Except that 'Wordsmithing', in most of your examples is actually useful in professional terms. Let me break it down:
Lethal Force - Force that death is a reasonable, even 'usual' result from. Standard firearms, fragmentary explosives, etc...
Nonlethal - The use of this term is actually depreciated in the force-continuum. It's a sad fact that humans can be both incredibly resilient and incredibly fragile. A disabler that works on a guy able to cut his own arm off that's trapped by a boulder and apply a tourniquet before hiking 26 miles to get to medical care is probably going to be lethal to a 90 year old diabetic great-grandmother. Worse, it's not always apparent who's 'fragile' and who's not.
Less-lethal - The replacement term. It's still potentially lethal, so care should be employed in it's deployment, but as long as you follow the directions, your department shouldn't kill anybody with it any given year.
WMD: Weapon of Mass Destruction. Now, I'm old school with this one, and demand that it be NBC - Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical. And the last is iffy as well. In order for me to count it as a WMD, it needs to be able to destroy city blocks of people, or at least kill more people than any individual practical conventional bomb. I dislike calling a pressure cooker bomb a 'WMD'. So I'd say on a 'killzone' requirement to be a WMD: Several blocks radius OR 'significant' primary duration in time. IE, as a direct intended effect from the bomb, it will keep killing people who enter the area for a significant amount of time after deployment, not just from hazards like structurally compromised buildings.
IED: Improvised Explosive Device. As opposed to a non-improvised one. A very important distinction during my time in the military. Standard munitions have standard means of disarming and disposal. EOD(Explosive Ordinance Disposal) rolls up on a Mark 82 500 pound bomb(or it's Russian equivalent), they know how to make it safe. All that goes out the window when it's an IED. Think of it like a paperwork thing - for a car you put make & model. For a bomb you'd do the same, but IED = 'home built'/unknown/unlisted. So your going 'It's a BOMB' is like saying 'It's a CAR' when I say that a Honda Civic was in an accident.
Depends on the size of the drone and the vertical distance before impact.
Also, not all police drones will be prop driven. Something like a Global Hawk you'd be able to make a powered impact with.
Then again, in a place like North Dakota, if the local police force is willing to 'use up' an expensive drone that they're not going to automatically get funding to replace, odds are that the target would 'deserve' and 'require' it.
And they show up in accounting sheets - just not those of the originator. They show up in the accounting sheets of healthcare organizations. Life Insurance organizations. Building maintenance(back when acid rain was even dissolving them). Etc...
The term "externals" is what you say when you want something to be more expensive but can't actually cite any of it with any clarity.
No, it's more like I don't want to write a book. I can, using completely open sources, peg an average 'per mWh' external expense to coal. It might not be accurate down to the mill(1/10 of one cent), but I can do it. It's true that you can't really attribute any given death to a specific plant, much less a specific unit of power. But you can certainly do so in the aggregate. If it was any less diffuse people would be able to successfully sue for their illnesses.
It might be somewhat 'unfair', but it does mean that you can 'get it in the ballpark' with regards to internalizing the cost by doing something like charging for the pollution. The USA currently mostly does it by the EPA and fines, but I support a more straight-forward system.
You're lucky that the lamp works. I can be in a room 'full' of ballasts, and point right at the 'weak' one, and the flicker from it is enough to annoy me.
As the building custodian though, I was able to get them replaced.
Perhaps, but if you set your paper up correctly, for search engine purposes you can have your keywords be separate from the title. Thus allowing you to have a concise title that still shows up in the appropriate searches.
And how do you know if wind and solar is cheaper?... when china and india prefer it to coal. If they prefer coal... then coal is cheaper. Count on it.
China and India are installing every energy production method going. Coal, Natural Gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind. That's not even a complete list.
Coal is only cheaper if you don't count external costs. Right now China's setting itself up for a healthcare holocaust, especially if you consider it's air pollution. For example, simply breathing Beijing air is equivalent to smoking 21 cigarettes a day.
But right now China is all about economic growth *NOW*. I also wonder if there's a consiparcy theory out there that the pollution is deliberate - aimed at killing off most of their Seniors early before the lack of young people gets them into trouble.
Basically the same 'freakanomics' that showed that smokers were cheaper. At least if they were low/middle educated - on average they'd die shortly after retirement, for not much more in the way of end of life costs. So fewer pension payments and less medical care was required, even if the 'sharp end' came sooner.
For rich/educated types - they tend to not retire at 65, but keep working, so having them live longer was profitable. Ideally you'd get your educated types(doctors, professors, and such) to not smoke, but have all your factory workers do so.
I think that the whole "teh bureaucracy is teh worst" excuse was just an angle to make purchasing easier general, not because they are really upset about not keeping this gigantic mound of data, if not for a $50 part.
That's a possibility. The old data not being even worth a $50 upgrade is another.
Lastly, I wonder if it's not so much the drive. The clue is that it's a desktop machine - the crashes described sound to me as more 'access database like behavior'. IE they're not using a 'serious' DB like SQL. As such, replacing the HD with a larger one wouldn't work. So they talk about certification and everything else because they don't want to admit that they bought a horribly programmed non-expandable system.
The obvious alternative was to tell the greedy litle sod not to nick other people's sandwiches.
The problem with this is that the sensitivity is really quite insane for some with peanut allergies. As somebody mentioned, some of them will go into shock from touching a pencil touched by somebody who had just eaten the sandwich.
Now, one could tell your kid to eat neater as well as have the allergic kid washing everything down first in case of peanut-butter infused crumbs, but we'd really rather not risk potentially deadly symptoms.
Now what's hilarious is when the occasional school tries to say that the epi-pen is a drug and thus, per policy, needs to be kept in the nurse's office, to be administered when the nurse is available only.
Tragically, it's resulted in at least one death. They took the girl's pen away, she latter suffocated during a reaction during class. Normally it just results in an epic stomp by the parents.
I don't believe in alien or government mind control stuff that can be blocked by foil, but it being impervious to visible light is well known to night workers trying to sleep during the day.
I'm sensitive to visible radiation - specifically, I'm in the top x% that's sensitive to flickering. For example, I could spot a CRT monitor set to a 60hz refresh rate from across the room. I can spot weak fluorescent ballasts. The effect is not subtle to me.
But even then, bump it from 60hz to 70-75, and I'm fine.
The wireless router, I'd point out that it's the lights annoying me.
Heck - that could be another test. Get away from 'RFI' sufferers. Just test 'comfort levels' in some rooms where the only difference is blinking lights, perhaps of different colors like red and blue. I'd suggest: 50hz, 60hz, 70hz, semi-random(like router activity lights), and off as the control. Go the extra mile and test the difference between 'standard' worn-in fluorescent lighting and DC LED lighting(so absolutely no flicker).
Done properly though, keywords is separate from the title. Also, there might be researcher bias - the longer titles from a particular researcher are cited more, but researchers that tend towards concise titles tend to be cited far more often.
I don't understand this. Why is the suggestion that the radio is off (dark lights) not as strong as the suggestion that the radio is on?
It's a matter of ratios, which is why it's good to do all 4 possibilities(in this case) in 1 experiment.
Basically, between the lights on and lights off tests, you can figure out, roughly, how many people are (presumably) responding to the lights, and not the radio. How many are responding to the radio, and not the lights, etc...
Why would it not be a stronger experiment if there were no lights at all?
Let me ask this: What are you gaining by testing less?
There have been a number of experiments like you describe. By not telling them whether the wifi is active or not, you do indeed confound them enough that they can't just guess and fake the symptoms.
But as yndrd mentions, by having the lights as additional test groups, it can help zero in on whether it's psychosomatic in nature. And the evidence is that it IS, at least in part.
It also gives you the ability to differentiate between symptoms between two levels - when people think they're supposed to be sick, and when they think they aren't. If there was a minor difference when they think they're supposed to be, but not when they don't, you can detect it with the more detailed study.
I disagree. There is no reason at all to show lights if what you are really testing is sensitivity to radio signals.
As the famous 'experiment' down in South Africa showed, where the cell phone tower operators shut the tower off six weeks before a meeting about turning the tower off, where people were STILL expressing the same symptoms, how getting away from the tower decreased them, how it was the radiation from the tower giving them rashes and such, perception is a thing.
By having the lights be visible, it allowed the study to not just test radio sensitivity, it allowed them to test perception of radio sensitivity.
The test essentially showed that the people were getting sick when they thought they were being bombarded with radio waves, not when they were actually being bombarded.
A real test would not provide any misleading clues.
They tested that as well. They had 4 different tests - Radio & lights, Radio & dark, No Radio &lights, No Radio & dark. Symptoms tracked with the status lights on the test device, not the radio waves.
If people were sensitive, but also fooling themselves with the lights, more people would have shown something when the lights were dark but the radio was on.
To expand upon this, in a 'double blind' test, not even those with any contact with the test subjects know whether they're administering the real thing or a placebo. IE those handing out the pills and recording any symptoms don't know. This prevents even more contamination, because the doctor can act differently if he knows which pills he's handing out, and influence the patients that way.
There have been double-blind tests performed, but the subjects were quite upset when they learned that apparently it wasn't the wifi signals making them sick, but the blinking lights on the wireless devices.
IE lights disabled, radios fully enabled, on highest power, transmitting data: No symptoms. Simulated status light activity, radios completely disabled and unpowered: symptoms. Lights & radio on : symptoms Lights & radio disabled: no symptoms.
Conclusion: Clearly we need to investigate the status lights.;)
Solyndra had 'lots' of VC capital. In this case, the VCs lost it all. Which is why you don't get into VC until you have enough money to invest in enough startups that, statistically speaking, you're going to make your money back on the occasional 'big winner'.
Now, I wouldn't call two trillion dollars spent fighting a war to protect oil fields a subsidy.
I hate saying this, but none of the recent wars were actually to protect oil. Even Kuwait 'paid us back' for protecting it in the first gulf war. If they had been about oil, we would have prosecuted them in a far different way.
Oil company subsidies are embedded into the system so well that we don't even notice them most the time.
Yes, we subsidize 'oil' so much that the government gets more profit per barrel than the company itself.
Sure, we give them some money back. After we charge them: For the rights to drill, extract, ship, refine, property taxes, sales taxes, surcharges, fuel taxes, etc...
If solar can cut oil demand by 10%.. then the price of oil will never recover and we can start saving oil for unique things instead of burning it for energy.
It would be tough. Solar is primarily for electricity, oil is primarily for heat/transport. Natural Gas is currently pushing oil out of heating.
Now, I wouldn't call two trillion dollars spent fighting a war to protect oil fields a subsidy.
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Except that 'Wordsmithing', in most of your examples is actually useful in professional terms. Let me break it down:
Lethal Force - Force that death is a reasonable, even 'usual' result from. Standard firearms, fragmentary explosives, etc...
Nonlethal - The use of this term is actually depreciated in the force-continuum. It's a sad fact that humans can be both incredibly resilient and incredibly fragile. A disabler that works on a guy able to cut his own arm off that's trapped by a boulder and apply a tourniquet before hiking 26 miles to get to medical care is probably going to be lethal to a 90 year old diabetic great-grandmother. Worse, it's not always apparent who's 'fragile' and who's not.
Less-lethal - The replacement term. It's still potentially lethal, so care should be employed in it's deployment, but as long as you follow the directions, your department shouldn't kill anybody with it any given year.
WMD: Weapon of Mass Destruction. Now, I'm old school with this one, and demand that it be NBC - Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical. And the last is iffy as well. In order for me to count it as a WMD, it needs to be able to destroy city blocks of people, or at least kill more people than any individual practical conventional bomb. I dislike calling a pressure cooker bomb a 'WMD'. So I'd say on a 'killzone' requirement to be a WMD: Several blocks radius OR 'significant' primary duration in time. IE, as a direct intended effect from the bomb, it will keep killing people who enter the area for a significant amount of time after deployment, not just from hazards like structurally compromised buildings.
IED: Improvised Explosive Device. As opposed to a non-improvised one. A very important distinction during my time in the military. Standard munitions have standard means of disarming and disposal. EOD(Explosive Ordinance Disposal) rolls up on a Mark 82 500 pound bomb(or it's Russian equivalent), they know how to make it safe. All that goes out the window when it's an IED. Think of it like a paperwork thing - for a car you put make & model. For a bomb you'd do the same, but IED = 'home built'/unknown/unlisted. So your going 'It's a BOMB' is like saying 'It's a CAR' when I say that a Honda Civic was in an accident.
--does that count as "lethal force"?
Depends on the size of the drone and the vertical distance before impact.
Also, not all police drones will be prop driven. Something like a Global Hawk you'd be able to make a powered impact with.
Then again, in a place like North Dakota, if the local police force is willing to 'use up' an expensive drone that they're not going to automatically get funding to replace, odds are that the target would 'deserve' and 'require' it.
The "externals" can't be accurately counted or evaluated. And they don't show up on accounting sheets.
It depends. How accurate do you demand it be?
deaths per TWH by energy source
Health effects
And they show up in accounting sheets - just not those of the originator. They show up in the accounting sheets of healthcare organizations. Life Insurance organizations. Building maintenance(back when acid rain was even dissolving them). Etc...
The term "externals" is what you say when you want something to be more expensive but can't actually cite any of it with any clarity.
No, it's more like I don't want to write a book. I can, using completely open sources, peg an average 'per mWh' external expense to coal. It might not be accurate down to the mill(1/10 of one cent), but I can do it. It's true that you can't really attribute any given death to a specific plant, much less a specific unit of power. But you can certainly do so in the aggregate. If it was any less diffuse people would be able to successfully sue for their illnesses.
It might be somewhat 'unfair', but it does mean that you can 'get it in the ballpark' with regards to internalizing the cost by doing something like charging for the pollution. The USA currently mostly does it by the EPA and fines, but I support a more straight-forward system.
You're lucky that the lamp works. I can be in a room 'full' of ballasts, and point right at the 'weak' one, and the flicker from it is enough to annoy me.
As the building custodian though, I was able to get them replaced.
I suppose ye Americans are living in a faster-paced consumerist throw-away society. If it's not this year's model it's considered old.
Turn of phrase. The average car age, not even it's lifespan, is 11.4 years now. There's actually a LOT of 20+ year old cars on the roads.
Perhaps, but if you set your paper up correctly, for search engine purposes you can have your keywords be separate from the title. Thus allowing you to have a concise title that still shows up in the appropriate searches.
And how do you know if wind and solar is cheaper?... when china and india prefer it to coal. If they prefer coal... then coal is cheaper. Count on it.
China and India are installing every energy production method going. Coal, Natural Gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind. That's not even a complete list.
Coal is only cheaper if you don't count external costs. Right now China's setting itself up for a healthcare holocaust, especially if you consider it's air pollution. For example, simply breathing Beijing air is equivalent to smoking 21 cigarettes a day.
But right now China is all about economic growth *NOW*. I also wonder if there's a consiparcy theory out there that the pollution is deliberate - aimed at killing off most of their Seniors early before the lack of young people gets them into trouble.
Basically the same 'freakanomics' that showed that smokers were cheaper. At least if they were low/middle educated - on average they'd die shortly after retirement, for not much more in the way of end of life costs. So fewer pension payments and less medical care was required, even if the 'sharp end' came sooner.
For rich/educated types - they tend to not retire at 65, but keep working, so having them live longer was profitable. Ideally you'd get your educated types(doctors, professors, and such) to not smoke, but have all your factory workers do so.
I think that the whole "teh bureaucracy is teh worst" excuse was just an angle to make purchasing easier general, not because they are really upset about not keeping this gigantic mound of data, if not for a $50 part.
That's a possibility. The old data not being even worth a $50 upgrade is another.
Lastly, I wonder if it's not so much the drive. The clue is that it's a desktop machine - the crashes described sound to me as more 'access database like behavior'. IE they're not using a 'serious' DB like SQL. As such, replacing the HD with a larger one wouldn't work. So they talk about certification and everything else because they don't want to admit that they bought a horribly programmed non-expandable system.
The obvious alternative was to tell the greedy litle sod not to nick other people's sandwiches.
The problem with this is that the sensitivity is really quite insane for some with peanut allergies. As somebody mentioned, some of them will go into shock from touching a pencil touched by somebody who had just eaten the sandwich.
Now, one could tell your kid to eat neater as well as have the allergic kid washing everything down first in case of peanut-butter infused crumbs, but we'd really rather not risk potentially deadly symptoms.
Now what's hilarious is when the occasional school tries to say that the epi-pen is a drug and thus, per policy, needs to be kept in the nurse's office, to be administered when the nurse is available only.
Tragically, it's resulted in at least one death. They took the girl's pen away, she latter suffocated during a reaction during class. Normally it just results in an epic stomp by the parents.
Boy, you're really going on that citation thing, you know? Completely missed where I posted sources?
Here, have another couple.
I don't believe in alien or government mind control stuff that can be blocked by foil, but it being impervious to visible light is well known to night workers trying to sleep during the day.
You must of missed this post then.
I'm sensitive to visible radiation - specifically, I'm in the top x% that's sensitive to flickering. For example, I could spot a CRT monitor set to a 60hz refresh rate from across the room. I can spot weak fluorescent ballasts. The effect is not subtle to me.
But even then, bump it from 60hz to 70-75, and I'm fine.
The wireless router, I'd point out that it's the lights annoying me.
Heck - that could be another test. Get away from 'RFI' sufferers. Just test 'comfort levels' in some rooms where the only difference is blinking lights, perhaps of different colors like red and blue. I'd suggest: 50hz, 60hz, 70hz, semi-random(like router activity lights), and off as the control. Go the extra mile and test the difference between 'standard' worn-in fluorescent lighting and DC LED lighting(so absolutely no flicker).
Done properly though, keywords is separate from the title. Also, there might be researcher bias - the longer titles from a particular researcher are cited more, but researchers that tend towards concise titles tend to be cited far more often.
I don't understand this. Why is the suggestion that the radio is off (dark lights) not as strong as the suggestion that the radio is on?
It's a matter of ratios, which is why it's good to do all 4 possibilities(in this case) in 1 experiment.
Basically, between the lights on and lights off tests, you can figure out, roughly, how many people are (presumably) responding to the lights, and not the radio. How many are responding to the radio, and not the lights, etc...
Why would it not be a stronger experiment if there were no lights at all?
Let me ask this: What are you gaining by testing less?
There have been a number of experiments like you describe. By not telling them whether the wifi is active or not, you do indeed confound them enough that they can't just guess and fake the symptoms.
But as yndrd mentions, by having the lights as additional test groups, it can help zero in on whether it's psychosomatic in nature. And the evidence is that it IS, at least in part.
It also gives you the ability to differentiate between symptoms between two levels - when people think they're supposed to be sick, and when they think they aren't. If there was a minor difference when they think they're supposed to be, but not when they don't, you can detect it with the more detailed study.
Which is the reason for the wink smiley. ;)
I've found that liquid electrical tape works pretty good as well. I've even used foil a couple times.
I disagree. There is no reason at all to show lights if what you are really testing is sensitivity to radio signals.
As the famous 'experiment' down in South Africa showed, where the cell phone tower operators shut the tower off six weeks before a meeting about turning the tower off, where people were STILL expressing the same symptoms, how getting away from the tower decreased them, how it was the radiation from the tower giving them rashes and such, perception is a thing.
By having the lights be visible, it allowed the study to not just test radio sensitivity, it allowed them to test perception of radio sensitivity.
The test essentially showed that the people were getting sick when they thought they were being bombarded with radio waves, not when they were actually being bombarded.
A real test would not provide any misleading clues.
They tested that as well. They had 4 different tests - Radio & lights, Radio & dark, No Radio &lights, No Radio & dark. Symptoms tracked with the status lights on the test device, not the radio waves.
If people were sensitive, but also fooling themselves with the lights, more people would have shown something when the lights were dark but the radio was on.
To expand upon this, in a 'double blind' test, not even those with any contact with the test subjects know whether they're administering the real thing or a placebo. IE those handing out the pills and recording any symptoms don't know. This prevents even more contamination, because the doctor can act differently if he knows which pills he's handing out, and influence the patients that way.
Well, here's one - Note "sham".
and another.
The study I'm remembering was slightly different, but I'm being drowned out by different studies.
Oddly, works even better when administered to the parents of the sufferer instead of directly.
There have been double-blind tests performed, but the subjects were quite upset when they learned that apparently it wasn't the wifi signals making them sick, but the blinking lights on the wireless devices.
IE lights disabled, radios fully enabled, on highest power, transmitting data: No symptoms.
Simulated status light activity, radios completely disabled and unpowered: symptoms.
Lights & radio on : symptoms
Lights & radio disabled: no symptoms.
Conclusion: Clearly we need to investigate the status lights. ;)
Solyndra had 'lots' of VC capital. In this case, the VCs lost it all. Which is why you don't get into VC until you have enough money to invest in enough startups that, statistically speaking, you're going to make your money back on the occasional 'big winner'.
Now, I wouldn't call two trillion dollars spent fighting a war to protect oil fields a subsidy.
I hate saying this, but none of the recent wars were actually to protect oil. Even Kuwait 'paid us back' for protecting it in the first gulf war. If they had been about oil, we would have prosecuted them in a far different way.
Oil company subsidies are embedded into the system so well that we don't even notice them most the time.
Yes, we subsidize 'oil' so much that the government gets more profit per barrel than the company itself.
Sure, we give them some money back. After we charge them:
For the rights to drill, extract, ship, refine, property taxes, sales taxes, surcharges, fuel taxes, etc...
If solar can cut oil demand by 10%.. then the price of oil will never recover and we can start saving oil for unique things instead of burning it for energy.
It would be tough. Solar is primarily for electricity, oil is primarily for heat/transport. Natural Gas is currently pushing oil out of heating.
Now, I wouldn't call two trillion dollars spent fighting a war to protect oil fields a subsidy.