(the economic experiment over the last 30 years seems to support this hypothesis). Thus, we must tweak our system so that it does not destroy the middle class.
Amazing that claims such as those in OP persist, given that the historical record is indisputable:
I dispute!
as our economy has become less capitalist, income inequality has been increasing at an ever-increasing pace.
I'm having trouble following this argument, but since it's been rated as "+5 Insightful" I suppose there's supposed to be some truth here.
I can only assume you are referring to the "last 30 years" (as in the quote from GP you are discussing) as a time when "our economy has become less capitalist."
Obviously one has always to define what "capitalist" means, but I suppose most people tend to equate it with economic freedom. And, well, we actually have indices designed to measure how this is changing, such as the Index of Economic Freedom, which is a scoring system created by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal (and thus should presumably have some meaning for "capitalists," since they based their index on principles derived from Adam Smith).
Basically, the U.S. has consistently ranked from 4th to 10th in the world in terms of economic freedom since this index was inaugurated in 1995. The overall world has become slightly more free over this period, so the U.S.'s small decline in ranking is over a period where its score has remained relatively consistent. (And if you want to visualize the data compared to other countries, you can do so here.)
I think most people would agree that the various policies of the U.S. in the 1980s led to greater economic freedom overall, and here we have stats designed by organizations at the heart of capitalism who say that we've been basically static since 1995.
We can talk about correlation/causation until the cows come home, but this much is simple: when there is a negative correlation, then capitalism isn't the cause.
Except there's no negative correlation, certainly not in the past 30 years you seem to be responding to. Economic freedom in the U.S. is pretty darn high compared to most countries in the world, and it's been consistently scored high for the past few decades.
That's not to say that capitalism is the sole or major cause of income inequality, but the "negative correlation" you claim is not borne out by the actual data.
I have some old books (17th century) where the first word of the next page overleaf is printed under the text. When did this go out of fashion?
That's a "catchword." They were used by binders to be sure pages or gatherings (i.e., groups of pages sewn as a unit) were in the correct order.
They decreased in use significantly over the 1800s as printing machinery became more automated. You can still sometimes find them (or related marks to number gatherings) in handmade books in the early 1900s.
Pretty sure GP didn't actually say that. He said he wanted a kid to be happy. One can be ambitious but happy about what you've achieved, or one could be less ambitious and happy where you are. Being able to be satisfied in where you are at the moment does NOT imply that you can't have ambition or desires to also do other things.
On the other hand, some people are unhappy anywhere.
One that will happily work at a dead-end job and bum around with his friends rather than put in the effort to be a better person.
Judgmental much? What exactly is a "better person" according to your criteria?
Lots of people work hard, even in a "menial" blue-collar job. Lots of laborers take pride in their work. Also, for lots of people, life is not about work -- work is what you do to get money to do the REST OF THINGS, which is your ACTUAL LIFE (like "bumming around with friends" perhaps).
Yeah, I agree with GP -- I'd rather have a kid who could be satisfied and happy in his life, even if he worked what you call a "dead-end job" and had good relationships with friends. As long as he's happy and able to support himself, why do you care what he does? What makes him a "bad person"?
I'd rather have that than some ambitious jerk who cheated, stole, and was an overall ass to do whatever it took to get ahead, and then was never satisfied with his life anyway. There are lots of depressed millionaires in the world. I would sincerely hope my kids don't become them.
Which is what I said: second salary + additional tax from 2 salaries combined resulting in a higher overall bracket - smaller tax deductions - daycare $0. Two, of the four variables in this equation are tax related because of the first variable (second salary).
Yes, but the situation could also work the opposite way. For example, there are a number of tax credits and deductions that are available only if the spouse works, especially child care credits or FSAs for dependent care. Depending on the spouse's income, this could be enough to offset the extra tax bracket effects.
Your reasoning is only valid in a limited number of scenarios, such as where the spouse's earning potential is REALLY low and the overall family income is high enough to already cut off the possibility of some child credits, or in areas with exorbitant childcare costs. In most cases where the spouse is capable of making any decent income, the family will probably end up with more money overall -- the question then mostly comes down to how much that second salary is reduced by childcare costs. I'm not saying your scenario doesn't exist, but for most families the tax benefits go both ways... So the decision is mostly about actual amount of second salary vs. child care cost. Taxes and brackets are only relevant to a much smaller number of families in this.
I always thought this rule was invented to make it easier for typesetters to distinguish the end of a sentence from abbreviations. Were the two spaces ever actually typeset?
No, not quite.
Early typesetting practices up to the late 1600s or so varied considerably according to local style. By the early 1700s, the standard practice emerged that larger spaces were placed after punctuation by typesetters to mark the ends of important parts of a sentence (which would allow readers to parse the meaning easier). The standard ultimately adopted in much of Europe was putting an M-quad (a square spacer the size of an 'M' in the font) after a period, an N-quad (the size of 'N', about half an M-quad) after lesser punctuation like commas, and a normal spacer (now called a "thick space") after words, which traditionally was about 1/3 of an em.
Note that these were the way a typesetter would begin to space a line, but most typeset matter was justified, which means various spaces in the lines had to be modified and squeezed or stretched, which might in some cases involve adding extra spacers in places. (The rules for which spaces to add width to were often quite complex, for those typesetters who wanted to obtain an optimal result.)
When typewriters first came into use in the late 1800s, people tried to imitate proper typesetting as best as they could by using 2 or 3 spaces after periods, and sometimes 2 spaces after other punctuation. Ultimately, the standard typesetting rule of 2 spaces after a period came about as an approximation to proper typeset text in the late 1800s.
In the period of roughly the 1920s to 1960s, a little war among publishers to decrease publication costs in books led to poorer cheap materials being used, as well as anything to minimize costs, so interword spaces got squeezed to 1/4-em in many houses, margins got smaller, line spacing decreased, etc. Obviously the large sentence spaces now looked out of place, so they were also reduced gradually to an N-quad and then just a standard interword space. (This was previously known as "French spacing" -- not as anything to do with the Germans, as asserted by the GP. It was practiced in the 19th century in a small number of French publishing houses.)
Meanwhile, typists were (and are) some of the few to attempt to retain the old larger sentence spaces that imitated the way things had been done in typesetting in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Germany had the last laugh... German has always been "one space after terminal punctuation in sentences", and since 2009 or so, that's been retcon'ed into English as well: "Ha! Take that English speakers!
Umm, no.
Making the sentence space the same size as the interword space is called "French spacing," which was a minority practice that was originally only common in some French publishing houses in the late 18th and 19th centuries. I also have no idea what 2009 has to do with it, since French spacing became the norm in most Americans and Western European publishing houses around 1950 or so.
As far back as I can remember, $20 has been the denomination dispensed by nearly all ATMs. A handful of ATMs might mix in $50 or $100 bills for larger total amounts
Yes, $20 is the standard in the US, which is fairly reasonable. I'm almost never embarrassed having to pay with a $20 bill, even for something that costs a dollar or two.
In Europe, though, you'll often get 50 Euro notes if you withdraw anything more than that at an ATM. It's very annoying, because some countries in Europe are much more up-tight about making change than the US. (I'm looking at you, Germany!) Seriously -- there's a truly insane "we don't want to make change" culture in many places in Europe. And I'm not talking about something outlandish, like trying to pay for a 2 Euro bill with a 50. I'm talking about trying to pay for a 35 or 40 Euro bill with a 50.
When I've spent extended time in Europe, I've often strategically planned my expenditures to figure out ways to get rid of the darn 50s the ATMs spit out without getting dirty looks or weird objections from random people. Why there's such a disconnect between the standard bills the ATMs give out and what most businesses are willing to accept, I just don't know.
That is NOT a description of what's happening here. It's not a virally spreading idea.
Sorry to interject in your debate with this other user, but yeah -- actually, this IS a virally spreading INACCURATE idea, i.e., that Wikipedia is "almost as good as" or "just as good as" or (in some sources) "even better than" Britannica in terms of accuracy, on the basis of this particular study.
I made mention of 2005 study. And I know that not because of a chain of repeats, but because I remember the report from the time, and looked it up.
A meme is a meme if it is a meme. Whether or not you personally have learned of this information through subsequent viral spreading is irrelevant to whether it is, in fact, a meme or not. If you happen to post a link to Rick Astley's song as a joke being completely unaware of the phenomenon of Rickrolling, you can't just say, "Oh, it isn't a meme, because I didn't know it was a meme."
And regardless of how you learned of the information, the fact is that you are reporting it and its conclusions inaccurately, which also happen to correspond with the way the (false) meme tends to report it.
It is NOT a meme. And you not agreeing with the study doesn't make it a meme, regardless of whether your skepticism is valid or not.
Actually, YOU are the one who is NOT agreeing with the study. Your opponent in this debate has acknowledged multiple times what the study actually DOES say, i.e., a limited, non-randomly selected, non-peer reviewed, small sample of mostly somewhat obscure science articles (which tend to be some of Wikipedia's most accurate, since they are non-controversial, tend to be written by geeks who were the predominant editors in Wikipedia's early days, etc.) were not significantly worse than Britannica in terms of reliabililty, according to some measures of errors that have been acknowledged in many subsequent peer-reviewed expert studies of this issue to be somewhat problematic. There was no intention in the authors of your study to be exhaustive in comparing the two encyclopedias, nor even to have a random sample. There was no statistical analysis of the results. Even calling it a "study" is a bit of a stretch, since it implies a sort of methodological rigor which wasn't present.
Neither I nor your opponent in this discussion are claiming that this "study" meant nothing -- only that it's not reasonable to conclude a general statement that "Wikipedia is about as good as Britannica" from it. If I went to some local bookstore, found a particular area of local authors the store was strongly know for, and compared their inventory to Amazon's offerings, it would not follow that simply having one strong section of the store meant that this local bookstore was "as good as Amazon" in general. I know this analogy is not precise, but it's the same type of comparison -- saying, "X is as good as Y" when talking about something as broad as an encyclopedia requires a detailed comparison of the entirety, or at least a random sampling of the contents. Neither was done here -- and thus your reported conclusion is invalid.
That simply is not a reasonable conclusion from the data at hand -- and the fact that the internet thinks that was the conclusion when it wasn't is what makes it a meme, regardless of how you came upon your particular misleading interpretation of it.
At some point, you may wish to actually read the study you're talking about, to see what it does actually prove. You could even learn what the original authors actually said, such as where they noted reviewers' significant comments on style, organization, etc. which greatly decreased readability in the articles on Wikipedia, even if they didn't contain as many factual errors as people at the time might have thought.
And, better yet, maybe you should take some time to look at some of the dozen or so (maybe more) subsequent studies of accuracy and comparisons that h
The wheelchair record is actually only about 80 minutes total. So they've already beat that 2 hour record by over 40 minutes... and that's on a standard marathon course, not one that's downhill.
Yes, they are measuring by weight; I don't think I implied otherwise. In fact, I stressed its importance. I merely said that when they state a recipe, often it is given in terms of percentages, which are all based on weighing ingredients.
So what is the difference exactly, except that you learned a set of numbers in Fahrenheit trough your experience, and we learned another set in Celsius trough ours?
There's no difference -- it's all arbitrary. I think that's what the GP's point was. The Fahrenheit range of 0-100 is roughly the range where it's possible for humans to actually be outside for a while and be okay. (I said "roughly" -- I know it isn't precise.) 0 C is also a meaningful number for weather purposes, etc., but 100 C is not.
All the scales are arbitrary, and they all have advantages and disadvantages.
Personally, other than noting roughly where 0 C is for the purposes of knowing whether I'm likely to see rain vs. sleet vs. snow, I find the whole concept of temperature used for weather forecasts nearly useless. Between wind chill, effects of humidity, effects of cloud cover vs. full sun, etc., temperature is just one factor that really isn't all that relevant -- since, to our bodies, what matters is rate of heat transfer, not temperature.
When I've lived in a relatively warm, humid climate, for example, the number I MOST cared about in weather forecasts was dewpoint. If the dew point is above 70 F, I'm going to be perspiring like crazy outside, no matter whether the temperature is 72 F or 95 F. If the dewpoint is 55 F, it's possible for me to be comfortable even if it's in the 80s or even higher. In other situations, it might be some other factor that's most important.
Point is -- the temperature scales are all based on arbitrary references points, so who cares? The only reason to argue is just so we all work on the same standard. And the main reason to argue for Celsius over Fahrenheit is that most of the world has adopted Celsius, not because it has some wonderful features that make it superior. (I'm all in favor of dropping Fahrenheit, by the way -- even though I grew up with it. It doesn't matter to me. But, on the other hand, there's also no real good "scientific" reason to make the switch other than ensuring consistency internationally.)
1 cup of flour is trivially measured by volume: Just grab the "1 cup" cup from your set of measuring cups, scoop up flour from your storage container, level. You're done.
This is indeed easyâ"but very inaccurate: it can lead to the measurement being out by as much as 30%.
MOD PARENT UP.
Professional bakers actually don't use volumes or weights when they state a recipe -- they use something called "baker's percentage," where 100% = the weight of the flour. Not the volume; the weight. All other ingredients are stated in proportions relative to the weight of the flour, making it easy to scale a recipe up or down. This is because bakers actually realize that weighing is so important because of the compressibility of flour.
If you're making bread, for example, an error of 30% in measurement of flour is the difference roughly between the stickiest wettest possible dough you could work with (producing a very crusty bread with large holes, like pizza or ciabatta dough) and a dry dough that is so tough that it's barely kneadable by hand (like bagel dough). Almost all of the varieties of bread fall in that range of about 30% error in flour measurement.
Baking requires somewhat more precision than other cooking, because once you throw the batter/dough in the oven, you can't make modifications. It's not like making soup where you can just taste it while cooking and say, "oops! I forgot the salt!" and just add some and everything will turn out okay.
If you're baking bread or a cake and say "1 cup of flour," you might as well just say "Add enough flour to get the 'right' consistency... whatever that is... you just have to know." Because with volume measurements of flour, it's REALLY hard to get consistent results unless you're skilled in recognizing what the final batter/dough is supposed to be like already.
Until Starbucks came along, though, we really didn't even pretend very hard to have good coffee.
That's not strictly true, at least not in some big cities and college towns that had decent coffee shops pre-Starbucks. It was really quite sad where I was living at the time when Starbucks came to town and basically started taking over spots that used to be indy coffee shops. Sure, not all of them were great, but they were generally better than Starbucks... Which frankly is terrible. Even if they had decent coffee, I wouldn't prefer to go there because of the pretentious BS of it all. No, I don't find it sophisticated or even cute to call sizes by some bizarre names, no I don't want to be asked 20 questions including my name just to order a plain standard drink. In Italy, you can find better coffee on any block at the local bar, and they don't need any of this crap "grande white chocolate mocha 1% with whip" to serve up something decent. You don't need white chocolate syrup and whipped cream to make a decent espresso taste good. I'd personally rather get a coffee from Dunkin Donuts than Captain Ahab's mate's joint.
The cost of launching from earth is much higher than from space because we have to break Earth's gravity and pass through the atmosphere.
While this is certainly true, I don't think your general conclusions follow from this fact.
Build the next space station already. Build it big and ship it people and supplies and do it there.
The biggest expense is getting things into orbit, as you point out. It requires a certain amount of fuel for every pound or kilo of stuff we want to lift up there.
Given that space isn't exactly filled with random supplies (food, fuel for other missions, etc.) floating around, most of it is still going to have to come from Earth. So, exactly HOW is it cheaper to launch a mission from space if we still need to lift all the supplies from Earth anyway? Eventually, if we start being able to ferry people between a space station, the moon, other places, etc., we wouldn't have to lift the PEOPLE up again (if they're willing to basically live in space), but it's going to take quite a while until we can actually have a mechanism for deriving most of the other necessary SUPPLIES for missions from space... which will just have to be lifted up off the ground from Earth anyway.
So, what you're proposing is rather than flying ONE "high cost" mission up through the Earth's atmosphere, we should spend years or decades launching dozens (hundreds?) of times that material up through the atmosphere to build a giant space station or moonbase or whatever. And meanwhile, we have to keep sending up supplies continuously for any people there.
How exactly is that supposed to save costs??... except perhaps in a REALLY long term, assuming that space travel becomes an established thing in the next few decades (which is far from determined... maybe it'll catch on a few decades, maybe in a century or more).
If we cat accomplish that, we don belong in space.
From my perspective, this whole "Mission to Mars" idea is mostly a kind of propaganda move, though not in a negative sense. As other posters have said, why else bother sending humans? Robots can do just fine. But, just like the moon missions in the 1960s and 70s, this is supposed to reignite the public interest in space travel, which will make it easier to raise the kind of funds necessary to build your space station or whatever.
The first missions will be sort of "proof of concept." You're proposing investing in a giant infrastruction that will likely cost hundreds or even thousands of times the cost of one mission just to save some phantom money on not having to lift things out of Earth's gravity to launch a mission to Mars (when we had to lift most of that from Earth anyway to the space station or whatever).
I'm not saying your idea is bad in the (VERY) long term. But right now the psychological effect of launching one slightly more expensive mission that achieves a bigger goal may provide a spark. And that spark may get more people interested in the much larger amount of funding necessary to create the incredibly expensive infrastructure which you argue should make things cheaper.
Somebody from the 1950's given Siri to play with for a few hours would be quite impressed.
By that standard, all your categories should get an A. Some random dude from the 50s driving a modern car, for example, would probably be quite impressed -- from gas mileage, to airbags, to antilock brakes, to the smooth ride and incredible "quiet" possible in a luxury sedan compared to the 50s. It may not be flying, but it'd be darn impressive to many.
But I thought your standard was about predictions, not about what would seem impressive to average Joe.
No, it's not human-level, but human level would be "A".
Yes, human level would be an A. And what I'm saying is that compared to that we might barely be squeaking by with a C, and that's being really generous. Siri is really quite good at accomplishing very specific tasks it has been programmed directly to do. " Intelligence" implies an adaptability, a creativity, an ability to process abstract concepts and learn, etc. Siri has absolutely NONE of that. It's somewhat better at pattern matching than a toaster which automatically detects when your bread is likely toasted. I'm NOT saying Siri isn't impressive: I'm saying it displays little in coming with what we generally call "intelligence," including what the 50s guys used that term to mean.
Also keep in mind that back then they considered winning at chess a strong test of AI.
It was considered a good test at that time because the kind of hardware necessary for a sort of "brute force" solution to chess was inconceivable. But that's effectively how Deep Blue won: through exhaustive searches of moves far in advance of what human players do and pattern matching with an enormous database of just about any game that has been played on record. Humans simply aren't capable of that sort of exhaustive data analysis on that scale, and yet our brains still allow us to be pretty good at chess -- again because of abilities such as creativity, ability to form abstractions and inferences connected to them, efficient learning rather than exhaustive search, etc.
As I said in my first reply to you, most of our "progress" toward AI has been made possible by the computer and electronics revolution you mentioned, which was not predicted in the 50s. So, we've passed a few "tests" by simulating "intelligence" through radically different methods from what the 50s thought possible. That's why I'd say we might squeak by with a C. But once anyone who actually made these predictions from the 50s tried to probe the "intelligence" of modern devices (as in Turing's Shakespeare example), they'd immediately be able to see we've made precious few advances other than faster computers and bigger databases (and admittedly better searching and matching algorithms).
Really, B- for AI? I'd give it a C-minus at best, and that's mostly due to the unexpected increases in computer technology and speed, and also due to data aggregation and connections on the internet (which were largely not predicted). If you grade AI and curve it based on 1950s predictions about the state of electronics, computers, etc., I'd say you're looking at a solid D-minus.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm thrilled with the kinds of things computers can do and the limited "intelligent" functionality we have developed, particularly just in the past few years. But are we really anywhere near the predictions of "Sputnik era" (as you put it)?
My baseline has always been the original Turing test description by Turing himself (from 1950, close to Sputnik era), where he describes a skilled "interrogator" comparing responses between an intelligent human and an AI, trying to sort out which one is human. In Turing's example, the "interrogator" has to resort to a complex discussion of the appropriateness of potential word substitutions in Shakespearean sonnets, including layers of subtlety of meaning -- because the AI is apparently so fluent in the English language that it could converse on that that level with no errors.
Turing predicted that, by the year 2000, we'd have AI that could fool 30% of intelligent interrogators on such a test with machines that would have 100 MB of storage capacity.
Instead, 14 years after Turing's prediction, we have people claiming to have "passed" his test by having a chatbot pretend to be an annoying, nonresponsive teenager who doesn't even really speak the language of the interrogator. Debating the scansion and subtle meanings of Shakespeare's poetry, indeed...
But don't take this one prediction as an example. Take a look at an actual study on AI predictions and their accuracy. Heck, that article starts with discussion of the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, where they proposed that a team of 10 guys working for only 2 months over the summer could basically solve the basic problems of AI like comprehending natural language, forming abstract concepts, and becoming self-learning.
That's definitely "Sputnik era," and that's what the top researchers thought at that point. It didn't happen in two months or even two decades, and only in the past decade have we really started getting close to actual natural language voice recognition, let alone understanding or comprehension.
Yes, through terms like "neural networks" and "deep learning," AI researchers have convinced us that something LIKE human "intelligence" is involved in their algorithms, but mostly we just have computers that can do computations faster and draw on larger databases to make better guesses. We're just even beginning to do basic things like have computers be able to recognize language constructs to detect what the antecedent of a pronoun is -- and even that is in its infancy and only tends to work in circumscribed cases. With that sort of benchmark now, it's safe to say we've made precious little progress in having AI actually "understand" or "create" abstract concepts, when it often can't even figure out how to parse a paragraph in a way that connects sentences together. (I'm focusing on language understanding issues because Turing did, but there are other similar limitations for AI applications in other areas.)
Again, I do NOT wish to downplay the significant advances we have made. And I applaud AI researchers for the awesome things we are starting to see glimpses of in recent technology.
But to claim we are anywhere even on the spectrum of what people thought in the 1950s? No way.
Most liberal arts courses are driven by writing essays where you defend a thesis. The actual validity of your thesis didn't matter so long as you are able to find several points to defend it.
Then you had poor teachers, unless you were taking only courses in the art of persuasive writing (or, as you call it, rhetoric). If your other professors let you get away with this, then shame on them.
As someone who has taught university courses (and who has discussed pedagogy and writing with a lot of faculty in both sciences and humanities), I do see the value in constructing a thesis with supporting evidence as a first step to writing an expository essay. But at some level you do need to question the validity of the argument and the significance of the evidence -- if your professors never required this level of rigor, they did you a disservice.
On the other hand, as someone who has read thousands of student essays over the years, let me also say that faculty are often overwhelmed with simply trying to get students to put together some semblance of a logical chain of an argument in the first place, let alone requiring the rigor you're talking about. That's not to excuse what you describe, but a significant percentage of university-level students have such poor writing skills now that they can get nowhere near the standard you suggest. And professors are often just happy to have a kid submit something that "sounds like an argument," even if it isn't fully rigorous, because it's better than much of the crap that has to be read and graded.
What I commonly saw was students starting with a conclusion and working backwards to find evidence which best fit the chosen thesis. [snip] In a science course this would be called cherry picking the data, in liberal arts, it's called another day.
Well, it's also called "confirmation bias," which is problem both in scientific experimental design and in humanities arguments. Part of the problem is that humanities issues are often not quantifiable in the same way that science ones are, and even if you try to quantify them, you end up with so many interacting variables that statistical analysis can be pretty meaningless. So, in some ways it's related to the fundamental nature of the content of the field -- which still doesn't excuse poor reasoning.
My science course work on the other hand is where critical thinking was encouraged.
Okay, let's see what that entailed....
I was taught how to write logical proofs, I was taught how to represent both everyday situations, and also computational operations in the form of atomic sentences.
That sounds like a course in "formal logic," which is often taught in philosophy departments, not science courses. And as for "represent... everyday situations," I have met many, many science undergraduates who have very little perspective on applying their methods to "real-world problems," unfortunately.
I was taught the dangers of conflating correlation with causation, I was taught the dangers of Type I and Type II errors.
This is basic statistics, which should be a required course for everyone, no matter what major. (Frankly, I think it should be required to graduate high school.)
I was taught about common logical fallacies.
This is traditionally the purview of a rhetoric course in English or the logic courses in the philosophy department, though given your background in Cognitive Systems, I assume you might learn about this in the course of various cognitive biases.
I was taught how to evaluate information critically, I was taught the importance of internal consistency, I was taught how critically examine evidence.
Now we're finally getting to "critical thinking," and this should be important in any rigorous college course, regardless of discipline.
If an English Lit grad has decent programming skills, I would be very confused why the person would get the degree in English Lit in the first place???
Why does anyone get an English Lit degree? (I know some other people here might ask that question seriously.) Other than those who go on to grad school and then become professors of English literature, or maybe high school teachers, why would anyone major in English Lit? (And even if you wanted to become a high school teacher, do you really need a full-blown degree in English Lit? It's not like you're going to be debating the complex structure of Joyce's Ulysses or doing a radical post-structuralist reading of the colonialist implications of Melville's obscure poetic works with your average high-school class. You're going to be teaching them to write in complete sentences and maybe reading a novel or two if you're lucky.)
So why DO people major in English Lit? Maybe because some of them still believe in the classical idea of "liberal arts" as a gateway to the "critical thinking" skills you call a "buzzword." Sorry, but "critical thinking" is NOT a buzzword if you look at older -- often more rigorous -- liberal arts curricula. Those were the kind of systems where you worked your way through the original geometric proofs of Euclid, various scientific essays up to at least the 19th century, as well as reading novels and interpreting poems. The point was that you were exposed to a LOT of different areas of thinking, and by trying to understand, confront, and analyze these disparate ideas, you'd develop "critical thinking" skills that could be broadly applied to many areas.
Until the past few decades, it was quite common for English Lit., History majors, etc. to make up a large part of the business workforce, partly because of exposure to a lot of disparate ideas in college. Now, everybody just gets generic "business degrees," and many English Lit. departments have partly transitioned into pop culture sociology departments (though certainly not all).
Or even the person can do programming, I would not want to maintain the code the person wrote because the code may not be well formed.
That's why I'd never hire somebody unless I could look at examples of what they'd actually done. A degree tells me next to nothing, by itself. But I see no inherent reason why an intelligent, motivated, and organized English Lit. major who worked as a programmer for a number of years couldn't pick up quite a bit of high-level coding skills, whereas some code monkey with a CS degree from nowhere might just be at the "top of his game" when he graduates and never go further from there.
Context is everything. People make various life choices. I see no reason to care why a person made the choice of an English Lit. degree unless that person is relatively fresh out of college. After a couple years, I care about what they've been doing lately, and how good is their work now. Have they shown significant growth and adaptability? I've also met way too many people with a degree in X who took advanced courses in X, but basically forgot everything from those courses within a few years because they never really had to use that material. Hiring them 10 years after degree expecting them to be able to do high-level work based on 10-year-old coursework is insane.
While I'd tend toward Computer Science (since that is what my degree is in) I'd FIRST want to see what they've done already.
Exactly. I've met plenty of people with degrees in X who have little practical experience when they're fresh out of school. They may have some sort of vague theoretical sense of the field, but even that can be very nebulous, since real understanding without doing is rather difficult.
It's not that you cannot get a programming job with a Lit degree. It is that the other candidates will probably have more DEMONSTRATED skills in the programming field.
THIS. Especially if you're more than 5 years out of school, I'd barely give a crap what your major was unless you've actually been working in that area.
That's one of a number of things I'd add to the college major:
(1) How long since degree?
(2) What experience since degree?
(3) Is degree from a known school with unusual demographics?
(4) How did student perform in degree?
For an extreme case, I'd be much more likely to hire a guy with a English Lit. degree from MIT (yes, they do have them) who had a perfect GPA and has done serious high-level work in programming since graduation, than a guy fresh out of school with a C-average in CS from Upper Bucksnort State Teachers College of Nowhere.
And, by the way, I'm NOT saying one should automatically look for MIT or Ivy League or whatever degrees over others, but those schools do have a targeted demographic for admissions that tends to consist of very talented people to begin with. If they did well there, regardless of major, it's something to perhaps pay attention to. (On the other hand, if I'm looking at someone with an A average from Duke vs. C average from an Ivy, probably go with the Duke guy.) Also, tech-heavy schools tend to have more rigorous math/science requirements for all students, so even a person with a Lit or History degree from such schools may have a stronger tech background than a tech major, say, from a much lower-ranked liberal arts school or something.
To me, a college degree is mostly a certificate saying, "I can follow instructions and am responsible enough to pass courses." Beyond that, the details matter a lot more than the major. A smart, motivated person can figure out how to do things on the job. A guy with a CS degree who barely scaped by at a crappy school may have already hit his cognitive limit and may be a terrible hire.
This is one of the reasons why applicant screening should never be based on some stupid credential that isn't equal everywhere. With experienced hires who both have real work experience but one has a degree in another field, I'm often actually more intrigued -- all other things being equal -- by the guy with the weird degree who switched into the field and was successful, because that guy has shown competence in multiple areas and adaptability. Not saying I'd hire on this basis, but if I wanted someone who could actually think and be useful in a variety of ways in a job, I might give that resume a second look.
Incorrect. (3) is 100% unaffected by speed, as many already know.
False.
It is a factor of shitty drivers braking for no reason, causing motorists behind them to brake for no reason in a chain reaction. I only apply my brakes on the highway if I actually need to decelerate; 99% of the time someone in front of me is braking, I can just let off the accelerator and decelerate to their speed (because I never follow very closely)
The last clause of your sentence there is critical. Notice in my post I mentioned for the SAME TRAFFIC DENSITY. People in general follow too closely. Therefore, if they are all going at 65 mph and someone has to brake, a chain reaction will follow.
But, in the same traffic density (i.e., the same spacing of cars), the same cars driving 45 mph might have adequate time to maneuver without heavy braking.
You're correct that the problem is following distance, and if we could get everyone to maintain that, you could all drive at 90 mph. But that's simply not feasible at rush hour in many places, because too many cars keep joining the traffic, and people don't adequately expand the following distance to compensate.
So, if there's going to be a high traffic density no matter what, the only efficient way to solve the problem is to lower the average travelling speed. That's something that could at least be enforceable. Trying to enforce adequate following distance (except for really egregious behavior) would be nearly impossible.
Actually, when people say googling, they really do mean "look it up using Google." They don't mean "look it up using DuckDuckGo"
No, they mean "look it up using an internet search engine." I've seen plenty of more clueless folks who just happen to have Yahoo or Bing or whatever as their default search page that opens in their browser, and they still use the word "google," rather than a cumbersome phrase like "use an internet search engine to find..."
or "look it up using Yelp" or "look it up using Ask.com" or "look it up using Wolfram Alpha."
You're right, they don't mean those things, because those are specialized search, not a generic web search, which is what "googling" means.
When Google no longer dominates generic web search (as opposed to specialized internet search like Yelp) and there are other comparable players, only then would there be a case for genericization.
There are other "comparable players," at least ones that work well enough for many people, like Bing and Yahoo. Look up the stats -- Google may have the majority of searches, but it's only something like 2/3 of general internet searches. The other 1/3 is done on other search engines.
So, 1/3 of people are somehow managing to do general internet searching without Google. And many of them still use the word "googling" rather than "perform a general internet search" for what they are doing.
19 footnotes for a 24 page opinion, including one so long that spills over from one page onto the next.
You obviously haven't read many legal opinions. Such footnote practice is commonplace.
Ouch! Detracts from what is otherwise a great read
Uh, you do realize that footnotes are optional to read, right? That's why they are footnotes, as opposed to part of the main body of text.
I've never understood people who complain about excessive footnotes -- either they're so ADD that they get distracted by the numbers and the text so they can't stay focused, or they're so OCD that they can't resist reading words at the bottom of the page, even if they are tangential to the argument.
Don't get me wrong: footnotes in legal arguments are often important. But they're not generally essential to the main argument. That's the point. If you just want to read the core argument, read the text, and don't read the footnotes. (If the text is not understandable without the footnotes, that's a different writing problem, which should be criticized.)
Complaining about footnotes from distracted readers who can't focus on the text is what leads to monstrosities like endnotes -- which basically makes the notes unusable. (Or even worse, the current publishing trend where endnotes don't even have numerical references on the page -- so you have to match up the endnote with some phrase of text to find out there even is supposed to be a note there.)
If you don't want to read footnotes, just don't. I certainly don't if I'm just reading the main argument. But there's often a reason why they can be helpful to SOME readers, and forcing writers to either turn them into invisible endnotes or incorporate them into the text just makes things worse.
MIT cares about "diversity" numbers, sure, but they already can claim that they are a "minority majority" campus with over 51% of undergraduates from minorities. So, they'd really have no reason to further inflate the Asian numbers... unless, well, the Asian students were actually more qualified.
Which means Asian researchers are probably working at MIT because MIT actually is looking for highly qualified people -- and thus, MIT hired/admitted them.
The only people "losing their mind" are racists, who clearly aren't "everybody." (If they were, MIT wouldn't have such high numbers of minorities in the first place.)
And why are we discussing this anyway? TFA has a photo of the lab team, which is certainly not all Asian in composition.
Slashdot Mirror
(the economic experiment over the last 30 years seems to support this hypothesis). Thus, we must tweak our system so that it does not destroy the middle class.
Amazing that claims such as those in OP persist, given that the historical record is indisputable:
I dispute!
as our economy has become less capitalist, income inequality has been increasing at an ever-increasing pace.
I'm having trouble following this argument, but since it's been rated as "+5 Insightful" I suppose there's supposed to be some truth here.
I can only assume you are referring to the "last 30 years" (as in the quote from GP you are discussing) as a time when "our economy has become less capitalist."
Obviously one has always to define what "capitalist" means, but I suppose most people tend to equate it with economic freedom. And, well, we actually have indices designed to measure how this is changing, such as the Index of Economic Freedom, which is a scoring system created by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal (and thus should presumably have some meaning for "capitalists," since they based their index on principles derived from Adam Smith).
So, let's look at their historical rankings for the past 20 years.
Basically, the U.S. has consistently ranked from 4th to 10th in the world in terms of economic freedom since this index was inaugurated in 1995. The overall world has become slightly more free over this period, so the U.S.'s small decline in ranking is over a period where its score has remained relatively consistent. (And if you want to visualize the data compared to other countries, you can do so here.)
I think most people would agree that the various policies of the U.S. in the 1980s led to greater economic freedom overall, and here we have stats designed by organizations at the heart of capitalism who say that we've been basically static since 1995.
Meanwhile, most indicators show that income inequality has been consistently increasing for at least the past 30 years in the United States.
We can talk about correlation/causation until the cows come home, but this much is simple: when there is a negative correlation, then capitalism isn't the cause.
Except there's no negative correlation, certainly not in the past 30 years you seem to be responding to. Economic freedom in the U.S. is pretty darn high compared to most countries in the world, and it's been consistently scored high for the past few decades.
That's not to say that capitalism is the sole or major cause of income inequality, but the "negative correlation" you claim is not borne out by the actual data.
I have some old books (17th century) where the first word of the next page overleaf is printed under the text. When did this go out of fashion?
That's a "catchword." They were used by binders to be sure pages or gatherings (i.e., groups of pages sewn as a unit) were in the correct order.
They decreased in use significantly over the 1800s as printing machinery became more automated. You can still sometimes find them (or related marks to number gatherings) in handmade books in the early 1900s.
Really? You want a kid with no ambition?
Pretty sure GP didn't actually say that. He said he wanted a kid to be happy. One can be ambitious but happy about what you've achieved, or one could be less ambitious and happy where you are. Being able to be satisfied in where you are at the moment does NOT imply that you can't have ambition or desires to also do other things.
On the other hand, some people are unhappy anywhere.
One that will happily work at a dead-end job and bum around with his friends rather than put in the effort to be a better person.
Judgmental much? What exactly is a "better person" according to your criteria?
Lots of people work hard, even in a "menial" blue-collar job. Lots of laborers take pride in their work. Also, for lots of people, life is not about work -- work is what you do to get money to do the REST OF THINGS, which is your ACTUAL LIFE (like "bumming around with friends" perhaps).
Yeah, I agree with GP -- I'd rather have a kid who could be satisfied and happy in his life, even if he worked what you call a "dead-end job" and had good relationships with friends. As long as he's happy and able to support himself, why do you care what he does? What makes him a "bad person"?
I'd rather have that than some ambitious jerk who cheated, stole, and was an overall ass to do whatever it took to get ahead, and then was never satisfied with his life anyway. There are lots of depressed millionaires in the world. I would sincerely hope my kids don't become them.
Which is what I said: second salary + additional tax from 2 salaries combined resulting in a higher overall bracket - smaller tax deductions - daycare $0. Two, of the four variables in this equation are tax related because of the first variable (second salary).
Yes, but the situation could also work the opposite way. For example, there are a number of tax credits and deductions that are available only if the spouse works, especially child care credits or FSAs for dependent care. Depending on the spouse's income, this could be enough to offset the extra tax bracket effects.
Your reasoning is only valid in a limited number of scenarios, such as where the spouse's earning potential is REALLY low and the overall family income is high enough to already cut off the possibility of some child credits, or in areas with exorbitant childcare costs. In most cases where the spouse is capable of making any decent income, the family will probably end up with more money overall -- the question then mostly comes down to how much that second salary is reduced by childcare costs. I'm not saying your scenario doesn't exist, but for most families the tax benefits go both ways... So the decision is mostly about actual amount of second salary vs. child care cost. Taxes and brackets are only relevant to a much smaller number of families in this.
I always thought this rule was invented to make it easier for typesetters to distinguish the end of a sentence from abbreviations. Were the two spaces ever actually typeset?
No, not quite.
Early typesetting practices up to the late 1600s or so varied considerably according to local style. By the early 1700s, the standard practice emerged that larger spaces were placed after punctuation by typesetters to mark the ends of important parts of a sentence (which would allow readers to parse the meaning easier). The standard ultimately adopted in much of Europe was putting an M-quad (a square spacer the size of an 'M' in the font) after a period, an N-quad (the size of 'N', about half an M-quad) after lesser punctuation like commas, and a normal spacer (now called a "thick space") after words, which traditionally was about 1/3 of an em.
Note that these were the way a typesetter would begin to space a line, but most typeset matter was justified, which means various spaces in the lines had to be modified and squeezed or stretched, which might in some cases involve adding extra spacers in places. (The rules for which spaces to add width to were often quite complex, for those typesetters who wanted to obtain an optimal result.)
When typewriters first came into use in the late 1800s, people tried to imitate proper typesetting as best as they could by using 2 or 3 spaces after periods, and sometimes 2 spaces after other punctuation. Ultimately, the standard typesetting rule of 2 spaces after a period came about as an approximation to proper typeset text in the late 1800s.
In the period of roughly the 1920s to 1960s, a little war among publishers to decrease publication costs in books led to poorer cheap materials being used, as well as anything to minimize costs, so interword spaces got squeezed to 1/4-em in many houses, margins got smaller, line spacing decreased, etc. Obviously the large sentence spaces now looked out of place, so they were also reduced gradually to an N-quad and then just a standard interword space. (This was previously known as "French spacing" -- not as anything to do with the Germans, as asserted by the GP. It was practiced in the 19th century in a small number of French publishing houses.)
Meanwhile, typists were (and are) some of the few to attempt to retain the old larger sentence spaces that imitated the way things had been done in typesetting in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Germany had the last laugh... German has always been "one space after terminal punctuation in sentences", and since 2009 or so, that's been retcon'ed into English as well: "Ha! Take that English speakers!
Umm, no.
Making the sentence space the same size as the interword space is called "French spacing," which was a minority practice that was originally only common in some French publishing houses in the late 18th and 19th centuries. I also have no idea what 2009 has to do with it, since French spacing became the norm in most Americans and Western European publishing houses around 1950 or so.
As far back as I can remember, $20 has been the denomination dispensed by nearly all ATMs. A handful of ATMs might mix in $50 or $100 bills for larger total amounts
Yes, $20 is the standard in the US, which is fairly reasonable. I'm almost never embarrassed having to pay with a $20 bill, even for something that costs a dollar or two.
In Europe, though, you'll often get 50 Euro notes if you withdraw anything more than that at an ATM. It's very annoying, because some countries in Europe are much more up-tight about making change than the US. (I'm looking at you, Germany!) Seriously -- there's a truly insane "we don't want to make change" culture in many places in Europe. And I'm not talking about something outlandish, like trying to pay for a 2 Euro bill with a 50. I'm talking about trying to pay for a 35 or 40 Euro bill with a 50.
When I've spent extended time in Europe, I've often strategically planned my expenditures to figure out ways to get rid of the darn 50s the ATMs spit out without getting dirty looks or weird objections from random people. Why there's such a disconnect between the standard bills the ATMs give out and what most businesses are willing to accept, I just don't know.
That is NOT a description of what's happening here. It's not a virally spreading idea.
Sorry to interject in your debate with this other user, but yeah -- actually, this IS a virally spreading INACCURATE idea, i.e., that Wikipedia is "almost as good as" or "just as good as" or (in some sources) "even better than" Britannica in terms of accuracy, on the basis of this particular study.
I made mention of 2005 study. And I know that not because of a chain of repeats, but because I remember the report from the time, and looked it up.
A meme is a meme if it is a meme. Whether or not you personally have learned of this information through subsequent viral spreading is irrelevant to whether it is, in fact, a meme or not. If you happen to post a link to Rick Astley's song as a joke being completely unaware of the phenomenon of Rickrolling, you can't just say, "Oh, it isn't a meme, because I didn't know it was a meme."
And regardless of how you learned of the information, the fact is that you are reporting it and its conclusions inaccurately, which also happen to correspond with the way the (false) meme tends to report it.
It is NOT a meme. And you not agreeing with the study doesn't make it a meme, regardless of whether your skepticism is valid or not.
Actually, YOU are the one who is NOT agreeing with the study. Your opponent in this debate has acknowledged multiple times what the study actually DOES say, i.e., a limited, non-randomly selected, non-peer reviewed, small sample of mostly somewhat obscure science articles (which tend to be some of Wikipedia's most accurate, since they are non-controversial, tend to be written by geeks who were the predominant editors in Wikipedia's early days, etc.) were not significantly worse than Britannica in terms of reliabililty, according to some measures of errors that have been acknowledged in many subsequent peer-reviewed expert studies of this issue to be somewhat problematic. There was no intention in the authors of your study to be exhaustive in comparing the two encyclopedias, nor even to have a random sample. There was no statistical analysis of the results. Even calling it a "study" is a bit of a stretch, since it implies a sort of methodological rigor which wasn't present.
Neither I nor your opponent in this discussion are claiming that this "study" meant nothing -- only that it's not reasonable to conclude a general statement that "Wikipedia is about as good as Britannica" from it. If I went to some local bookstore, found a particular area of local authors the store was strongly know for, and compared their inventory to Amazon's offerings, it would not follow that simply having one strong section of the store meant that this local bookstore was "as good as Amazon" in general. I know this analogy is not precise, but it's the same type of comparison -- saying, "X is as good as Y" when talking about something as broad as an encyclopedia requires a detailed comparison of the entirety, or at least a random sampling of the contents. Neither was done here -- and thus your reported conclusion is invalid.
That simply is not a reasonable conclusion from the data at hand -- and the fact that the internet thinks that was the conclusion when it wasn't is what makes it a meme, regardless of how you came upon your particular misleading interpretation of it.
At some point, you may wish to actually read the study you're talking about, to see what it does actually prove. You could even learn what the original authors actually said, such as where they noted reviewers' significant comments on style, organization, etc. which greatly decreased readability in the articles on Wikipedia, even if they didn't contain as many factual errors as people at the time might have thought.
And, better yet, maybe you should take some time to look at some of the dozen or so (maybe more) subsequent studies of accuracy and comparisons that h
The wheelchair record is actually only about 80 minutes total. So they've already beat that 2 hour record by over 40 minutes... and that's on a standard marathon course, not one that's downhill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J..., aka Giovanni Caboto;( c. 1450 â" c. 1499) was an Italian navigator and explorer )
Yes, and GP is also wrong about Columbus being a "Spaniard." His journey may have been financed by Spain but he was from Genoa (in modern-day ITALY).
Both Cabot and Columbus were Italians.
Ha! Awesome. Thanks for that -- you made my day. But in all seriousness, I bet that would sell... after all, it works for the evening news.
Yes, they are measuring by weight; I don't think I implied otherwise. In fact, I stressed its importance. I merely said that when they state a recipe, often it is given in terms of percentages, which are all based on weighing ingredients.
So what is the difference exactly, except that you learned a set of numbers in Fahrenheit trough your experience, and we learned another set in Celsius trough ours?
There's no difference -- it's all arbitrary. I think that's what the GP's point was. The Fahrenheit range of 0-100 is roughly the range where it's possible for humans to actually be outside for a while and be okay. (I said "roughly" -- I know it isn't precise.) 0 C is also a meaningful number for weather purposes, etc., but 100 C is not.
All the scales are arbitrary, and they all have advantages and disadvantages.
Personally, other than noting roughly where 0 C is for the purposes of knowing whether I'm likely to see rain vs. sleet vs. snow, I find the whole concept of temperature used for weather forecasts nearly useless. Between wind chill, effects of humidity, effects of cloud cover vs. full sun, etc., temperature is just one factor that really isn't all that relevant -- since, to our bodies, what matters is rate of heat transfer, not temperature.
When I've lived in a relatively warm, humid climate, for example, the number I MOST cared about in weather forecasts was dewpoint. If the dew point is above 70 F, I'm going to be perspiring like crazy outside, no matter whether the temperature is 72 F or 95 F. If the dewpoint is 55 F, it's possible for me to be comfortable even if it's in the 80s or even higher. In other situations, it might be some other factor that's most important.
Point is -- the temperature scales are all based on arbitrary references points, so who cares? The only reason to argue is just so we all work on the same standard. And the main reason to argue for Celsius over Fahrenheit is that most of the world has adopted Celsius, not because it has some wonderful features that make it superior. (I'm all in favor of dropping Fahrenheit, by the way -- even though I grew up with it. It doesn't matter to me. But, on the other hand, there's also no real good "scientific" reason to make the switch other than ensuring consistency internationally.)
1 cup of flour is trivially measured by volume: Just grab the "1 cup" cup from your set of measuring cups, scoop up flour from your storage container, level. You're done.
This is indeed easyâ"but very inaccurate: it can lead to the measurement being out by as much as 30%.
MOD PARENT UP.
Professional bakers actually don't use volumes or weights when they state a recipe -- they use something called "baker's percentage," where 100% = the weight of the flour. Not the volume; the weight. All other ingredients are stated in proportions relative to the weight of the flour, making it easy to scale a recipe up or down. This is because bakers actually realize that weighing is so important because of the compressibility of flour.
If you're making bread, for example, an error of 30% in measurement of flour is the difference roughly between the stickiest wettest possible dough you could work with (producing a very crusty bread with large holes, like pizza or ciabatta dough) and a dry dough that is so tough that it's barely kneadable by hand (like bagel dough). Almost all of the varieties of bread fall in that range of about 30% error in flour measurement.
Baking requires somewhat more precision than other cooking, because once you throw the batter/dough in the oven, you can't make modifications. It's not like making soup where you can just taste it while cooking and say, "oops! I forgot the salt!" and just add some and everything will turn out okay.
If you're baking bread or a cake and say "1 cup of flour," you might as well just say "Add enough flour to get the 'right' consistency... whatever that is... you just have to know." Because with volume measurements of flour, it's REALLY hard to get consistent results unless you're skilled in recognizing what the final batter/dough is supposed to be like already.
Until Starbucks came along, though, we really didn't even pretend very hard to have good coffee.
That's not strictly true, at least not in some big cities and college towns that had decent coffee shops pre-Starbucks. It was really quite sad where I was living at the time when Starbucks came to town and basically started taking over spots that used to be indy coffee shops. Sure, not all of them were great, but they were generally better than Starbucks... Which frankly is terrible. Even if they had decent coffee, I wouldn't prefer to go there because of the pretentious BS of it all. No, I don't find it sophisticated or even cute to call sizes by some bizarre names, no I don't want to be asked 20 questions including my name just to order a plain standard drink. In Italy, you can find better coffee on any block at the local bar, and they don't need any of this crap "grande white chocolate mocha 1% with whip" to serve up something decent. You don't need white chocolate syrup and whipped cream to make a decent espresso taste good. I'd personally rather get a coffee from Dunkin Donuts than Captain Ahab's mate's joint.
The cost of launching from earth is much higher than from space because we have to break Earth's gravity and pass through the atmosphere.
While this is certainly true, I don't think your general conclusions follow from this fact.
Build the next space station already. Build it big and ship it people and supplies and do it there.
The biggest expense is getting things into orbit, as you point out. It requires a certain amount of fuel for every pound or kilo of stuff we want to lift up there.
Given that space isn't exactly filled with random supplies (food, fuel for other missions, etc.) floating around, most of it is still going to have to come from Earth. So, exactly HOW is it cheaper to launch a mission from space if we still need to lift all the supplies from Earth anyway? Eventually, if we start being able to ferry people between a space station, the moon, other places, etc., we wouldn't have to lift the PEOPLE up again (if they're willing to basically live in space), but it's going to take quite a while until we can actually have a mechanism for deriving most of the other necessary SUPPLIES for missions from space... which will just have to be lifted up off the ground from Earth anyway.
So, what you're proposing is rather than flying ONE "high cost" mission up through the Earth's atmosphere, we should spend years or decades launching dozens (hundreds?) of times that material up through the atmosphere to build a giant space station or moonbase or whatever. And meanwhile, we have to keep sending up supplies continuously for any people there.
How exactly is that supposed to save costs??... except perhaps in a REALLY long term, assuming that space travel becomes an established thing in the next few decades (which is far from determined... maybe it'll catch on a few decades, maybe in a century or more).
If we cat accomplish that, we don belong in space.
From my perspective, this whole "Mission to Mars" idea is mostly a kind of propaganda move, though not in a negative sense. As other posters have said, why else bother sending humans? Robots can do just fine. But, just like the moon missions in the 1960s and 70s, this is supposed to reignite the public interest in space travel, which will make it easier to raise the kind of funds necessary to build your space station or whatever.
The first missions will be sort of "proof of concept." You're proposing investing in a giant infrastruction that will likely cost hundreds or even thousands of times the cost of one mission just to save some phantom money on not having to lift things out of Earth's gravity to launch a mission to Mars (when we had to lift most of that from Earth anyway to the space station or whatever).
I'm not saying your idea is bad in the (VERY) long term. But right now the psychological effect of launching one slightly more expensive mission that achieves a bigger goal may provide a spark. And that spark may get more people interested in the much larger amount of funding necessary to create the incredibly expensive infrastructure which you argue should make things cheaper.
Somebody from the 1950's given Siri to play with for a few hours would be quite impressed.
By that standard, all your categories should get an A. Some random dude from the 50s driving a modern car, for example, would probably be quite impressed -- from gas mileage, to airbags, to antilock brakes, to the smooth ride and incredible "quiet" possible in a luxury sedan compared to the 50s. It may not be flying, but it'd be darn impressive to many.
But I thought your standard was about predictions, not about what would seem impressive to average Joe.
No, it's not human-level, but human level would be "A".
Yes, human level would be an A. And what I'm saying is that compared to that we might barely be squeaking by with a C, and that's being really generous. Siri is really quite good at accomplishing very specific tasks it has been programmed directly to do. " Intelligence" implies an adaptability, a creativity, an ability to process abstract concepts and learn, etc. Siri has absolutely NONE of that. It's somewhat better at pattern matching than a toaster which automatically detects when your bread is likely toasted. I'm NOT saying Siri isn't impressive: I'm saying it displays little in coming with what we generally call "intelligence," including what the 50s guys used that term to mean.
Also keep in mind that back then they considered winning at chess a strong test of AI.
It was considered a good test at that time because the kind of hardware necessary for a sort of "brute force" solution to chess was inconceivable. But that's effectively how Deep Blue won: through exhaustive searches of moves far in advance of what human players do and pattern matching with an enormous database of just about any game that has been played on record. Humans simply aren't capable of that sort of exhaustive data analysis on that scale, and yet our brains still allow us to be pretty good at chess -- again because of abilities such as creativity, ability to form abstractions and inferences connected to them, efficient learning rather than exhaustive search, etc.
As I said in my first reply to you, most of our "progress" toward AI has been made possible by the computer and electronics revolution you mentioned, which was not predicted in the 50s. So, we've passed a few "tests" by simulating "intelligence" through radically different methods from what the 50s thought possible. That's why I'd say we might squeak by with a C. But once anyone who actually made these predictions from the 50s tried to probe the "intelligence" of modern devices (as in Turing's Shakespeare example), they'd immediately be able to see we've made precious few advances other than faster computers and bigger databases (and admittedly better searching and matching algorithms).
Artificial Intelligence: B-
Really, B- for AI? I'd give it a C-minus at best, and that's mostly due to the unexpected increases in computer technology and speed, and also due to data aggregation and connections on the internet (which were largely not predicted). If you grade AI and curve it based on 1950s predictions about the state of electronics, computers, etc., I'd say you're looking at a solid D-minus.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm thrilled with the kinds of things computers can do and the limited "intelligent" functionality we have developed, particularly just in the past few years. But are we really anywhere near the predictions of "Sputnik era" (as you put it)?
My baseline has always been the original Turing test description by Turing himself (from 1950, close to Sputnik era), where he describes a skilled "interrogator" comparing responses between an intelligent human and an AI, trying to sort out which one is human. In Turing's example, the "interrogator" has to resort to a complex discussion of the appropriateness of potential word substitutions in Shakespearean sonnets, including layers of subtlety of meaning -- because the AI is apparently so fluent in the English language that it could converse on that that level with no errors.
Turing predicted that, by the year 2000, we'd have AI that could fool 30% of intelligent interrogators on such a test with machines that would have 100 MB of storage capacity.
Instead, 14 years after Turing's prediction, we have people claiming to have "passed" his test by having a chatbot pretend to be an annoying, nonresponsive teenager who doesn't even really speak the language of the interrogator. Debating the scansion and subtle meanings of Shakespeare's poetry, indeed...
But don't take this one prediction as an example. Take a look at an actual study on AI predictions and their accuracy. Heck, that article starts with discussion of the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, where they proposed that a team of 10 guys working for only 2 months over the summer could basically solve the basic problems of AI like comprehending natural language, forming abstract concepts, and becoming self-learning.
That's definitely "Sputnik era," and that's what the top researchers thought at that point. It didn't happen in two months or even two decades, and only in the past decade have we really started getting close to actual natural language voice recognition, let alone understanding or comprehension.
Yes, through terms like "neural networks" and "deep learning," AI researchers have convinced us that something LIKE human "intelligence" is involved in their algorithms, but mostly we just have computers that can do computations faster and draw on larger databases to make better guesses. We're just even beginning to do basic things like have computers be able to recognize language constructs to detect what the antecedent of a pronoun is -- and even that is in its infancy and only tends to work in circumscribed cases. With that sort of benchmark now, it's safe to say we've made precious little progress in having AI actually "understand" or "create" abstract concepts, when it often can't even figure out how to parse a paragraph in a way that connects sentences together. (I'm focusing on language understanding issues because Turing did, but there are other similar limitations for AI applications in other areas.)
Again, I do NOT wish to downplay the significant advances we have made. And I applaud AI researchers for the awesome things we are starting to see glimpses of in recent technology.
But to claim we are anywhere even on the spectrum of what people thought in the 1950s? No way.
Most liberal arts courses are driven by writing essays where you defend a thesis. The actual validity of your thesis didn't matter so long as you are able to find several points to defend it.
Then you had poor teachers, unless you were taking only courses in the art of persuasive writing (or, as you call it, rhetoric). If your other professors let you get away with this, then shame on them.
As someone who has taught university courses (and who has discussed pedagogy and writing with a lot of faculty in both sciences and humanities), I do see the value in constructing a thesis with supporting evidence as a first step to writing an expository essay. But at some level you do need to question the validity of the argument and the significance of the evidence -- if your professors never required this level of rigor, they did you a disservice.
On the other hand, as someone who has read thousands of student essays over the years, let me also say that faculty are often overwhelmed with simply trying to get students to put together some semblance of a logical chain of an argument in the first place, let alone requiring the rigor you're talking about. That's not to excuse what you describe, but a significant percentage of university-level students have such poor writing skills now that they can get nowhere near the standard you suggest. And professors are often just happy to have a kid submit something that "sounds like an argument," even if it isn't fully rigorous, because it's better than much of the crap that has to be read and graded.
What I commonly saw was students starting with a conclusion and working backwards to find evidence which best fit the chosen thesis. [snip] In a science course this would be called cherry picking the data, in liberal arts, it's called another day.
Well, it's also called "confirmation bias," which is problem both in scientific experimental design and in humanities arguments. Part of the problem is that humanities issues are often not quantifiable in the same way that science ones are, and even if you try to quantify them, you end up with so many interacting variables that statistical analysis can be pretty meaningless. So, in some ways it's related to the fundamental nature of the content of the field -- which still doesn't excuse poor reasoning.
My science course work on the other hand is where critical thinking was encouraged.
Okay, let's see what that entailed....
I was taught how to write logical proofs, I was taught how to represent both everyday situations, and also computational operations in the form of atomic sentences.
That sounds like a course in "formal logic," which is often taught in philosophy departments, not science courses. And as for "represent... everyday situations," I have met many, many science undergraduates who have very little perspective on applying their methods to "real-world problems," unfortunately.
I was taught the dangers of conflating correlation with causation, I was taught the dangers of Type I and Type II errors.
This is basic statistics, which should be a required course for everyone, no matter what major. (Frankly, I think it should be required to graduate high school.)
I was taught about common logical fallacies.
This is traditionally the purview of a rhetoric course in English or the logic courses in the philosophy department, though given your background in Cognitive Systems, I assume you might learn about this in the course of various cognitive biases.
I was taught how to evaluate information critically, I was taught the importance of internal consistency, I was taught how critically examine evidence.
Now we're finally getting to "critical thinking," and this should be important in any rigorous college course, regardless of discipline.
The problem is t
If an English Lit grad has decent programming skills, I would be very confused why the person would get the degree in English Lit in the first place???
Why does anyone get an English Lit degree? (I know some other people here might ask that question seriously.) Other than those who go on to grad school and then become professors of English literature, or maybe high school teachers, why would anyone major in English Lit? (And even if you wanted to become a high school teacher, do you really need a full-blown degree in English Lit? It's not like you're going to be debating the complex structure of Joyce's Ulysses or doing a radical post-structuralist reading of the colonialist implications of Melville's obscure poetic works with your average high-school class. You're going to be teaching them to write in complete sentences and maybe reading a novel or two if you're lucky.)
So why DO people major in English Lit? Maybe because some of them still believe in the classical idea of "liberal arts" as a gateway to the "critical thinking" skills you call a "buzzword." Sorry, but "critical thinking" is NOT a buzzword if you look at older -- often more rigorous -- liberal arts curricula. Those were the kind of systems where you worked your way through the original geometric proofs of Euclid, various scientific essays up to at least the 19th century, as well as reading novels and interpreting poems. The point was that you were exposed to a LOT of different areas of thinking, and by trying to understand, confront, and analyze these disparate ideas, you'd develop "critical thinking" skills that could be broadly applied to many areas.
Until the past few decades, it was quite common for English Lit., History majors, etc. to make up a large part of the business workforce, partly because of exposure to a lot of disparate ideas in college. Now, everybody just gets generic "business degrees," and many English Lit. departments have partly transitioned into pop culture sociology departments (though certainly not all).
Or even the person can do programming, I would not want to maintain the code the person wrote because the code may not be well formed.
That's why I'd never hire somebody unless I could look at examples of what they'd actually done. A degree tells me next to nothing, by itself. But I see no inherent reason why an intelligent, motivated, and organized English Lit. major who worked as a programmer for a number of years couldn't pick up quite a bit of high-level coding skills, whereas some code monkey with a CS degree from nowhere might just be at the "top of his game" when he graduates and never go further from there.
Context is everything. People make various life choices. I see no reason to care why a person made the choice of an English Lit. degree unless that person is relatively fresh out of college. After a couple years, I care about what they've been doing lately, and how good is their work now. Have they shown significant growth and adaptability? I've also met way too many people with a degree in X who took advanced courses in X, but basically forgot everything from those courses within a few years because they never really had to use that material. Hiring them 10 years after degree expecting them to be able to do high-level work based on 10-year-old coursework is insane.
While I'd tend toward Computer Science (since that is what my degree is in) I'd FIRST want to see what they've done already.
Exactly. I've met plenty of people with degrees in X who have little practical experience when they're fresh out of school. They may have some sort of vague theoretical sense of the field, but even that can be very nebulous, since real understanding without doing is rather difficult.
It's not that you cannot get a programming job with a Lit degree. It is that the other candidates will probably have more DEMONSTRATED skills in the programming field.
THIS. Especially if you're more than 5 years out of school, I'd barely give a crap what your major was unless you've actually been working in that area.
That's one of a number of things I'd add to the college major:
(1) How long since degree?
(2) What experience since degree?
(3) Is degree from a known school with unusual demographics?
(4) How did student perform in degree?
For an extreme case, I'd be much more likely to hire a guy with a English Lit. degree from MIT (yes, they do have them) who had a perfect GPA and has done serious high-level work in programming since graduation, than a guy fresh out of school with a C-average in CS from Upper Bucksnort State Teachers College of Nowhere.
And, by the way, I'm NOT saying one should automatically look for MIT or Ivy League or whatever degrees over others, but those schools do have a targeted demographic for admissions that tends to consist of very talented people to begin with. If they did well there, regardless of major, it's something to perhaps pay attention to. (On the other hand, if I'm looking at someone with an A average from Duke vs. C average from an Ivy, probably go with the Duke guy.) Also, tech-heavy schools tend to have more rigorous math/science requirements for all students, so even a person with a Lit or History degree from such schools may have a stronger tech background than a tech major, say, from a much lower-ranked liberal arts school or something.
To me, a college degree is mostly a certificate saying, "I can follow instructions and am responsible enough to pass courses." Beyond that, the details matter a lot more than the major. A smart, motivated person can figure out how to do things on the job. A guy with a CS degree who barely scaped by at a crappy school may have already hit his cognitive limit and may be a terrible hire.
This is one of the reasons why applicant screening should never be based on some stupid credential that isn't equal everywhere. With experienced hires who both have real work experience but one has a degree in another field, I'm often actually more intrigued -- all other things being equal -- by the guy with the weird degree who switched into the field and was successful, because that guy has shown competence in multiple areas and adaptability. Not saying I'd hire on this basis, but if I wanted someone who could actually think and be useful in a variety of ways in a job, I might give that resume a second look.
Incorrect. (3) is 100% unaffected by speed, as many already know.
False.
It is a factor of shitty drivers braking for no reason, causing motorists behind them to brake for no reason in a chain reaction. I only apply my brakes on the highway if I actually need to decelerate; 99% of the time someone in front of me is braking, I can just let off the accelerator and decelerate to their speed (because I never follow very closely)
The last clause of your sentence there is critical. Notice in my post I mentioned for the SAME TRAFFIC DENSITY. People in general follow too closely. Therefore, if they are all going at 65 mph and someone has to brake, a chain reaction will follow.
But, in the same traffic density (i.e., the same spacing of cars), the same cars driving 45 mph might have adequate time to maneuver without heavy braking.
You're correct that the problem is following distance, and if we could get everyone to maintain that, you could all drive at 90 mph. But that's simply not feasible at rush hour in many places, because too many cars keep joining the traffic, and people don't adequately expand the following distance to compensate.
So, if there's going to be a high traffic density no matter what, the only efficient way to solve the problem is to lower the average travelling speed. That's something that could at least be enforceable. Trying to enforce adequate following distance (except for really egregious behavior) would be nearly impossible.
Actually, when people say googling, they really do mean "look it up using Google." They don't mean "look it up using DuckDuckGo"
No, they mean "look it up using an internet search engine." I've seen plenty of more clueless folks who just happen to have Yahoo or Bing or whatever as their default search page that opens in their browser, and they still use the word "google," rather than a cumbersome phrase like "use an internet search engine to find..."
or "look it up using Yelp" or "look it up using Ask.com" or "look it up using Wolfram Alpha."
You're right, they don't mean those things, because those are specialized search, not a generic web search, which is what "googling" means.
When Google no longer dominates generic web search (as opposed to specialized internet search like Yelp) and there are other comparable players, only then would there be a case for genericization.
There are other "comparable players," at least ones that work well enough for many people, like Bing and Yahoo. Look up the stats -- Google may have the majority of searches, but it's only something like 2/3 of general internet searches. The other 1/3 is done on other search engines.
So, 1/3 of people are somehow managing to do general internet searching without Google. And many of them still use the word "googling" rather than "perform a general internet search" for what they are doing.
19 footnotes for a 24 page opinion, including one so long that spills over from one page onto the next.
You obviously haven't read many legal opinions. Such footnote practice is commonplace.
Ouch! Detracts from what is otherwise a great read
Uh, you do realize that footnotes are optional to read, right? That's why they are footnotes, as opposed to part of the main body of text.
I've never understood people who complain about excessive footnotes -- either they're so ADD that they get distracted by the numbers and the text so they can't stay focused, or they're so OCD that they can't resist reading words at the bottom of the page, even if they are tangential to the argument.
Don't get me wrong: footnotes in legal arguments are often important. But they're not generally essential to the main argument. That's the point. If you just want to read the core argument, read the text, and don't read the footnotes. (If the text is not understandable without the footnotes, that's a different writing problem, which should be criticized.)
Complaining about footnotes from distracted readers who can't focus on the text is what leads to monstrosities like endnotes -- which basically makes the notes unusable. (Or even worse, the current publishing trend where endnotes don't even have numerical references on the page -- so you have to match up the endnote with some phrase of text to find out there even is supposed to be a note there.)
If you don't want to read footnotes, just don't. I certainly don't if I'm just reading the main argument. But there's often a reason why they can be helpful to SOME readers, and forcing writers to either turn them into invisible endnotes or incorporate them into the text just makes things worse.
European researchers work at MIT and nobody beats an eye,
Asian researchers work at MIT and everybody looses their mind.
Uh, who is "everybody"? Certainly not MIT itself. Stats on their international students show that about 50% of all international students and scholars come from Asia, much more than Europe.
MIT cares about "diversity" numbers, sure, but they already can claim that they are a "minority majority" campus with over 51% of undergraduates from minorities. So, they'd really have no reason to further inflate the Asian numbers... unless, well, the Asian students were actually more qualified.
Which means Asian researchers are probably working at MIT because MIT actually is looking for highly qualified people -- and thus, MIT hired/admitted them.
The only people "losing their mind" are racists, who clearly aren't "everybody." (If they were, MIT wouldn't have such high numbers of minorities in the first place.)
And why are we discussing this anyway? TFA has a photo of the lab team, which is certainly not all Asian in composition.