Note that a vast majority of *real* scientists concur that global warming is happening, though there are myriad theories of WHY it is happening.
The important question is not whether the Earth got slightly hotter, the first question is whether humans caused the Earth to get hotter, because the really important question is whether human behavior will cause the Earth to get significantly hotter in the future. That's the important question, and as far as I've seen it has not yet been answered beyond conjecture.
I have a biotech background from school. With a few weeks of research, I can pretty consistently find out more about my condition and the most up-to-date treatments than my doctor knows.
Right, but I bet you don't get any of that information from television commercials with people jumping and dancing and singing the name of a pill.
There's a difference between publishing information for people to look up, and pushing a product.
I will give you that there are some randomized experiments there which I did not previously notice, but they do not satisfy the conclusion drawn.
Upon looking up the original Bartholow and Anderson study, it seems to have one rather significant flaw. While it is randomized, it is not blind. The aggressiveness testing portion of the experiment uses a confederate who also participated in the video game playing portion of the experiment, knew who was playing which video game, and was aware of the hypothesis being tested, which is that violent video game players have greater aggression. It has been documented for decades that participants will show greater aggression when experimenters ask them to, and having a confederate participating in the aggression test who expects greater aggression out of one group can skew the results.
It is important that studies of this type be experimenter or confederate blind for the aggressiveness evaluation portion.
I was unable to locate a copy of the Irwin & Goss study on short notice, as it unfortunately predates electronic archival for that journal, but it certainly seems to fit into the same problem as I will mention at the end.
The second and third group of studies simply shows that people who play violent video games have violence in their mind immediately afterward. This is not surprising nor hard to believe for anyone who has played a video games, but it is not in any way indicative of learning criminal behavior.
The most significant problem with all of these studies is that they still do not satisfy the requirement I stated which was, "I have never seen a study which has legitimately concluded a causal relationship between violent video games and violent behavior later in life."
There is a HUGE difference between showing violent thought right after playing a video game and violent (or criminal) behavior later in life. To understand this a little more clearly, think about a horror film. It would be very easy to show that people who watch a horror film have more fearful thoughts afterward, or even that if a confederate jumps out at them from around a corner, they will jump higher. (This is actually why people watch horror films, as they enjoy that state of mind.) But this in no way indicates that people who are made to watch horror films will live a life of paranoia or live a more fearful life than other people and be long-term risk avoidant.
When people conclude that violent video games induce violent (or criminal) behavior later in life without evidence directly indicating that, they are making an identical leap of logic to what I just described with horror films, and that is not correct.
Most of the humanoid species we know about seem to have lasted around a million years or so. So if we make a silly estimate that there's a 50% chance of a single planet humanoid species disappearing after a million years, then that leaves about 1/14427 of dying off in the next 100 years. That's way less than his estimate.
But none of that takes into account that we're the smartest species the planet has ever seen. It remains to be seen whether being the smartest species ultimately contributes to our survival or to our destruction, but my money is on our survival.
Try this instead. What are you going to trust - randomized controlled trials, including field studies and long-term followups, or some hack who makes up stuff that confirms your biases?
A randomized controlled trial might be nice, but that's not what you referenced. A randomized trial cannot have participants who self-select their category (i.e., choose for themselves whether or not they will be the violent video media experiencers). What you referenced is another example of the classic logical fallacy in most violent media research. The study you provided is a longitudinal study which shows that people who commit more violent crimes in life are more likely to have watched violent media as children. Then the study takes this data and makes the conclusion that it is "unequivocal" proof that violent media causes people to commit violent crimes.
This is completely false, and borders on incompetence. One of the first thing taught in every psychology research course is that correlation does not imply causation. The fallacy used here is called "post hoc ergo propter hoc", or "after this, therefore because of this", and it erroneously concludes that one thing caused another event because it came before the event. This is a fallacy because there are many alternate reasons things can be correlated.
There is a correlation showing that psychopathic killers are more likely to have tortured small animals when they were young. Does this mean that small animals cause people to become psychopathic killers later in life? Of course not, and it's bad science for anyone to suggest something of the sort.
So, given the choice between some hack who makes stuff up that confirms his bias, and some hack with a published study that made stuff up which confirms his bias, I'm going to go with neither, and stick with accurate science, which was not used here.
I have never seen a study which has legitimately concluded a causal relationship between violent video games and violent behavior later in life. I have seen a number of studies erroneously conclude this when their data does not support it, but I have never seen one which properly concludes causation from a randomized controlled trial.
A much better solution would be to say that for each service that needs to be started which services must be started before it and to provide a priority for each service. The boot loader could then use this information to start processes in parallel giving priorities as needed.
"Make" can already do this in parallel, and is an appropriate tool for specifying dependencies. It would be a simple matter to use it as the primary boot manager rather than shell scripts.
I'm a Wikipedia contributor, but I find the automatic response of "You're criticising a Wiki? How DARE you...stop whining and fix it yourself!" to be very irritating.
The important point is often missed. It's not that you HAVE to fix it, it's that you CAN fix it. So if a particular thing bothers you enough, go ahead and fix it. If not, then it probably doesn't bother you that much.
And it would be the Republicans complaining because a mere 60,000 vote switch in Ohio gave Kerry the presidency through the electoral college system despite Bush having won the popular vote by over 3 million.
If there are enough votes in error to cause the election to shift, then much of the rest of the country would have to be recounted for this popular vote tally to be considered valid. The unadjusted final exit polls were also showing the popular vote in the other direction.
Theres several problems with our voting system (not the least of which is that I think the 1 vote for one candidate thing is silly, I would rather see a ranked voting system)... In most states to be involved in the elections, you effectivly have to be aproved by the parties.
The current voting system's game-theory fostering a two-party system results in a horrible false dichotomy. For the most part, candidates are only given a serious chance at winning an important office if they agree with one party's position on both economic AND social issues (or any other grouping method), rather than taking some positions from each party. But the fact is, the vast majority of the country would probably be more in the middle on many issues if the middle were an option.
A system like Approval Voting would allow candidates to express views on issues, and what's more, encourage them to do so. Candidates who were bland, refused to take a stance, or refused to say anything of substance would simply be ignored as noise if there were a handful of names on the ballot, and each one could be voted yes or no. There wouldn't be a motivation for voting for one candidate because you don't like the other. Voters would simply vote for as many candidates as they DID like, and then the most liked one would win. How much simpler and better could an election system get?
But would not the availability of free energy eventually cause people to use huge amounts of energy? Sooner or later we would have the new problem of efficiently radiating all that extra heat (the energy would turn into heat sooner or later) off this planet.
Ah, that's easy. Giant fusion powered air conditioning units.
The exit polls reveal that there is not much of a correlation between political affiliation and education.
Actually, they do show a relationship. Support for Bush is slightly higher among college graduates (which correlates with support for Bush being higher among those with more money), but support for Kerry shoots up significantly upon completion of a Masters degree or a PhD (which is in contrast to the correlation with money). When combined together, Bush's support is strongest among those with no college degree, whereas support is split among those with a college degree, with the Kerry support growing as education increases beyond this point.
The data is here: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/sta tes/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
I saw the event on CNN News, but haven't seen more mention of it since then. Coverage was quickly carried away to counting votes. I would also be interested in seeing articles with more information on this.
So many people alow themselves to be tracked anyways because of subway passes and credit cards.
There's a world of difference between allowing yourself to be tracked, and being required to be tracked. Freedom means you can tell people where you are, and freedom means you can go somewhere without telling anyone that you're going there.
If you lose that, you lose the freedom of assembly, because you no longer have the ability to come together in groups with anonymity. At this point, the freedom of democracy disappears.
If there is no evidence of a link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, why did a federal judge (appointed by Clinton) award $100,000,000 to plaintiffs payable by Saddam?
I'm sorry, but you just said, "no evidence of a link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein". That's the same line blurring that causes the misconceptions reported in the article in the first place. Of COURSE there is a link between Iraq and Saddam, he ran the place for decades! However, that has nothing to do with the issue being disputed, because Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are very different guys (while yes, both of them have beards).
With an Approval voting system, a "none of the above" option would not be necessary, as all of the candidates who would consider running could run simultaneously, even with large overlap of views.
Or alternatively, we could stop viewing everything as who it's going to make win in the next election, and start viewing things in terms of how it will change the dynamic of our political system, and how these things will affect the long-term prosperity of our country.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that a vast majority of *real* scientists concur that global warming is happening, though there are myriad theories of WHY it is happening.
The important question is not whether the Earth got slightly hotter, the first question is whether humans caused the Earth to get hotter, because the really important question is whether human behavior will cause the Earth to get significantly hotter in the future. That's the important question, and as far as I've seen it has not yet been answered beyond conjecture.
So the "why" is everything.
They've already developed a mind enhancing drug, and it's called beer. It helps me understand women with precise clarity
That's probably a unidirectional effect...
I have a biotech background from school. With a few weeks of research, I can pretty consistently find out more about my condition and the most up-to-date treatments than my doctor knows.
Right, but I bet you don't get any of that information from television commercials with people jumping and dancing and singing the name of a pill.
There's a difference between publishing information for people to look up, and pushing a product.
I will give you that there are some randomized experiments there which I did not previously notice, but they do not satisfy the conclusion drawn.
Upon looking up the original Bartholow and Anderson study, it seems to have one rather significant flaw. While it is randomized, it is not blind. The aggressiveness testing portion of the experiment uses a confederate who also participated in the video game playing portion of the experiment, knew who was playing which video game, and was aware of the hypothesis being tested, which is that violent video game players have greater aggression. It has been documented for decades that participants will show greater aggression when experimenters ask them to, and having a confederate participating in the aggression test who expects greater aggression out of one group can skew the results.
It is important that studies of this type be experimenter or confederate blind for the aggressiveness evaluation portion.
I was unable to locate a copy of the Irwin & Goss study on short notice, as it unfortunately predates electronic archival for that journal, but it certainly seems to fit into the same problem as I will mention at the end.
The second and third group of studies simply shows that people who play violent video games have violence in their mind immediately afterward. This is not surprising nor hard to believe for anyone who has played a video games, but it is not in any way indicative of learning criminal behavior.
The most significant problem with all of these studies is that they still do not satisfy the requirement I stated which was, "I have never seen a study which has legitimately concluded a causal relationship between violent video games and violent behavior later in life."
There is a HUGE difference between showing violent thought right after playing a video game and violent (or criminal) behavior later in life. To understand this a little more clearly, think about a horror film. It would be very easy to show that people who watch a horror film have more fearful thoughts afterward, or even that if a confederate jumps out at them from around a corner, they will jump higher. (This is actually why people watch horror films, as they enjoy that state of mind.) But this in no way indicates that people who are made to watch horror films will live a life of paranoia or live a more fearful life than other people and be long-term risk avoidant.
When people conclude that violent video games induce violent (or criminal) behavior later in life without evidence directly indicating that, they are making an identical leap of logic to what I just described with horror films, and that is not correct.
Most of the humanoid species we know about seem to have lasted around a million years or so. So if we make a silly estimate that there's a 50% chance of a single planet humanoid species disappearing after a million years, then that leaves about 1/14427 of dying off in the next 100 years. That's way less than his estimate.
:)
But none of that takes into account that we're the smartest species the planet has ever seen. It remains to be seen whether being the smartest species ultimately contributes to our survival or to our destruction, but my money is on our survival.
With that said, let's start colonizing.
Try this instead. What are you going to trust - randomized controlled trials, including field studies and long-term followups, or some hack who makes up stuff that confirms your biases?
A randomized controlled trial might be nice, but that's not what you referenced. A randomized trial cannot have participants who self-select their category (i.e., choose for themselves whether or not they will be the violent video media experiencers). What you referenced is another example of the classic logical fallacy in most violent media research. The study you provided is a longitudinal study which shows that people who commit more violent crimes in life are more likely to have watched violent media as children. Then the study takes this data and makes the conclusion that it is "unequivocal" proof that violent media causes people to commit violent crimes.
This is completely false, and borders on incompetence. One of the first thing taught in every psychology research course is that correlation does not imply causation. The fallacy used here is called "post hoc ergo propter hoc", or "after this, therefore because of this", and it erroneously concludes that one thing caused another event because it came before the event. This is a fallacy because there are many alternate reasons things can be correlated.
There is a correlation showing that psychopathic killers are more likely to have tortured small animals when they were young. Does this mean that small animals cause people to become psychopathic killers later in life? Of course not, and it's bad science for anyone to suggest something of the sort.
So, given the choice between some hack who makes stuff up that confirms his bias, and some hack with a published study that made stuff up which confirms his bias, I'm going to go with neither, and stick with accurate science, which was not used here.
I have never seen a study which has legitimately concluded a causal relationship between violent video games and violent behavior later in life. I have seen a number of studies erroneously conclude this when their data does not support it, but I have never seen one which properly concludes causation from a randomized controlled trial.
I paid for my name to be put in the ad. ... Gives me some free press as well even if I have to point it out to people.
:)
Don't you mean, gives you some free press, but all you had to do was pay for it?
A much better solution would be to say that for each service that needs to be started which services must be started before it and to provide a priority for each service. The boot loader could then use this information to start processes in parallel giving priorities as needed.
"Make" can already do this in parallel, and is an appropriate tool for specifying dependencies. It would be a simple matter to use it as the primary boot manager rather than shell scripts.
I'm a Wikipedia contributor, but I find the automatic response of "You're criticising a Wiki? How DARE you...stop whining and fix it yourself!" to be very irritating.
The important point is often missed. It's not that you HAVE to fix it, it's that you CAN fix it. So if a particular thing bothers you enough, go ahead and fix it. If not, then it probably doesn't bother you that much.
Because none of the blindfolded people want the boat rocked while they think it's heading in the direction they want to go.
And it would be the Republicans complaining because a mere 60,000 vote switch in Ohio gave Kerry the presidency through the electoral college system despite Bush having won the popular vote by over 3 million.
If there are enough votes in error to cause the election to shift, then much of the rest of the country would have to be recounted for this popular vote tally to be considered valid. The unadjusted final exit polls were also showing the popular vote in the other direction.
If not, I really can't see where a Libertarian party that would waste Ohio taxpayers' money on this silliness has any value at all.
"Waste money" on ensuring a fair democratic election??? That's the very foundation of our government. There's nothing more important for us to do.
Sorry to double-post, but here's some more information you should read.
Do you understand the words "well-regulated?" The militia is not simply "the people."
Do YOU? Try reading about it.
Why is this modded Funny? And why is Nader the only one calling for a recount?
Theres several problems with our voting system (not the least of which is that I think the 1 vote for one candidate thing is silly, I would rather see a ranked voting system) ...
In most states to be involved in the elections, you effectivly have to be aproved by the parties.
The current voting system's game-theory fostering a two-party system results in a horrible false dichotomy. For the most part, candidates are only given a serious chance at winning an important office if they agree with one party's position on both economic AND social issues (or any other grouping method), rather than taking some positions from each party. But the fact is, the vast majority of the country would probably be more in the middle on many issues if the middle were an option.
A system like Approval Voting would allow candidates to express views on issues, and what's more, encourage them to do so. Candidates who were bland, refused to take a stance, or refused to say anything of substance would simply be ignored as noise if there were a handful of names on the ballot, and each one could be voted yes or no. There wouldn't be a motivation for voting for one candidate because you don't like the other. Voters would simply vote for as many candidates as they DID like, and then the most liked one would win. How much simpler and better could an election system get?
But would not the availability of free energy eventually cause people to use huge amounts of energy? Sooner or later we would have the new problem of efficiently radiating all that extra heat (the energy would turn into heat sooner or later) off this planet.
Ah, that's easy. Giant fusion powered air conditioning units.
</humor>
And http://www.blackboxvoting.org is looking for donations to investigate this. Please contribute.
Sorry, the fixed link is here.
The exit polls reveal that there is not much of a correlation between political affiliation and education.
a tes/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
Actually, they do show a relationship. Support for Bush is slightly higher among college graduates (which correlates with support for Bush being higher among those with more money), but support for Kerry shoots up significantly upon completion of a Masters degree or a PhD (which is in contrast to the correlation with money). When combined together, Bush's support is strongest among those with no college degree, whereas support is split among those with a college degree, with the Kerry support growing as education increases beyond this point.
The data is here: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/st
I saw the event on CNN News, but haven't seen more mention of it since then. Coverage was quickly carried away to counting votes. I would also be interested in seeing articles with more information on this.
So many people alow themselves to be tracked anyways because of subway passes and credit cards.
There's a world of difference between allowing yourself to be tracked, and being required to be tracked. Freedom means you can tell people where you are, and freedom means you can go somewhere without telling anyone that you're going there.
If you lose that, you lose the freedom of assembly, because you no longer have the ability to come together in groups with anonymity. At this point, the freedom of democracy disappears.
If there is no evidence of a link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, why did a federal judge (appointed by Clinton) award $100,000,000 to plaintiffs payable by Saddam?
I'm sorry, but you just said, "no evidence of a link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein". That's the same line blurring that causes the misconceptions reported in the article in the first place. Of COURSE there is a link between Iraq and Saddam, he ran the place for decades! However, that has nothing to do with the issue being disputed, because Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are very different guys (while yes, both of them have beards).
With an Approval voting system, a "none of the above" option would not be necessary, as all of the candidates who would consider running could run simultaneously, even with large overlap of views.
Or alternatively, we could stop viewing everything as who it's going to make win in the next election, and start viewing things in terms of how it will change the dynamic of our political system, and how these things will affect the long-term prosperity of our country.