The harvard.edu news article, quoted in the slashdot summary is inaccurate. It says:
For the first time, they have measured the black hole's "point of no return"-- the closest distance that matter can approach before being irretrievably pulled into the black hole.
This reads as a claim that they've resolved the event horizon. That's not true, although there are good prospects for resolving the event horizon of a black hole in the near future.
In units where G=1 and c=1, the radius of the event horizon is 2M, where M is the mass of the black hole. The radius of the ISCO, for a nonrotating black hole, is 6M, i.e., three times the radius of the event horizon. What they've resolved is structure at 5.5M.
The first author of the paper, Doeleman, seems to post all his papers on arxiv.org, but unfortunately this one doesn't seem to be there yet, and Science has their copy paywalled.
So now there's GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo. Is there going to be cooperation between the different sets of satellites, or will a given device only talk to its own set of satellites? It sucks, for example, when I'm hiking and can't get a GPS fix because I'm in a canyon with a view of only part of the sky. Ditto when all the visible satellites are near the horizon, so the vertical position's accuracy goes to hell, like a couple of weeks ago when I was at 7000' and it told me I was at 14000'. If we had a large number of satellites all in the sky at once, and could use them in any combination, it would be really cool.
The relationship between simulation and simulator isn't necessarily arbitrary, but it's probably not understandable by the simulation. That is in effect (among) what Goedel's incompleteness theorems say.
No, actually that has nothing to do with what Godel's theorems say.
If you believe the story (and I find it eminently credible, if biased), there simply was no problem with the kid. His test scores were high, but the teachers were put off by the fact that he "didn't seem to do any work".
I don't think it matters whether we believe her story or not. Regardless of whether we believe her interpretation of the situation: (1) there was a problem, which consisted of a mismatch between the kid's genetically determined, natural behavior and the modern social environment that his behavior prevented him from functioning in; (2) the problem was 100% solved by drugs; and (3) the problem had nothing to do with a lack of money being "invested" by society in his education, or with a lack of money being "invested" by society in non-drug treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy.
The mom describes the school as being run by a bunch of burned-out post-menopausal hags and preening, hedonistic bottle-blonde prima donnas. Cutting out all the nasty personal characterizations of the teachers and the principal, would this kid have done fine academically in an environment that was run by someone else? I sincerely doubt it. He's nearing the age where he has to learn algebra. Sorry, but algebra just doesn't sink into your brain unless you spend at least some small amount of time sitting at a desk, holding a pencil in your hand, and solving for x.
The slashdot summary has this sentence quoted from a doctor: "We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions," hyperlinked to this blog post on Salon. However, there appears to be no logical link between the quote and the blog post. The blog post doesn't describe any "effective nonpharmaceutical interventions." Actually, what it describes is a situation where a sixth-grader wasn't interested in doing his school work, the parents tried dealing with it using normal parenting techniques, that failed, and what worked was... a pharmaceutical. The story told in the blog post leads to a conclusion that's precisely the opposite of the words in the hyperlinked quote.
What exactly does it mean in this context to have "society invest?"
Whoever put together the misleading slashdot summary seems to have in mind that we should have "society invest" in better schools. But the situation described in the blog post is one where basically the kid wasn't interested in doing school work, enjoyed wandering around the school and helping to fix computers, etc., and although some of his teachers thought it was cool to let him do that, not all of them did, and the principal didn't either. This situation doesn't seem to have anything to do with how much money their state was spending on schools.
I suspect that the doctor being quoted actually had in mind options like talk therapy, which is more expensive than prescribing pills. (WP says that specific types of non-drug therapy that are effective include "psychoeducational input, behavior therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), family therapy, school-based interventions, social skills training, parent management training, neurofeedback, and nature exposure.") But the thing is, society *is* investing a ton of tax money in treating disabled kids. Special ed programs are extraordinarily expensive. At the community college where I teach, we have a whole disabled student center, with half a dozen full-time employees, who seem to spend most of their time helping the huge number of students who are diagnosed with ADHD.
If it was true that kids with ADHD just needed expensive non-drug therapy, and then they'd be fine, then we'd expect to see affluent parents paying for it out of pocket. But that's not what we see at all. What we really see is that affluent parents make sure their kids get drugs.
The real problem isn't that we need to have "society invest" more money in kids with ADHD. The real problem is that (a) kids lie on a bell curve in terms of their ability to learn (in a school environment, but also in any environment), and (b) there has been a long-term historical trend of requiring people to be more and more educated (e.g., a doctor in the 19th century usually has only a few years of college education). If education was really an equalizer in our society, smart working-class kids would end up being more successful than dumb affluent kids -- or more successful than affluent kids who just hated school. This would be unacceptable to affluent parents. It's an arms race, and everyone has the highest possible motivation to get their kid diagnosed with ADHD and get the kid taking the drugs that will allow him to compete.
The problem isn't occurring because of a lack of "investment" by society at large. Society has been investing for a couple of hundred years now in raising the level of education. The result of that investment is the extremely competitive environment we have now, where there is intense pressure on kids who are at the low end of the bell curve in terms of "doing school." Investment by society at large isn't the cure for the problem, it's the cause of the problem.
I'm a libertarian. Been registered libertarian for most of the last 20 years. Have a Gary Johnson bumper sticker on my car right now.
Nevertheless, my reaction is the same. What is the point of this? Why would anyone care?
Neither of the following facts should be a surprise: (1) TV is a passive medium of communication designed for the lowest common denominator. (2) The US has a two-party system designed to lock out third parties.
The superficial problem is that universities can't afford to subscribe to all the journals that are out there. The ultimate source of this problem is that there are too many fourth-rate universities trying to pretend that they're research universities, and too many people trying to make it in academia in proportion to the number of available permanent jobs doing research. These people have a heavy incentive to publish lots of papers. If some of those papers happen to be important and influential in their field, that's good too, but the primary commandment is just to publish a ton of articles. This is what they have to do in order to get tenure. In many cases, they're in a department at a lower-tier state school that isn't really research oriented at all. Tenured faculty in their department aren't even doing research, just teaching. But the school wants to be just like the research-oriented universities (UC, Ivy Leage, etc.), so they make research a criterion for teaching. The school can afford to do this, because they have 300 applicants for every tenure-track job. All of this creates an overwhelming incentive for huge numbers of people to do research that is probably correct but utterly unimportant, and will never be cited in another paper. These useless papers have to be published somewhere. That's why all the low-impact-factor journals exist.
The only solution I can imagine is that we could create not just a full set of high-quality free journals in all academic disciplines but also a full spectrum of medium- and low-impact free journals as well. Kind of depressing, but it seems to be what junior faculty need.
Labtiva's approach doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a way of tackling the problem. The problem they describe is that research libraries can't afford to subscribe to all the low-impact journals. Low-impact journals are crap. They're low-impact. Their papers hardly ever get cited. For that reason, the market for $0.99 downloads of their papers will be too small to matter; nobody wants to read these papers.
I teach at a community college, so I don't have access to journals. It would be great if I could get specific articles from high-quality journals for $0.99 a copy. But the publishers of those journals have no incentive to sell the articles for $0.99 rather than $30. If they did that, it would just encourage libraries to cut their subscriptions. As it is, some researchers will pay $30 for a specific article out of their grant money, and the journal will pull in a pile of money for doing almost nothing.
Right now, there's a huge profit incentive for patent trolls because of the huge payouts in damages when these lawsuits are won.
The slashdot headline, and, to some extent, the slashdot summary, make it sound like Google and Apple are the only ones compiling bogus patents, but it works both ways, of course. They sue other people for patent infringement, but they also get sued. The big difference is that Google and Apple really do have R&D, and really do come up with at least some things that deserve to be patented, whereas the typical patent troll has never made any positive contributions, and is simply hoping to take advantage of the fact that the patent office doesn't really care whether applications are nontrivial.
I got subpoenaed last week by a lawyer from Google, because Google is getting sued by a patent troll (I don't know the name of the company), and Google wants to use the web site in my sig, which dates back to 2001, to prove prior art and invalidate the patent. It's apparently a business methods patent. You might ask, "How do you know that they're a patent troll when you don't even know the company's name, and don't know anything about the patent other than the fact that it's a methods patent?" Well, the way I know that is that I built that site, and it required absolutely zero innovation or creativity on my part. If you take a look a the code, you'll see that it's embarrassingly amateurish -- I think it was the very first Perl code I ever wrote. I simply bought the O'Reilly book on the Perl DBI interface, and built a bog-standard web-based front end for a SQL database. The database is nothing but a digital library catalog, the sole difference being that most such catalogs keep track of a physical collection of books, whereas mine is a catalog of books that are free on the web. It also has a feature where users can write reviews.
Responding to the subpoena (as I'm legally required to do) has been and continues to be a minor pain in the ass. But it's just absurd that any patent examiner allowed anyone to patent anything that went into my web site, because it required zero originality. For that reason, I feel like I'm doing something somewhat positive for society by helping Google deliver a smackdown to this troll.
Google and Apple are probably both companies that would benefit greatly from patent reform, including the elimination of software and business method patents. The big losers would be the patent trolls.
Fluids exposed to atmosphere, like the water on the surface of the eyes and lining the mucous membranes will boil, but not the blood.
Even that process is extremely slow. Here's an experience I've had that demonstrates this pretty clearly. Wet the inside of a vacuum flask (i.e., one reinforced with some kind of rubber or plastic so that it doesn't implode hazardously when you evacuate it). Pour out all the water, but leave droplets all over the inside surface. Pump on it with a vacuum pump. It takes *hours* for the water droplets to evaporate completely.
First of all, the State of California buys an awful lot of those expensive textbooks, and would reap the savings almost immediately.
This would apply more to K-12 than to college, since college students pay for their own books. Schwarzenegger had a K-12 free textbook initiative similar to this, but it seems to have failed.
Secondly, if it makes education less expensive, it will likely lead to more educated people. People who can afford to pay taxes and your social security.
This may or may not be true. I don't think it's at all self-evident. There is a new book out, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, by David F. Labaree. I haven't read the book, but there is a review in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/cover-to-cover/309071/ . According to the review, Labaree argues that you can't use the public education system to promote equality, because the families that consume education are motivated by the desire to get ahead of other families. This suggests that educating more people will not lead to a greater number of affluent people who pay taxes, but will instead simply lead to more highly educated people doing the same jobs that used to be done by less educated people. I certainly see this at the community college where I teach. Nurses need bachelor's degrees now to be marketable, whereas they used to be fine with an AA degree. Physical therapists need graduate degrees (a DPT) for jobs that are shockingly low-paying.
Although the cost of textbooks is scandalously high, and extremely exploitative, I don't believe that their high costs reduces the number of people getting college educations. At the California community college where I teach, the bottleneck is that due to state budget cuts, not enough classes are being offered in order to satisfy demand. At four-year schools, even state schools, tuition is so much more money than books that I really don't believe there are people making a decision not to go to college based on the cost of books. At the time when they're making that decision, they don't even have information about how much their books will cost.
Professors might want to use the free books but the colleges/universities might not. They can't get a cut from the bookstore if the bookstore doesn't sell any books.
College administrators don't make decisions on what textbook to adopt. Professors do.
With this one phrase, the entire idea is rendered useless. Why bother with free textbooks for college level classes if no college will offer classes that use them for coursework?
I think this is a little too pessimistic. A lot of free books already exist, and a lot of faculty are already using them. See my sig for a catalog that includes several hundred examples. The books that are actively in use for instruction tend to highly "top-heavy," i.e., there's a ton of free graduate texts, not as many college ones, few high school ones, and almost no K-8 books.
The teacher's privilege of choosing what book to use is an important part of academic freedom in higher education. The lack of choice by teachers is part of what makes K-12 textbooks suck so much. K-12 books are written by a committee and sold to a commitee, based on criteria such as whether they show pictures of disabled kids doing math.
My own experience as the author of some free physics textbooks is that teachers' ability to choose the book they want is a huge positive factor in getting people to use my books. I currently have about 30-40 college adoptions and about 30-40 high school adoptions. (There's no way for me to know exact numbers, because the books are free.) Of those high school adoptions, nearly all are from private schools (mostly Catholic schools). The reason isn't hard to guess. K-12 textbook selection in public schools is highly political and bureaucratic. A high school physics teacher at a public school can't simply choose whatever book he wants.
The problem with ArXIv is that papers have yet to be formally peer-reviewed. It's certainly true that physicists post there and you can find (nearly) all papers there in some form - but many papers posted there don't make it past peer review.
Why is that a "problem with arxiv?"
So that's why this is important.
I don't see the link between the first quote and the second quote.
As a physicist, my reaction to this article is... huh?
Among physicists, putting all your papers on arxiv.org has been standard since about 1999. I basically *never* need to go anywhere but arxiv for anything published in this century. The only exception I can think of is papers published in Nature, which always seem to be paywalled and not available on arxiv. I assume Nature is very stone-age and forces authors not to post on arxiv. But anyway, Nature isn't really a big venue for physics publications. I teach at a community college, so I have no access to subscription-based journals. Whenever a paper is paywalled, I need to drive to the nearest 4-year university and photocopy it. This basically only happens when I'm looking up golden oldies from decades ago.
What would be news would be if other fields besides math and physics started to do this.
Apparently the religious group is outside the US, which adds another level of difficulty.
But anyway, in general, if you live in the US, and protecting your copyright is really important to you, you should file copyright forms with the US Copyright Office. Although current law says that you enjoy copyright protection regardless of whether you file, it doesn't give you *equal* protection if you don't file. If you file, you can sue for both actual damages and statutory damages. If you didn't file, then you can only sue for actual damages, which are presumably zero in your case. When statutory damages are in play, a lawyer will often be willing to take such a case on a contingent fee basis.
The DMCA sucks, but it doesn't follow that enforcing copyright automatically sucks, or even that enforcing it using the DMCA automatically sucks. Laws are like beer and shotguns; they can be used for both good and bad purposes. I'm willing to contemplate living in a society without copyright, but in such a society the GPL and BSD software licenses, for example, would be unenforceable. Likewise, I'm willing to contemplate living in a society without private property -- but if I tried to implement such a society unilaterally, I'd run into all kinds of problems.
Power is money. As long as there is a somewhat unhampered economy in the locus of data centers (and there is), then every entrepreneur will attempt to economize power usage. You don't have to worry about it because the entrepreneurs that use power efficiently will eat the lunch of those that do not, ceteris paribus (all other things equal).
This would work fine except for all the externalities, which include global warming, people breathing particulates emitted by diesel backup generators, and a ruinous series of wars that the US has fought in the Middle East. All of these amount to government subsidies for energy consumption.
From your sig, it looks like you're a libertarian. Me too, woo hoo. Hope you're voting for Gary Johnson, who I think is a better candidate than Ron Paul anyway.
But just because we're libertarians, that doesn't mean we have to accept it when other people pump pollution into our lungs or create conditions such that malaria can invade the latitudes where we live. We certainly wouldn't accept it if other people dumped liquid pollution on our lawns, or smeared anthrax on our doorknobs.
And just because we're libertarians, that doesn't mean we have to imagine we're living in some fairyland where markets are perfectly efficient. I would be happy if I could buy webhosting that was energy-efficient and yet highly reliable, the equivalent of a Honda Fit. In a perfectly efficient market, that webhosting would be available, and it would be cheaper than webhosting that was energy-inefficient and highly reliable, the equivalent of a Porsche 911. In reality, you can't buy the webhosting equivalent of a Porsche 911. The reason is partly the distortion in the energy market brought about by government and partly just the reality that markets aren't perfectly efficient.
I'm part of the problem. Wish I wasn't, but I don't seem to have any choice.
I run a small web site, and if it goes down, there are various consequences in my personal and professional life that can be extremely annoying and embarrassing. To stay sane, I need the site to have good uptime. Over the years, this has caused me to gradually migrate to more and more expensive webhosting, now ~$100/mo.
The average load on my dedicated server is extremely low, so it's basically like one of the extremely wasteful boxes described in TFA. My site is basically I/O-intensive: I serve big PDF files. In terms of CPU, I'm sure the site would run fine on a low-end ARM, or as one of a dozen sites running off of the same Celeron chip. So by comparison with either of those hypothetical, energy-efficient setups, virtually all of the electrical power is being wasted. I'm a small fry, but there are millions of sites like mine, so I'm sure it adds up. (It would be interesting to know how much of total server-center power consumption comes from the "long tails" of the distribution such as Google and Facebook, and what percentage from cottage industries like me.)
There are basically two problems. (1) Nobody will sell me high-reliability webhosting on low-end hardware. The only way to get energy-efficient hardware is to get cheap webhosting. I've tried cheap webhosting. Cheap webhosts have low reliability and nonexistent customer service. (2) Sometimes you get spikes in demand, and you want some excess capacity to be able to handle it without crashing the server. Maybe you get slashdotted. Actually, in my case one thing that has been a problem is that some people apparently run IE plugins that are supposed to accelerate large downloads, by opening multiple connections with the server. When these people hit my server and download a large PDF, the effect is very much like a DOS attack. My logs show one IP address using 300 Mb of throughput to download a 3 Mb PDF. I've written scripts that lock these bozos out ASAP, but on a low-end machine, these events would bring my server to its knees instantly.
I know these people pretty well, and they're pretty competent. [...] And since IE breaks compatibility every single release, that means that more than 600 of the applications we provide (most external, some internal) have to be updated, re-tested and pushed. Almost once a year. Are you f*cking kidding me?
IE doesn't break compatibility with web standards every single release. What IE breaks with every release is bug-for-bug compatibility with older versions of IE. The competent solution would have been to build your company's web site to be compatible with the intersection of the set of web standards with the set of features that some version of IE supported.
If you need stuff that isn't defined by a web standard, and browsers do it differently, then the competent approach is to use javascript frameworks that hide those grotty details from you and that allow you a smooth upgrade path without major code rewrites. This is why these frameworks exist. Not knowing about them or not using them shows a lack of competence.
If they web developers at your company are competent, they can even handle cases where IE doesn't support web standards and never will. For example, IE is never going to support mathml, but you can get support for it through mathjax.
"When you include a Digital Book in KDP Select, you give us the exclusive right to sell and distribute your Digital Book in digital format while your book is in KDP Select."
Maybe my info is out of date? Maybe KDP select is different than the program you had in mind?
Exclusive publishing rights. Just like B&N, they want their program to be something more than simple wrappers around public domain content. That's their choice. He has other alternatives for distribution, and has decided to GIVE it away.
This particular case has a lot of features that will make people sympathize more with Amazon and less with the author. But there are many other cases where the facts are different. As an example, I'm the author of some math and physics books that are licensed under CC-BY-SA, free in LaTeX, PDF, and HTML formats, and also available in print. I'm essentially the sole author, although I do have material in the books such as photos from wikimedia commons. I basically operate on a nonprofit basis, but I do have significant webhosting expenses. (The PDF files are a lot of megabytes, and a lot of people download them, so I can't use el cheapo webhosts.) I don't mind making a few bucks here and there to offset those expenses. I looked into selling my books on amazon for, say, $0.99, in kindle format. Well, one thing I immediately learned is that ebook formats and readers don't have good enough support for math to do a good job on books with a lot of math in them. But anyway, there were also two showstoppers: (1) amazon requires exclusivity, and (2) this: "You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book." So for a book that is free in any format, amazon is not an option. OK, you don't have to cue the world's smallest violin. It's not a huge tragedy for me that I can't sell on amazon. But slashdotters might find that the facts of my situation evoke a different feeling in their fuzzy little free-information-loving hearts than the facts of the one in TFA.
Yes, it's also true that in a free-enterprise system, we don't expect to be able to tell a company that they have any moral or legal duty to sell a product that they don't want to sell. However, it's worth bearing in mind that amazon is very close to being a monopolist in the ebook business. If someone held a monopoly on paper, we probably would be a little concerned if they started refusing to sell various broad categories of books.
Sounds like the author took one bad course, and is blaming online classes for his bad experience. Any of these complaints could apply easily to a poorly instructed statistics class at your local community college.
Then I think you must have tl;dr'd it. He makes many complaints that could have applied to an in-person class, but he also makes many specific complaints that are directly tied to the massive-enrollment online structure of the course, and he discusses this explicitly, over and over.
This seems like a typical situation that we see in the West arising from: (1) the legacy of heedless 19th-century attitudes toward the environment and (2) unrealistic expectations about human interaction with the environment.
A hundred years ago, people did all kinds of things to cherished natural resources that they'd never do today. San Francisco dammed Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite's twin that was reputed to be even more beautiful than Yosemite. Until ca. 1950, people intentionally fed bears in Yosemite Valley for entertainment, and sent burning logs over Yosemite Falls at night for people down in the valley to watch. They put permanent steps and cables on the back of Half Dome, which is something that just isn't a normal thing to do on a peak in the Sierra. And they developed the hell out of Yosemite Valley, turning it from a natural cathedral into an asphalt parking lot with big-city-style smog problems in the summer high season. All of these things have had negative consequences. A bunch of people have died on Half Dome, so they've had to start rationing access. Bear-human interactions, which are very, very seldom an issue in the undeveloped backcountry, are a huge problem in specific places, especially Yosemite Valley. And now we have hantavirus, which doesn't seem to be a big problem either in the city or in the backcountry.
People also have unrealistic expectations about how they can live alongside the environment. People build houses in beautiful forests, refuse to clear defensible space around their houses because they like the trees, and then yelp to the government to put out forest fires so their houses don't burn down. The result is that we build up tinder for decades, and then get huge, catastrophic fires that, unlike the many smaller fires that would naturally occur, have negative environmental effects. An example was the huge Station Fire in the San Gabriels a few years back. Various opportunistic species have taken over in the disturbed habitat. One of the worst of these is purple poodle bush, which is sort of like poison oak except ten times worse -- it gets microscopic needles under your skin like little syringes injecting you with the irritating chemical. The stuff is ordinarily pretty rare (thank God), but in the burned areas it's taking over like crazy.
It's not realistic to imagine that you can have a natural environment in Yosemite Valley with the population density they're trying to support. Why is it a surprise if they get disease-carrying rodents? If it was undeveloped backcountry, you wouldn't have a big enough supply of garbage to feed such a high density of mice. If it was a city, you could exterminate the mice. You can't do any of that in an environment that's basically a high-density suburb that you're pretending is a wilderness.
The guvmint-based solution is to scale back the density of development in Yosemite Valley radically, and also to stop allowing people to drive private cars into the valley.
As an individual, there are a couple of positive things you can do: (1) Instead of driving your car into Yosemite Valley, take the YARTS bus from a nearby town like Mariposa. (2) If you live in the Bay Area, please show a little originality by not doing the same stuff that everybody else does. The two things that people want to do are (a) climbing Half Dome as a day hike and (b) overnight backpacking in Little Yosemite. These areas are heavily overimpacted. Try something else. The Sierra is a big place.
Slashdot Mirror
The harvard.edu news article, quoted in the slashdot summary is inaccurate. It says:
This reads as a claim that they've resolved the event horizon. That's not true, although there are good prospects for resolving the event horizon of a black hole in the near future.
As is made clear in the rest of the article, and in the abstract of the published paper, what they've really resolved is structure inside the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO).
In units where G=1 and c=1, the radius of the event horizon is 2M, where M is the mass of the black hole. The radius of the ISCO, for a nonrotating black hole, is 6M, i.e., three times the radius of the event horizon. What they've resolved is structure at 5.5M.
The first author of the paper, Doeleman, seems to post all his papers on arxiv.org, but unfortunately this one doesn't seem to be there yet, and Science has their copy paywalled.
So now there's GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo. Is there going to be cooperation between the different sets of satellites, or will a given device only talk to its own set of satellites? It sucks, for example, when I'm hiking and can't get a GPS fix because I'm in a canyon with a view of only part of the sky. Ditto when all the visible satellites are near the horizon, so the vertical position's accuracy goes to hell, like a couple of weeks ago when I was at 7000' and it told me I was at 14000'. If we had a large number of satellites all in the sky at once, and could use them in any combination, it would be really cool.
No, actually that has nothing to do with what Godel's theorems say.
You might want to read this: http://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Incomplete-Guide-Abuse/dp/1568812388
I don't think it matters whether we believe her story or not. Regardless of whether we believe her interpretation of the situation: (1) there was a problem, which consisted of a mismatch between the kid's genetically determined, natural behavior and the modern social environment that his behavior prevented him from functioning in; (2) the problem was 100% solved by drugs; and (3) the problem had nothing to do with a lack of money being "invested" by society in his education, or with a lack of money being "invested" by society in non-drug treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy.
The mom describes the school as being run by a bunch of burned-out post-menopausal hags and preening, hedonistic bottle-blonde prima donnas. Cutting out all the nasty personal characterizations of the teachers and the principal, would this kid have done fine academically in an environment that was run by someone else? I sincerely doubt it. He's nearing the age where he has to learn algebra. Sorry, but algebra just doesn't sink into your brain unless you spend at least some small amount of time sitting at a desk, holding a pencil in your hand, and solving for x.
The slashdot summary has this sentence quoted from a doctor: "We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions," hyperlinked to this blog post on Salon. However, there appears to be no logical link between the quote and the blog post. The blog post doesn't describe any "effective nonpharmaceutical interventions." Actually, what it describes is a situation where a sixth-grader wasn't interested in doing his school work, the parents tried dealing with it using normal parenting techniques, that failed, and what worked was ... a pharmaceutical. The story told in the blog post leads to a conclusion that's precisely the opposite of the words in the hyperlinked quote.
What exactly does it mean in this context to have "society invest?"
Whoever put together the misleading slashdot summary seems to have in mind that we should have "society invest" in better schools. But the situation described in the blog post is one where basically the kid wasn't interested in doing school work, enjoyed wandering around the school and helping to fix computers, etc., and although some of his teachers thought it was cool to let him do that, not all of them did, and the principal didn't either. This situation doesn't seem to have anything to do with how much money their state was spending on schools.
I suspect that the doctor being quoted actually had in mind options like talk therapy, which is more expensive than prescribing pills. (WP says that specific types of non-drug therapy that are effective include "psychoeducational input, behavior therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), family therapy, school-based interventions, social skills training, parent management training, neurofeedback, and nature exposure.") But the thing is, society *is* investing a ton of tax money in treating disabled kids. Special ed programs are extraordinarily expensive. At the community college where I teach, we have a whole disabled student center, with half a dozen full-time employees, who seem to spend most of their time helping the huge number of students who are diagnosed with ADHD.
If it was true that kids with ADHD just needed expensive non-drug therapy, and then they'd be fine, then we'd expect to see affluent parents paying for it out of pocket. But that's not what we see at all. What we really see is that affluent parents make sure their kids get drugs.
The real problem isn't that we need to have "society invest" more money in kids with ADHD. The real problem is that (a) kids lie on a bell curve in terms of their ability to learn (in a school environment, but also in any environment), and (b) there has been a long-term historical trend of requiring people to be more and more educated (e.g., a doctor in the 19th century usually has only a few years of college education). If education was really an equalizer in our society, smart working-class kids would end up being more successful than dumb affluent kids -- or more successful than affluent kids who just hated school. This would be unacceptable to affluent parents. It's an arms race, and everyone has the highest possible motivation to get their kid diagnosed with ADHD and get the kid taking the drugs that will allow him to compete.
The problem isn't occurring because of a lack of "investment" by society at large. Society has been investing for a couple of hundred years now in raising the level of education. The result of that investment is the extremely competitive environment we have now, where there is intense pressure on kids who are at the low end of the bell curve in terms of "doing school." Investment by society at large isn't the cure for the problem, it's the cause of the problem.
I'm a libertarian. Been registered libertarian for most of the last 20 years. Have a Gary Johnson bumper sticker on my car right now.
Nevertheless, my reaction is the same. What is the point of this? Why would anyone care?
Neither of the following facts should be a surprise: (1) TV is a passive medium of communication designed for the lowest common denominator. (2) The US has a two-party system designed to lock out third parties.
The superficial problem is that universities can't afford to subscribe to all the journals that are out there. The ultimate source of this problem is that there are too many fourth-rate universities trying to pretend that they're research universities, and too many people trying to make it in academia in proportion to the number of available permanent jobs doing research. These people have a heavy incentive to publish lots of papers. If some of those papers happen to be important and influential in their field, that's good too, but the primary commandment is just to publish a ton of articles. This is what they have to do in order to get tenure. In many cases, they're in a department at a lower-tier state school that isn't really research oriented at all. Tenured faculty in their department aren't even doing research, just teaching. But the school wants to be just like the research-oriented universities (UC, Ivy Leage, etc.), so they make research a criterion for teaching. The school can afford to do this, because they have 300 applicants for every tenure-track job. All of this creates an overwhelming incentive for huge numbers of people to do research that is probably correct but utterly unimportant, and will never be cited in another paper. These useless papers have to be published somewhere. That's why all the low-impact-factor journals exist.
The only solution I can imagine is that we could create not just a full set of high-quality free journals in all academic disciplines but also a full spectrum of medium- and low-impact free journals as well. Kind of depressing, but it seems to be what junior faculty need.
Labtiva's approach doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a way of tackling the problem. The problem they describe is that research libraries can't afford to subscribe to all the low-impact journals. Low-impact journals are crap. They're low-impact. Their papers hardly ever get cited. For that reason, the market for $0.99 downloads of their papers will be too small to matter; nobody wants to read these papers.
I teach at a community college, so I don't have access to journals. It would be great if I could get specific articles from high-quality journals for $0.99 a copy. But the publishers of those journals have no incentive to sell the articles for $0.99 rather than $30. If they did that, it would just encourage libraries to cut their subscriptions. As it is, some researchers will pay $30 for a specific article out of their grant money, and the journal will pull in a pile of money for doing almost nothing.
The slashdot headline, and, to some extent, the slashdot summary, make it sound like Google and Apple are the only ones compiling bogus patents, but it works both ways, of course. They sue other people for patent infringement, but they also get sued. The big difference is that Google and Apple really do have R&D, and really do come up with at least some things that deserve to be patented, whereas the typical patent troll has never made any positive contributions, and is simply hoping to take advantage of the fact that the patent office doesn't really care whether applications are nontrivial.
I got subpoenaed last week by a lawyer from Google, because Google is getting sued by a patent troll (I don't know the name of the company), and Google wants to use the web site in my sig, which dates back to 2001, to prove prior art and invalidate the patent. It's apparently a business methods patent. You might ask, "How do you know that they're a patent troll when you don't even know the company's name, and don't know anything about the patent other than the fact that it's a methods patent?" Well, the way I know that is that I built that site, and it required absolutely zero innovation or creativity on my part. If you take a look a the code, you'll see that it's embarrassingly amateurish -- I think it was the very first Perl code I ever wrote. I simply bought the O'Reilly book on the Perl DBI interface, and built a bog-standard web-based front end for a SQL database. The database is nothing but a digital library catalog, the sole difference being that most such catalogs keep track of a physical collection of books, whereas mine is a catalog of books that are free on the web. It also has a feature where users can write reviews.
Responding to the subpoena (as I'm legally required to do) has been and continues to be a minor pain in the ass. But it's just absurd that any patent examiner allowed anyone to patent anything that went into my web site, because it required zero originality. For that reason, I feel like I'm doing something somewhat positive for society by helping Google deliver a smackdown to this troll.
Google and Apple are probably both companies that would benefit greatly from patent reform, including the elimination of software and business method patents. The big losers would be the patent trolls.
Even that process is extremely slow. Here's an experience I've had that demonstrates this pretty clearly. Wet the inside of a vacuum flask (i.e., one reinforced with some kind of rubber or plastic so that it doesn't implode hazardously when you evacuate it). Pour out all the water, but leave droplets all over the inside surface. Pump on it with a vacuum pump. It takes *hours* for the water droplets to evaporate completely.
First of all, the State of California buys an awful lot of those expensive textbooks, and would reap the savings almost immediately.
This would apply more to K-12 than to college, since college students pay for their own books. Schwarzenegger had a K-12 free textbook initiative similar to this, but it seems to have failed.
Secondly, if it makes education less expensive, it will likely lead to more educated people. People who can afford to pay taxes and your social security.
This may or may not be true. I don't think it's at all self-evident. There is a new book out, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, by David F. Labaree. I haven't read the book, but there is a review in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/cover-to-cover/309071/ . According to the review, Labaree argues that you can't use the public education system to promote equality, because the families that consume education are motivated by the desire to get ahead of other families. This suggests that educating more people will not lead to a greater number of affluent people who pay taxes, but will instead simply lead to more highly educated people doing the same jobs that used to be done by less educated people. I certainly see this at the community college where I teach. Nurses need bachelor's degrees now to be marketable, whereas they used to be fine with an AA degree. Physical therapists need graduate degrees (a DPT) for jobs that are shockingly low-paying.
Although the cost of textbooks is scandalously high, and extremely exploitative, I don't believe that their high costs reduces the number of people getting college educations. At the California community college where I teach, the bottleneck is that due to state budget cuts, not enough classes are being offered in order to satisfy demand. At four-year schools, even state schools, tuition is so much more money than books that I really don't believe there are people making a decision not to go to college based on the cost of books. At the time when they're making that decision, they don't even have information about how much their books will cost.
Professors might want to use the free books but the colleges/universities might not. They can't get a cut from the bookstore if the bookstore doesn't sell any books.
College administrators don't make decisions on what textbook to adopt. Professors do.
With this one phrase, the entire idea is rendered useless. Why bother with free textbooks for college level classes if no college will offer classes that use them for coursework?
I think this is a little too pessimistic. A lot of free books already exist, and a lot of faculty are already using them. See my sig for a catalog that includes several hundred examples. The books that are actively in use for instruction tend to highly "top-heavy," i.e., there's a ton of free graduate texts, not as many college ones, few high school ones, and almost no K-8 books.
The teacher's privilege of choosing what book to use is an important part of academic freedom in higher education. The lack of choice by teachers is part of what makes K-12 textbooks suck so much. K-12 books are written by a committee and sold to a commitee, based on criteria such as whether they show pictures of disabled kids doing math.
My own experience as the author of some free physics textbooks is that teachers' ability to choose the book they want is a huge positive factor in getting people to use my books. I currently have about 30-40 college adoptions and about 30-40 high school adoptions. (There's no way for me to know exact numbers, because the books are free.) Of those high school adoptions, nearly all are from private schools (mostly Catholic schools). The reason isn't hard to guess. K-12 textbook selection in public schools is highly political and bureaucratic. A high school physics teacher at a public school can't simply choose whatever book he wants.
Former Gov. Schwarzenegger tried to do exactly this, with his Free Digital Textbook Initiative. As far as I can tell, it had zero impact.
The problem with ArXIv is that papers have yet to be formally peer-reviewed. It's certainly true that physicists post there and you can find (nearly) all papers there in some form - but many papers posted there don't make it past peer review.
Why is that a "problem with arxiv?"
So that's why this is important.
I don't see the link between the first quote and the second quote.
As a physicist, my reaction to this article is ... huh?
Among physicists, putting all your papers on arxiv.org has been standard since about 1999. I basically *never* need to go anywhere but arxiv for anything published in this century. The only exception I can think of is papers published in Nature, which always seem to be paywalled and not available on arxiv. I assume Nature is very stone-age and forces authors not to post on arxiv. But anyway, Nature isn't really a big venue for physics publications. I teach at a community college, so I have no access to subscription-based journals. Whenever a paper is paywalled, I need to drive to the nearest 4-year university and photocopy it. This basically only happens when I'm looking up golden oldies from decades ago.
What would be news would be if other fields besides math and physics started to do this.
Apparently the religious group is outside the US, which adds another level of difficulty.
But anyway, in general, if you live in the US, and protecting your copyright is really important to you, you should file copyright forms with the US Copyright Office. Although current law says that you enjoy copyright protection regardless of whether you file, it doesn't give you *equal* protection if you don't file. If you file, you can sue for both actual damages and statutory damages. If you didn't file, then you can only sue for actual damages, which are presumably zero in your case. When statutory damages are in play, a lawyer will often be willing to take such a case on a contingent fee basis.
The DMCA sucks, but it doesn't follow that enforcing copyright automatically sucks, or even that enforcing it using the DMCA automatically sucks. Laws are like beer and shotguns; they can be used for both good and bad purposes. I'm willing to contemplate living in a society without copyright, but in such a society the GPL and BSD software licenses, for example, would be unenforceable. Likewise, I'm willing to contemplate living in a society without private property -- but if I tried to implement such a society unilaterally, I'd run into all kinds of problems.
Oops, meant to say this: " In reality, you can't buy the webhosting equivalent of a Honda fit."
Power is money. As long as there is a somewhat unhampered economy in the locus of data centers (and there is), then every entrepreneur will attempt to economize power usage. You don't have to worry about it because the entrepreneurs that use power efficiently will eat the lunch of those that do not, ceteris paribus (all other things equal).
This would work fine except for all the externalities, which include global warming, people breathing particulates emitted by diesel backup generators, and a ruinous series of wars that the US has fought in the Middle East. All of these amount to government subsidies for energy consumption.
From your sig, it looks like you're a libertarian. Me too, woo hoo. Hope you're voting for Gary Johnson, who I think is a better candidate than Ron Paul anyway.
But just because we're libertarians, that doesn't mean we have to accept it when other people pump pollution into our lungs or create conditions such that malaria can invade the latitudes where we live. We certainly wouldn't accept it if other people dumped liquid pollution on our lawns, or smeared anthrax on our doorknobs.
And just because we're libertarians, that doesn't mean we have to imagine we're living in some fairyland where markets are perfectly efficient. I would be happy if I could buy webhosting that was energy-efficient and yet highly reliable, the equivalent of a Honda Fit. In a perfectly efficient market, that webhosting would be available, and it would be cheaper than webhosting that was energy-inefficient and highly reliable, the equivalent of a Porsche 911. In reality, you can't buy the webhosting equivalent of a Porsche 911. The reason is partly the distortion in the energy market brought about by government and partly just the reality that markets aren't perfectly efficient.
I'm part of the problem. Wish I wasn't, but I don't seem to have any choice.
I run a small web site, and if it goes down, there are various consequences in my personal and professional life that can be extremely annoying and embarrassing. To stay sane, I need the site to have good uptime. Over the years, this has caused me to gradually migrate to more and more expensive webhosting, now ~$100/mo.
The average load on my dedicated server is extremely low, so it's basically like one of the extremely wasteful boxes described in TFA. My site is basically I/O-intensive: I serve big PDF files. In terms of CPU, I'm sure the site would run fine on a low-end ARM, or as one of a dozen sites running off of the same Celeron chip. So by comparison with either of those hypothetical, energy-efficient setups, virtually all of the electrical power is being wasted. I'm a small fry, but there are millions of sites like mine, so I'm sure it adds up. (It would be interesting to know how much of total server-center power consumption comes from the "long tails" of the distribution such as Google and Facebook, and what percentage from cottage industries like me.)
There are basically two problems. (1) Nobody will sell me high-reliability webhosting on low-end hardware. The only way to get energy-efficient hardware is to get cheap webhosting. I've tried cheap webhosting. Cheap webhosts have low reliability and nonexistent customer service. (2) Sometimes you get spikes in demand, and you want some excess capacity to be able to handle it without crashing the server. Maybe you get slashdotted. Actually, in my case one thing that has been a problem is that some people apparently run IE plugins that are supposed to accelerate large downloads, by opening multiple connections with the server. When these people hit my server and download a large PDF, the effect is very much like a DOS attack. My logs show one IP address using 300 Mb of throughput to download a 3 Mb PDF. I've written scripts that lock these bozos out ASAP, but on a low-end machine, these events would bring my server to its knees instantly.
I know these people pretty well, and they're pretty competent. [...] And since IE breaks compatibility every single release, that means that more than 600 of the applications we provide (most external, some internal) have to be updated, re-tested and pushed. Almost once a year. Are you f*cking kidding me?
IE doesn't break compatibility with web standards every single release. What IE breaks with every release is bug-for-bug compatibility with older versions of IE. The competent solution would have been to build your company's web site to be compatible with the intersection of the set of web standards with the set of features that some version of IE supported.
If you need stuff that isn't defined by a web standard, and browsers do it differently, then the competent approach is to use javascript frameworks that hide those grotty details from you and that allow you a smooth upgrade path without major code rewrites. This is why these frameworks exist. Not knowing about them or not using them shows a lack of competence.
If they web developers at your company are competent, they can even handle cases where IE doesn't support web standards and never will. For example, IE is never going to support mathml, but you can get support for it through mathjax.
Amazon does not require exclusivity...
"When you include a Digital Book in KDP Select, you give us the exclusive right to sell and distribute your Digital Book in digital format while your book is in KDP Select."
Maybe my info is out of date? Maybe KDP select is different than the program you had in mind?
Exclusive publishing rights. Just like B&N, they want their program to be something more than simple wrappers around public domain content.
That's their choice. He has other alternatives for distribution, and has decided to GIVE it away.
This particular case has a lot of features that will make people sympathize more with Amazon and less with the author. But there are many other cases where the facts are different. As an example, I'm the author of some math and physics books that are licensed under CC-BY-SA, free in LaTeX, PDF, and HTML formats, and also available in print. I'm essentially the sole author, although I do have material in the books such as photos from wikimedia commons. I basically operate on a nonprofit basis, but I do have significant webhosting expenses. (The PDF files are a lot of megabytes, and a lot of people download them, so I can't use el cheapo webhosts.) I don't mind making a few bucks here and there to offset those expenses. I looked into selling my books on amazon for, say, $0.99, in kindle format. Well, one thing I immediately learned is that ebook formats and readers don't have good enough support for math to do a good job on books with a lot of math in them. But anyway, there were also two showstoppers: (1) amazon requires exclusivity, and (2) this: "You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book." So for a book that is free in any format, amazon is not an option. OK, you don't have to cue the world's smallest violin. It's not a huge tragedy for me that I can't sell on amazon. But slashdotters might find that the facts of my situation evoke a different feeling in their fuzzy little free-information-loving hearts than the facts of the one in TFA.
Yes, it's also true that in a free-enterprise system, we don't expect to be able to tell a company that they have any moral or legal duty to sell a product that they don't want to sell. However, it's worth bearing in mind that amazon is very close to being a monopolist in the ebook business. If someone held a monopoly on paper, we probably would be a little concerned if they started refusing to sell various broad categories of books.
Sounds like the author took one bad course, and is blaming online classes for his bad experience. Any of these complaints could apply easily to a poorly instructed statistics class at your local community college.
Then I think you must have tl;dr'd it. He makes many complaints that could have applied to an in-person class, but he also makes many specific complaints that are directly tied to the massive-enrollment online structure of the course, and he discusses this explicitly, over and over.
This seems like a typical situation that we see in the West arising from: (1) the legacy of heedless 19th-century attitudes toward the environment and (2) unrealistic expectations about human interaction with the environment.
A hundred years ago, people did all kinds of things to cherished natural resources that they'd never do today. San Francisco dammed Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite's twin that was reputed to be even more beautiful than Yosemite. Until ca. 1950, people intentionally fed bears in Yosemite Valley for entertainment, and sent burning logs over Yosemite Falls at night for people down in the valley to watch. They put permanent steps and cables on the back of Half Dome, which is something that just isn't a normal thing to do on a peak in the Sierra. And they developed the hell out of Yosemite Valley, turning it from a natural cathedral into an asphalt parking lot with big-city-style smog problems in the summer high season. All of these things have had negative consequences. A bunch of people have died on Half Dome, so they've had to start rationing access. Bear-human interactions, which are very, very seldom an issue in the undeveloped backcountry, are a huge problem in specific places, especially Yosemite Valley. And now we have hantavirus, which doesn't seem to be a big problem either in the city or in the backcountry.
People also have unrealistic expectations about how they can live alongside the environment. People build houses in beautiful forests, refuse to clear defensible space around their houses because they like the trees, and then yelp to the government to put out forest fires so their houses don't burn down. The result is that we build up tinder for decades, and then get huge, catastrophic fires that, unlike the many smaller fires that would naturally occur, have negative environmental effects. An example was the huge Station Fire in the San Gabriels a few years back. Various opportunistic species have taken over in the disturbed habitat. One of the worst of these is purple poodle bush, which is sort of like poison oak except ten times worse -- it gets microscopic needles under your skin like little syringes injecting you with the irritating chemical. The stuff is ordinarily pretty rare (thank God), but in the burned areas it's taking over like crazy.
It's not realistic to imagine that you can have a natural environment in Yosemite Valley with the population density they're trying to support. Why is it a surprise if they get disease-carrying rodents? If it was undeveloped backcountry, you wouldn't have a big enough supply of garbage to feed such a high density of mice. If it was a city, you could exterminate the mice. You can't do any of that in an environment that's basically a high-density suburb that you're pretending is a wilderness.
The guvmint-based solution is to scale back the density of development in Yosemite Valley radically, and also to stop allowing people to drive private cars into the valley.
As an individual, there are a couple of positive things you can do: (1) Instead of driving your car into Yosemite Valley, take the YARTS bus from a nearby town like Mariposa. (2) If you live in the Bay Area, please show a little originality by not doing the same stuff that everybody else does. The two things that people want to do are (a) climbing Half Dome as a day hike and (b) overnight backpacking in Little Yosemite. These areas are heavily overimpacted. Try something else. The Sierra is a big place.
So why do you buy them? Or their stupid readers? Are you allergic to paper or something?
Please read my post more carefully.