Peer review, which does not protect against purposeful fraudulent papers, does keep a reign on the problem.
I love ironic mistakes with homophones. In some small disciplines, which are controlled by a small number of people in a particular paradigm, this might actually be a true statement.
More to the point, the way the world is going, a kid born today as a very high chance of leading a life of debt, unemployment, poverty, starvation, war, and whatever else the future has in store, before dying.
I used to think this way too. But I think the one thing that stands out as irrational in your argument is "today." What is so bad about "today"?
Go back a hundred years, and the chances of a lot of these things was significantly higher. Go back a few centuries, and most kids died in early childhood, many women died in childbirth, and most people who managed to get to adulthood faced much, much more harsh conditions than the vast majority of people would in an industrialized country would today.
So, if you want to have a pessimistic worldview, and you think that's a good reason not to have a child, that's fine. But just be honest with yourself and admit that -- by that logic -- the human race should have become extinct a long, long time ago. It has to do with your philosophy and beliefs, not some terrible conditions that are supposedly so much worse "today."
As far as we're concerned, my s.o. and I, the best time for fatherhood is never, as we reckon giving life today isn't really a gift.
Life is neither a "gift," nor is it some sort of "punishment." It is simply life. Frankly, while I myself had thought the same thoughts in the past, I have since realized the hypocrisy that often comes with it. If so many things are so terrible in the world today, why not commit suicide right now? If life is "suffering" and having a child is only to bring a new life into a world of suffering, why do you yourself continue to exist?
And if your answer is simply, "Well, things are getting worse... so I'm still okay, but my child would have a terrible future," then please see above and read some history books. Miraculously, millions of those people in the past didn't commit suicide either, despite the horrendous suffering in their world -- and they even chose to bring more kids into it.
Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with people who decide not to have kids for whatever reason. I think fewer people probably should have them, since it's a significant responsibility, and people should think about it seriously. But try to be honest with yourself about what your motivations are.
(Otherwise, you end up going down the bizarre irrational path of philosophers, like David Benatar who advocate that the human race commit collective suicide (see Benatar's book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence), but the philosophers themselves -- despite horrendous suffering in the world, and their likely contribution to more of it every day -- somehow decide that they should themselves continue stay alive. Life really must not seem that bad to most people who make this argument, if they're still living in this world.)
Either the janitorial stuff is contracted out, or it would be if this were made law. If I were CEO, and was faced with a cap, I'd try to see how many low-paying jobs I could outsource.
Yours is the most insightful comment in this whole section of the thread. Every time I see this proposal about tying executive salaries to the lowest-wage workers in a company (or even median salaries or whatever), I'm amazed at how many people don't consider the unintended consequences.
Obviously the idea is that executives should try to bring up the standard of living of all the people who work for their company -- but you're absolutely right, CEOs will just outsource the lowest-paid workers.
I can see some of the responses -- "Well, in that case, tie it to median household income in the community, or city, or state where the company is located. CEOs will have to work to raise the standard of living in their community to profit more." And that won't work either: you'll just get big companies moving all their jobs to cities or states with the highest median salaries.
No matter how this sort of regulation tries to "fix" things, there will be loads of repercussions as CEOs and executives try to find ways to "game the system" and still maximize profits.
Personally, I still think something needs to be done. But a lot of these proposals are rather naive.
It cost me something like $7/mo flat-fee, and I could even have the one I used generate and mail certified checks if needed
Woah... I can name a half dozen banks off the top of my head where you could get all that service for free. Most credit unions I know also give you free checking if you carry a reasonably large balance (like at least a few thousand dollars).
I guess I really don't understand what makes people want to use, say, BoA or Chase, when it seems that their sole purpose is to rake as much money out of you as possible.
In my entire life, I've probably only paid maybe $25 in banking fees, and that was almost all due to a couple foreign checks and one overdraw payment when something got crossed in the mail. I'd run screaming from any place that charged me a "flat $7/month fee." And assuming you have reasonable balances, you wouldn't pay that at either BoA or Chase.
Just because you're not writing the bank a check doesn't mean you're not paying fees. The bank charges 2-4% on every credit card purchase you make. You can imagine that "the store pays it," but the store is paying it with money they got from you.
Very few stores these days charge different prices for "cash" vs. "credit." Sure, you might see some coffee shops or convenience stores say, "Minimum $10 charge for credit cards" or whatever, and gas stations occasionally do it, but not most other places.
So, you can imagine that "I'm not paying the fee by not using a credit card," but you are anyway. Everyone who shops at stores subsidizes those credit card users. So you might as well get a rewards card and get 1% or 2% cash back or whatever, and actually collect some of that fee for yourself. Just pay off the card every month. (I've literally made thousands of dollars doing this.)
The only place I don't use credit cards is small independent shops like independent coffee shops or whatever, because I figure I'll save them the bank fees. Everywhere else -- well, their prices are set, so I might as well take a cut where I can get it. If more stores offered "cash only" reduced prices, I might reconsider my policy.
At the beginning of the 1500s, when a book about the New World could be produced, a blank book made 80 or so years earlier was hardly unimaginable.
"Unimaginable"? No. Very unlikely? Yes.
The production of blank paper books for various purposes in recent centuries is common enough, but producing a blank vellum book only to sit on a shelf for nearly a century without being used would be quite unusual. Do you realize how many animals had to be killed to make this book, not to mention effort gone into scraping, stretching, treating, and otherwise processing each page of skin? This was a very expensive and wasteful endeavor... making such a book to sit on a shelf for 80 years in the 1400s would be quite unusual.
...yet another researcher reports their findings that one of the Rorschach inkblots may definitely be a picture of a face...
While this has been modded "funny," it really should be marked "insightful."
For a century now, there have been numerous people -- including serious researchers -- who have chased after crazy theories regarding this manuscript. This particular study seems to involve some people who see a few blotches of ink on a couple of the illustrations of plants (among many weird drawings in the manuscript, it must be said), and decide that these must be New World plants.
This follows in the general pattern of Voynich research theories: (1) Fixate on a couple weird features, (2) find some odd connection to something you think you recognize, and most crucially, (3) ignore all evidence that contradicts your theory.
There are numerous elements of this manuscript that date it to the early 1400s, i.e., before Columbus visited the New World -- it's not just radiocarbon dating. It's the types of calligraphy used, the style of pen usage, the artistic qualities of the drawings, etc. They all are consistent with a date before significant numbers of Europeans happened to be in Mexico. And it's really not enough to say, "Well, it could have been someone attempting to recreate an older style of writing and drawing." I can explain this further with what we know about history, but let's just say for now that this kind of level of detail to try to "fake" a 15th century style would be unheard of... it's far beyond just throwing in something a little anachronistic.
I'd be happy to read something new and interesting about this manuscript. But this is just yet another of the hundreds of wacko theories that have come out over the decades.
It's much, much more likely that these researchers are just "seeing what they want to see" in a handful of drawings, and ignoring detailed evidence from hundreds of other pages of the manuscript.
Umm, no. Vellum was sometimes reused once, and it was common enough to scrape off, wash, and reuse stuff that there is a term for it, palimpsest. While there are quite rare examples of a "double palimpsest" (reused twice), it certainly was not at all the norm to use vellum "over and over."
So, unless we have some clear evidence that it has not been reused, the manuscript text may well be written on vellum significantly older than itself.
No, I don't really buy that theory either. As someone who has actually spent quite a bit of time working with early manuscripts and has even played a hand at deciphering previous "scraped off" texts in palimpsests, I can tell you that the vast majority of palimpsests have lots of tell-tale signs, most notably places where the previous writing is actually visible. It's in fact so common for previous writing to be visible (particularly as the manuscript ages further), that many writings are now only known to survive in copies that were actually scraped off, but which are still visible today, with or without technological intervention. (There were also standard practices, which weren't followed in all manuscripts, like reusing leaves in a perpendicular fashion to their original orientation, also generally evidence of heavy scraping and/or chemicals used to wash it, etc.)
For an entire manuscript to be scraped off and reused without some obvious clues that the vellum had all been repurposed would be quite extraordinary... and would have required a great deal of effort to hide any imperfections. And since this manuscript has been examined by so many scholars over the years, and I don't think anyone has found significant evidence of such reuse, I think the burden of proof is on your theory to prove that it was reused.
The blog author is... pretty much clueless. Nobody but him is confusing Bitcoins and Amazon Coins, or referring to the latter as crypto-currency.
Indeed. This is all nonsense. The summary says: "But Amazon Coins' existence could alienate the same demographic that made Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies such a hit." Yeah... and?
The people who use Amazon coins are generally tethered to a locked-down Amazon product (like a Kindle) and want the convenience of buying something for $1 without having to run through a credit card authorization or whatever every time. (Plus, Amazon apparently gives out bonus "coins" in various scenarios.)
Cryptocurrency users want to... well, use a currency to make financial transactions in the real world (not fake internal Amazon transactions). And some of the biggest advocates are people who want to avoid tracking and such. I sincerely doubt they are going to confuse Bitcoin with an internal bookkeeping token on a locked-down device or something. The fact that Amazon is now offering it to other people who want to buy crap from their app store doesn't change the idea very much.
No one's being "alienated." The target audiences were and still are two mostly mutually exclusive sets of people. At a minimum, no one except the people who wrote and promoted this story seem confused about how these are for two completely different types of transactions.
All this stupid "Don't eat eggs or fat" bullshit is literally killing us.
Yeah, the eggs this is particularly ridiculous. Every year or so, there's always still some study coming out trying to make eggs out to be the most evil thing ever.
Here's the deal: eggs have cholesterol. They have it in a more concentrated form than other foods. Some lunatic half a century ago who realized that cholesterol might have some relationship to circulatory system and heart problems decided that the way to lower blood cholesterol would be to ingest less cholesterol.
Perhaps this seems like common sense. But the fact is your body itself produces much more cholesterol to function than most people would ever ingest -- generally about 3 or 4 times as much. For healthy people, ingesting more dietary cholesterol just causes their body to produce less, so your body naturally regulates the blood cholesterol to keep the level constant. So even if you believe that blood cholesterol levels by themselves are a great predictor of health problems (and there are serious reasons to doubt the current statins craze to lower it no matter what), what you need to fix is making your body make less cholesterol, not avoiding eggs.
Researchers have known this for many decades. Yet for some bizarre reason, everyone still thinks that dietary cholesterol regulation should be a high priority for health. While some people might have a small sensitivity to dietary cholesterol intake, it seems only to be a minority of people. And I really don't get why so many researchers are so dead set to prove eggs are evil.
Ah, sorry. I blathered on a bit there, assuming the birthday problem idea was unclear. I think TFA was trying to make a distinction between actual improbable events (which only tend to happen with loads of trials) vs. apparently "improbable" events which actually happen frequently because people don't know how to calculate probability. It was mostly about the latter. I assumed from your wording that you were talking about the former. In any case, I understand what you were saying now.
One last thing: I know that speculative physics (particularly string theory) is actively involved in trying to imagine stuff outside of our universe -- other dimensions, brane theory, etc. Some of these models have been created to try to explain problems in the way physics seems to work in our universe.
Once we have some actual emprical evidence of some sort of interaction from outside the universe that actually gives some merit to these speculative mathematical theories, I'll be the first one to step up and revise my statements. But for right now, in terms of actual evidence, it could just be invisible enormous gnomes yanking on the "amoeba" in the multiversal petri dish that caused inflation in the early universe or the apparent cosmological constant, and a giant spaghetti monster reaching his tendrils beside our universe in higher dimensional space that is causing apparent "dark matter" or whatever. Or maybe we just haven't come up with the right model that explains everything in the universe as a self-contained thing. Or... well, anything.
Incorrect, this was the point of the article. If the odds are one in a billion, but you have a billion repetitions of the event, the odds of a hit are much higher than one in a billion.
Actually, no -- that was NOT the point of the article. The article mentions the law of large numbers at the beginning, but the rest of the article is not simply about many chances at an event = higher probability.
Instead, the article is about variations on birthday paradox, that is, if I attend a small party and find that someone has the same birthday as I do, everyone at the party is often surprised. Your response is that if I attend hundreds of parties or if there are hundreds of guests at the party, we should not be surprised, because eventually there will be a "hit."
But that's not the point of the birthday problem (or the article). The point is that even at a single small gathering, there are lots of combinations of possible pairs of people who could have the same birthday. So, while it seems to me that it's weird that someone shares my birthday at a relatively small gathering, the people at the party should not be collectively surprised that some random pair happened to share a birthday. Suppose there are 20 people at party I attend. I find someone shares my birthday. We tell people, and everyone's astounded, because it seems improbable: there are only 20 possible hits for someone sharing a birthday with mine, but 366 possible birthdays. However, suppose everyone's having a conversation about their birthdays -- that's over 200 possible pairs, and 200 chances for a hit: a factor of 10 times more combinations.
It's hard to come up with a reasonable analogy to the cosmological issue here, but I suppose it might be something like: we assume that 10 different fundamental constants have to all fall in a certain range to make life possible in the universe, thus getting a probability of 1 in a trillion or whatever. That seems really low... but what if those numbers aren't actually independent? What if we might lower one number a little and raise another a little, and then we actually get another universe that could work (maybe not life as we could imagine it, but intelligent nonetheless). It might turn out that by looking at different possible combinations of fundamental constants that could all work, maybe that 1 in a trillion chance is only 1 in a billion or maybe even in 1 in a hundred.
That would be a reasonable analogy to what TFA is talking about. It's not talking about simply imagining how a 1 in a trillion chance is much more probable if you run it a trillion times.
My point was that, even if you had a good measure of the odds, saying "the odds of a human friendly universe are a trillion to one against" is not illuminating since you do not know how many universes exist, or have existed.
Again, that doesn't matter in this instance. As I pointed out, I can draw a straight flush on my first time playing poker, and undoubtedly quite a few people have. Just because that event is improbable says nothing about whether or not it happened by design. If the probability is non-zero, it could happen. And that's enough to get our universe.
If we actually knew for sure there were other universes with other conditions and that life didn't happen in them, sure, maybe your argument might mean something in a statistical sense. But since we don't have any evidence of them, much less measurements of things that would tell how likely life is to occur in them, nor any reason to believe that they did or could come into existence -- beyond complete speculation -- this argument is absolutely meaningless.
If there are an infinite number of them, chances of finding a human-friendly one are pretty good. The SAP assumes a single universe and then tries to say it is more likely it was designed than exists by chance.
Look -- I get what you're trying to say, but from a logical s
I think ultimately someone made a page demonstrating how to find Shakespeare using the same technique. Or maybe finding the same messages in the works of Shakespeare.
Well, the classic debunking occurred by finding similar patterns in Moby Dick, but there were also things found in War and Peace (particularly the Hebrew translation!), as you can read about here.
This has always been my answer to the "Strong Anthropic Principle" which claims that some agency must have tuned the universe to be able to support conscious life. Since no one knows how many repetitions exist, the SAP has no legs to stand on.
While I think SAP is a bogus argument, your rebuttal also makes little sense.
(1) It doesn't matter "how many repetitions exist" -- it only matters what the odds are, and whether that seems a reasonable way to evaluate the nature of the universe. I can draw a 1 in 1,000,000 poker hand the first time I ever play cards and never play again. The fact that I only played one hand of cards and that one hand happened to have unique statistical properties doesn't mean that someone designed it to happen. It just meant that some weird thing occurred. If I play 1000s of hands of cards, it might seem less weird, but the fact that a bunch of coincidences happen the first time I try something isn't necessarily significant either -- it just means, well, that it happened, and that the chances of its occurrence were non-zero.
(2) Any probabilistic arguments are hugely speculative, since we really have no idea what determines how/why/whether any arbitrary universe has any "constraints" on how it is "tuned." Without a sample of random universes, we can't know how likely it is for one to appear with our characteristics -- perhaps there is something fundamental about the way the universe appeared (and the way that random universes tend to go "Big Bang") that results in the "tuning" we think we see... so perhaps most universes will actually end up "tuned" automatically by some natural process. On the other hand, perhaps it is really a ridiculously unlikely event.
Regardless, the argument can't validate OR invalidate SAP. The only way to do that would be to have actual knowledge about whether some force/entity/creator/whatever was involved in the formation of the universe. We can make an Occam's razor argument that we have little evidence of such a thing existing, so why assume one -- but arguing about apparent probabilities in things like fundamental constants with only a sample size of ONE to draw conclusions from is just a ridiculous position, on either side of the argument.
As far as the old article is concerned, the problem was that the Lottery commission, in order to maintain sales, interfered with the actual randomization. Every pack of 1,000 tickets sent to a store has so many $2, $5, and $20 winners. A clerk at the store paying attention would open a new pack of a thousand tickets and keep track of the winners. If there were fewer than expected, then it actually made sense to buy the last 150 tickets of the pack (using friends and accomplices)
Nope. While this may be another way to hack some lottery tickets, this is not what happened in the GP's link scenario. You can read more of the details about the statistician who publicized the problem here.
Basically, on the tickets in question, there were a lot of exposed numbers on the tickets that were visible before you bought the ticket. There were a few hidden numbers that you scratched off after you bought the ticket and tried to match to the ones that were already visible.
The problem was that in order to make a certain number of winners at various levels per batch, they used an algorithm that unintentionally created recognizable patterns in the exposed numbers. (In other words, creating "wins" in pseudo-randomness required the algorithm to leave clues in visible numbers.) Thus, by looking at the exposed numbers before buying the ticket, someone would have a high likelihood of guessing which tickets were winners.
it seems inevitable that there will be enough mutations taking place to produce the variety of life we see on earth.
Hold on a sec. Just because we might significantly underestimate the probability of something is NOT evidence that it is "inevitable" (or even highly likely).
Note that I'm on the side of evolution here. And I think the "intelligent design" movement is largely a smokescreen to get religious teachings back into schools.
But we still have to be careful about skewing our perceptions of odds the opposite way. If we don't EVER accept the possibility of design, then we must assume that a pocketwatch found buried in Pre-Cambrian rocks must have been naturally formed by processes in the earth that refined the metals and formed all the gears... all just by the chance forces in the soil. After all, there are HUGE numbers of atoms in the soil, and it would seem "inevitable" that there will be enough pushes and pulls and moving stuff around there to form a pocketwatch.
Of course, most paleontologists who found a pocketwatch buried in Pre-Cambrian rocks would assume that some modern human just happened to be digging there before, and we just hadn't found evidence of the previous excavation -- since that is actually a significantly more likely scenario than a pocketwatch forming from natural processes.
The point to take away from your arguments isn't that design is impossible. It's that we really, really don't have anywhere near enough evidence to even begin to estimate probabilities like how likely life is to evolve in certain ways. The intelligent design people think it's basically impossible; you think it "seems inevitable." In reality, the odds are somewhere in the middle in the vast mathematical gap between these assumptions. And it's hard to draw conclusions about what is "impossible" or "inevitable" from only one example (earth).
Personally, I think the odds of intelligent life evolving are likely much more remote than many people think -- I certainly don't think it's like Star Trek where every other star system has a planet teeming with plant life, if not some bipedal human-like species. I'm joking a bit here, but I think that scientists who are hoping to find evidence of primitive life even in our own solar system may be committing a similar fallacy to the intelligent design folks, in terms of overestimating probability rather than underestimating it.
Of course, I have no real way of knowing, and there's no reason not to look. But until we have some sort of sample of how often life actually evolves in the universe and under what conditions, all this talk of probability estimates is just meaningless speculation -- on both sides of the question.
The link is old so I imagine the serial number gig has been fixed (yet I have no clue one way or the other), but supports the improbability disclaimer.
While this may be interesting to some, it has very little to do with TFA.
TFA is arguing that random events are often more probable than we might think, because we often fail to take the context of an event into account.
Most of the scenarios in TFA are variations on the "birthday paradox," which basically amounts to people looking at an event X with a very tiny probability P in a specific case, and assuming that P is the probability it would happen. But we often forget that there are Q number of combinations or situations that would all result in X being true... so P is a gross underesimate of the probability of X.
Your link deals with a poorly designed computer algorithm that actually isn't random which is spitting out lottery tickets. The scratch-ticket system has to make money, so the numbers can't be entirely random -- they must only payout so many tickets within a given batch. The guys who designed the computer system that chooses the numbers didn't take into account that there were statistical clues that could allow someone to "crack the code" to the fake randomness.
There are two completely different phenomena. Finding a flaw in pseudo-randomness is completely different from miscalculating odds of genuinely random events.
Before the industrial revolution, "according to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, the medieval workday was not more than eight hours".
You need to keep reading further down the page you cited. You'll discover that most of the sources used in that article assume a workday of anywhere from 9.5-12 hours, and generally a 6-day week, leading to workweeks of often 70 hours or so.
The idea that it somehow averages out to "8 hours per day" is when you recognize that it was difficult to do many jobs during the winter. So, instead, people worked 60-70 hour weeks for 2/3 or 3/4 of the year, and then had some downtime when plants weren't growing or there wasn't enough daylight to do their jobs. If you take the yearly average number of hours and spread it out, the total number of annual hours may come to a modern worker's equivalent... but that has little to do with actual lengths of typical medieval workweeks.
Your citation doesn't actually say what you think it does.
Eight centuries of annual hours
13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours
Calculated from Gregory Clark's estimate of 150 days per family, assumes 12 hours per day, 135 days per year for adult male ("Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture", mimeo, 1986)
14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours
Calculated from Nora Ritchie's estimate of 120 days per year. Assumes 12-hour day. ("Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II", in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, London: Edward Arnold, 1962).
Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hours
Juliet Schor's estime of average medieval laborer working two-thirds of the year at 9.5 hours per day
Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day ("Labour productivity and work psychology in the English mining industry, 1400-1600", Economic History Review 31, 23 (1978).
1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours
Based on 69-hour week; hours from W.S. Woytinsky, "Hours of labor," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1935). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours
Based on 70-hour week; hours from Joseph Zeisel, "The workweek in American industry, 1850-1956", Monthly Labor Review 81, 23-29 (1958). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year.
One last thing -- I forgot to mention extracurriculars. Many teachers are required (or strongly encouraged) to do some sort of coaching or service outside of school time. In many cases, they may be paid extra for it -- but it's still additional time toward their jobs.
Add those in, and it's easy to see teachers getting to 60 hour/week or more.
As a former teacher, I can tell you right now that the claim is bullshit.
Too bad you're spouting a lot of it yourself. I don't agree with GP that most teachers work 60 hour weeks, but a lot of what you say is bogus.
By the time you're done removing all that, it comes down to 32 weeks a year or so of actual workweeks.
Most states mandate a school year that has at least 180 instructional days or so. 180/5 = 36. So, you somehow missed an entire month of workweeks in your calculation. And in most states, snow days need to be made up so as to satisfy the minimum 180-day rule.
Add in at least another week of days before/after the schoolyear and days for meetings. Then generally add 2 or 3 weeks during the summer that many teachers are required to attend conferences or other training. Sure, there's more time "off" than in most jobs, but you're exaggerating quite a bit.
Most school hours are usually open 7:30am-3:00pm at the most, and most schools are ghost towns before 7am and after 4pm.
Because no teacher ever took grading or planning work home with them. [/sarcasm]
Most primary and secondary teachers don't really have offices. Many of them prefer not to hang out in an empty classroom in the evening hours when they can do it more comfortably at home.
And aside from that, I think you see schools as "ghost towns" after hours because of the lack of students. My experience teaching high school for a few years (at three different schools, of varying quality) tells me that it really depends on the school. At two of the three schools I worked out, at least half of the teachers in my department were usually still around until 4:30 or 5:00 or later, even when school dismissed at 2:30 or 2:45. 9-10 hour days or so were the norm. Sure, there are always people who run out the door the moment the bell rings, but most of the good teachers I knew rarely did that.
Teachers from grade 6 on up (e.g. Middle/High School) alternate quiet periods (with no students) with active periods (students) so that they can grade papers, plan upcoming curriculum and syllabi, etc. Oftentimes, school districts will extend that alternating period schemata all the way down to the 2nd grade.
They don't alternate periods -- they usually get one or two free periods per day (depending on how the schedule works), and at least part of that time is often filled up with required meetings, "duty" like monitoring halls or lunchrooms, etc. I'd say most teachers probably spend about 1/4 of the "active school day" not standing in front of a class, but from experience I can tell you that during the day, I often needed that time just to handle basic administrative tasks like answering email from parents (and other school email), making photocopies, getting materials and other things organized in the classroom, etc. Not to mention just having a few minutes to recover after being "on task" in front of students for many hours.
So yeah, there are "free periods," but I rarely had time to do any serious grading or planning during them, which I mostly ended up doing after school or in the evenings.
( As for the younger kids? Any teacher for grades 5 and under who cannot whiz through 45 test papers in 30 minutes for their kids really should not be teaching.)
I know you're talking about primary school here, but as a high school teacher at public schools, I had somewhere around 140-150 students per year that I was responsible for grading. At a top-tier private high school, you might get that down to 60 or so.
My point is that grading 150 papers takes a long time. And elementary school teachers who may only have 25-30 kids in their class (but have them all day) often have multiple assignments to grade every day.
Long story short, if you find a teacher working "60 hours a week", one of three things are wro
I don't get how you can claim this. I linked to a story clearly showing that financial firms are trying to encourage people to stay home at least 4 days per month, perhaps Sundays. If someone works 7 days per week for 8 hours per day, that's already 56 hours, which is close to the threshold the GP claimed was something that "normal" people didn't do. Add in a few 9-10 hour days, and even take a short day on one of the weekend days, and you'll still get to 60. My link clearly implies that companies find it necessary to encourage employees to stop doing what GP says doesn't happen. I don't know how that agrees with GP.
The way to get ahead is to book/claim 12 hour days.
This has nothing to do with "booking" or "claiming." I'm talking about interns and entry-level folks. They often need to be around the office for 12 hours to do whatever stuff is supposed to be done. While that might include some downtime some (or even many) days, when I show up at the office at 7am and don't leave until after 7pm, I've worked a "12 hour day."
That's why you hear about lawyers billing commutes, or lunches, or context switching so they can bill 8 rounded-up 15 minute segments in an hour.
Yeah, that happens. But I don't see how this applies to physicians that are actually at the hospital and expected to be available to work for 60-80 hours/week. Are they continuously engaged in treating patients? Probably not. But they're at work and actively available for duties for much more than 40 hours.
There productive time is far less than 12 hours a day.
Yes, and? Most people I know who work 40 hours per week aren't "productive" 8 hours per day either, particularly in fields requiring a lot of thinking rather than mindless work or manual labor. The only useful metric for how long these people work is how long they are at the office and expected to be working... which is often a lot more than 40 hours.
But no human really can work that hard.
You really need to read some history. The 40 hour week is not some sort of magical number handed down from God. Before modern unions and workers' rights, average industrial workers often worked 6 days per week for long hours (more than 8 hours/day). They survived. They may not have lived very long compared to now, but they did it. Before the industrial revolution, farmers worked many months out of the year basically from sunrise to sundown.
If your argument simply is, "Well no one can actually concentrate and do intellectual work for 60 hours/week," I agree. I don't even think people are really capable for doing 40 hours of work requiring deep thought each week... maybe 10-20 hours, with the rest filled up by more mindless tasks. Occasionally, you can push it longer before a deadline or something, but you get mentally fatigued.
Nevertheless, this has nothing to do with how long people actually effectively "work" each day... and lots of professions do expect 60+ hours in the office doing something job-related.
Yes, there are legitimate workaholics that do 60 hours a week. Average Joes doing it? Rarely.
Maybe true in IT. But other fields like law, medicine, finance? The common perception is that when you're starting out as an intern or assistant, the way you get ahead is working 12 hours days or weekends or whatnot.
There have been recent stories of Wall Street firms trying to get people to stay home on Sundays. (The assumption being, of course, that everyone has to work on Saturdays.)
Thankfully, some physicians have finally started speaking out about the grueling hazing done on residents and young doctors at hospitals, where insanely long hours actually put lives at risk.
Maybe other professions can finally start catching on....
We just have a generally messed-up attitude toward work and "getting ahead" in the U.S. There may be many proximate causes, but nothing's going to change until you fix the overall cultural attitude.
(5) "Troll" is lingo --- you may have people who enjoy trolling, who have absolutely no idea what the word 'Troll' means.
And, generally speaking, what it really means is "someone who says something that I don't like."
Sometimes it seems to mean that around here, depending on the mod.
But it has a pretty well-accepted definition: "In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a forum, chat room, or blog), either accidentally or with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion."
I think some aspects of this definition are incredibly subjective, like just saying someone who "starts arguments or upsets people." That, by itself, is more about the results of trolling, rather than a good definition.
But "posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages" with the intent to provoke -- that sounds like a reasonable definition. Sure, it will always be subjective, but that's a good baseline idea, which is much more specific than "I don't like it."
(The one thing I somewhat disagree with in the Wikipedia definition is the idea that trolling can be accidental. Someone who accidentally "trolls" may be reacted to as if he/she is a troll, but I'd be more likely to call that an newb or ignorant user, rather than a troll. The actual reaction should be different: a newbie or ignorant user needs guidance to point out why the post is inappropriate; an actual troll should be ignored. Also, as we clearly see in Slashdot moderation sometimes, attempts to be "over-the-top" in a humorous way are often difficult to spot and may be misidentified as "trolls.")
Slashdot Mirror
Peer review, which does not protect against purposeful fraudulent papers, does keep a reign on the problem.
I love ironic mistakes with homophones. In some small disciplines, which are controlled by a small number of people in a particular paradigm, this might actually be a true statement.
More to the point, the way the world is going, a kid born today as a very high chance of leading a life of debt, unemployment, poverty, starvation, war, and whatever else the future has in store, before dying.
I used to think this way too. But I think the one thing that stands out as irrational in your argument is "today." What is so bad about "today"?
Go back a hundred years, and the chances of a lot of these things was significantly higher. Go back a few centuries, and most kids died in early childhood, many women died in childbirth, and most people who managed to get to adulthood faced much, much more harsh conditions than the vast majority of people would in an industrialized country would today.
So, if you want to have a pessimistic worldview, and you think that's a good reason not to have a child, that's fine. But just be honest with yourself and admit that -- by that logic -- the human race should have become extinct a long, long time ago. It has to do with your philosophy and beliefs, not some terrible conditions that are supposedly so much worse "today."
As far as we're concerned, my s.o. and I, the best time for fatherhood is never, as we reckon giving life today isn't really a gift.
Life is neither a "gift," nor is it some sort of "punishment." It is simply life. Frankly, while I myself had thought the same thoughts in the past, I have since realized the hypocrisy that often comes with it. If so many things are so terrible in the world today, why not commit suicide right now? If life is "suffering" and having a child is only to bring a new life into a world of suffering, why do you yourself continue to exist?
And if your answer is simply, "Well, things are getting worse... so I'm still okay, but my child would have a terrible future," then please see above and read some history books. Miraculously, millions of those people in the past didn't commit suicide either, despite the horrendous suffering in their world -- and they even chose to bring more kids into it.
Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with people who decide not to have kids for whatever reason. I think fewer people probably should have them, since it's a significant responsibility, and people should think about it seriously. But try to be honest with yourself about what your motivations are.
(Otherwise, you end up going down the bizarre irrational path of philosophers, like David Benatar who advocate that the human race commit collective suicide (see Benatar's book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence), but the philosophers themselves -- despite horrendous suffering in the world, and their likely contribution to more of it every day -- somehow decide that they should themselves continue stay alive. Life really must not seem that bad to most people who make this argument, if they're still living in this world.)
Either the janitorial stuff is contracted out, or it would be if this were made law. If I were CEO, and was faced with a cap, I'd try to see how many low-paying jobs I could outsource.
Yours is the most insightful comment in this whole section of the thread. Every time I see this proposal about tying executive salaries to the lowest-wage workers in a company (or even median salaries or whatever), I'm amazed at how many people don't consider the unintended consequences.
Obviously the idea is that executives should try to bring up the standard of living of all the people who work for their company -- but you're absolutely right, CEOs will just outsource the lowest-paid workers.
I can see some of the responses -- "Well, in that case, tie it to median household income in the community, or city, or state where the company is located. CEOs will have to work to raise the standard of living in their community to profit more." And that won't work either: you'll just get big companies moving all their jobs to cities or states with the highest median salaries.
No matter how this sort of regulation tries to "fix" things, there will be loads of repercussions as CEOs and executives try to find ways to "game the system" and still maximize profits.
Personally, I still think something needs to be done. But a lot of these proposals are rather naive.
It cost me something like $7/mo flat-fee, and I could even have the one I used generate and mail certified checks if needed
Woah... I can name a half dozen banks off the top of my head where you could get all that service for free. Most credit unions I know also give you free checking if you carry a reasonably large balance (like at least a few thousand dollars).
I guess I really don't understand what makes people want to use, say, BoA or Chase, when it seems that their sole purpose is to rake as much money out of you as possible.
In my entire life, I've probably only paid maybe $25 in banking fees, and that was almost all due to a couple foreign checks and one overdraw payment when something got crossed in the mail. I'd run screaming from any place that charged me a "flat $7/month fee." And assuming you have reasonable balances, you wouldn't pay that at either BoA or Chase.
Just because you're not writing the bank a check doesn't mean you're not paying fees. The bank charges 2-4% on every credit card purchase you make. You can imagine that "the store pays it," but the store is paying it with money they got from you.
Very few stores these days charge different prices for "cash" vs. "credit." Sure, you might see some coffee shops or convenience stores say, "Minimum $10 charge for credit cards" or whatever, and gas stations occasionally do it, but not most other places.
So, you can imagine that "I'm not paying the fee by not using a credit card," but you are anyway. Everyone who shops at stores subsidizes those credit card users. So you might as well get a rewards card and get 1% or 2% cash back or whatever, and actually collect some of that fee for yourself. Just pay off the card every month. (I've literally made thousands of dollars doing this.)
The only place I don't use credit cards is small independent shops like independent coffee shops or whatever, because I figure I'll save them the bank fees. Everywhere else -- well, their prices are set, so I might as well take a cut where I can get it. If more stores offered "cash only" reduced prices, I might reconsider my policy.
At the beginning of the 1500s, when a book about the New World could be produced, a blank book made 80 or so years earlier was hardly unimaginable.
"Unimaginable"? No. Very unlikely? Yes.
The production of blank paper books for various purposes in recent centuries is common enough, but producing a blank vellum book only to sit on a shelf for nearly a century without being used would be quite unusual. Do you realize how many animals had to be killed to make this book, not to mention effort gone into scraping, stretching, treating, and otherwise processing each page of skin? This was a very expensive and wasteful endeavor... making such a book to sit on a shelf for 80 years in the 1400s would be quite unusual.
...yet another researcher reports their findings that one of the Rorschach inkblots may definitely be a picture of a face...
While this has been modded "funny," it really should be marked "insightful."
For a century now, there have been numerous people -- including serious researchers -- who have chased after crazy theories regarding this manuscript. This particular study seems to involve some people who see a few blotches of ink on a couple of the illustrations of plants (among many weird drawings in the manuscript, it must be said), and decide that these must be New World plants.
This follows in the general pattern of Voynich research theories: (1) Fixate on a couple weird features, (2) find some odd connection to something you think you recognize, and most crucially, (3) ignore all evidence that contradicts your theory.
There are numerous elements of this manuscript that date it to the early 1400s, i.e., before Columbus visited the New World -- it's not just radiocarbon dating. It's the types of calligraphy used, the style of pen usage, the artistic qualities of the drawings, etc. They all are consistent with a date before significant numbers of Europeans happened to be in Mexico. And it's really not enough to say, "Well, it could have been someone attempting to recreate an older style of writing and drawing." I can explain this further with what we know about history, but let's just say for now that this kind of level of detail to try to "fake" a 15th century style would be unheard of... it's far beyond just throwing in something a little anachronistic.
I'd be happy to read something new and interesting about this manuscript. But this is just yet another of the hundreds of wacko theories that have come out over the decades.
It's much, much more likely that these researchers are just "seeing what they want to see" in a handful of drawings, and ignoring detailed evidence from hundreds of other pages of the manuscript.
Vellum was used over and over.
Umm, no. Vellum was sometimes reused once, and it was common enough to scrape off, wash, and reuse stuff that there is a term for it, palimpsest. While there are quite rare examples of a "double palimpsest" (reused twice), it certainly was not at all the norm to use vellum "over and over."
So, unless we have some clear evidence that it has not been reused, the manuscript text may well be written on vellum significantly older than itself.
No, I don't really buy that theory either. As someone who has actually spent quite a bit of time working with early manuscripts and has even played a hand at deciphering previous "scraped off" texts in palimpsests, I can tell you that the vast majority of palimpsests have lots of tell-tale signs, most notably places where the previous writing is actually visible. It's in fact so common for previous writing to be visible (particularly as the manuscript ages further), that many writings are now only known to survive in copies that were actually scraped off, but which are still visible today, with or without technological intervention. (There were also standard practices, which weren't followed in all manuscripts, like reusing leaves in a perpendicular fashion to their original orientation, also generally evidence of heavy scraping and/or chemicals used to wash it, etc.)
For an entire manuscript to be scraped off and reused without some obvious clues that the vellum had all been repurposed would be quite extraordinary... and would have required a great deal of effort to hide any imperfections. And since this manuscript has been examined by so many scholars over the years, and I don't think anyone has found significant evidence of such reuse, I think the burden of proof is on your theory to prove that it was reused.
The blog author is... pretty much clueless. Nobody but him is confusing Bitcoins and Amazon Coins, or referring to the latter as crypto-currency.
Indeed. This is all nonsense. The summary says: "But Amazon Coins' existence could alienate the same demographic that made Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies such a hit." Yeah... and?
The people who use Amazon coins are generally tethered to a locked-down Amazon product (like a Kindle) and want the convenience of buying something for $1 without having to run through a credit card authorization or whatever every time. (Plus, Amazon apparently gives out bonus "coins" in various scenarios.)
Cryptocurrency users want to... well, use a currency to make financial transactions in the real world (not fake internal Amazon transactions). And some of the biggest advocates are people who want to avoid tracking and such. I sincerely doubt they are going to confuse Bitcoin with an internal bookkeeping token on a locked-down device or something. The fact that Amazon is now offering it to other people who want to buy crap from their app store doesn't change the idea very much.
No one's being "alienated." The target audiences were and still are two mostly mutually exclusive sets of people. At a minimum, no one except the people who wrote and promoted this story seem confused about how these are for two completely different types of transactions.
All this stupid "Don't eat eggs or fat" bullshit is literally killing us.
Yeah, the eggs this is particularly ridiculous. Every year or so, there's always still some study coming out trying to make eggs out to be the most evil thing ever.
Here's the deal: eggs have cholesterol. They have it in a more concentrated form than other foods. Some lunatic half a century ago who realized that cholesterol might have some relationship to circulatory system and heart problems decided that the way to lower blood cholesterol would be to ingest less cholesterol.
Perhaps this seems like common sense. But the fact is your body itself produces much more cholesterol to function than most people would ever ingest -- generally about 3 or 4 times as much. For healthy people, ingesting more dietary cholesterol just causes their body to produce less, so your body naturally regulates the blood cholesterol to keep the level constant. So even if you believe that blood cholesterol levels by themselves are a great predictor of health problems (and there are serious reasons to doubt the current statins craze to lower it no matter what), what you need to fix is making your body make less cholesterol, not avoiding eggs.
Researchers have known this for many decades. Yet for some bizarre reason, everyone still thinks that dietary cholesterol regulation should be a high priority for health. While some people might have a small sensitivity to dietary cholesterol intake, it seems only to be a minority of people. And I really don't get why so many researchers are so dead set to prove eggs are evil.
Ah, sorry. I blathered on a bit there, assuming the birthday problem idea was unclear. I think TFA was trying to make a distinction between actual improbable events (which only tend to happen with loads of trials) vs. apparently "improbable" events which actually happen frequently because people don't know how to calculate probability. It was mostly about the latter. I assumed from your wording that you were talking about the former. In any case, I understand what you were saying now.
Ha! Thanks for that. :)
One last thing: I know that speculative physics (particularly string theory) is actively involved in trying to imagine stuff outside of our universe -- other dimensions, brane theory, etc. Some of these models have been created to try to explain problems in the way physics seems to work in our universe.
Once we have some actual emprical evidence of some sort of interaction from outside the universe that actually gives some merit to these speculative mathematical theories, I'll be the first one to step up and revise my statements. But for right now, in terms of actual evidence, it could just be invisible enormous gnomes yanking on the "amoeba" in the multiversal petri dish that caused inflation in the early universe or the apparent cosmological constant, and a giant spaghetti monster reaching his tendrils beside our universe in higher dimensional space that is causing apparent "dark matter" or whatever. Or maybe we just haven't come up with the right model that explains everything in the universe as a self-contained thing. Or... well, anything.
Incorrect, this was the point of the article. If the odds are one in a billion, but you have a billion repetitions of the event, the odds of a hit are much higher than one in a billion.
Actually, no -- that was NOT the point of the article. The article mentions the law of large numbers at the beginning, but the rest of the article is not simply about many chances at an event = higher probability.
Instead, the article is about variations on birthday paradox, that is, if I attend a small party and find that someone has the same birthday as I do, everyone at the party is often surprised. Your response is that if I attend hundreds of parties or if there are hundreds of guests at the party, we should not be surprised, because eventually there will be a "hit."
But that's not the point of the birthday problem (or the article). The point is that even at a single small gathering, there are lots of combinations of possible pairs of people who could have the same birthday. So, while it seems to me that it's weird that someone shares my birthday at a relatively small gathering, the people at the party should not be collectively surprised that some random pair happened to share a birthday. Suppose there are 20 people at party I attend. I find someone shares my birthday. We tell people, and everyone's astounded, because it seems improbable: there are only 20 possible hits for someone sharing a birthday with mine, but 366 possible birthdays. However, suppose everyone's having a conversation about their birthdays -- that's over 200 possible pairs, and 200 chances for a hit: a factor of 10 times more combinations.
It's hard to come up with a reasonable analogy to the cosmological issue here, but I suppose it might be something like: we assume that 10 different fundamental constants have to all fall in a certain range to make life possible in the universe, thus getting a probability of 1 in a trillion or whatever. That seems really low... but what if those numbers aren't actually independent? What if we might lower one number a little and raise another a little, and then we actually get another universe that could work (maybe not life as we could imagine it, but intelligent nonetheless). It might turn out that by looking at different possible combinations of fundamental constants that could all work, maybe that 1 in a trillion chance is only 1 in a billion or maybe even in 1 in a hundred.
That would be a reasonable analogy to what TFA is talking about. It's not talking about simply imagining how a 1 in a trillion chance is much more probable if you run it a trillion times.
My point was that, even if you had a good measure of the odds, saying "the odds of a human friendly universe are a trillion to one against" is not illuminating since you do not know how many universes exist, or have existed.
Again, that doesn't matter in this instance. As I pointed out, I can draw a straight flush on my first time playing poker, and undoubtedly quite a few people have. Just because that event is improbable says nothing about whether or not it happened by design. If the probability is non-zero, it could happen. And that's enough to get our universe.
If we actually knew for sure there were other universes with other conditions and that life didn't happen in them, sure, maybe your argument might mean something in a statistical sense. But since we don't have any evidence of them, much less measurements of things that would tell how likely life is to occur in them, nor any reason to believe that they did or could come into existence -- beyond complete speculation -- this argument is absolutely meaningless.
If there are an infinite number of them, chances of finding a human-friendly one are pretty good. The SAP assumes a single universe and then tries to say it is more likely it was designed than exists by chance.
Look -- I get what you're trying to say, but from a logical s
I think ultimately someone made a page demonstrating how to find Shakespeare using the same technique. Or maybe finding the same messages in the works of Shakespeare.
Well, the classic debunking occurred by finding similar patterns in Moby Dick, but there were also things found in War and Peace (particularly the Hebrew translation!), as you can read about here.
This has always been my answer to the "Strong Anthropic Principle" which claims that some agency must have tuned the universe to be able to support conscious life. Since no one knows how many repetitions exist, the SAP has no legs to stand on.
While I think SAP is a bogus argument, your rebuttal also makes little sense.
(1) It doesn't matter "how many repetitions exist" -- it only matters what the odds are, and whether that seems a reasonable way to evaluate the nature of the universe. I can draw a 1 in 1,000,000 poker hand the first time I ever play cards and never play again. The fact that I only played one hand of cards and that one hand happened to have unique statistical properties doesn't mean that someone designed it to happen. It just meant that some weird thing occurred. If I play 1000s of hands of cards, it might seem less weird, but the fact that a bunch of coincidences happen the first time I try something isn't necessarily significant either -- it just means, well, that it happened, and that the chances of its occurrence were non-zero.
(2) Any probabilistic arguments are hugely speculative, since we really have no idea what determines how/why/whether any arbitrary universe has any "constraints" on how it is "tuned." Without a sample of random universes, we can't know how likely it is for one to appear with our characteristics -- perhaps there is something fundamental about the way the universe appeared (and the way that random universes tend to go "Big Bang") that results in the "tuning" we think we see... so perhaps most universes will actually end up "tuned" automatically by some natural process. On the other hand, perhaps it is really a ridiculously unlikely event.
Regardless, the argument can't validate OR invalidate SAP. The only way to do that would be to have actual knowledge about whether some force/entity/creator/whatever was involved in the formation of the universe. We can make an Occam's razor argument that we have little evidence of such a thing existing, so why assume one -- but arguing about apparent probabilities in things like fundamental constants with only a sample size of ONE to draw conclusions from is just a ridiculous position, on either side of the argument.
As far as the old article is concerned, the problem was that the Lottery commission, in order to maintain sales, interfered with the actual randomization. Every pack of 1,000 tickets sent to a store has so many $2, $5, and $20 winners. A clerk at the store paying attention would open a new pack of a thousand tickets and keep track of the winners. If there were fewer than expected, then it actually made sense to buy the last 150 tickets of the pack (using friends and accomplices)
Nope. While this may be another way to hack some lottery tickets, this is not what happened in the GP's link scenario. You can read more of the details about the statistician who publicized the problem here.
Basically, on the tickets in question, there were a lot of exposed numbers on the tickets that were visible before you bought the ticket. There were a few hidden numbers that you scratched off after you bought the ticket and tried to match to the ones that were already visible.
The problem was that in order to make a certain number of winners at various levels per batch, they used an algorithm that unintentionally created recognizable patterns in the exposed numbers. (In other words, creating "wins" in pseudo-randomness required the algorithm to leave clues in visible numbers.) Thus, by looking at the exposed numbers before buying the ticket, someone would have a high likelihood of guessing which tickets were winners.
it seems inevitable that there will be enough mutations taking place to produce the variety of life we see on earth.
Hold on a sec. Just because we might significantly underestimate the probability of something is NOT evidence that it is "inevitable" (or even highly likely).
Note that I'm on the side of evolution here. And I think the "intelligent design" movement is largely a smokescreen to get religious teachings back into schools.
But we still have to be careful about skewing our perceptions of odds the opposite way. If we don't EVER accept the possibility of design, then we must assume that a pocketwatch found buried in Pre-Cambrian rocks must have been naturally formed by processes in the earth that refined the metals and formed all the gears... all just by the chance forces in the soil. After all, there are HUGE numbers of atoms in the soil, and it would seem "inevitable" that there will be enough pushes and pulls and moving stuff around there to form a pocketwatch.
Of course, most paleontologists who found a pocketwatch buried in Pre-Cambrian rocks would assume that some modern human just happened to be digging there before, and we just hadn't found evidence of the previous excavation -- since that is actually a significantly more likely scenario than a pocketwatch forming from natural processes.
The point to take away from your arguments isn't that design is impossible. It's that we really, really don't have anywhere near enough evidence to even begin to estimate probabilities like how likely life is to evolve in certain ways. The intelligent design people think it's basically impossible; you think it "seems inevitable." In reality, the odds are somewhere in the middle in the vast mathematical gap between these assumptions. And it's hard to draw conclusions about what is "impossible" or "inevitable" from only one example (earth).
Personally, I think the odds of intelligent life evolving are likely much more remote than many people think -- I certainly don't think it's like Star Trek where every other star system has a planet teeming with plant life, if not some bipedal human-like species. I'm joking a bit here, but I think that scientists who are hoping to find evidence of primitive life even in our own solar system may be committing a similar fallacy to the intelligent design folks, in terms of overestimating probability rather than underestimating it.
Of course, I have no real way of knowing, and there's no reason not to look. But until we have some sort of sample of how often life actually evolves in the universe and under what conditions, all this talk of probability estimates is just meaningless speculation -- on both sides of the question.
The link is old so I imagine the serial number gig has been fixed (yet I have no clue one way or the other), but supports the improbability disclaimer.
While this may be interesting to some, it has very little to do with TFA.
TFA is arguing that random events are often more probable than we might think, because we often fail to take the context of an event into account.
Most of the scenarios in TFA are variations on the "birthday paradox," which basically amounts to people looking at an event X with a very tiny probability P in a specific case, and assuming that P is the probability it would happen. But we often forget that there are Q number of combinations or situations that would all result in X being true... so P is a gross underesimate of the probability of X.
Your link deals with a poorly designed computer algorithm that actually isn't random which is spitting out lottery tickets. The scratch-ticket system has to make money, so the numbers can't be entirely random -- they must only payout so many tickets within a given batch. The guys who designed the computer system that chooses the numbers didn't take into account that there were statistical clues that could allow someone to "crack the code" to the fake randomness.
There are two completely different phenomena. Finding a flaw in pseudo-randomness is completely different from miscalculating odds of genuinely random events.
Before the industrial revolution, "according to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, the medieval workday was not more than eight hours".
You need to keep reading further down the page you cited. You'll discover that most of the sources used in that article assume a workday of anywhere from 9.5-12 hours, and generally a 6-day week, leading to workweeks of often 70 hours or so.
The idea that it somehow averages out to "8 hours per day" is when you recognize that it was difficult to do many jobs during the winter. So, instead, people worked 60-70 hour weeks for 2/3 or 3/4 of the year, and then had some downtime when plants weren't growing or there wasn't enough daylight to do their jobs. If you take the yearly average number of hours and spread it out, the total number of annual hours may come to a modern worker's equivalent... but that has little to do with actual lengths of typical medieval workweeks.
Your citation doesn't actually say what you think it does.
Eight centuries of annual hours
13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours
Calculated from Gregory Clark's estimate of 150 days per family, assumes 12 hours per day, 135 days per year for adult male ("Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture", mimeo, 1986)
14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours
Calculated from Nora Ritchie's estimate of 120 days per year. Assumes 12-hour day. ("Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II", in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, London: Edward Arnold, 1962).
Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hours
Juliet Schor's estime of average medieval laborer working two-thirds of the year at 9.5 hours per day
1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours
Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day ("Labour productivity and work psychology in the English mining industry, 1400-1600", Economic History Review 31, 23 (1978).
1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours
Based on 69-hour week; hours from W.S. Woytinsky, "Hours of labor," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1935). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours
Based on 70-hour week; hours from Joseph Zeisel, "The workweek in American industry, 1850-1956", Monthly Labor Review 81, 23-29 (1958). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year.
Add those in, and it's easy to see teachers getting to 60 hour/week or more.
As a former teacher, I can tell you right now that the claim is bullshit.
Too bad you're spouting a lot of it yourself. I don't agree with GP that most teachers work 60 hour weeks, but a lot of what you say is bogus.
By the time you're done removing all that, it comes down to 32 weeks a year or so of actual workweeks.
Most states mandate a school year that has at least 180 instructional days or so. 180/5 = 36. So, you somehow missed an entire month of workweeks in your calculation. And in most states, snow days need to be made up so as to satisfy the minimum 180-day rule.
Add in at least another week of days before/after the schoolyear and days for meetings. Then generally add 2 or 3 weeks during the summer that many teachers are required to attend conferences or other training. Sure, there's more time "off" than in most jobs, but you're exaggerating quite a bit.
Most school hours are usually open 7:30am-3:00pm at the most, and most schools are ghost towns before 7am and after 4pm.
Because no teacher ever took grading or planning work home with them. [/sarcasm]
Most primary and secondary teachers don't really have offices. Many of them prefer not to hang out in an empty classroom in the evening hours when they can do it more comfortably at home.
And aside from that, I think you see schools as "ghost towns" after hours because of the lack of students. My experience teaching high school for a few years (at three different schools, of varying quality) tells me that it really depends on the school. At two of the three schools I worked out, at least half of the teachers in my department were usually still around until 4:30 or 5:00 or later, even when school dismissed at 2:30 or 2:45. 9-10 hour days or so were the norm. Sure, there are always people who run out the door the moment the bell rings, but most of the good teachers I knew rarely did that.
Teachers from grade 6 on up (e.g. Middle/High School) alternate quiet periods (with no students) with active periods (students) so that they can grade papers, plan upcoming curriculum and syllabi, etc. Oftentimes, school districts will extend that alternating period schemata all the way down to the 2nd grade.
They don't alternate periods -- they usually get one or two free periods per day (depending on how the schedule works), and at least part of that time is often filled up with required meetings, "duty" like monitoring halls or lunchrooms, etc. I'd say most teachers probably spend about 1/4 of the "active school day" not standing in front of a class, but from experience I can tell you that during the day, I often needed that time just to handle basic administrative tasks like answering email from parents (and other school email), making photocopies, getting materials and other things organized in the classroom, etc. Not to mention just having a few minutes to recover after being "on task" in front of students for many hours.
So yeah, there are "free periods," but I rarely had time to do any serious grading or planning during them, which I mostly ended up doing after school or in the evenings.
( As for the younger kids? Any teacher for grades 5 and under who cannot whiz through 45 test papers in 30 minutes for their kids really should not be teaching.)
I know you're talking about primary school here, but as a high school teacher at public schools, I had somewhere around 140-150 students per year that I was responsible for grading. At a top-tier private high school, you might get that down to 60 or so.
My point is that grading 150 papers takes a long time. And elementary school teachers who may only have 25-30 kids in their class (but have them all day) often have multiple assignments to grade every day.
Long story short, if you find a teacher working "60 hours a week", one of three things are wro
That fits in with what the GP is saying.
I don't get how you can claim this. I linked to a story clearly showing that financial firms are trying to encourage people to stay home at least 4 days per month, perhaps Sundays. If someone works 7 days per week for 8 hours per day, that's already 56 hours, which is close to the threshold the GP claimed was something that "normal" people didn't do. Add in a few 9-10 hour days, and even take a short day on one of the weekend days, and you'll still get to 60. My link clearly implies that companies find it necessary to encourage employees to stop doing what GP says doesn't happen. I don't know how that agrees with GP.
The way to get ahead is to book/claim 12 hour days.
This has nothing to do with "booking" or "claiming." I'm talking about interns and entry-level folks. They often need to be around the office for 12 hours to do whatever stuff is supposed to be done. While that might include some downtime some (or even many) days, when I show up at the office at 7am and don't leave until after 7pm, I've worked a "12 hour day."
That's why you hear about lawyers billing commutes, or lunches, or context switching so they can bill 8 rounded-up 15 minute segments in an hour.
Yeah, that happens. But I don't see how this applies to physicians that are actually at the hospital and expected to be available to work for 60-80 hours/week. Are they continuously engaged in treating patients? Probably not. But they're at work and actively available for duties for much more than 40 hours.
There productive time is far less than 12 hours a day.
Yes, and? Most people I know who work 40 hours per week aren't "productive" 8 hours per day either, particularly in fields requiring a lot of thinking rather than mindless work or manual labor. The only useful metric for how long these people work is how long they are at the office and expected to be working... which is often a lot more than 40 hours.
But no human really can work that hard.
You really need to read some history. The 40 hour week is not some sort of magical number handed down from God. Before modern unions and workers' rights, average industrial workers often worked 6 days per week for long hours (more than 8 hours/day). They survived. They may not have lived very long compared to now, but they did it. Before the industrial revolution, farmers worked many months out of the year basically from sunrise to sundown.
If your argument simply is, "Well no one can actually concentrate and do intellectual work for 60 hours/week," I agree. I don't even think people are really capable for doing 40 hours of work requiring deep thought each week... maybe 10-20 hours, with the rest filled up by more mindless tasks. Occasionally, you can push it longer before a deadline or something, but you get mentally fatigued.
Nevertheless, this has nothing to do with how long people actually effectively "work" each day... and lots of professions do expect 60+ hours in the office doing something job-related.
Yes, there are legitimate workaholics that do 60 hours a week. Average Joes doing it? Rarely.
Maybe true in IT. But other fields like law, medicine, finance? The common perception is that when you're starting out as an intern or assistant, the way you get ahead is working 12 hours days or weekends or whatnot.
There have been recent stories of Wall Street firms trying to get people to stay home on Sundays. (The assumption being, of course, that everyone has to work on Saturdays.)
Thankfully, some physicians have finally started speaking out about the grueling hazing done on residents and young doctors at hospitals, where insanely long hours actually put lives at risk.
Maybe other professions can finally start catching on....
As I said then.
We just have a generally messed-up attitude toward work and "getting ahead" in the U.S. There may be many proximate causes, but nothing's going to change until you fix the overall cultural attitude.
(5) "Troll" is lingo --- you may have people who enjoy trolling, who have absolutely no idea what the word 'Troll' means.
And, generally speaking, what it really means is "someone who says something that I don't like."
Sometimes it seems to mean that around here, depending on the mod.
But it has a pretty well-accepted definition: "In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a forum, chat room, or blog), either accidentally or with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion."
I think some aspects of this definition are incredibly subjective, like just saying someone who "starts arguments or upsets people." That, by itself, is more about the results of trolling, rather than a good definition.
But "posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages" with the intent to provoke -- that sounds like a reasonable definition. Sure, it will always be subjective, but that's a good baseline idea, which is much more specific than "I don't like it."
(The one thing I somewhat disagree with in the Wikipedia definition is the idea that trolling can be accidental. Someone who accidentally "trolls" may be reacted to as if he/she is a troll, but I'd be more likely to call that an newb or ignorant user, rather than a troll. The actual reaction should be different: a newbie or ignorant user needs guidance to point out why the post is inappropriate; an actual troll should be ignored. Also, as we clearly see in Slashdot moderation sometimes, attempts to be "over-the-top" in a humorous way are often difficult to spot and may be misidentified as "trolls.")