If a company had to screen non-degree candidates for positions, it would take much, much longer and be a more complicated process - meaning HR costs would go up.
You mean that HR people would actually have to know how to screen someone? A degree is just a glorified reference from an institution rather than a particular person, actually it is a reference from a collection of people in the form of professors who give you grades.
The problem with too much education is that eventually it does mean that the burden of cost is actually too high for the economy to sustain if there is not an offsetting benefit. The fact that HR costs might go up doesn't consider the fact that costs have already gone up to pay people enough in salaries to pay off their student loans. But then there is the less tangible cost of people having less Freedom because they are stuck paying off loans for a big chunk of their productive lives.
I really hate the comparisons of Three Mile Island to Chernobyl. Three Mile Island was an example of a failure at a nuclear facility that was solved correctly. Chernobyl was an example of a failure that was caused by extraordinary stupidity and handled as badly as you could handle such an incident.
Actually, Chernobyl was an example of an experiment gone bad:
The immediate cause of the Chernobyl accident was a mismanaged electrical-engineering experiment. Engineers with no knowledge of reactor physics were interested to see if they could draw electricity from the turbine generator of the Number 4 reactor unit to run water pumps during an emergency when the turbine was no longer being driven by the reactor but was still spinning inertially. The engineers needed the reactor to wind up the turbine; then they planned to idle it to 2.5 percent power. Unexpected electrical demand on the afternoon of April 29 delayed the experiment until eleven o'clock that night. When the experimenters finally started, they felt pressed to make up for lost time, so they reduced the reactor's power level too rapidly. That mistake caused a rapid buildup of neutron-absorbing fission by products in the reactor core, which poisoned the reaction. To compensate, the operators withdrew a majority of the reactor's control rods, but even with the rods withdrawn, they were unable to increase the power level to more than 30 megawatts, a low level of operation at which the reactor's instability potential is at its worst and that the Chernobyl plant's own safety rules forbade.
Chernobyl was more akin to America's nuclear experiments that released lots of radiation into the atmosphere. Hanford's "Green Run" purposefully released radioactive gases in order to test our ability to detect releases of radioactive material. And all those above ground nuclear tests didn't do us much good in terms of release of radiation.
Fact is that there has never been a release of significant amounts of radiation from a electricity generating nuclear plant unless people started screwing around with it on purpose. Far more radiation has been released from coal. And far more people have died in accidents relating to the production of oil. From a land use perspective, even solar and wind are more destructive to the environment than nuclear.
Ya I see how being in control of google.com is so much scarier than a corporation having control over tens of millions of computers with a product that is being mandated in thousands of corporations simply because Microsoft keeps IT departments busy with enough work to justify big salaries.
Reading a bit more, it really sounds like they are saying we just can't afford to go for a manned mission to Mars so let's do some other stuff that we can afford.
There are some interesting parts to these ideas, but what I was trying to get at was that manned exploration is about going places and not about using people as guinea pig test subjects or as a squishy brained guidance system. That part of this set of ideas is what I find half baked. It seems there as more of a political compromise than for any practical reason.
The chance of a mission like that succeeding without any prior experience colonizing a planet is pretty much zero. Better to start closer to home and waste less time travelling and more time learning.
We have plenty of experience colonizing our own planet. If we can find another planet like ours and can get there, then it is a sure bet. We have no idea if Mars really can be colonized and if anyone would really like living there.
It's not 10 minutes, it's 10 minutes for every single instruction and response, as opposed to operating in real time. Not only would this speed things up by a massive factor, it allows the possibility of human intervention or control to prevent things going wrong (e.g., a human controlled landing).
Like when the rover sees a shadow, the human controller could quickly swing the camera around to see the Martians...
Those probes cost many millions of dollars to get there (and with a human in orbit it would cost billions more), no one on Earth is going to allow any astronaut to be making split second decisions about rolling over into a ditch or checking out a particularly interesting rock. What we need is better robotics and AI for these missions and more of them not a very expensive human fly by.
To me the only interesting planet in our solar system is our own, so I'd be all for ditching manned exploration altogether and throwing money at solving the issues of getting a probe or even a manned mission to another solar system where there might be habitable worlds and new life. These are completely different problems to solve.
And the US has a right to decide to protect its citizens and corporations from being snooped on by foreign governments. Beyond the right to privacy, a foreign government is possibly interfering with legal a contract between Yahoo and its customers. I doubt the US government will respond, but it should. Yahoo will likely eventually comply and the US government will likely just ignore this, but they shouldn't.
Think of it the other way around, if suddenly the US courts ordered an EU company to divulge data that was protected by EU law...
Each country doesn't get to decide its own jurisdiction, they have to fight for it.
It's not about "Americaness", it is simply about the rule of law. If you allow another country to impose its laws on Americans on American soil, then you no longer have the rule of law under one democratic system.
This is appears to be a threat to our sovereignty. Time to bring in the State Department.
Can't have foreign governments pushing their laws on US companies operating on our own soil. If this were data collected in their country by a company operating in their country then that is a different story. Otherwise this would be like a foreign government demanding the contents of my underwear drawer just because someone they were interested in had called me on the phone.
Practically speaking, if Google has any finances or offices in that country then they have to make a value judgement because the local government has the ability to impose their penalties, but pulling out of this country rather than complying should also be their option. And if a US company is forced to pull out of the EU, then the US should retaliate in kind.
The big one is clearly headed for us and the planet is doomed and they just don't want people to know and start panicking. So, I would encourage everyone to panic.
Since these particular sensors point towards the Earth, then I don't think we would have time to panic if they glimpsed the "big one".
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.
Interesting points. It could very well be that Ahmadinejad won along the lines of the election results.
But I think the point is that it is too hard to tell for sure... lack of press, scientific polling, observers from the various parties, etc.
But considering we are all buddy buddy with absolute monarchs and dictators around the world, I don't think it matters either way whether this was a free and fair election. Demonizing their election process is the wrong thing for outsiders to be doing, especially in the US when our own is also full of potential fraud and abuse and is certainly no less manipulated by the two-parties that are in power. How the Iranians sort out their government is their own business, as far as I am concerned whomever ends up on top should simply be dealt with regardless of how they got there.
Political stability might effect what deals and agreements can be relied upon in the longer term, but that is a decision that we have to make based on how much support we think their government has among their own people.
In the end it is and has been counter productive for the US to criticize and threaten Iran and regardless of the outcome we need to stop doing that as much, both as individual citizens and as a government.
The analysis relies on one glaringly suspect assumption.. that the 2005 election was free and fair and can be used as a baseline. That election was also suspect from what I heard on the radio today. So what does a trend analysis from one fraudulent election to the next really show? All it would show is that the fraud was committed with some consistency with the previous fraud.
For all we know it could very well be the case that both elections went through honestly, but the people that voted are talking to one another and unless everyone is lying to one another then they have figured out that more people voted for the other guy than is being reflected in the counts. It isn't about statistical analysis, it is about what you are going to believe. Are you going to believe the people on the street who voted or are you going to believe the guy that was supposed to win.
No - that is, by definition, an example of solving a problem reactively.
Ah, well by definition you can't solve a problem until it is a problem. But I get your point.
The metric for measuring introduction of new problems is a bit harder to get at, since there is always a value proposition between number of problems versus value created with any new product or service.
But how do you measure the success rate of a problem you solved proactively, thus ensuring it never becomes a measurable problem?
That is simple: fewer number of calls or calls about a particular problem is the success rate of solving a problem proactively. Strictly speaking the IT Service desk shouldn't be solving problems, just getting customers back to the point where they can use the service again or work around some problem. Management and the level 2 engineers should be the ones solving the problems.
We have a problematic metric with password resets, they don't take very long but are the biggest amount of calls our help desk gets.
But password resets should be self service and at some point they are going to be. At which point our Service Desk metrics are going to get screwed up because suddenly we will have far fewer calls but the average time spent per call will go up. Depending on which metrics management has been caring about, this will either be understood as an overall improvement or will be misunderstood as some negative change in the quality of service.
It takes some management understanding to make sense of metrics, otherwise if you have management which is out of touch with operations then you are going to have problems.
However the paper concludes with this conjecture: "If the secular variation is caused by the ocean flow, the entire concept of the dynamo operating in the Earthâ(TM)s core is called into question: there exists no other evidence of hydrodynamic flow in the core." So while the paper doesn't say it, the author seems to entertain the possibility that currents my be solely responsible for the magnetic field.
That's not it at all. At least not in the part you quote or from what I have seen so far. The author is talking about the shorter term variations of the field not the totality of the magnetic field.
If the oceans can explain those variations, then the models for the earth's interior need to be updated to discount for that effect.
Slashdot Mirror
If a company had to screen non-degree candidates for positions, it would take much, much longer and be a more complicated process - meaning HR costs would go up.
You mean that HR people would actually have to know how to screen someone? A degree is just a glorified reference from an institution rather than a particular person, actually it is a reference from a collection of people in the form of professors who give you grades.
The problem with too much education is that eventually it does mean that the burden of cost is actually too high for the economy to sustain if there is not an offsetting benefit. The fact that HR costs might go up doesn't consider the fact that costs have already gone up to pay people enough in salaries to pay off their student loans. But then there is the less tangible cost of people having less Freedom because they are stuck paying off loans for a big chunk of their productive lives.
Does it reasonably cost $5000 in man hours to retrieve 6 months worth of emails from one persons mailbox in Microsoft Exchange?
I really hate the comparisons of Three Mile Island to Chernobyl. Three Mile Island was an example of a failure at a nuclear facility that was solved correctly. Chernobyl was an example of a failure that was caused by extraordinary stupidity and handled as badly as you could handle such an incident.
Actually, Chernobyl was an example of an experiment gone bad:
The immediate cause of the Chernobyl accident was a mismanaged electrical-engineering experiment. Engineers with no knowledge of reactor physics were interested to see if they could draw electricity from the turbine generator of the Number 4 reactor unit to run water pumps during an emergency when the turbine was no longer being driven by the reactor but was still spinning inertially. The engineers needed the reactor to wind up the turbine; then they planned to idle it to 2.5 percent power. Unexpected electrical demand on the afternoon of April 29 delayed the experiment until eleven o'clock that night. When the experimenters finally started, they felt pressed to make up for lost time, so they reduced the reactor's power level too rapidly. That mistake caused a rapid buildup of neutron-absorbing fission by products in the reactor core, which poisoned the reaction. To compensate, the operators withdrew a majority of the reactor's control rods, but even with the rods withdrawn, they were unable to increase the power level to more than 30 megawatts, a low level of operation at which the reactor's instability potential is at its worst and that the Chernobyl plant's own safety rules forbade.
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/chernobyl.html
Chernobyl was more akin to America's nuclear experiments that released lots of radiation into the atmosphere. Hanford's "Green Run" purposefully released radioactive gases in order to test our ability to detect releases of radioactive material. And all those above ground nuclear tests didn't do us much good in terms of release of radiation.
Fact is that there has never been a release of significant amounts of radiation from a electricity generating nuclear plant unless people started screwing around with it on purpose. Far more radiation has been released from coal. And far more people have died in accidents relating to the production of oil. From a land use perspective, even solar and wind are more destructive to the environment than nuclear.
Microsoft Outlook 2007 running on Microsoft Windows XP hangs on me all the time in mid email. I'd hardly call that stable.
Clearly this was a diversion by the unskilled laborers unions in order to get a ban on construction equipment.
Ya I see how being in control of google.com is so much scarier than a corporation having control over tens of millions of computers with a product that is being mandated in thousands of corporations simply because Microsoft keeps IT departments busy with enough work to justify big salaries.
Reading a bit more, it really sounds like they are saying we just can't afford to go for a manned mission to Mars so let's do some other stuff that we can afford.
There are some interesting parts to these ideas, but what I was trying to get at was that manned exploration is about going places and not about using people as guinea pig test subjects or as a squishy brained guidance system. That part of this set of ideas is what I find half baked. It seems there as more of a political compromise than for any practical reason.
The chance of a mission like that succeeding without any prior experience colonizing a planet is pretty much zero. Better to start closer to home and waste less time travelling and more time learning.
We have plenty of experience colonizing our own planet. If we can find another planet like ours and can get there, then it is a sure bet. We have no idea if Mars really can be colonized and if anyone would really like living there.
The answer is yes.
It's not 10 minutes, it's 10 minutes for every single instruction and response, as opposed to operating in real time. Not only would this speed things up by a massive factor, it allows the possibility of human intervention or control to prevent things going wrong (e.g., a human controlled landing).
Like when the rover sees a shadow, the human controller could quickly swing the camera around to see the Martians...
Those probes cost many millions of dollars to get there (and with a human in orbit it would cost billions more), no one on Earth is going to allow any astronaut to be making split second decisions about rolling over into a ditch or checking out a particularly interesting rock. What we need is better robotics and AI for these missions and more of them not a very expensive human fly by.
To me the only interesting planet in our solar system is our own, so I'd be all for ditching manned exploration altogether and throwing money at solving the issues of getting a probe or even a manned mission to another solar system where there might be habitable worlds and new life. These are completely different problems to solve.
Space is not about science it is about exploration. The science is just a side show.
This panel sounds like just a way to justify cutting spending on NASA without making Obama sound like more of a wimp than Bush.
Putting the study's results more succinctly, robots are preferred for all the jobs that put the other guy out of work.
Other countries should be protecting their own laws against US over reach also.
And the US has a right to decide to protect its citizens and corporations from being snooped on by foreign governments. Beyond the right to privacy, a foreign government is possibly interfering with legal a contract between Yahoo and its customers. I doubt the US government will respond, but it should. Yahoo will likely eventually comply and the US government will likely just ignore this, but they shouldn't.
Think of it the other way around, if suddenly the US courts ordered an EU company to divulge data that was protected by EU law...
Each country doesn't get to decide its own jurisdiction, they have to fight for it.
It's not about "Americaness", it is simply about the rule of law. If you allow another country to impose its laws on Americans on American soil, then you no longer have the rule of law under one democratic system.
Oh then nevermind. I don't use any Yahoo services
This is appears to be a threat to our sovereignty. Time to bring in the State Department.
Can't have foreign governments pushing their laws on US companies operating on our own soil. If this were data collected in their country by a company operating in their country then that is a different story. Otherwise this would be like a foreign government demanding the contents of my underwear drawer just because someone they were interested in had called me on the phone.
Practically speaking, if Google has any finances or offices in that country then they have to make a value judgement because the local government has the ability to impose their penalties, but pulling out of this country rather than complying should also be their option. And if a US company is forced to pull out of the EU, then the US should retaliate in kind.
The big one is clearly headed for us and the planet is doomed and they just don't want people to know and start panicking. So, I would encourage everyone to panic.
Since these particular sensors point towards the Earth, then I don't think we would have time to panic if they glimpsed the "big one".
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.
Ironic and amusing on so many levels. Thanks.
Interesting points. It could very well be that Ahmadinejad won along the lines of the election results.
But I think the point is that it is too hard to tell for sure... lack of press, scientific polling, observers from the various parties, etc.
But considering we are all buddy buddy with absolute monarchs and dictators around the world, I don't think it matters either way whether this was a free and fair election. Demonizing their election process is the wrong thing for outsiders to be doing, especially in the US when our own is also full of potential fraud and abuse and is certainly no less manipulated by the two-parties that are in power. How the Iranians sort out their government is their own business, as far as I am concerned whomever ends up on top should simply be dealt with regardless of how they got there.
Political stability might effect what deals and agreements can be relied upon in the longer term, but that is a decision that we have to make based on how much support we think their government has among their own people.
In the end it is and has been counter productive for the US to criticize and threaten Iran and regardless of the outcome we need to stop doing that as much, both as individual citizens and as a government.
The analysis relies on one glaringly suspect assumption.. that the 2005 election was free and fair and can be used as a baseline. That election was also suspect from what I heard on the radio today. So what does a trend analysis from one fraudulent election to the next really show? All it would show is that the fraud was committed with some consistency with the previous fraud.
For all we know it could very well be the case that both elections went through honestly, but the people that voted are talking to one another and unless everyone is lying to one another then they have figured out that more people voted for the other guy than is being reflected in the counts. It isn't about statistical analysis, it is about what you are going to believe. Are you going to believe the people on the street who voted or are you going to believe the guy that was supposed to win.
No - that is, by definition, an example of solving a problem reactively.
Ah, well by definition you can't solve a problem until it is a problem. But I get your point.
The metric for measuring introduction of new problems is a bit harder to get at, since there is always a value proposition between number of problems versus value created with any new product or service.
But how do you measure the success rate of a problem you solved proactively, thus ensuring it never becomes a measurable problem?
That is simple: fewer number of calls or calls about a particular problem is the success rate of solving a problem proactively. Strictly speaking the IT Service desk shouldn't be solving problems, just getting customers back to the point where they can use the service again or work around some problem. Management and the level 2 engineers should be the ones solving the problems.
We have a problematic metric with password resets, they don't take very long but are the biggest amount of calls our help desk gets.
But password resets should be self service and at some point they are going to be. At which point our Service Desk metrics are going to get screwed up because suddenly we will have far fewer calls but the average time spent per call will go up. Depending on which metrics management has been caring about, this will either be understood as an overall improvement or will be misunderstood as some negative change in the quality of service.
It takes some management understanding to make sense of metrics, otherwise if you have management which is out of touch with operations then you are going to have problems.
Here's a trick, if you want them to start saying 'yes' give them more of a budget, as most 'no's comes from a lack of money.
Or if you just want them to stop saying no, then given them no budget at all. No people, no problem.
However the paper concludes with this conjecture: "If the secular variation is caused by the ocean
flow, the entire concept of the dynamo operating in the Earthâ(TM)s core is called into question: there
exists no other evidence of hydrodynamic flow in the core." So while the paper doesn't say it, the author seems to entertain the possibility that currents my be solely responsible for the magnetic field.
That's not it at all. At least not in the part you quote or from what I have seen so far. The author is talking about the shorter term variations of the field not the totality of the magnetic field.
If the oceans can explain those variations, then the models for the earth's interior need to be updated to discount for that effect.