrose or honey or whatever else that's basically going to have similar bad effects. We need to lower sugar consumption in general....
Then you should also sign a card saying you are not entitled to medical care to treat potential illnesses caused that have direct links to the digestion of trans fats, unless you pay for it yourself.
Well, okay. Then YOU should sign a card saying you are not entitled to medical care to treat illnesses after you live past the average life expectancy of the general population, unless you pay for it yourself.
I'm all for "it's my body" and all that, I honestly am, but not at the expense of others.
Then pay up if you live long! Seriously.
This is generally the problem with people who make these arguments. There are lots of studies that show that medical costs associated with "unhealthy behaviors" also tend to result in EARLIER DEATH. Meanwhile, there are plenty of studies that show that total medical costs increase significantly with age.
Which means that the greatest cost to society is generally due to the "healthy" people who live to 95 and have to have multiple joint replacements, break hips here and there, have chronic degenerative illnesses that might take 10 or 20 years to kill someone, have a few rounds of minor cancer treatments over the years, and require many years of round-the-clock care after their minds succumb to dementia until they finally die.
Meanwhile, that poor fat guy who ate terribly cost a hell of a lot in diabetes treatment in his 50s, but then he was nice enough to save money for society by having a heart attack and dying at age 62, right after his retirement party.
In sum, when you actually take into account the extra medical expenses caused by LIVING LONGER, it's usually enough to make "healthy" people more expensive over a lifespan compared to people with "unhealthy" behaviors. (This goes for smoking, obesity, etc.)
So, if you're talking about annual premiums for insurance, sure -- I'm with you: make people who eat trans fats pay more if it's actually going to increase short-term medical expenses.
But if you're looking at overall societal costs for people over their lives, be prepared to pony up when you end up living longer and costing more for your "healthy" lifestyle.
(P.S. I don't use trans fats and haven't really used them much ever in my cooking. I don't give a crap if they disappear from processed foods, because I generally avoid them. But this has no bearing on whether your argument is wrong.)
Poor people are also much more likely to have 5 children each with a different person. Maintaining a healthy weight requires some degree of effort and discipline. People that never adequately prepared for their future are simply demonstrating the same faults in their eating habits as they have done in other things.
Yeah... those darn poor people. If only they realized that they need to STOP BEING POOR! Then they'd be so much better off!
(Hint: Correlation does not equal causation in your analysis.)
Being poor doesn't eliminate the possibility of doing better.
No, it doesn't. But it can make it a lot harder to accomplish a number of things. And there are many studies showing significant impacts after years of being poor -- physically, mentally, etc. -- which you can't just dismiss and say "DO BETTER, ya poor slob!"
I feel sorry for people who don't get it. You implied that you were worse off, and you've done better for yourself. Congratulations. But you're like the guy who was feeling down in his life a little and then got motivated -- but you turn and look at the person with clinical depression, which could be caused by a chemical imbalance or years of mental problems... and you just say, "HEY! Just get your darn body out'a bed in the morning! How hard is it? Look... I did it! All it takes is a little effort!"
I'm glad that you've found a way to better yourself. But it's not that easy for a lot of people.
And what's your explanation here? If poor people lack pervasive impulse control, as you suggest, does that mean they are genetically determined to be poor? Well, no -- that's refuted by numerous studies of adoptions that have shown that poor kids can end up doing perfectly well when raised in rich families. So it doesn't seem to be genetic (or at least MOST of the explanation isn't genetic).
Which means it's primarily caused by some sort of environmental factor. Poor people look around at people surrounding them, and they imitate them. Kids imitate parents. You can look at studies like the differences in ways that poor parents talk to and interact with their kids, which causes kids to behave differently from rich kids and reinforces their socioeconomic status, for example.
Poor people don't just "have" impulse control problems -- if they do have them, it's fundamentally engrained in the culture surrounding them which they probably observe from their childhood years. If you spend many, many years believing that X is "normal," it can be hard to turn things around... or to see another possible way of behaving. More importantly -- your body and your mind can "fight" you and try to lead you back to what you've grown up thinking is "normal."
And then when you look at "convenience foods" that are loaded with crap and engineered to produce cravings for them (which they are) or to produce weird reactions in our bodies that would not even occur when our ancestors ate unprocessed foods hundreds of thousands of years ago, you realize that people who end up eating cheap, convenient food because they don't have a lot of money and are too tired to cook meals themselves after working double shifts all the time... well, they might just end up with screwed up biochemistry in their bodies, which will contribute to weight gain.
As you say:
Maintaining a healthy weight requires some degree of effort and discipline.
While that's true, it wasn't true for basically the entire history of civilization until the past couple generations. Most people for almost all of history didn't have excess food just lying around. Only the rich could afford to be fat. The poor people were just struggling usually to get enough calories to survive while they did backbreaking labor. So you didn't need "effort and discipline" to maintain a healthy weight -- you were lucky enough to have enough calories
Those are great skills to have. But they're not common anymore, and they're not likely to be common again (barring the zombie apocalypse).
What skills? Being able to eat? Our food industry knows how to preserve local foods... and can stock their shelves with local preserved foods and winter crops over the winter. They already have such things in cans and jars and freezers pre-made for you.
The question in this thread is whether people can choose to live off of locally grown foods. In most cases, that would be a possible and reasonable choice. It requires no special skills that the grocery industry doesn't already employ. It's just that most people choose not to do that, and our grocery system doesn't make it easy. I'm not judging them for it -- just noting it's a fact that one can live off of local foods in most places if you wanted to. It's just not what our current system encourages.
there is little reason to ship all that produce all over the country and world when many many smaller plots would be more ecologically safe.
Except for the small, inconvenient fact that much of the country doesn't have the climate to support growing stuff year-round, leaving vast swaths of the country without produce for much of the year.
So, ya know, you actually grow "winter crops," i.e., things that either store well or which can be left in the soil and dug up later.
A few years back, when I was living somewhere in the northeast U.S., I bought a share in a local farm. ALL of the produce was grown exclusively on that farm. Every week, I'd go pick up my fresh produce from that farm. In the summer, there were fun things like berries. In the fall, there was more than I knew what to do with, so I canned and fermented and froze things. And when it was winter, I got plenty of potatoes and squash and such to roast on cold winter nights, because those stored well.
Believe it or not, people managed to survive in colder climates before they could truck in fresh fruit year-round from California. And actually, if they planned well, they could eat rather well with a variety of food. The stuff that didn't store well? Well, that's why they invented fermentation. And canning. And freezing.
Personally, I like that lifestyle. You learn more about cooking when you have to cook what's available, rather than just going to the grocery store in January and getting fresh blueberries shipped in from South America that taste like sawdust. I'd prefer having my fresh blueberries picked off the bushes down the road for the month or so they actually grow -- when they actually taste fresh and sweet.
Frankly, I think food is more meaningful that way -- tied into natural cycles, which make you appreciate certain foods more when they are plentiful and available.
I understand that not everyone wants that. But it's actually very possible to have food available to eat year-round from local sources in most parts of the U.S.... well, except in deserts like California, where you have to ship in water for anyone to grow enough to survive.
During public hearings on WA State's House Bill 1813, which took aim at boy's historical over-representation in K-12 computer classes
That should be boys', not boy's.
Well, either that, or it's a capitalization error. ("Boy's"?) Perhaps TFS is really a complaint about the overuse of Boy George's music in K-12 computer classes.
With Timothy editing the summary, you never can be sure what he's talking about....
Now it's Belgians. No, wait, sorry, that was two years ago. Saisons? "Farmhouse"? No, that was last year. Sours. I think it's sours now. Especially gose or barrel-aged.
You're making the mistake of conflating current fashion among the beer equivalent of " foodies" (I'm sure there's a word for them) with actual current stocks found in bars and such around the U.S. I can assure you that it's VERY common in many cities in the U.S. to still see a trend toward very hoppy beers occupying large portions of the menu. Many bars realized they needed to start stocking some "craft" beers, so they jumped on the hops bandwagon, and it's still a major market for a lot of craft breweries. Yes, new fads will come, but the hoppiness is still pretty dominant in many places... I often go to bars with 20+ beers on tap, and I struggle to find something "interesting" and different from standard mass-production beers and isn't called "hoptastic" or "hops-my-goodness" or some stupid name... (FYI -- I love sours, for example, but I have only seen them actually on tap in a bar once or twice...)
Argh. This is what I get for reading the NPR summary instead of the actual opinion.
Apparently, the reason the cops asked him to step out of the car was because the windshield was broken and there was fresh glass on the hood. And, contrary to the NPR report, apparently the 3 shots were fired while the car was basically "boxed in" by the cops, though apparently he wasn't really trapped, since he escaped and then the cops fired 12 more shots during his flight.
Very different account from what NPR says.
In any case, police still usually have "qualified immunity" unless their actions are clearly illegal or unconstitutional, as well as "unreasonable" given the circumstances.
He can sue the police, which is the recourse available everyone should exploit for being wrongfully arrested.
Possibly, but not likely. Police generally have qualified immunity, which basically will prevent their being sued unless there's proof of serious and unreasonable violation of Constitutional rights. This was just upheld again by the Supreme Court last year.
Read that last link to see how far "qualified immunity" goes -- guy gets pulled over for broken headlight, then takes off in the car after cops ask him to get out of the car for no apparent reason. Cops set off in high-speed pursuit, fired three shots at the car, and AFTER he finally crashed, the police fired 12 shots into the vehicle killing the guy and the (completely innocent) passenger... for no apparent reason.
Supreme Court ruled unanimously that cops have qualified immunity in that case. There's basically NO CHANCE they'll be able to be sued for arresting a guy carrying something that looked like a gun near a school in a state where carrying guns near schools is illegal.
Also, the stereotypical example for bizarre old imperial units is chemical engineering, probably because so much of it was pioneered in the U.S.
You really haven't lived until you've encountered a problem incorporating thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and mass transfer using enthalpies in BTU/lb-R, an ideal gas constant in ft^3-atm/lb-mol-R, pressure in psig, and a liquid flow rate in gal./min.
The thing is -- many of the really handy charts and graphs in a field like that allow you to do really complex calculations just by reading off of six different scales drawn in different shapes on the same graph (like Mollier diagrams)... and many of those charts still haven't been redrawn in metric for more obscure or rare situations.
That said, I don't believe the anecdote from GGP either -- any engineer who's been trained in the past 40 years in the U.S. should be fluent in metric units, even if they sometimes use imperial in specific circumstances.
Pick a busier airport, wait until you are in the middle of the security queue with people cordoned all around you in a big mass and BOOM! Most of these airports haven't got high ceilings and the screening area is in a corridor like space to prevent people from bypassing it. Look what the bomb in Boston did outdoors, think what harm it would do to people indoors!
While this is all true, it also points out the ridiculousness of worrying about airports at all. There are probably hundreds or even thousands of events every day with many hundreds of people (or more) gathered in small areas or clustered in buildings with minimal security or (in most cases) none at all.
The only terrorists who'd target an airplane these days are stupid -- because the point of terrorism seems to be to scare people ("terrorize") and disrupt society. Airports are already disrupted due to terrorism concerns. A terrorist who actually wanted to do more significant damage would target some other random everyday activity where there are hundreds or thousands of people gathered together.
There are countries in the world at various times in history which have experienced REAL terrorism, where random terrorist events could occur anywhere. After 9/11, many people were concerned that such a thing could happen in the U.S., since it seemed that such a highly coordinated attack would imply large numbers of terrorists. But those terrorists never materialized, we never saw the random attacks, and people forgot all about that... while still retaining some weird obsession with security concerns on airplanes.
Sure, you might get a few hundred casulties and the loss of a plane and possible some casulties on the ground.. there are far worse things they could do. Black Friday at a Wal-mart? Sporting events, train stations..
Yes, this is the obvious thing. I recall after 9/11 when people were actually freaked out by such possibilities. I had a couple friends who didn't even want to go to shopping malls for a few months, because there was fear that any large congregation of people could be a target.
And then what happened?? Nothing.
And people stopped worrying about all those other possibilities....
Also, a fun stat on that "sure you might get a few hundred casualties" with a loss of a plane. Keep in mind that TSA is not free either. And I'm not just talking about cost or special scanners (whether they have medical consequences or not) or groping.
I'm talking about how everyone was saddened after 9/11 about how much of a waste it was -- that so many people had "lost their lives" in their prime.
Well, guess what? Run the math on the 600,000,000 passengers who board flights in the U.S. every year or so. For every minute/person the TSA wastes, that equates to roughly 1000 years of people's lifespans wasted cumulatively.
If the TSA wastes 5 minutes on average for people standing in line and going through extra security crap, that's 5000 years of lifespans "lost" every year when people could be doing something else, being productive in their own lives. (And that doesn't even take into account how much time is wasted because people arrive early at airports just in case of a long security delay.)
This may sound like a silly analysis, but it's time we're all forced to give out of our lives for no apparent reason just to board a plane.
One could thus argue that the TSA is already wasting "hundreds of lives" every year, even if a plane doesn't go down... we don't need the terrorists to do it.
I will stop paying for netflix when it's not ad free viewing.
You might. How about most of Netflix's customers?
We cut the cord because of ads
Most of the people I know having "cut to cord" yet. (I personally did long before Netflix "instant watch" even existed, but I acknowledge I'm not "most people.") Many people have Netflix, but they also keep cable -- usually because they're addicted to sports or news or particular live shows.
Those people are still used to seeing ads, and they put up with them elsewhere.
- not because we're willing to pay for ad free content.
I'm not sure I understand this. You are currently paying Netflix for "ad free content," so you seem "willing to pay for ad free content." Are you saying that you'd be unwilling to pay even a small amount more to have ad-free content? Or has Netflix maxed out its price for you?
Personally, when the option is to pay $10 to Netlfix vs. paying $50-150/month to a major cable company, guess which I'll choose? Netflix would have to raise prices quite a bit for me to go back to cable. Of course most people also are paying for cable internet anyway, but in most areas it's pretty hard to find a long-term cable plan (not some promotion) that won't cost you AT LEAST $20-30/month more than your cable internet to have TV.
So as long as Netflix has an ad-free option, I think there are a lot of people who HAVE "cut the cord" who'd be interested in paying a little more.
This is what the consumer wants.
What the consumer wants is not the highest priority for any large corporation. Small businesses who actually care about individual customers often tailor their services/products to retain their loyal customer base.
But large businesses know that they are just as "anonymous" to you as you are to them. You've obviously shown that in your post here -- you have no loyalty. You're happy to jump ship the moment something happens that you don't like.
If you have a true "personal" relationship with a business, you could complain, and they might listen.
But a large business knows that most people don't have that "personal" investment. All they care about is the most they can get away with to make a profit. If they degrade quality too much too quickly, it will drive too many customers elsewhere. But if they continue to offer a service that is cheaper and better than other big alternatives, they can keep pushing the limits to make more profits.
Netflix may have a strong and vocal community of "cord cutters" who probably also stream huge amounts of videos each month. But they also likely have a large community of people who are still using cable (and thus still see ads regularly), and those people probably don't watch Netflix nearly as much.
So -- on a balance sheet, who are they going to care about more? The people who tax their servers and demand no ads and thus cost a lot more? Or the people who are okay with some ads and don't cost them as much?
And by the way, if you don't realize the broader trend here -- the reason Netflix is developing its own content is to "lock you in." It wants you to get obsessed with its shows just as some people get (or used to get) obsessed with major network shows. Once they have enough people locked in because they need Netflix to see those shows, watch the prices slowly creep up, the ads come in, etc.... it's obviously the long-term plan.
Netflix has no obligation to give you "what consumers want." It just has to give you something either better or cheaper than alternatives so it can retain enough customers. And once major cable companies lose significant market share to streaming, the streaming services will jack up prices just as the cable companies did in the past.
No, from an outside perspective it's never inside the event horizon. Only from the perspective of the matter entering the black hole does it cross. Saying "by then it's well within the event horizon" is simply not accurate from an outside perspective. No data collected from Earth will ever correspond to a reality in which the object has passed the event horizon.
The more I think about your post here, the more wrong it sounds to me. The only way to conclude that an object has passed the event horizon would be to observe the absence of radiation from that object. And that definitely occurs in finite time, since photons are discrete. See here, which offers the following explanation:
Now, this led early on to an image of a black hole as a strange sort of suspended-animation object, a "frozen star" with immobilized falling debris and gedankenexperiment astronauts hanging above it in eternally slowing precipitation. This is, however, not what you'd see. The reason is that as things get closer to the event horizon, they also get dimmer. Light from them is redshifted and dimmed, and if one considers that light is actually made up of discrete photons, the time of escape of the last photon is actually finite, and not very large. So things would wink out as they got close, including the dying star, and the name "black hole" is justified.
As an example, take the eight-solar-mass black hole I mentioned before. If you start timing from the moment the you see the object half a Schwarzschild radius away from the event horizon, the light will dim exponentially from that point on with a characteristic time of about 0.2 milliseconds, and the time of the last photon is about a hundredth of a second later. The times scale proportionally to the mass of the black hole. If I jump into a black hole, I don't remain visible for long.
No, from an outside perspective it's never inside the event horizon. Only from the perspective of the matter entering the black hole does it cross. Saying "by then it's well within the event horizon" is simply not accurate from an outside perspective.
The problem is you're having this argument while not taking into account the problems with discussing "simultaneity" in general relativity. One might argue, by this logic, that black holes never really exist (even though we seem to observe them, or at least clear evidence of their effects), or that they could never grow (even though we could see them getting bigger in finite time).
While some people are happy to just argue for those things, e.g., that black holes never really exist, it gets at a deeper epistemological question of what sort of observation is necessary to prove something "exists." We infer the existence of a lot of things by their effects, even if we can't observe them directly. For very long periods of time, black holes do exist according to that latter definition.
No data collected from Earth will ever correspond to a reality in which the object has passed the event horizon.
That's true in the sense that there is no visible event of an object crossing the event horizon in finite time.
But, on the other hand, we can also observe changes in the black hole occurring in finite time (formation, growth, evaporation), which seems to imply actual travel across the event horizon. It's complicated to explain why both such things are possible, though this answer seems to get at some of the problems.
Which is why there's no information paradox: the information is never in an unreachable state from any perspective.
That's somewhat true, but it's a somewhat different question to determine what it means for a distant observer to judge "whether something is inside the event horizon." Do we mean:
(1) "I visually saw that thing go inside the event horizon" (false -- obviously, since the definitely of "event horizon" precludes observation of such a thing)
Or
(2) "That black hole appears bigger than it did a billion years ago, so it must have absorbed mass from that thing" (could be true)
Personally, I think (2) would count as "data collected from Earth [that] correspond[s] to a reality in which the object has passed the event horizon."
Potty mouth zero-content sniping comments and Dice troll crap.
I absolutely agree that GP's comment is a bit of hyperbole. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have something of a point.
So a science article has stunning visuals and not a single damned equation
I'm okay with nice visuals if they're advertised and discussed clearly. They're not here.
Of course it is relevant and interesting to speculate what black holes look like.
Except that's not what the title or TFS implies. They ask "Do black holes have a shape?" And the answer is clearly simple -- spherical or nearly so.
Done.
Posing that question to anyone who knows anything about science probably would cause a reader to wonder -- "Hmm, are there more exotic shapes to black holes I haven't thought of? Why would those exist?"
But TFA is not about that -- in fact, it's about basic phenomena that anyone who knows anything about black holes would already be familiar with, like accretion disks and the fact that light gets distorted around black holes.
TFA is not actually about the shape of black holes themselves. It's about the shape of other phenomena that occur around black holes, or the temporary shifts in such phenomena when black holes merge or whatever. And while it has pretty pictures, nobody who has even read one book on pop science astronomy will learn any new facts from it.
(And, oddly, TFA isn't aimed at a new audience either, since it doesn't really explain basic facts like why we see the accretion disk but not the black hole or anything basic like that.)
It's primal because they're the most perilous things yet conceived and yet no one has actually 'seen' one. Even more disturbing, the physics claims we never could actually see them, only their effects. So we become curious about those effects. Not just from idle fancy, we instinctively feel the need to know how they may appear to us, no matter how unlikely that they would, because they are dangerous.
NO -- THEY ARE NOT "DANGEROUS."
You must be one of those people who think of black holes as some sort of giant vacuum cleaner going around and sucking up stuff around the universe. Sorry -- they don't work that way. They have gravity which works just like any other star or other large mass. You could have a stable orbit around them, for example (obviously at a safe distance).
They're only "dangerous" if you went inside one. But if that's your criteria, so are stars. So is the planet earth with its molten rock interior.
Your post is spreading the exact kind of ignorance that Slashdot should be committed to stomping out.
If TFA were an article that served as an intro to black holes and actually addressed some of that BS you're spouting about how "disturbed" everyone must be about things that are supposedly "dangerous," I'd be fine with that. But it's not. If TFA were an article that actually had some interesting noteworthy science about black holes, I'd be fine with that. But it's not.
And if TFA is just an article about pretty pictures (which it is), then just advertise it as such. And make the title accurate -- something like "What do we see when we look toward a black hole?"
TL;DR: THAT'S why GP is right to be upset -- not because the article is light on facts, but because it's misleading about the fact that it is uninformative (and only about pretty pictures), and it presents itself as tackling questions which it does not.
Aren't we all smart enough to turn off the adware during install?
No -- most people just keep clicking "OK" until the install is finished. Just like most people keep signing pages or initialing forms when presented with a bunch of paperwork... they stop reading the details.
The number of people who actually stop and read everything they sign is similar to the number that consider all the options during install scripts -- and that number is VERY SMALL.
(Small anecdote -- quite a few years ago I signed the rental agreement for my first apartment. I was told to initial each of the 10 pages or so and sign the final page. I stopped and read the thing before doing so. My landlord -- who managed something like 40 apartments and had been doing so for a couple decades -- said he could only recall one other person who read the whole rental agreement before signing. And I actually discovered some really interesting rental policies while doing so.)
Also, more on point -- there's the rather obvious evidence that companies wouldn't bother bundling adware if no one ever installed it.
I even know some old people who turn off "add-ons" that they don't need.
And I even know many young people who don't seem to pay any attention while installing and end up with all sorts of weird "add-ons" and don't know how they got there. What's your point?
The Slate article makes some good points. On the other hand, I almost stopped reading at this nonsense:
In a four-year study that started with nearly 3,000 college students, a team of Michigan State University researchers led by Neal Schmitt found that test score (SAT or ACTâ"whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year. If the students were ranked on both their test scores and cumulative GPAs, those who had test scores in the top half (above the 50th percentile, or median) would have had a roughly two-thirds chance of having a cumulative GPA in the top half. By contrast, students with bottom-half SAT scores would be only one-third likely to make it to the top half in GPA.
This tells me almost nothing about a test's effectiveness, other than it can differentiate pretty well between "high-achievers" and "total morons." I could probably come up with a "test" that could satisfy this stat by talking to each student for a minute.
But hey, I gave the Slate article author the benefit of the doubt, so I tracked down the actual article he cited in this paragraph, which provides data summarized in more helpful and less dubious ways.
You can read that article, if you like, because it presents a much more nuanced picture. Long story short: correlation of SAT/ACT performance with college GPA is at a level of 0.53. That's exactly the same correlation (0.53) of high school GPA with college GPA. Meanwhile, high school GPA and SAT/ACT performance correlation with each other is 0.58.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a more thorough analysis in this article about where the mismatches occur. THAT would be really interesting. What are the characteristics of students who get high GPA in high school but low SAT scores -- how do they perform in college? And the reverse: high SAT, but low GPA? That's the only way we could actually tell how much information the SAT is actually adding... but alas, most such analyses don't look at the data that way.
Also, college GPA isn't everything. You also need to, well, FINISH college. According to that cited article, turns out high school GPA is a much better predictor in this regard than SAT scores. Having a better high school GPA gives you an odds ratio of 3.77 to actually graduate college, while having a high SAT has odds ratio of only 1.3. (This isn't mentioned in the Slate article, which only notes how high SAT correlates with graduation -- well, yes it does, but nowhere near as well as high school GPA.)
Anyhow, you can take from this what you will. I've read a number of such studies on SATs, and my conclusion is a little different from the Slate guy. Yes, SATs are correlated with college achievement. But so are some other things too (like high school grades). In borderline cases, having the SAT score may help with an admissions decision, but is the level of correlation high enough to justify letting student A in with an SAT score of X, while rejecting student B with an SAT of X-50? That's really the kind of question we need to ask if we want to justify the rampant use of SAT scores in admissions.
And I'm not sure if any research out there really can answer that question well. Certainly not most of the citations in the Slate article, which focus on broader correlations, and definitely not the Slate article itself, which cites some stats that barely qualify the SAT as useful as if they were truly revelatory.
SAT scores correlate closely with measured IQ
Here's the other problem -- the SAT was originally designed as a proxy for IQ, more or less. But over the past few decades, each
Meanwhile, just about every craft dark beer (stout, porter, etc.) can't be sold unless it's brewed with some odd concoction of chocolate, coffee, herbs, and who knows what else. (I'm very sensitive to caffeine, so I don't want coffee in my beer, thank you.)
If you don't like hoppy lighter beers or coffee-infused dark beers, in most bars you're stuck drinking some "classic" beer on the menu. If you're lucky, you might see some craft brown ale that isn't completely "off the spectrum" of normal beer.
I actually love trying "interesting" beers. I also appreciate breweries that create variations on standard styles (not every stout needs to taste like Guinness, and there is a great deal of room for decent porters, cask ales, etc.).
But if I'm looking at a place that has 20+ beers on tap, there's often only one or two choices for people who might be interested in trying something different that's NOT overrun by hops or coffee. (A couple months ago, I had a beer that literally tasted like eating burnt pine cones and huge amounts of nutmeg -- terrible. But at least it was different. I only tried it because there was nothing else on the large beer menu which wasn't a standard classic beer, a hoppy IPA or ale, or a coffee-infused dark beer.)
If I wanted something incredibly bitter and/or full of coffee/caffeine in a wildly out-of-balance way, I'd just go drink crappy coffee at Starbucks. Ironically (to my mind), it seems that's where craft beer is taking its cues from these days.
You're absolutely correct that this story is mostly about how we should distrust science journalism, and the author of the "study" makes that clear.
However...
If a scientist had done this they would be losing their job any minute. Any of the following would be enough to disgrace a practicing scientist (I am one):
Yes, all of that is true. But I think you're exaggerating quite a bit about the impact any of this would have had on whether a study like this could have been done by a reputable scientist (it certainly could have been), or whether it would have been published if that scientist had appropriate credentials (as noted in the article, there are plenty of places to publish bad research with little vetting).
2- asking people to undergo a study that he knew before hand that was not beneficial to the subjects, in fact could likely be the opposite (this would mean he'd never get approval of the study)
The details of methodology in this study might have been changed a bit to get it approved by a review board, and there's certainly nothing about the basic idea of this study that suggests it would NECESSARILY (or even likely) have significant detrimental effects for the subjects. And there is certainly at least a possibility of beneficial effects.
I suggest you have a look at some of the research articles linked even in an article of Wikipedia on the subject. There have been dozens, and probably hundreds of studies that have tried to measure health effects of chocolate -- many of them have involved people eating small amounts of chocolate and observing effects, just as the study here did.
So, the idea that an actual scientist, with the appropriate amount of time, could "never get approval of the study" is just ridiculous. As I said, there would probably be some more detailed methodological justification and tweaks, but lots of nutrition studies like this happen all the time.
Unlike what the guy says, journalist can never be "peer" reviewers of any science... their role is different and yet they are not doing it properly.
Yes, journalists have their own jobs to do, and there are certainly flaws in the system.
But there are flaws in the science system too, which makes the job of journalists (and scientists trying to look at research out there and evaluate it) much harder. "P hacking" is not just something made up by this journalist -- it's a real thing, and it's a real problem. Yes, many reputable journals have tried to make review procedures better to avoid various statistical problems, but they often don't really fight them head-on (with a few notable exceptions of brave editors or boards). There are a LOT of problems with common statistical procedures followed by researchers -- even those who have proper credentials and have gotten independent reviews.
Anyhow, most of your criticism boils down to "this guy wasn't credentialed to do what he did." That's great, but it doesn't address the larger flaws here -- not only in journalistic reporting, but in some aspects of scientific methodology. This study was clearly not rigorous, but I've seen worse studies published in reputable journals.
She might have remained just a doctor, but now she's... a doctor doctor!
( huh? )
Actually, in Germany (unlike, say, in the U.S.) multiple doctorates are explicitly mentioned in the title during formal address. Someone with two doctorates is actually "Frau Doktor Doktor X" someone with a bunch of doctorates (earned and honorary) would be "Frau Dr. Dr. h.c. mult." etc.
However I have to point out that this renewed focus on short songs is strange, being that going back to the beginning of 20th century pop music, songs were regularly 2-3 minutes in length.
Definitely true. I was mostly responding to GP, who was arguing about how songs are artificially shortened.
But you're absolutely right that short songs have a long history too, though again there are limits. There are plenty of songs in the 2-3 minute range, but very few less than 2 minutes. And, aside from "novelty songs" (or very fast tempo songs) and advertising jingles and such, songs less than 60-90 seconds are exceptionally rare.
Thus, I find TFA's discussion of the possibility of artists replacing a 3-minute song with six 30-second songs to be rather silly -- unless all pop music is going to become advertising jingles. Sure, it's fun to watch a particularly good 30-second commercial a few times, but you're not going to listen to it hundreds of times, as many do with pop songs they love.
On the flip side we have a band like Rush that has consistently created longer songs that "remain interesting" and usually don't adhere to the AABA song structure.
Long songs certainly CAN be done. But except for my folk ballad examples of songs with 50 verses, the only other way to do it in a simple way is to cobble together contrasting sections, with each section being a few minutes long. Effectively, you create a piece like a classical work with "movements," a la Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or many of Rush's longer pieces.
If you want to sustain a longer piece without just chaining a bunch of contrasting blocks ("movements") together, it gets harder. There are certainly solutions, both in the pop world and historically in classical music (e.g., 15-minute-long "sonata form" movements of classical symphonies by Beethoven or Brahms are often just vastly expanded and complex variations on AABA forms).
And certainly AABA is not the ONLY form in the world. I was just using it as an example because it's so common and displays some of the characteristics among various song organization types (i.e., repetition/return/variation and contrast).
Time is 100% relevant to this discussion. Music history is littered with examples of songs that have had their structure and duration altered as a result of outside forces. [snip] While radio stations aren't as anal about running times these days, you still won't hear a 10-minute song on the radio. And there's no disputing that that particular limitation had a deep effect on much of the music of the previous century.
Yes, and no. You're right that media constraints often try to keep songs shorter. But that doesn't imply that longer songs would be that common, even without those constraints.
Examine most of music history. Whether you're talking about 14th-century French chansons, 16th-century Italian madrigals, 18th-century independent arias, 19th-century German lieder, or 20th-century pop (or Broadway or jazz or...) -- ALL of those repertoires tend to have songs that average about 3-5 minutes in length, with some that might go 6-7 minutes, rare ones that are 7-10 minutes, and almost none more than 10 minutes. Individual movements of larger classical works often follow a similar pattern.
(The main exception are certain kinds of folk ballades or epic ballades which have many, many verses because they tell a long story. But in that case, the actual form of the music takes a "back seat" to the story -- essentially after the 5th or 6th verse, it's kind of a recitation formula which loses its musical impact. A related form is repetitive chanting, where the music becomes less important than the ritualistic experience of repeating the music again and again.)
It's surprising that TFA seems to be written by a songwriting professor, because he seems to understand little about these long-term trends and what they say about basic cognitive patterns that relate to musical structure.
Effective musical composition is really about balancing two things: repetition and novelty. That's it. Seriously. If you write a song that NEVER repeats a refrain or a musical phrase or a short "motive" of a few notes or even a basic rhythmic pattern, you end up with something that just sounds like "random notes." In fact, you have to work quite hard to write something that has no repetitive patterns at all. And it gives a listener a little pleasure in hearing something familiar again -- you "know how that part goes," and that recognition about how it sounds and how the phrase is going to play out is comforting and satisfying.
On the other hand, outside of dance music (again, a pattern going back roughly a thousand years for dance music), too much repetition makes a piece boring. If you keep playing the same few notes over and over again, it gets tedious.
Composers over the centuries have settled on a number of standard forms for putting together songs, because they effectively balance repetition and novelty -- often through varied repetition (or elements where one thing is repeated, like the harmony, but the melody over top of it is varied somewhat).
Lots of songs, for example, use a "song form" of AABA for verses. Why? Because the first time we hear A, it's unfamiliar and new. When we hear A again, it's a welcome repetition -- we get to feel like we "know how this goes." So why not do A a third time? Because it starts to get boring -- so we do a B section that contrasts and often introduces some drama/tension (or changes the feel or dynamics at least in some way). And then, to finish it off, we do a return to A (often with a little variation or a little shorter than the first time) -- which again satisfies because it's familiar... it kind of releases the tension introduced by the contrasting B.
That may be a structure for a verse, but entire songs often have a similar structure: verse-refrain-verse-refrain-BRIDGE-refrain, where each "verse-refrain" unit is kind of like a big "A," the bridge introduces contrast, and then the final return to the refrain (often transformed or at a higher energy level) provides a satisfying conclusion
Human nature provides ample fuel for the corruption of the scientific process.
On individual days and in individual studies the science can be protected, but you will never completely remove even unintentional bias.
THIS is the most insightful post here, by far. Humans are imperfect, and thus science will always be imperfect.
And it's important to note the role of "unintentional bias," which goes all the way from which grant proposal gets accepted to experimental design to choices about data collection to statistical analysis to formation of conclusions and interpretation. Every one of those levels is going to be influenced by fundamental human cognitive biases. We can try to be conscious of them or to create various checks against them, but we can NEVER escape them. And some types of research and some stages of research will always require humans to make choices where there's really no way to control for these biases.
Willful misrepresentation of the facts to satisfy an agenda will continue as long as humans are involved in the experimentation or in the compilation of the results.
While that may be true, I think the vast majority of scientific bias is NOT "willful misrepresentation." A lot of it goes into the very kinds of questions we ask, the kind of research paradigms our culture already has set up, etc. Deliberate misrepresentation is also generally easier to catch -- because it's often more obvious. Fundamental human cognitive biases or blanket underlying methodological assumptions, though -- those are much harder to spot, since they may be problems not only for the researchers themselves but for reviewers, etc., who also aren't consciously on the look out for such problems.
Slashdot Mirror
One could argue that HFCS is worse than transfat, but one could ALSO argue that excess consumption of large amounts of most common sugars is worse than transfat.
Look around, and you'll find only one or two studies that seem to show HFCS is significantly worse than, say, table sugar. There are all of these claims about metabolic differences, but they rarely seem to show up in experiments -- you'll find a lot of experiments, in fact, where there's little difference in effects.
I absolutely agree with you that we should decrease HFCS consumption. But I don't agree if your remedy is that we're just going to replace it with sucrose or honey or whatever else that's basically going to have similar bad effects. We need to lower sugar consumption in general....
Then you should also sign a card saying you are not entitled to medical care to treat potential illnesses caused that have direct links to the digestion of trans fats, unless you pay for it yourself.
Well, okay. Then YOU should sign a card saying you are not entitled to medical care to treat illnesses after you live past the average life expectancy of the general population, unless you pay for it yourself.
I'm all for "it's my body" and all that, I honestly am, but not at the expense of others.
Then pay up if you live long! Seriously.
This is generally the problem with people who make these arguments. There are lots of studies that show that medical costs associated with "unhealthy behaviors" also tend to result in EARLIER DEATH. Meanwhile, there are plenty of studies that show that total medical costs increase significantly with age.
Which means that the greatest cost to society is generally due to the "healthy" people who live to 95 and have to have multiple joint replacements, break hips here and there, have chronic degenerative illnesses that might take 10 or 20 years to kill someone, have a few rounds of minor cancer treatments over the years, and require many years of round-the-clock care after their minds succumb to dementia until they finally die.
Meanwhile, that poor fat guy who ate terribly cost a hell of a lot in diabetes treatment in his 50s, but then he was nice enough to save money for society by having a heart attack and dying at age 62, right after his retirement party.
In sum, when you actually take into account the extra medical expenses caused by LIVING LONGER, it's usually enough to make "healthy" people more expensive over a lifespan compared to people with "unhealthy" behaviors. (This goes for smoking, obesity, etc.)
So, if you're talking about annual premiums for insurance, sure -- I'm with you: make people who eat trans fats pay more if it's actually going to increase short-term medical expenses.
But if you're looking at overall societal costs for people over their lives, be prepared to pony up when you end up living longer and costing more for your "healthy" lifestyle.
(P.S. I don't use trans fats and haven't really used them much ever in my cooking. I don't give a crap if they disappear from processed foods, because I generally avoid them. But this has no bearing on whether your argument is wrong.)
No. It's about having better impulse control.
Poor people are also much more likely to have 5 children each with a different person. Maintaining a healthy weight requires some degree of effort and discipline. People that never adequately prepared for their future are simply demonstrating the same faults in their eating habits as they have done in other things.
Yeah... those darn poor people. If only they realized that they need to STOP BEING POOR! Then they'd be so much better off!
(Hint: Correlation does not equal causation in your analysis.)
Being poor doesn't eliminate the possibility of doing better.
No, it doesn't. But it can make it a lot harder to accomplish a number of things. And there are many studies showing significant impacts after years of being poor -- physically, mentally, etc. -- which you can't just dismiss and say "DO BETTER, ya poor slob!"
I feel sorry for people who don't get it. You implied that you were worse off, and you've done better for yourself. Congratulations. But you're like the guy who was feeling down in his life a little and then got motivated -- but you turn and look at the person with clinical depression, which could be caused by a chemical imbalance or years of mental problems... and you just say, "HEY! Just get your darn body out'a bed in the morning! How hard is it? Look... I did it! All it takes is a little effort!"
I'm glad that you've found a way to better yourself. But it's not that easy for a lot of people.
And what's your explanation here? If poor people lack pervasive impulse control, as you suggest, does that mean they are genetically determined to be poor? Well, no -- that's refuted by numerous studies of adoptions that have shown that poor kids can end up doing perfectly well when raised in rich families. So it doesn't seem to be genetic (or at least MOST of the explanation isn't genetic).
Which means it's primarily caused by some sort of environmental factor. Poor people look around at people surrounding them, and they imitate them. Kids imitate parents. You can look at studies like the differences in ways that poor parents talk to and interact with their kids, which causes kids to behave differently from rich kids and reinforces their socioeconomic status, for example.
Poor people don't just "have" impulse control problems -- if they do have them, it's fundamentally engrained in the culture surrounding them which they probably observe from their childhood years. If you spend many, many years believing that X is "normal," it can be hard to turn things around... or to see another possible way of behaving. More importantly -- your body and your mind can "fight" you and try to lead you back to what you've grown up thinking is "normal."
And then when you look at "convenience foods" that are loaded with crap and engineered to produce cravings for them (which they are) or to produce weird reactions in our bodies that would not even occur when our ancestors ate unprocessed foods hundreds of thousands of years ago, you realize that people who end up eating cheap, convenient food because they don't have a lot of money and are too tired to cook meals themselves after working double shifts all the time... well, they might just end up with screwed up biochemistry in their bodies, which will contribute to weight gain.
As you say:
Maintaining a healthy weight requires some degree of effort and discipline.
While that's true, it wasn't true for basically the entire history of civilization until the past couple generations. Most people for almost all of history didn't have excess food just lying around. Only the rich could afford to be fat. The poor people were just struggling usually to get enough calories to survive while they did backbreaking labor. So you didn't need "effort and discipline" to maintain a healthy weight -- you were lucky enough to have enough calories
Those are great skills to have. But they're not common anymore, and they're not likely to be common again (barring the zombie apocalypse).
What skills? Being able to eat? Our food industry knows how to preserve local foods... and can stock their shelves with local preserved foods and winter crops over the winter. They already have such things in cans and jars and freezers pre-made for you.
The question in this thread is whether people can choose to live off of locally grown foods. In most cases, that would be a possible and reasonable choice. It requires no special skills that the grocery industry doesn't already employ. It's just that most people choose not to do that, and our grocery system doesn't make it easy. I'm not judging them for it -- just noting it's a fact that one can live off of local foods in most places if you wanted to. It's just not what our current system encourages.
there is little reason to ship all that produce all over the country and world when many many smaller plots would be more ecologically safe.
Except for the small, inconvenient fact that much of the country doesn't have the climate to support growing stuff year-round, leaving vast swaths of the country without produce for much of the year.
So, ya know, you actually grow "winter crops," i.e., things that either store well or which can be left in the soil and dug up later.
A few years back, when I was living somewhere in the northeast U.S., I bought a share in a local farm. ALL of the produce was grown exclusively on that farm. Every week, I'd go pick up my fresh produce from that farm. In the summer, there were fun things like berries. In the fall, there was more than I knew what to do with, so I canned and fermented and froze things. And when it was winter, I got plenty of potatoes and squash and such to roast on cold winter nights, because those stored well.
Believe it or not, people managed to survive in colder climates before they could truck in fresh fruit year-round from California. And actually, if they planned well, they could eat rather well with a variety of food. The stuff that didn't store well? Well, that's why they invented fermentation. And canning. And freezing.
Personally, I like that lifestyle. You learn more about cooking when you have to cook what's available, rather than just going to the grocery store in January and getting fresh blueberries shipped in from South America that taste like sawdust. I'd prefer having my fresh blueberries picked off the bushes down the road for the month or so they actually grow -- when they actually taste fresh and sweet.
Frankly, I think food is more meaningful that way -- tied into natural cycles, which make you appreciate certain foods more when they are plentiful and available.
I understand that not everyone wants that. But it's actually very possible to have food available to eat year-round from local sources in most parts of the U.S.... well, except in deserts like California, where you have to ship in water for anyone to grow enough to survive.
During public hearings on WA State's House Bill 1813, which took aim at boy's historical over-representation in K-12 computer classes
That should be boys', not boy's.
Well, either that, or it's a capitalization error. ("Boy's"?) Perhaps TFS is really a complaint about the overuse of Boy George's music in K-12 computer classes.
With Timothy editing the summary, you never can be sure what he's talking about....
Rest in peace, Sir Lee.
I really appreciate your sentiment here -- though note that one should never use Sir + last name when referring to someone who is knighted.
He can be addressed as "Sir Christopher" or "Sir Christopher Lee," but NOT "Sir Lee."
Not to mention in this context it makes him sound surly. Or, to paraphrase a movie that once parodied movies like ones Christopher Lee was in: "Don't call me 'Surly'!"
Now it's Belgians. No, wait, sorry, that was two years ago. Saisons? "Farmhouse"? No, that was last year. Sours. I think it's sours now. Especially gose or barrel-aged.
You're making the mistake of conflating current fashion among the beer equivalent of " foodies" (I'm sure there's a word for them) with actual current stocks found in bars and such around the U.S. I can assure you that it's VERY common in many cities in the U.S. to still see a trend toward very hoppy beers occupying large portions of the menu. Many bars realized they needed to start stocking some "craft" beers, so they jumped on the hops bandwagon, and it's still a major market for a lot of craft breweries. Yes, new fads will come, but the hoppiness is still pretty dominant in many places... I often go to bars with 20+ beers on tap, and I struggle to find something "interesting" and different from standard mass-production beers and isn't called "hoptastic" or "hops-my-goodness" or some stupid name... (FYI -- I love sours, for example, but I have only seen them actually on tap in a bar once or twice...)
Apparently, the reason the cops asked him to step out of the car was because the windshield was broken and there was fresh glass on the hood. And, contrary to the NPR report, apparently the 3 shots were fired while the car was basically "boxed in" by the cops, though apparently he wasn't really trapped, since he escaped and then the cops fired 12 more shots during his flight.
Very different account from what NPR says.
In any case, police still usually have "qualified immunity" unless their actions are clearly illegal or unconstitutional, as well as "unreasonable" given the circumstances.
He can sue the police, which is the recourse available everyone should exploit for being wrongfully arrested.
Possibly, but not likely. Police generally have qualified immunity, which basically will prevent their being sued unless there's proof of serious and unreasonable violation of Constitutional rights. This was just upheld again by the Supreme Court last year.
Read that last link to see how far "qualified immunity" goes -- guy gets pulled over for broken headlight, then takes off in the car after cops ask him to get out of the car for no apparent reason. Cops set off in high-speed pursuit, fired three shots at the car, and AFTER he finally crashed, the police fired 12 shots into the vehicle killing the guy and the (completely innocent) passenger... for no apparent reason.
Supreme Court ruled unanimously that cops have qualified immunity in that case. There's basically NO CHANCE they'll be able to be sued for arresting a guy carrying something that looked like a gun near a school in a state where carrying guns near schools is illegal.
Also, the stereotypical example for bizarre old imperial units is chemical engineering, probably because so much of it was pioneered in the U.S.
You really haven't lived until you've encountered a problem incorporating thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and mass transfer using enthalpies in BTU/lb-R, an ideal gas constant in ft^3-atm/lb-mol-R, pressure in psig, and a liquid flow rate in gal./min.
The thing is -- many of the really handy charts and graphs in a field like that allow you to do really complex calculations just by reading off of six different scales drawn in different shapes on the same graph (like Mollier diagrams)... and many of those charts still haven't been redrawn in metric for more obscure or rare situations.
That said, I don't believe the anecdote from GGP either -- any engineer who's been trained in the past 40 years in the U.S. should be fluent in metric units, even if they sometimes use imperial in specific circumstances.
Pick a busier airport, wait until you are in the middle of the security queue with people cordoned all around you in a big mass and BOOM! Most of these airports haven't got high ceilings and the screening area is in a corridor like space to prevent people from bypassing it. Look what the bomb in Boston did outdoors, think what harm it would do to people indoors!
While this is all true, it also points out the ridiculousness of worrying about airports at all. There are probably hundreds or even thousands of events every day with many hundreds of people (or more) gathered in small areas or clustered in buildings with minimal security or (in most cases) none at all.
The only terrorists who'd target an airplane these days are stupid -- because the point of terrorism seems to be to scare people ("terrorize") and disrupt society. Airports are already disrupted due to terrorism concerns. A terrorist who actually wanted to do more significant damage would target some other random everyday activity where there are hundreds or thousands of people gathered together.
There are countries in the world at various times in history which have experienced REAL terrorism, where random terrorist events could occur anywhere. After 9/11, many people were concerned that such a thing could happen in the U.S., since it seemed that such a highly coordinated attack would imply large numbers of terrorists. But those terrorists never materialized, we never saw the random attacks, and people forgot all about that... while still retaining some weird obsession with security concerns on airplanes.
Sure, you might get a few hundred casulties and the loss of a plane and possible some casulties on the ground.. there are far worse things they could do. Black Friday at a Wal-mart? Sporting events, train stations..
Yes, this is the obvious thing. I recall after 9/11 when people were actually freaked out by such possibilities. I had a couple friends who didn't even want to go to shopping malls for a few months, because there was fear that any large congregation of people could be a target.
And then what happened?? Nothing.
And people stopped worrying about all those other possibilities....
Also, a fun stat on that "sure you might get a few hundred casualties" with a loss of a plane. Keep in mind that TSA is not free either. And I'm not just talking about cost or special scanners (whether they have medical consequences or not) or groping.
I'm talking about how everyone was saddened after 9/11 about how much of a waste it was -- that so many people had "lost their lives" in their prime.
Well, guess what? Run the math on the 600,000,000 passengers who board flights in the U.S. every year or so. For every minute/person the TSA wastes, that equates to roughly 1000 years of people's lifespans wasted cumulatively.
If the TSA wastes 5 minutes on average for people standing in line and going through extra security crap, that's 5000 years of lifespans "lost" every year when people could be doing something else, being productive in their own lives. (And that doesn't even take into account how much time is wasted because people arrive early at airports just in case of a long security delay.)
This may sound like a silly analysis, but it's time we're all forced to give out of our lives for no apparent reason just to board a plane.
One could thus argue that the TSA is already wasting "hundreds of lives" every year, even if a plane doesn't go down... we don't need the terrorists to do it.
Same here. I pay Netflix for ad free viewing.
I will stop paying for netflix when it's not ad free viewing.
You might. How about most of Netflix's customers?
We cut the cord because of ads
Most of the people I know having "cut to cord" yet. (I personally did long before Netflix "instant watch" even existed, but I acknowledge I'm not "most people.") Many people have Netflix, but they also keep cable -- usually because they're addicted to sports or news or particular live shows.
Those people are still used to seeing ads, and they put up with them elsewhere.
- not because we're willing to pay for ad free content.
I'm not sure I understand this. You are currently paying Netflix for "ad free content," so you seem "willing to pay for ad free content." Are you saying that you'd be unwilling to pay even a small amount more to have ad-free content? Or has Netflix maxed out its price for you?
Personally, when the option is to pay $10 to Netlfix vs. paying $50-150/month to a major cable company, guess which I'll choose? Netflix would have to raise prices quite a bit for me to go back to cable. Of course most people also are paying for cable internet anyway, but in most areas it's pretty hard to find a long-term cable plan (not some promotion) that won't cost you AT LEAST $20-30/month more than your cable internet to have TV.
So as long as Netflix has an ad-free option, I think there are a lot of people who HAVE "cut the cord" who'd be interested in paying a little more.
This is what the consumer wants.
What the consumer wants is not the highest priority for any large corporation. Small businesses who actually care about individual customers often tailor their services/products to retain their loyal customer base.
But large businesses know that they are just as "anonymous" to you as you are to them. You've obviously shown that in your post here -- you have no loyalty. You're happy to jump ship the moment something happens that you don't like.
If you have a true "personal" relationship with a business, you could complain, and they might listen.
But a large business knows that most people don't have that "personal" investment. All they care about is the most they can get away with to make a profit. If they degrade quality too much too quickly, it will drive too many customers elsewhere. But if they continue to offer a service that is cheaper and better than other big alternatives, they can keep pushing the limits to make more profits.
Netflix may have a strong and vocal community of "cord cutters" who probably also stream huge amounts of videos each month. But they also likely have a large community of people who are still using cable (and thus still see ads regularly), and those people probably don't watch Netflix nearly as much.
So -- on a balance sheet, who are they going to care about more? The people who tax their servers and demand no ads and thus cost a lot more? Or the people who are okay with some ads and don't cost them as much?
And by the way, if you don't realize the broader trend here -- the reason Netflix is developing its own content is to "lock you in." It wants you to get obsessed with its shows just as some people get (or used to get) obsessed with major network shows. Once they have enough people locked in because they need Netflix to see those shows, watch the prices slowly creep up, the ads come in, etc.... it's obviously the long-term plan.
Netflix has no obligation to give you "what consumers want." It just has to give you something either better or cheaper than alternatives so it can retain enough customers. And once major cable companies lose significant market share to streaming, the streaming services will jack up prices just as the cable companies did in the past.
No, from an outside perspective it's never inside the event horizon. Only from the perspective of the matter entering the black hole does it cross. Saying "by then it's well within the event horizon" is simply not accurate from an outside perspective. No data collected from Earth will ever correspond to a reality in which the object has passed the event horizon.
The more I think about your post here, the more wrong it sounds to me. The only way to conclude that an object has passed the event horizon would be to observe the absence of radiation from that object. And that definitely occurs in finite time, since photons are discrete. See here, which offers the following explanation:
Now, this led early on to an image of a black hole as a strange sort of suspended-animation object, a "frozen star" with immobilized falling debris and gedankenexperiment astronauts hanging above it in eternally slowing precipitation. This is, however, not what you'd see. The reason is that as things get closer to the event horizon, they also get dimmer. Light from them is redshifted and dimmed, and if one considers that light is actually made up of discrete photons, the time of escape of the last photon is actually finite, and not very large. So things would wink out as they got close, including the dying star, and the name "black hole" is justified.
As an example, take the eight-solar-mass black hole I mentioned before. If you start timing from the moment the you see the object half a Schwarzschild radius away from the event horizon, the light will dim exponentially from that point on with a characteristic time of about 0.2 milliseconds, and the time of the last photon is about a hundredth of a second later. The times scale proportionally to the mass of the black hole. If I jump into a black hole, I don't remain visible for long.
No, from an outside perspective it's never inside the event horizon. Only from the perspective of the matter entering the black hole does it cross. Saying "by then it's well within the event horizon" is simply not accurate from an outside perspective.
The problem is you're having this argument while not taking into account the problems with discussing "simultaneity" in general relativity. One might argue, by this logic, that black holes never really exist (even though we seem to observe them, or at least clear evidence of their effects), or that they could never grow (even though we could see them getting bigger in finite time).
While some people are happy to just argue for those things, e.g., that black holes never really exist, it gets at a deeper epistemological question of what sort of observation is necessary to prove something "exists." We infer the existence of a lot of things by their effects, even if we can't observe them directly. For very long periods of time, black holes do exist according to that latter definition.
No data collected from Earth will ever correspond to a reality in which the object has passed the event horizon.
That's true in the sense that there is no visible event of an object crossing the event horizon in finite time.
But, on the other hand, we can also observe changes in the black hole occurring in finite time (formation, growth, evaporation), which seems to imply actual travel across the event horizon. It's complicated to explain why both such things are possible, though this answer seems to get at some of the problems.
Which is why there's no information paradox: the information is never in an unreachable state from any perspective.
That's somewhat true, but it's a somewhat different question to determine what it means for a distant observer to judge "whether something is inside the event horizon." Do we mean:
(1) "I visually saw that thing go inside the event horizon" (false -- obviously, since the definitely of "event horizon" precludes observation of such a thing)
Or
(2) "That black hole appears bigger than it did a billion years ago, so it must have absorbed mass from that thing" (could be true)
Personally, I think (2) would count as "data collected from Earth [that] correspond[s] to a reality in which the object has passed the event horizon."
Potty mouth zero-content sniping comments and Dice troll crap.
I absolutely agree that GP's comment is a bit of hyperbole. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have something of a point.
So a science article has stunning visuals and not a single damned equation
I'm okay with nice visuals if they're advertised and discussed clearly. They're not here.
Of course it is relevant and interesting to speculate what black holes look like.
Except that's not what the title or TFS implies. They ask "Do black holes have a shape?" And the answer is clearly simple -- spherical or nearly so.
Done.
Posing that question to anyone who knows anything about science probably would cause a reader to wonder -- "Hmm, are there more exotic shapes to black holes I haven't thought of? Why would those exist?"
But TFA is not about that -- in fact, it's about basic phenomena that anyone who knows anything about black holes would already be familiar with, like accretion disks and the fact that light gets distorted around black holes.
TFA is not actually about the shape of black holes themselves. It's about the shape of other phenomena that occur around black holes, or the temporary shifts in such phenomena when black holes merge or whatever. And while it has pretty pictures, nobody who has even read one book on pop science astronomy will learn any new facts from it.
(And, oddly, TFA isn't aimed at a new audience either, since it doesn't really explain basic facts like why we see the accretion disk but not the black hole or anything basic like that.)
It's primal because they're the most perilous things yet conceived and yet no one has actually 'seen' one. Even more disturbing, the physics claims we never could actually see them, only their effects. So we become curious about those effects. Not just from idle fancy, we instinctively feel the need to know how they may appear to us, no matter how unlikely that they would, because they are dangerous.
NO -- THEY ARE NOT "DANGEROUS."
You must be one of those people who think of black holes as some sort of giant vacuum cleaner going around and sucking up stuff around the universe. Sorry -- they don't work that way. They have gravity which works just like any other star or other large mass. You could have a stable orbit around them, for example (obviously at a safe distance).
They're only "dangerous" if you went inside one. But if that's your criteria, so are stars. So is the planet earth with its molten rock interior.
Your post is spreading the exact kind of ignorance that Slashdot should be committed to stomping out.
If TFA were an article that served as an intro to black holes and actually addressed some of that BS you're spouting about how "disturbed" everyone must be about things that are supposedly "dangerous," I'd be fine with that. But it's not. If TFA were an article that actually had some interesting noteworthy science about black holes, I'd be fine with that. But it's not.
And if TFA is just an article about pretty pictures (which it is), then just advertise it as such. And make the title accurate -- something like "What do we see when we look toward a black hole?"
TL;DR: THAT'S why GP is right to be upset -- not because the article is light on facts, but because it's misleading about the fact that it is uninformative (and only about pretty pictures), and it presents itself as tackling questions which it does not.
Aren't we all smart enough to turn off the adware during install?
No -- most people just keep clicking "OK" until the install is finished. Just like most people keep signing pages or initialing forms when presented with a bunch of paperwork... they stop reading the details.
The number of people who actually stop and read everything they sign is similar to the number that consider all the options during install scripts -- and that number is VERY SMALL.
(Small anecdote -- quite a few years ago I signed the rental agreement for my first apartment. I was told to initial each of the 10 pages or so and sign the final page. I stopped and read the thing before doing so. My landlord -- who managed something like 40 apartments and had been doing so for a couple decades -- said he could only recall one other person who read the whole rental agreement before signing. And I actually discovered some really interesting rental policies while doing so.)
Also, more on point -- there's the rather obvious evidence that companies wouldn't bother bundling adware if no one ever installed it.
I even know some old people who turn off "add-ons" that they don't need.
And I even know many young people who don't seem to pay any attention while installing and end up with all sorts of weird "add-ons" and don't know how they got there. What's your point?
Disagree.
The Slate article makes some good points. On the other hand, I almost stopped reading at this nonsense:
In a four-year study that started with nearly 3,000 college students, a team of Michigan State University researchers led by Neal Schmitt found that test score (SAT or ACTâ"whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year. If the students were ranked on both their test scores and cumulative GPAs, those who had test scores in the top half (above the 50th percentile, or median) would have had a roughly two-thirds chance of having a cumulative GPA in the top half. By contrast, students with bottom-half SAT scores would be only one-third likely to make it to the top half in GPA.
This tells me almost nothing about a test's effectiveness, other than it can differentiate pretty well between "high-achievers" and "total morons." I could probably come up with a "test" that could satisfy this stat by talking to each student for a minute.
But hey, I gave the Slate article author the benefit of the doubt, so I tracked down the actual article he cited in this paragraph, which provides data summarized in more helpful and less dubious ways.
You can read that article, if you like, because it presents a much more nuanced picture. Long story short: correlation of SAT/ACT performance with college GPA is at a level of 0.53. That's exactly the same correlation (0.53) of high school GPA with college GPA. Meanwhile, high school GPA and SAT/ACT performance correlation with each other is 0.58.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a more thorough analysis in this article about where the mismatches occur. THAT would be really interesting. What are the characteristics of students who get high GPA in high school but low SAT scores -- how do they perform in college? And the reverse: high SAT, but low GPA? That's the only way we could actually tell how much information the SAT is actually adding... but alas, most such analyses don't look at the data that way.
Also, college GPA isn't everything. You also need to, well, FINISH college. According to that cited article, turns out high school GPA is a much better predictor in this regard than SAT scores. Having a better high school GPA gives you an odds ratio of 3.77 to actually graduate college, while having a high SAT has odds ratio of only 1.3. (This isn't mentioned in the Slate article, which only notes how high SAT correlates with graduation -- well, yes it does, but nowhere near as well as high school GPA.)
Anyhow, you can take from this what you will. I've read a number of such studies on SATs, and my conclusion is a little different from the Slate guy. Yes, SATs are correlated with college achievement. But so are some other things too (like high school grades). In borderline cases, having the SAT score may help with an admissions decision, but is the level of correlation high enough to justify letting student A in with an SAT score of X, while rejecting student B with an SAT of X-50? That's really the kind of question we need to ask if we want to justify the rampant use of SAT scores in admissions.
And I'm not sure if any research out there really can answer that question well. Certainly not most of the citations in the Slate article, which focus on broader correlations, and definitely not the Slate article itself, which cites some stats that barely qualify the SAT as useful as if they were truly revelatory.
SAT scores correlate closely with measured IQ
Here's the other problem -- the SAT was originally designed as a proxy for IQ, more or less. But over the past few decades, each
WTF? If you don't like hoppy IPAs just order something else. It's certainly not like the only craft beer that's available.
While that's true, the percentage of hoppy IPAs (and similar styles) available on many beer menus has skyrocketed in the past decade or so.
Meanwhile, just about every craft dark beer (stout, porter, etc.) can't be sold unless it's brewed with some odd concoction of chocolate, coffee, herbs, and who knows what else. (I'm very sensitive to caffeine, so I don't want coffee in my beer, thank you.)
If you don't like hoppy lighter beers or coffee-infused dark beers, in most bars you're stuck drinking some "classic" beer on the menu. If you're lucky, you might see some craft brown ale that isn't completely "off the spectrum" of normal beer.
I actually love trying "interesting" beers. I also appreciate breweries that create variations on standard styles (not every stout needs to taste like Guinness, and there is a great deal of room for decent porters, cask ales, etc.).
But if I'm looking at a place that has 20+ beers on tap, there's often only one or two choices for people who might be interested in trying something different that's NOT overrun by hops or coffee. (A couple months ago, I had a beer that literally tasted like eating burnt pine cones and huge amounts of nutmeg -- terrible. But at least it was different. I only tried it because there was nothing else on the large beer menu which wasn't a standard classic beer, a hoppy IPA or ale, or a coffee-infused dark beer.)
If I wanted something incredibly bitter and/or full of coffee/caffeine in a wildly out-of-balance way, I'd just go drink crappy coffee at Starbucks. Ironically (to my mind), it seems that's where craft beer is taking its cues from these days.
You're absolutely correct that this story is mostly about how we should distrust science journalism, and the author of the "study" makes that clear.
However...
If a scientist had done this they would be losing their job any minute. Any of the following would be enough to disgrace a practicing scientist (I am one):
Yes, all of that is true. But I think you're exaggerating quite a bit about the impact any of this would have had on whether a study like this could have been done by a reputable scientist (it certainly could have been), or whether it would have been published if that scientist had appropriate credentials (as noted in the article, there are plenty of places to publish bad research with little vetting).
2- asking people to undergo a study that he knew before hand that was not beneficial to the subjects, in fact could likely be the opposite (this would mean he'd never get approval of the study)
The details of methodology in this study might have been changed a bit to get it approved by a review board, and there's certainly nothing about the basic idea of this study that suggests it would NECESSARILY (or even likely) have significant detrimental effects for the subjects. And there is certainly at least a possibility of beneficial effects.
I suggest you have a look at some of the research articles linked even in an article of Wikipedia on the subject. There have been dozens, and probably hundreds of studies that have tried to measure health effects of chocolate -- many of them have involved people eating small amounts of chocolate and observing effects, just as the study here did.
So, the idea that an actual scientist, with the appropriate amount of time, could "never get approval of the study" is just ridiculous. As I said, there would probably be some more detailed methodological justification and tweaks, but lots of nutrition studies like this happen all the time.
Unlike what the guy says, journalist can never be "peer" reviewers of any science... their role is different and yet they are not doing it properly.
Yes, journalists have their own jobs to do, and there are certainly flaws in the system.
But there are flaws in the science system too, which makes the job of journalists (and scientists trying to look at research out there and evaluate it) much harder. "P hacking" is not just something made up by this journalist -- it's a real thing, and it's a real problem. Yes, many reputable journals have tried to make review procedures better to avoid various statistical problems, but they often don't really fight them head-on (with a few notable exceptions of brave editors or boards). There are a LOT of problems with common statistical procedures followed by researchers -- even those who have proper credentials and have gotten independent reviews.
Anyhow, most of your criticism boils down to "this guy wasn't credentialed to do what he did." That's great, but it doesn't address the larger flaws here -- not only in journalistic reporting, but in some aspects of scientific methodology. This study was clearly not rigorous, but I've seen worse studies published in reputable journals.
She might have remained just a doctor, but now she's... a doctor doctor! ( huh? )
Actually, in Germany (unlike, say, in the U.S.) multiple doctorates are explicitly mentioned in the title during formal address. Someone with two doctorates is actually "Frau Doktor Doktor X" someone with a bunch of doctorates (earned and honorary) would be "Frau Dr. Dr. h.c. mult." etc.
However I have to point out that this renewed focus on short songs is strange, being that going back to the beginning of 20th century pop music, songs were regularly 2-3 minutes in length.
Definitely true. I was mostly responding to GP, who was arguing about how songs are artificially shortened.
But you're absolutely right that short songs have a long history too, though again there are limits. There are plenty of songs in the 2-3 minute range, but very few less than 2 minutes. And, aside from "novelty songs" (or very fast tempo songs) and advertising jingles and such, songs less than 60-90 seconds are exceptionally rare.
Thus, I find TFA's discussion of the possibility of artists replacing a 3-minute song with six 30-second songs to be rather silly -- unless all pop music is going to become advertising jingles. Sure, it's fun to watch a particularly good 30-second commercial a few times, but you're not going to listen to it hundreds of times, as many do with pop songs they love.
On the flip side we have a band like Rush that has consistently created longer songs that "remain interesting" and usually don't adhere to the AABA song structure.
Long songs certainly CAN be done. But except for my folk ballad examples of songs with 50 verses, the only other way to do it in a simple way is to cobble together contrasting sections, with each section being a few minutes long. Effectively, you create a piece like a classical work with "movements," a la Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or many of Rush's longer pieces.
If you want to sustain a longer piece without just chaining a bunch of contrasting blocks ("movements") together, it gets harder. There are certainly solutions, both in the pop world and historically in classical music (e.g., 15-minute-long "sonata form" movements of classical symphonies by Beethoven or Brahms are often just vastly expanded and complex variations on AABA forms).
And certainly AABA is not the ONLY form in the world. I was just using it as an example because it's so common and displays some of the characteristics among various song organization types (i.e., repetition/return/variation and contrast).
But all good points.
Time is 100% relevant to this discussion. Music history is littered with examples of songs that have had their structure and duration altered as a result of outside forces. [snip] While radio stations aren't as anal about running times these days, you still won't hear a 10-minute song on the radio. And there's no disputing that that particular limitation had a deep effect on much of the music of the previous century.
Yes, and no. You're right that media constraints often try to keep songs shorter. But that doesn't imply that longer songs would be that common, even without those constraints.
Examine most of music history. Whether you're talking about 14th-century French chansons, 16th-century Italian madrigals, 18th-century independent arias, 19th-century German lieder, or 20th-century pop (or Broadway or jazz or...) -- ALL of those repertoires tend to have songs that average about 3-5 minutes in length, with some that might go 6-7 minutes, rare ones that are 7-10 minutes, and almost none more than 10 minutes. Individual movements of larger classical works often follow a similar pattern.
(The main exception are certain kinds of folk ballades or epic ballades which have many, many verses because they tell a long story. But in that case, the actual form of the music takes a "back seat" to the story -- essentially after the 5th or 6th verse, it's kind of a recitation formula which loses its musical impact. A related form is repetitive chanting, where the music becomes less important than the ritualistic experience of repeating the music again and again.)
It's surprising that TFA seems to be written by a songwriting professor, because he seems to understand little about these long-term trends and what they say about basic cognitive patterns that relate to musical structure.
Effective musical composition is really about balancing two things: repetition and novelty. That's it. Seriously. If you write a song that NEVER repeats a refrain or a musical phrase or a short "motive" of a few notes or even a basic rhythmic pattern, you end up with something that just sounds like "random notes." In fact, you have to work quite hard to write something that has no repetitive patterns at all. And it gives a listener a little pleasure in hearing something familiar again -- you "know how that part goes," and that recognition about how it sounds and how the phrase is going to play out is comforting and satisfying.
On the other hand, outside of dance music (again, a pattern going back roughly a thousand years for dance music), too much repetition makes a piece boring. If you keep playing the same few notes over and over again, it gets tedious.
Composers over the centuries have settled on a number of standard forms for putting together songs, because they effectively balance repetition and novelty -- often through varied repetition (or elements where one thing is repeated, like the harmony, but the melody over top of it is varied somewhat).
Lots of songs, for example, use a "song form" of AABA for verses. Why? Because the first time we hear A, it's unfamiliar and new. When we hear A again, it's a welcome repetition -- we get to feel like we "know how this goes." So why not do A a third time? Because it starts to get boring -- so we do a B section that contrasts and often introduces some drama/tension (or changes the feel or dynamics at least in some way). And then, to finish it off, we do a return to A (often with a little variation or a little shorter than the first time) -- which again satisfies because it's familiar... it kind of releases the tension introduced by the contrasting B.
That may be a structure for a verse, but entire songs often have a similar structure: verse-refrain-verse-refrain-BRIDGE-refrain, where each "verse-refrain" unit is kind of like a big "A," the bridge introduces contrast, and then the final return to the refrain (often transformed or at a higher energy level) provides a satisfying conclusion
Human nature provides ample fuel for the corruption of the scientific process.
On individual days and in individual studies the science can be protected, but you will never completely remove even unintentional bias.
THIS is the most insightful post here, by far. Humans are imperfect, and thus science will always be imperfect.
And it's important to note the role of "unintentional bias," which goes all the way from which grant proposal gets accepted to experimental design to choices about data collection to statistical analysis to formation of conclusions and interpretation. Every one of those levels is going to be influenced by fundamental human cognitive biases. We can try to be conscious of them or to create various checks against them, but we can NEVER escape them. And some types of research and some stages of research will always require humans to make choices where there's really no way to control for these biases.
Willful misrepresentation of the facts to satisfy an agenda will continue as long as humans are involved in the experimentation or in the compilation of the results.
While that may be true, I think the vast majority of scientific bias is NOT "willful misrepresentation." A lot of it goes into the very kinds of questions we ask, the kind of research paradigms our culture already has set up, etc. Deliberate misrepresentation is also generally easier to catch -- because it's often more obvious. Fundamental human cognitive biases or blanket underlying methodological assumptions, though -- those are much harder to spot, since they may be problems not only for the researchers themselves but for reviewers, etc., who also aren't consciously on the look out for such problems.