I like OSM and have spent a bunch of time adding edits to it. It's great for things like hiking trails and urban running trails, which usually aren't in google maps. There are some very nice web-based interfaces for making contour maps (example from closedcontour.com). What's really missing is decent driving directions. Yournavigation.org sucks.
(a) High school is already enough of a dehumanizing experience.
(b) I have two teenage kids. Their generation is growing up thinking that it's some kind of crime to walk home from school and kick pinecones instead of getting driven straight to soccer practice and then SAT prep.
Greetings, time traveler from the 19th century. "And" has been an acceptable opening segue for some time now here in 2012.
It's been normal English-language usage since before English was a written language. "And therfore at the kynges court my brother Ech man for hymself." - Chaucer. "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night." -- King James Bible, Luke 2:8
Also, we attempt to use gender-neutral language, which has made using the plural "they" and its variants as singular forms increasingly acceptable.
Generic "they" is also not a modern innovation. Generic "they" and generic "he" have coexisted ever since Old English's grammatical gender evolved into Middle English's natural gender. Generic "they" was used by Shakespeare and Austen.
Once an academic has a job, they can then expect to work 60-80 hours per week for the first five to six years. This will decrease over their career if they get tenure and take their foot of the gas, but with budget cuts and cut-throat competition for funding, that's not a wise idea. Quite simply, you have no idea what an academic job entails.
Well...kinda sorta maybe, but not really, not always.
What's bang on about your post (the portion I didn't quote) is its recognition that there is not just one but many different types of jobs in academia.
I'm senior tenured faculty at a community college in California. I belong to CTA/NEA, which is often referred to as the fourth branch of the California state government. I work about 40 hours a week during the fall and spring semesters, which add up to 32 out of the 52 weeks of the year. During winter and summer breaks, I have work to do, but the amount I'm *forced* to do is not very much. I don't consider my job very stressful at all. I've got it dialed in. If I work extra hard on something, it's because I find it fulfilling. I'm in LA, and most Saturdays I'm in the mountains hiking or playing in the snow. On Tuesdays my schedule is set so I can go for a long run before I have to go to work. Last June I went to East Africa for three weeks.
If I didn't care about doing a good job, I could work about 25-30 hours a week. I would not assign any written work that required hand grading, not volunteer for any committee work, etc.
As you point out, the story is completely different for contingent faculty.
As you point out in the portion of your post that I've quoted, the story is completely different for faculty at highfalutin' research universities.
Ths slashdot summary doesn't seem to be based closely on the linked articles:
but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone.
The linked articles don't discuss a "cold turkey" government-mandated switch to metric (which was never a realistic possibility given the nature of American culture and politics). They discuss incremental government-mandated measures. Some of these measures have already been carried out: requiring food labeling to be in both US and metric. Some have been stalled legislatively: eliminating the US units from food labeling.
It would be great if we could get road signs to be switched over to dual units. E.g., congress could pass a law saying that on the interstate system, any time an old sign is replaced with a new one, it has to have dual units.
These incremental measures would be incredibly easy, and would require no new taxes or increase in government regulation (just changes to existing regulations). That's why it's so pathetic that the pace of implementing these measures has been so slow.
I teach physics at a community college. My students are a bell curve, extending from folks who are very bright and will transfer to elite four-year schools, all the way down to people who really shouldn't be in college. The bottom half of this bell curve is probably pretty representative of the population of the US.
Some characteristics of people in this range: (1) They tend not to understand at the conceptual level what the operations of multiplication and division are about. (2) They tend not to have any habit of checking whether their answers make sense in order of magnitude. (3) When they learn some new mathematical concept, they memorize it as a rote procedure, and therefore when they don't use it for a month, they forget it completely.
My students are mostly science majors, so they end up developing some facility with the metric system, but it's an uphill climb. For most people, what happens is that they learn the metric system in grade school, and then they never use it in everyday life, so they forget it completely and utterly.
The FBI is primarily responsible for bringing down most of the major mafia families and their criminal enterprises.
In the U.S., the existence of organized crime has historically been largely due to the government trying to dictate to people what substances they could put in their bodies (as well as prohibitions on other victimless crimes, such as prostitution). The government created Al Capone by prohibiting alcohol, so I don't really think we should be falling over ourselves to thank the government for catching him and putting him in jail. And it wasn't the FBI that caught Capone, it was the IRS and the Bureau of Prohibition, which was a separate organization at the time.
The end of Prohibition could have put organized crime out of business, but luckily there was another illegal substance, heroin, that people wanted, and ca. 1950 the Sicilian mafia started profiting heavily from that. I don't know how accurate it is to say that the FBI brought down the Sicilian mafia. Joseph Bonanno disappeared. Carmine Galante was originally caught by the NYPD, and was in and out of jail for parole violations; the New Jersey State Police brought him in at one point. But even if the FBI did play some role, it's just another case of the government creating organized crime with drug prohibition.
Today we have various other drug gangs, such as the Crips and Bloods and whatever. Drug gangs will continue to exist for as long as the government decides to continue the War on Drugs. The day they give up and start looking at drugs as a public health issue, the drug gangs will evaporate. Until then, it'll just be more of the same.
The US has the world's highest incarceration rate. (South Africa used to hold the title, but now we're the champions. Go, USA!) Determinate sentencing has started to make jury trials a thing of the past. In some federal jurisdictions, as few as one out of 200 criminal defendants goes to trial. Defendants are so afraid of going to jail for life that they will plead guilty to virtually anything. Defendants are manipulated into giving evidence against other people in return for not going to jail. Those other people may or may not be guilty -- if A can avoid life in prison by accusing B, that's an awfully strong incentive for A, even if B is innocent. We've had the right to trial by jury since the era of the Magna Carta; now we're losing it because of an obsession over the victimless crime of drug use.
You do not have to be paranoid to be extremely mistrustful of the FBI. In fact, "paranoid" would be a word that would be more accurately applied to the FBI itself.
Read up on COINTELPRO. The FBI actively worked against the civil rights movement, targeting individuals and organizations such as Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They built up an 1800-page file on Albert Einstein, who was involved with "communist front" organizations such as the American Crusade Against Lynching. They tracked his phone calls and went through his trash. The FBI has a long history of anti-union activity, starting from the era of the Palmer Raids, continuing through the McCarthy era, and on to the present day, with, e.g., arrests in 2010 of peace and labor activists of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee.
No way would I ever cooperate with the FBI in any way. They're a threat to democracy. Always have been.
Your explanation of their surveillance and infiltration of Occupy is awfully naive. Trying to open a bank account on behalf of a group of people isn't the kind of thing that merits the creation of a "network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity."
Which is more likely: 1) People with psychological issues seek pharmaceutical drugs to help them stay calm and not screw up their lives even though they are hearing voices and other psychotic issues.
2) Drugs cause the problems - but no one ever noticed before.
There are all kinds of possibilities. Your #1 actually doesn't seem to fit, since they observed that the time-sequencing of the events worked both ways. Having psychotic symptoms at one time was correlated with smoking dope at a later age, but smoking dope was also correlated with psychotic symptoms later.
Some other possibilities:
3) Some genetic or environmental factor tends to cause both marijuana use and psychotic symptoms. (The summary explicitly mentions the genetic possibility.)
4) Smoking marijuana is correlated with methamphetamine use. WP says, "Methamphetamine induces a psychosis in 26-46 percent of heavy users." Marijuana is used by about 5% of people in the Netherlands. Rates of psychotic symptoms seem to be about 4% in most populations. I.e., both of these things are fairly uncommon. Since psychotic symptoms are so uncommon, and methamphetamine causes psychotic symptoms so strongly, it would only take a very, very small correlation between grass and metamphetamine to cause a huge excess of psychotic symptoms among marijuana users.
5) The standard definition of psychosis includes "hallucinations and delusions and impaired insight " (same WP article). Well, what's the reason people get stoned? It makes them feel a certain way. To people who are not stoned, they often seem peaceful, silly, and stupid. Stupidity is not all that different from "impaired insight." Marijuana is also a drug that is hard to classify, but in some ways it acts like a hallucinogen. And I can think of one person I know who smokes a lot of marijuana, and he often gets unrealistic ideas while he's stoned -- could they be considered delusions? Maybe. There seems to be a lot of overlap between the criteria a psychiatrist would use for diagnosing psychosis and the desired effects of marijuana. Are psychiatrists able to distinguish between the desired, temporary effects of the drug and permanent set of psychotic symptoms? What kind of questions are they asking their patients? I doubt that they ask them, "are you hallucinating right now?" I bet they ask them things like, "do you ever hallucinate?," or "within the last month, have you hallucinated?"
One blindingly obvious way to cut down on fake and artificial reviews: only allow reviews from people who have actually purchased the product.
Amazon already highlights reviews by people who have purchased the product, so the functionality already exists. Why not take the next step and only allow those people to write reviews in the first place?
I frequently review books on amazon that I bought and read 30 years ago, or that I checked out of the library. If I buy a book on amazon as a Christmas present for someone, should that person not be able to review the book?
Authors are a tiny percentage of the population, and they have an extremely strong incentive to write fraudulent reviews (good ones of their own books, bad ones of other people's books). Locking them out of reviewing therefore has at least one very big advantage, and no very big disadvantage. Your proposal, on the other hand, would affect a very large percentage of reviews (probably a majority of the ones I've written), and yet it would provide very little benefit, because most of the people locked out would be those who had no incentive for fraud.
What this all really points up is a more fundamental and unfortunate thing about amazon's system, which is that it's the handmaiden of a big commercial enterprise, and due to network effects it has very little competition. They deleted that high school kid's copy of 1984. Now they've deleted reviews that authors submitted in good faith. Even if it's run by angels, amazon and its database will not be here forever -- what's the half-life of internet-based businesses, 3 years? 10? It's said to see millions of people all over the world putting so much effort into something that is destined to disappear. This is totally different from Wikipedia, for example. If WP's fund-raising drives fail, and they have to shut down their servers and fire their employees, nothing will be lost.
Large extra dimensions was always a long shot. There's really no good case from theory for that showing up at current energies.
As I understand it, yes, it was a long shot, but the theoretical motivation was that if it existed, LHC energies were the best-motivated place for it to show up. The theoretical motivation is that it makes the Planck scale the same as the electroweak scale. (What we think of as the Planck scale would not actually be the Planck scale.)
#3 is also pretty weak, since the LHC has disappointed the many people who were sure it would find supersymmetry. The strongest physical motivation for supersymmetry is at the electroweak unification energy scale, so it's looking less and less likely that it exists, based on LHC data at that scale. If the LHC can't even see it, then it's unlikely that the ILC, operating at an energy an order of magnitude lower, would be able to see it.
So the only justification would seem to be to thoroughly characterize the Higgs. Is the LHC really incapable of doing this?
In general, the LHC results are turning out to be every particle physicist's worst nightmare. So far, it's confirmed the standard model and failed to turn up any new physics.
I suspect the reason Japan is such a good candidate is that the Japanese government's main vehicle for pork-barrel politics is construction projects.
This is really, really stupid. At the commnuity college where I teach in California, an AA degree requires a minimum of 60 units. Fees are $36/unit, and you also have to pay a $16/semester health fee. That's it. Total cost for a two-year degree: $2224. No "hacks" required.
And this is all assuming that you don't qualify for any merit- or need-based grants. An awful lot of our students qualify for Pell grants and fee waivers.
For typical working-class people, the financial problem with getting an AA degree isn't the cost of the coursework itself. The problem is that you have to pay for rent and groceries, and if you work full time, you'll have to take such a small course load every semester that it'll take you a decade to finish two years of college. One way around this is to cut your expenses, e.g., by living with your parents and not owning a car. Another way is to take out loans; if you have a low income and aren't dependent on your parents, then you qualify for subsidized Stafford loans, which have a low interest rate. If you're a veteran, the new GI bill allows you to get a stipend that's enough to live on, based on your zip code.
Anybody in the US who claims they're being excluded from a college education because of their income is full of baloney. Our state and federal governments spend lavishly to subsidize college education, and the subsidies are set up very carefully so that working-class people have a good enough deal to have access.
The real reason that working-class people get excluded from higher education is that they often got terrible K-12 educations, which didn't prepare them for college.
I think there are problems with using the anthropic principle for this. One is that the observers would be astronomically more likely to be Boltzmann brains than observers like us living in an entire universe that is not at maximum entropy.
I wouldn't really describe this as confirming the arrow of time.
The really powerful arrow of time is the thermodynamic one. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases. This thermodynamic arrow is essentially the same arrow as the psychological one, which allows us to remember the past but not the future, and all the other ones we see in nature, such as the laws of black hole thermodynamics, which say that the area of a black hole's event horizon always grows with time. This group of time-arrows, which are all essentially the same time-arrow, appear to occur because the big bang was fine-tuned to be extremely low in entropy, with its gravitational-wave degrees of freedom inactive. Nobody knows why we had a low-entropy big bang, when a random choice of initial conditions would be overwhelmingly more likely to produce a maximum-entropy one. (In particular, inflation doesn't explain it. Also, statistical mechanics doesn't explain it, because to produce the second law from statistical mechanics, you need to assume a low-entropy initial state.)
This paper is about an arrow of time that is obscure and completely unrelated to the others. It has to do with the weak nuclear force. Unlike the others, it has essentially no effect on the world we see around us.
TFA focuses mainly on content-based restrictions, such as prohibiting people from quoting certain passages from the Koran. But along with these restrictions, many schools now have extremely onerous "time, place, and manner" regulations. Although these are written so as to be blind to the content of the speech, they're often absurdly restrictive. I teach at a community college in Fullerton, California, where last year the police murdered a mentally ill homeless man. This resulted in murder charges being brought by the DA, and a city council recall. I wanted to set up a card table on my school's grassy quad to collect signatures for the recall petition. I went through the process of registering officially, and the restrictions were just nuts. They have two very small patches of grass, over at the corner of the quad, which are marked on the map. I was forbidden from approaching people as they walked by. A lot of colleges refer to these tiny patches, apparently without any consciousness of irony, as free speech zones.
As far as I can tell, the intention is simply to create conditions that make it absolutely impossible for students to stage anything like an actual political rally or protest. You simply wouldn't be able to fit more than about 10 human bodies into one of these free speech zones.
Did you know the Dewey Decimal System is a licensed service? Libraries have to pay to use it. Not saying not to use it here-- just maybe want to keep it on the down low...
The Library of Congress system, unlike Dewey Decimal, is free for anyone to use.
Particle physics isn't my field, but neither the paper nor the blog posts seem to be interpreting it, as the BBC does, as evidence against supersymmetry.
So he is also responsible for the cruel and inhumane treatment during his 900+ days incarceration. Also responsible for what people might call torture? And he is responsible for not getting the right to a speedy trial?
Make sure to keep donating to his defense fund:
Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610. Put "Bradley Manning Defense" on the memo line.
The single biggest hurdle is getting past the corruption in the education system. Richard P. Feynman wrote about his experience with being on the State of California's Curriculum Commission. http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
Flat World does college textbooks, not K-12 textbooks. At the college level, textbook selection is done by the individual professor or by several profs who all teach the same course at that school. There is no textbook bureaucracy as there is for K-12.
There are hundreds of free college textbooks out there on the web -- see my sig for a catalog.
There are basically two models that have been proved to work. (1) Do it yourself. (2) Set up nonprofit online collaborations so people can cooperate on producing high-quality free books.
The best example of an organization doing #2 is the Connexions project, which is run by Rice University. Other examples are Curriki and CK-12. These folks all use permissive licenses such as CC-BY, which encourages people to cooperate and view their work as contributing to a commons.
I first heard about Flat World Knowledge in 2008. What was never clear to me was what they were bringing to the table that was worthwhile or interesting. I doubt that they can afford to provide any of the services a traditional publisher would provide, such as professional copyediting or professional illustrations. Flat World Knowledge uses CC-BY-NC licensing, which is not free. That means that their authors know they're not contributing to a commons. At most they may hope to make some insignificant amount of money. What's the point?
Flexyourrights.org has some excellent videos (I think you can find them all on youtube) about how to exercise your protection against illegal searches in the US. I made my kids watch them. Unfortunately, this thing with the dogs is a really nasty loophole. I know someone whose teenage son was pulled over by the cops for some minor traffic violation. (When they pulled him over, he didn't know what he'd done wrong.) They tell him they want to search his car, and he says no. (Most likely he didn't do it the way the flexyourrights videos suggest, which is very politely and respectfully: "I'm sorry, officer, I know you're just trying to do your job, but I don't consent to a search.") So these small-town cops get all bent out of shape, bring in the drug-sniffing dog, and encourage the dog like crazy to get all worked up. "Come on, boy, do you smell anything? Do you? Come on...good dog!" They then use that as probable cause to basically rip the car apart searching for drugs. They found a soda straw from McDonald's, which they claimed was drug paraphernalia. Now the kid has a court date.
That makes three reasons not to do business with them:
1. I had an account with them, bought a ton of hiking and running shoes from them over a stretch of time. Made sure not to opt in to any spam. I was very happy with them, told friends about them, etc. Then recently they started sending me spam. Oops. Sorry, but I don't do business with people who spam me.
2. They botched their security badly enough to have this breach.
3. They're scummy enough to try to impose a ToS without actually getting the customer to accept it.
If it was only #2, I wouldn't have cared that much. IIRC they were very up front about it. But #1 is just inexcusable. Large retailers, including Zappos' corporate parent Amazon, all seem to understand this perfectly: if I opt out of spam, they respect that and never spam me. But small businesses are just horrible about this.
The nastiest example I've ever run into is O'Reilly, the book publisher. I'm a college professor, and I get a lot of spam from textbook publishers. An O'Reilly book rep sent me spam about a textbook they wanted me to use. Later, I posted about this on Slashdot when there was a discussion specifically about O'Reilly. Got an indignant reply posted by Tim O'Reilly accusing me of being a liar and challenging me to post the actual email. I posted a reply explaining that when I get spam, I delete it, so I didn't have a copy. Then it came up again in a different Slashdot thread. Same kind of vituperative reply from Tim O'Reilly, now accusing me of being a troll. How can small businesses be so amazingly clueless about how to address this issue?
...so we can deter future johns. Otherwise they'll just victimize more -- oh, wait, are the johns the victims? Or is it the johns who victimize the prostitutes? Both?
OK, let's publish the list so that future johns will be deterred from victimizing themselves. Or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I like OSM and have spent a bunch of time adding edits to it. It's great for things like hiking trails and urban running trails, which usually aren't in google maps. There are some very nice web-based interfaces for making contour maps (example from closedcontour.com). What's really missing is decent driving directions. Yournavigation.org sucks.
Hallelujah!
(a) High school is already enough of a dehumanizing experience.
(b) I have two teenage kids. Their generation is growing up thinking that it's some kind of crime to walk home from school and kick pinecones instead of getting driven straight to soccer practice and then SAT prep.
(c) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Greetings, time traveler from the 19th century. "And" has been an acceptable opening segue for some time now here in 2012.
It's been normal English-language usage since before English was a written language. "And therfore at the kynges court my brother Ech man for hymself." - Chaucer. "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night." -- King James Bible, Luke 2:8
Also, we attempt to use gender-neutral language, which has made using the plural "they" and its variants as singular forms increasingly acceptable.
Generic "they" is also not a modern innovation. Generic "they" and generic "he" have coexisted ever since Old English's grammatical gender evolved into Middle English's natural gender. Generic "they" was used by Shakespeare and Austen.
If you ignore Einstein, you will land a few nanometers further than you expected.
Unless you're using GPS, which wouldn't work at all without incorporating general relativity.
Once an academic has a job, they can then expect to work 60-80 hours per week for the first five to six years. This will decrease over their career if they get tenure and take their foot of the gas, but with budget cuts and cut-throat competition for funding, that's not a wise idea. Quite simply, you have no idea what an academic job entails.
Well...kinda sorta maybe, but not really, not always.
What's bang on about your post (the portion I didn't quote) is its recognition that there is not just one but many different types of jobs in academia.
I'm senior tenured faculty at a community college in California. I belong to CTA/NEA, which is often referred to as the fourth branch of the California state government. I work about 40 hours a week during the fall and spring semesters, which add up to 32 out of the 52 weeks of the year. During winter and summer breaks, I have work to do, but the amount I'm *forced* to do is not very much. I don't consider my job very stressful at all. I've got it dialed in. If I work extra hard on something, it's because I find it fulfilling. I'm in LA, and most Saturdays I'm in the mountains hiking or playing in the snow. On Tuesdays my schedule is set so I can go for a long run before I have to go to work. Last June I went to East Africa for three weeks.
If I didn't care about doing a good job, I could work about 25-30 hours a week. I would not assign any written work that required hand grading, not volunteer for any committee work, etc.
As you point out, the story is completely different for contingent faculty.
As you point out in the portion of your post that I've quoted, the story is completely different for faculty at highfalutin' research universities.
Ths slashdot summary doesn't seem to be based closely on the linked articles:
but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone.
The linked articles don't discuss a "cold turkey" government-mandated switch to metric (which was never a realistic possibility given the nature of American culture and politics). They discuss incremental government-mandated measures. Some of these measures have already been carried out: requiring food labeling to be in both US and metric. Some have been stalled legislatively: eliminating the US units from food labeling.
It would be great if we could get road signs to be switched over to dual units. E.g., congress could pass a law saying that on the interstate system, any time an old sign is replaced with a new one, it has to have dual units.
These incremental measures would be incredibly easy, and would require no new taxes or increase in government regulation (just changes to existing regulations). That's why it's so pathetic that the pace of implementing these measures has been so slow.
I teach physics at a community college. My students are a bell curve, extending from folks who are very bright and will transfer to elite four-year schools, all the way down to people who really shouldn't be in college. The bottom half of this bell curve is probably pretty representative of the population of the US.
Some characteristics of people in this range: (1) They tend not to understand at the conceptual level what the operations of multiplication and division are about. (2) They tend not to have any habit of checking whether their answers make sense in order of magnitude. (3) When they learn some new mathematical concept, they memorize it as a rote procedure, and therefore when they don't use it for a month, they forget it completely.
My students are mostly science majors, so they end up developing some facility with the metric system, but it's an uphill climb. For most people, what happens is that they learn the metric system in grade school, and then they never use it in everyday life, so they forget it completely and utterly.
The FBI is primarily responsible for bringing down most of the major mafia families and their criminal enterprises.
In the U.S., the existence of organized crime has historically been largely due to the government trying to dictate to people what substances they could put in their bodies (as well as prohibitions on other victimless crimes, such as prostitution). The government created Al Capone by prohibiting alcohol, so I don't really think we should be falling over ourselves to thank the government for catching him and putting him in jail. And it wasn't the FBI that caught Capone, it was the IRS and the Bureau of Prohibition, which was a separate organization at the time.
The end of Prohibition could have put organized crime out of business, but luckily there was another illegal substance, heroin, that people wanted, and ca. 1950 the Sicilian mafia started profiting heavily from that. I don't know how accurate it is to say that the FBI brought down the Sicilian mafia. Joseph Bonanno disappeared. Carmine Galante was originally caught by the NYPD, and was in and out of jail for parole violations; the New Jersey State Police brought him in at one point. But even if the FBI did play some role, it's just another case of the government creating organized crime with drug prohibition.
Today we have various other drug gangs, such as the Crips and Bloods and whatever. Drug gangs will continue to exist for as long as the government decides to continue the War on Drugs. The day they give up and start looking at drugs as a public health issue, the drug gangs will evaporate. Until then, it'll just be more of the same.
The US has the world's highest incarceration rate. (South Africa used to hold the title, but now we're the champions. Go, USA!) Determinate sentencing has started to make jury trials a thing of the past. In some federal jurisdictions, as few as one out of 200 criminal defendants goes to trial. Defendants are so afraid of going to jail for life that they will plead guilty to virtually anything. Defendants are manipulated into giving evidence against other people in return for not going to jail. Those other people may or may not be guilty -- if A can avoid life in prison by accusing B, that's an awfully strong incentive for A, even if B is innocent. We've had the right to trial by jury since the era of the Magna Carta; now we're losing it because of an obsession over the victimless crime of drug use.
You do not have to be paranoid to be extremely mistrustful of the FBI. In fact, "paranoid" would be a word that would be more accurately applied to the FBI itself.
Read up on COINTELPRO. The FBI actively worked against the civil rights movement, targeting individuals and organizations such as Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They built up an 1800-page file on Albert Einstein, who was involved with "communist front" organizations such as the American Crusade Against Lynching. They tracked his phone calls and went through his trash. The FBI has a long history of anti-union activity, starting from the era of the Palmer Raids, continuing through the McCarthy era, and on to the present day, with, e.g., arrests in 2010 of peace and labor activists of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee.
No way would I ever cooperate with the FBI in any way. They're a threat to democracy. Always have been.
Your explanation of their surveillance and infiltration of Occupy is awfully naive. Trying to open a bank account on behalf of a group of people isn't the kind of thing that merits the creation of a "network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity."
Which is more likely: 1) People with psychological issues seek pharmaceutical drugs to help them stay calm and not screw up their lives even though they are hearing voices and other psychotic issues.
2) Drugs cause the problems - but no one ever noticed before.
There are all kinds of possibilities. Your #1 actually doesn't seem to fit, since they observed that the time-sequencing of the events worked both ways. Having psychotic symptoms at one time was correlated with smoking dope at a later age, but smoking dope was also correlated with psychotic symptoms later.
Some other possibilities:
3) Some genetic or environmental factor tends to cause both marijuana use and psychotic symptoms. (The summary explicitly mentions the genetic possibility.)
4) Smoking marijuana is correlated with methamphetamine use. WP says, "Methamphetamine induces a psychosis in 26-46 percent of heavy users." Marijuana is used by about 5% of people in the Netherlands. Rates of psychotic symptoms seem to be about 4% in most populations. I.e., both of these things are fairly uncommon. Since psychotic symptoms are so uncommon, and methamphetamine causes psychotic symptoms so strongly, it would only take a very, very small correlation between grass and metamphetamine to cause a huge excess of psychotic symptoms among marijuana users.
5) The standard definition of psychosis includes "hallucinations and delusions and impaired insight " (same WP article). Well, what's the reason people get stoned? It makes them feel a certain way. To people who are not stoned, they often seem peaceful, silly, and stupid. Stupidity is not all that different from "impaired insight." Marijuana is also a drug that is hard to classify, but in some ways it acts like a hallucinogen. And I can think of one person I know who smokes a lot of marijuana, and he often gets unrealistic ideas while he's stoned -- could they be considered delusions? Maybe. There seems to be a lot of overlap between the criteria a psychiatrist would use for diagnosing psychosis and the desired effects of marijuana. Are psychiatrists able to distinguish between the desired, temporary effects of the drug and permanent set of psychotic symptoms? What kind of questions are they asking their patients? I doubt that they ask them, "are you hallucinating right now?" I bet they ask them things like, "do you ever hallucinate?," or "within the last month, have you hallucinated?"
One blindingly obvious way to cut down on fake and artificial reviews: only allow reviews from people who have actually purchased the product.
Amazon already highlights reviews by people who have purchased the product, so the functionality already exists. Why not take the next step and only allow those people to write reviews in the first place?
I frequently review books on amazon that I bought and read 30 years ago, or that I checked out of the library. If I buy a book on amazon as a Christmas present for someone, should that person not be able to review the book?
Authors are a tiny percentage of the population, and they have an extremely strong incentive to write fraudulent reviews (good ones of their own books, bad ones of other people's books). Locking them out of reviewing therefore has at least one very big advantage, and no very big disadvantage. Your proposal, on the other hand, would affect a very large percentage of reviews (probably a majority of the ones I've written), and yet it would provide very little benefit, because most of the people locked out would be those who had no incentive for fraud.
What this all really points up is a more fundamental and unfortunate thing about amazon's system, which is that it's the handmaiden of a big commercial enterprise, and due to network effects it has very little competition. They deleted that high school kid's copy of 1984. Now they've deleted reviews that authors submitted in good faith. Even if it's run by angels, amazon and its database will not be here forever -- what's the half-life of internet-based businesses, 3 years? 10? It's said to see millions of people all over the world putting so much effort into something that is destined to disappear. This is totally different from Wikipedia, for example. If WP's fund-raising drives fail, and they have to shut down their servers and fire their employees, nothing will be lost.
Large extra dimensions was always a long shot. There's really no good case from theory for that showing up at current energies.
As I understand it, yes, it was a long shot, but the theoretical motivation was that if it existed, LHC energies were the best-motivated place for it to show up. The theoretical motivation is that it makes the Planck scale the same as the electroweak scale. (What we think of as the Planck scale would not actually be the Planck scale.)
The WP article says the physics case is the following:
"1. Measure the mass, spin, and interaction strengths of the Higgs boson
"2. If existing, measure the number, size, and shape of any TeV-scale extra dimensions
"3. Investigate the lightest supersymmetric particles, possible candidates for dark matter"
This is very weak.
#2 is pretty much dead, since the LHC's observations don't look very compatible with large extra dimensions -- http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.3375 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.5830 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4683
#3 is also pretty weak, since the LHC has disappointed the many people who were sure it would find supersymmetry. The strongest physical motivation for supersymmetry is at the electroweak unification energy scale, so it's looking less and less likely that it exists, based on LHC data at that scale. If the LHC can't even see it, then it's unlikely that the ILC, operating at an energy an order of magnitude lower, would be able to see it.
So the only justification would seem to be to thoroughly characterize the Higgs. Is the LHC really incapable of doing this?
In general, the LHC results are turning out to be every particle physicist's worst nightmare. So far, it's confirmed the standard model and failed to turn up any new physics.
I suspect the reason Japan is such a good candidate is that the Japanese government's main vehicle for pork-barrel politics is construction projects.
This is really, really stupid. At the commnuity college where I teach in California, an AA degree requires a minimum of 60 units. Fees are $36/unit, and you also have to pay a $16/semester health fee. That's it. Total cost for a two-year degree: $2224. No "hacks" required.
And this is all assuming that you don't qualify for any merit- or need-based grants. An awful lot of our students qualify for Pell grants and fee waivers.
For typical working-class people, the financial problem with getting an AA degree isn't the cost of the coursework itself. The problem is that you have to pay for rent and groceries, and if you work full time, you'll have to take such a small course load every semester that it'll take you a decade to finish two years of college. One way around this is to cut your expenses, e.g., by living with your parents and not owning a car. Another way is to take out loans; if you have a low income and aren't dependent on your parents, then you qualify for subsidized Stafford loans, which have a low interest rate. If you're a veteran, the new GI bill allows you to get a stipend that's enough to live on, based on your zip code.
Anybody in the US who claims they're being excluded from a college education because of their income is full of baloney. Our state and federal governments spend lavishly to subsidize college education, and the subsidies are set up very carefully so that working-class people have a good enough deal to have access.
The real reason that working-class people get excluded from higher education is that they often got terrible K-12 educations, which didn't prepare them for college.
I think there are problems with using the anthropic principle for this. One is that the observers would be astronomically more likely to be Boltzmann brains than observers like us living in an entire universe that is not at maximum entropy.
Well, except for being necessary for CP violation, which in turn is the only way we have of explaining why there isn't much antimatter around.
No, CP violation doesn't explain baryon asymmetry. CP violation is part of the standard model. Baryon asymmetry isn't explained by the standard model.
I wouldn't really describe this as confirming the arrow of time.
The really powerful arrow of time is the thermodynamic one. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases. This thermodynamic arrow is essentially the same arrow as the psychological one, which allows us to remember the past but not the future, and all the other ones we see in nature, such as the laws of black hole thermodynamics, which say that the area of a black hole's event horizon always grows with time. This group of time-arrows, which are all essentially the same time-arrow, appear to occur because the big bang was fine-tuned to be extremely low in entropy, with its gravitational-wave degrees of freedom inactive. Nobody knows why we had a low-entropy big bang, when a random choice of initial conditions would be overwhelmingly more likely to produce a maximum-entropy one. (In particular, inflation doesn't explain it. Also, statistical mechanics doesn't explain it, because to produce the second law from statistical mechanics, you need to assume a low-entropy initial state.)
This paper is about an arrow of time that is obscure and completely unrelated to the others. It has to do with the weak nuclear force. Unlike the others, it has essentially no effect on the world we see around us.
TFA focuses mainly on content-based restrictions, such as prohibiting people from quoting certain passages from the Koran. But along with these restrictions, many schools now have extremely onerous "time, place, and manner" regulations. Although these are written so as to be blind to the content of the speech, they're often absurdly restrictive. I teach at a community college in Fullerton, California, where last year the police murdered a mentally ill homeless man. This resulted in murder charges being brought by the DA, and a city council recall. I wanted to set up a card table on my school's grassy quad to collect signatures for the recall petition. I went through the process of registering officially, and the restrictions were just nuts. They have two very small patches of grass, over at the corner of the quad, which are marked on the map. I was forbidden from approaching people as they walked by. A lot of colleges refer to these tiny patches, apparently without any consciousness of irony, as free speech zones.
As far as I can tell, the intention is simply to create conditions that make it absolutely impossible for students to stage anything like an actual political rally or protest. You simply wouldn't be able to fit more than about 10 human bodies into one of these free speech zones.
Did you know the Dewey Decimal System is a licensed service? Libraries have to pay to use it. Not saying not to use it here-- just maybe want to keep it on the down low...
The Library of Congress system, unlike Dewey Decimal, is free for anyone to use.
Here is the paper: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1493302/files/PAPER-2012-043.pdf
Some blogs discussing the significance of the result:
http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/lhcb_evidence_rare_decay_bs_dimuons-96311
http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/superstringy-compactifications.html#more
http://profmattstrassler.com/
Particle physics isn't my field, but neither the paper nor the blog posts seem to be interpreting it, as the BBC does, as evidence against supersymmetry.
So he is also responsible for the cruel and inhumane treatment during his 900+ days incarceration. Also responsible for what people might call torture? And he is responsible for not getting the right to a speedy trial?
Make sure to keep donating to his defense fund:
Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610. Put "Bradley Manning Defense" on the memo line.
The single biggest hurdle is getting past the corruption in the education system. Richard P. Feynman wrote about his experience with being on the State of California's Curriculum Commission. http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
Flat World does college textbooks, not K-12 textbooks. At the college level, textbook selection is done by the individual professor or by several profs who all teach the same course at that school. There is no textbook bureaucracy as there is for K-12.
There are hundreds of free college textbooks out there on the web -- see my sig for a catalog.
There are basically two models that have been proved to work. (1) Do it yourself. (2) Set up nonprofit online collaborations so people can cooperate on producing high-quality free books.
#1 is actually the most successful model by far. Just do it. Bite the bullet. Write the damn book and put it online for free. Here are some very high quality examples of DIY textbook projects: Hefferon, Linear Algebra, Carroll, Lecture Notes on General Relativity, Petkovsek et al., A=B.
The best example of an organization doing #2 is the Connexions project, which is run by Rice University. Other examples are Curriki and CK-12. These folks all use permissive licenses such as CC-BY, which encourages people to cooperate and view their work as contributing to a commons.
I first heard about Flat World Knowledge in 2008. What was never clear to me was what they were bringing to the table that was worthwhile or interesting. I doubt that they can afford to provide any of the services a traditional publisher would provide, such as professional copyediting or professional illustrations. Flat World Knowledge uses CC-BY-NC licensing, which is not free. That means that their authors know they're not contributing to a commons. At most they may hope to make some insignificant amount of money. What's the point?
Flexyourrights.org has some excellent videos (I think you can find them all on youtube) about how to exercise your protection against illegal searches in the US. I made my kids watch them. Unfortunately, this thing with the dogs is a really nasty loophole. I know someone whose teenage son was pulled over by the cops for some minor traffic violation. (When they pulled him over, he didn't know what he'd done wrong.) They tell him they want to search his car, and he says no. (Most likely he didn't do it the way the flexyourrights videos suggest, which is very politely and respectfully: "I'm sorry, officer, I know you're just trying to do your job, but I don't consent to a search.") So these small-town cops get all bent out of shape, bring in the drug-sniffing dog, and encourage the dog like crazy to get all worked up. "Come on, boy, do you smell anything? Do you? Come on...good dog!" They then use that as probable cause to basically rip the car apart searching for drugs. They found a soda straw from McDonald's, which they claimed was drug paraphernalia. Now the kid has a court date.
That makes three reasons not to do business with them:
1. I had an account with them, bought a ton of hiking and running shoes from them over a stretch of time. Made sure not to opt in to any spam. I was very happy with them, told friends about them, etc. Then recently they started sending me spam. Oops. Sorry, but I don't do business with people who spam me.
2. They botched their security badly enough to have this breach.
3. They're scummy enough to try to impose a ToS without actually getting the customer to accept it.
If it was only #2, I wouldn't have cared that much. IIRC they were very up front about it. But #1 is just inexcusable. Large retailers, including Zappos' corporate parent Amazon, all seem to understand this perfectly: if I opt out of spam, they respect that and never spam me. But small businesses are just horrible about this.
The nastiest example I've ever run into is O'Reilly, the book publisher. I'm a college professor, and I get a lot of spam from textbook publishers. An O'Reilly book rep sent me spam about a textbook they wanted me to use. Later, I posted about this on Slashdot when there was a discussion specifically about O'Reilly. Got an indignant reply posted by Tim O'Reilly accusing me of being a liar and challenging me to post the actual email. I posted a reply explaining that when I get spam, I delete it, so I didn't have a copy. Then it came up again in a different Slashdot thread. Same kind of vituperative reply from Tim O'Reilly, now accusing me of being a troll. How can small businesses be so amazingly clueless about how to address this issue?
...so we can deter future johns. Otherwise they'll just victimize more -- oh, wait, are the johns the victims? Or is it the johns who victimize the prostitutes? Both?
OK, let's publish the list so that future johns will be deterred from victimizing themselves. Or something.