Unfortunately, this reaction (from HR/Management) is all too common.
They have this "policy" about sexual harassment and they "train" people and then assume that "job done" it won't happen.
Then, when it does (inevitably in a big company) they don't know how to deal with it.
Sure, it's difficult - you can't just fire anyone and everyone that any woman complains about - that's open to abuse - but, IME, women don't complain officially at all until it's very serious.
It seems to me that there are certain "events" that HR ought to have a pre-planned policy for. Some are inevitable - pregnancy, marriage, illness - others you hope will never happen but if they do then you don't want to have to wing it - dealing with the death of a child of an employee is probably the one that would scare me the most if I worked in HR and I'd want guidance - and, hopefully, someone who had specifically trained to deal with this event to hand the problem over to - but if not, at least know what the company policy was. In particular, you need to know what to do straight away to buy some time while deciding on the longer term actions that should be taken.
I really can't imagine where these people are working that this is even an issue. I'm a professional in the tech industry and I can't imagine anyone I've worked with having any sort of inappropriate interactions with female colleagues (nor have I ever encountered this happening in almost two decades in the industry).
I think you'd be surprised - or you've only worked at small places where there have been "good" guys. Small places probably tend towards one extreme or another.
Big companies, of course, carry the whole gamut of people. I haven't had any experience of "thin skinned" women taking offence at trivial things but I've been surprised at how much inappropriate behaviour towards women that women have been prepared to put up with without even a murmur of complaint (other than a comment to a friend over coffee about how they wish X would keep his hands to himself sort of thing)
Aren't we at least two or three decades past the transitional "women coming into the workplace" period? Aren't practically all the guys that would be old enough for this to even remotely be a problem for already retired?
Unfortunately not. I've been shocked at how laid back HR are about the problem. I've had knowledge of internal disciplinary action over sexual harassment where the behaviour would be classed as criminal should the women have wanted to take it up with the police but HR treat it as a minor misdemeanor that can be brushed under the carpet. One case in particular, that was so serious, if I had been in HR I'd have been consulting lawyers about whether HR had a duty to report it to the police.
Apart from anything else, I would be uncomfortable working in an environment with blatant sexism in the workplace even if it is all male. Jokes, the odd picture etc are fine - I've looked at my fair share of porn and I've made the odd innuendo - but while you can chose to avoid the people who behave in a way you don't like outside of work, you cannot do so in work and so everyone has a duty to be civil to everyone else inside the workplace.
Finally, I'd have to say that if men started treating women with a bit more respect - and started doing it all the time so it became natural - then they'd probably find they'd have lots more female friends. I have significantly more female friends that I see one on one over lunch or dinner than I do male friends. In fact, I have a lot more difficulty making close male friends than I do close female friends.
Using a two-layer, 440-pound copper coil the size of a water bucket, they managed to coax 91.4 teslas from their creation for just a few milliseconds, surpassing the previous record of 89 teslas.
Unless the above arguments have been refuted, I don't know why iron fertilization is still being pushed as a realistic option. It seems to me that many decision makers are nearly completely illiterate in science.
It's more a case that the decision makers - being driven by their electorates - won't even admit there's a problem until it starts to bite catastrophically. When that does happen we still aren't going to be able to stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere instantly and even if we could it would probably be too late anyway for passive measures.
So scientists are looking for last gasp desperate measures that might have a chance of working.
When we finally *have* to deal with the pollution we're dumping into the atmosphere right now we quite possibly won't be able to afford to deal with it and will have to adapt or die (most will die, hopefully enough will adapt) Having something in our toolkit to try is better than having nothing at all.
The amp could be *DEFINED* as 6.24150965Ã--10^18 electrons flowing past a point in one second. At the moment it is measured to be that number of electrons.
They work fine but they're defined in terms of the kg (force between two conductors) which is itself defined in terms of a standard kg.
If you can define the ampere in terms of number of electrons passing a point in a second (and actually count them) then you no longer need that standard kg.
I can calibrate my laboratory instruments using just the properties of the universe and some dimensionless constants.
To be prepared for unexpected, unpredictable negative events is the very definition of responsibility. How have we lost that as a society?
Exactly. And health is one of those things that really does come as a roll of the dice. Sure, people can shift the odds a bit but a lot of it is down to who your parents are and how lucky you happen to be.
So a responsible society realizes that and provides a safety net for the less fortunate. The rich don't get a choice, the poor don't get a choice. Everyone pays according to his ability and everyone uses according to his needs.
I think the majority of people in Europe cannot understand at all why universal health care is controversial. Sure, debates about what should be available and what shouldn't abound but not the basic idea.
In my country, the UK, the Victorian elite built the sewer system because so many of the workers were dying or otherwise being unproductive because of communicable diseases that it was actually profitable to improve things for the poor. At some level, health care provides similar benefits.
Unfortunately, the sewers are now in need of expensive maintenance and we have lost the idea of selfish philanthropy. Everyone complains about how much tax they pay.
As I said originally, sexual offences against the child have special rules.
For your specific example the offence occurs on British soil. The offence is *arranging* for a person to leave the country...
Additionally, British subjects have some protections under British law from other British subjects when outside of the country. The courts will entertain a complaint even though the crime was committed abroad and was not a crime where it was committed.
And there are some things where it's an offence even to try to go abroad in order to commit them - one obvious one would be selling official secrets to China. Just because you do it in China and it's presumably not illegal there, you still commit an offence under British law.
But, in general, if you do something abroad that is legal in the country that you do it in then there is no crime committed at all. Possession of controlled substances is the canonical example.
Being outside of the US geographically does not give you carte blanche to do whatever the fuck you want, just because you happen to be in a country [...] where the law says its ok.
I don't see why not. Here in the UK you can usually travel to a foreign country and do something legal there that is illegal in the UK without fear of repercussion when you return to the UK.
In fact, for most crimes, you will not be prosecuted for the crime in the UK even if it's illegal both in the UK and in the country you visited.
TPTB had to make a special change to the law to be able to prosecute child sex tourists in the UK rather than having to rely on the destination country to prosecute.
And a derivative is, quite literally, betting on other people's bets. Unlike regular stock investment, it produces nothing, and does not finance production. It simply finances the financiers.
There's so much rubbish being written on this thread but I thought I'd reply to this one.
Derivatives, HFT, the works all have legitimate, valuable reasons for existing. That they *can* be abused for gambling isn't a good reason for getting rid of them completely. Until you understand why they are *needed* saying it's all crap and should just be banned is idiotic.
Derivatives form an essential part of any large multi-national company that needs to hedge exposure to commodity or fx price movements. And once you've got people who want to hedge their exposure, it's *required* to find someone else who will take the opposite bet.
I'm going to receive EUR in six months time and I'm going to pay you in USD. Are you willing to gamble that I can actually afford to pay you when the bill becomes due? I want to find someone who will take that bet and I really don't care if it's one person taking a six month bet or 16 million people each taking a one second bet.
Someone *has* to take the bet - either that or we cannot do business.
Companies often hire the wrong people for the job, pay poorly, treat their employees badly and then wonder why they can't find good workers.
I think it's more subtle than that.
Back in the last recession companies axed departments wholesale. There were, therefore, lots of great workers losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Also, many of them, once their department was looking to be on the hit list would also then look to jump ship before the axe hit and, because they were good, could get jobs fairly easily even in the recession.
They were, of course, eager to find a new job and were often quite happy to take no pay increase or even a pay cut to get back into the market.
This time companies have been much more sensible. Obviously there are the cases where the whole company goes bust and good people are laid off but I've also noticed that there's been a certain amount of "restructuring" and the best people moved to other departments before the department they used to be in is axed. So the early warning signs that a department might be axed has been when the best people are suddenly transferred to other departments.
So there are fewer good people in the market and those that are are usually not under the same pressure to get a new job that they have been in the past.
If they'd tried analyzing Beethoven it would have been even simpler:-)
V I V I V V V I IV V I
Take the slow movement of the seventh symphony. No tune (all on the same note), no rhythmic interest (dah, da, da, dah, dah repeated over and over again) and yet it's a hauntingly beautiful movement.
It's not even the way he uses the orchestra - Liszt's piano transcription is just as haunting:
(while four against three is fairly common in piano music - the chopin fantasy impromptu being the canonical example, this is the only piano work I know of that has four against three in one hand - the recurrence of the main theme before the fugue)
I got them both right immediately and via very similar "reasoning" as you although I had to "reverse engineer" my thinking for the bat and ball one because the answer came faster than I could have spoken it.
But I suspect that's related to having a mathematical bias in my thinking and education. These problems aren't just easy, their the sorts of problems I've done thousands of times before.
For an intelligent person from an arts background the problems are also easy but they actually need to bring their mathematical thinking to the fore. Hearing "dollar and ten cents" and then separating into two parts gives them "dollar" and "ten cents".
The redwood tree one, on the other hand was interesting. I've never heard of "anchoring bias" before and I didn't know where the discussion was going. I read the first bit about asking people whether the tallest tree was taller than X for X between 85 feet and 1000 feet. My immediate thought was hmmm, how tall can the tallest tree be. My wild (no supporting evidence whatsoever) guess was maybe 300 feet. A materials scientist might have laughed at that: "don't be daft, there's no way wood can support a structure that tall" or a botanist might have said "don't be daft, the canopy in the amazon is at about 500 feet" although a quick google while writing this suggests that I wasn't out by too much - 370 feet for the tallest tree.
Then we got to the next part of the question - how tall is the tallest tree. But I'd already answered that question by my way of approaching the first part. So I don't see how I could have had "anchoring bias" at least for this question. Of course, if X had been exactly 300 feet on the first part I'd have been a bit stymied because my estimate of the tallest tree would be inconsistent with my answer to whether the tallest tree is taller or shorter than 300 feet. What I think I would have said is "taller than 300 feet" for the first part and then "300 feet" for the second part although I didn't start thinking about this until after I'd looked up the height.
Automatic if you know about it and use the same station within two weeks to collect the refund.
Doesn't work well for the people who are making one off journeys - they discover six months or more later that their PAYG card is showing a negative balance by which time there's nothing that can be done to remedy the situation.
just that referring to them as "loopholes" makes it seem as if they were not intentionally created.
Often it's more a case that a tax exemption was created to cover a particular (reasonable) case but actually ends up including people who probably weren't intended to be included. It's a "loophole" when the non-intended beneficiaries use the tax exemption.
Of course, it also goes the other way. Extra taxes are created to catch some people who are "unnecessarily benefiting" but also end up hitting those who didn't deserve it.
I'm not sure there's a simple solution to any of this but politicians seem to delight in making systems complicated and "the people" seem to demand that the politicians make it more complicated[1]
My requirement for a fair system (and the UK tax system isn't fair under this model) is that the tax rate on X should be a monotonically increasing function of the size of X. e.g. if we're talking about income tax then the rate of income tax for someone earning X should always be less than or equal to someone earning X+Y for all positive values of Y
[1] For example, in the UK we have something called child benefit that is paid to the mother of every child. This was an untaxed, non-means tested benefit. The public (the daily wail) complained that it wasn't fair that someone earning 50000 a year should be getting this allowance so now it's become means tested. But despite the fact that we have individual taxation in the UK the father (husband?) is taxed if his income is too high even though it goes to the mother. Also we have the situation where a couple each earning 50000 (or whatever the limit is) still get child benefit while a family where one earns 60000 and the other earns 5000 don't get it.
So we've gone from a benefit that was near universally claimed, hard to defraud and easy to understand to something that is possible to defraud, that defrauding can be innocent (especially in the case of estranged couples where each may assume that the other is dealing with it or may deliberately engineer things to try and drop the other party in it), and difficult to know whether you are entitled or not, especially if your income is very variable.
If there was a politician with an IQ in positive figures then they'd have just put a penny on the higher rate of tax. 15 or 20 years later when the next generation is along they can also rinse, lather and repeat.
I think it's to try and stop too many riots during the Olympics.
Some stations are expected to have waits of 30 minutes plus to get onto a train due to the sheer number of people trying to use the station.
Warren Street is probably at risk from people thinking "ah ha - I'll avoid Euston underground" but then being unable to get onto trains due to them being already packed.
I'm an avid BBC proms goer and season ticket holder but I'm somewhat resigned to the fact that I might not actually go to very many concerts this year as getting to the Albert Hall from work could be interesting and getting from the Albert Hall to Euston could be almost impossible as I'm not sure it's even going to be possible to walk through hyde park along West Carriage Drive, let alone cycle, and the "zil" lanes on the other roads around that area are going to make the area all but impassable.
While there are lots of exhortations to cycle during the olympics, I'm not sure that the inevitable frustrations and raised tempers of the motorists are going to make cycling either fun or safe. I hope I'm wrong but I'm not looking forward to this summer.
However, there is a £5 (refundable) deposit for a PAYG oyster card.
For a very occasional visitor to London making a one off journey this can mean that PAYG oyster doesn't really make sense unless you've got the time to faf around getting a refund.
Refunds can also be problematic. AIUI, if you've used more than one way to top up the card - e.g. credit card plus cash - then the only way to get the deposit refunded is by cheque posted to your home address - which for non British london visitors will cost as much in charges too convert to local currency as it is worth. Your best bet may actually be to find some other tourist to sell your card to.
I also believe that the card is disabled if it's not used for two years. You don't lose any money or the deposit but you need to visit a tube office to get it reenabled before it can be used again.
Finally, while oyster works very well for people who use it regularly, it's surprisingly easy to get caught out and charged a "maximum fare" - one example where you have to be careful - I entered the central line the night before last and just as I entered there was warnings of flooding and major delays and "you are advised to take a bus". Had I turned around and walked straight back out again I would have been charged a £7 maximum fare. Armed with this knowledge I ignored the advice being given and forced my way onto the next train.
Modeling isn't a instrument, its closer to guessing.
You're right. It's so just guessing.
I've got a climate model - that the temperatures are higher in the summer than in the winter.
It's complete bunkum. Boy do I wonder why people think the summer should be warm and the winter cold. Obviously you get a far better fit to the results if you just toss a coin to decide whether the winter or summer was warmer in any one year.
It [modelling] is literately[sic] "here is the temperature data for the last 100 years, what curve will fit these points?"
There is empirical modelling and physical modelling. Empirical modelling is the curve fitting you allude to and, in certain circumstances can point to underlying physical processes that aren't yet understood - e.g. the Balmer formula in 1885.
Physical modelling is building a model from underlying physical properties and then seeing how closely it fits the actual data. Climate modelling is almost exclusively physical modelling.
In fact AGW in particular was predicted around 150 years ago based on the measuring of the physical properties of IR absorption of CO2 long before there was any signal available to be measured. Most climate models predicting warming *cannot* be empirical models because the models existed before the data.
I can measure the temperature right now, I can't measure the temperature with any degree of certainty or accuracy in a hour.
But I can be very confident that noon will be warmer than midnight. Given enough historical data I can even work out how likely it is that on any given day midnight will be warmer than midday. If I start seeing far too many instances where it isn't the case then I can have a high confidence that something has changed since my historical data was compiled.
Why should a coal miner, or perpetual student, subsidise the education of some city lawyers and bankers?
Because I want a meritocracy.
If she is smart enough to benefit from a university education then I do not want worries about finance to affect her decision to go into further education.
What the taxpayer should be deciding (via his elected representatives) is how many places he wants to fund.
There's still a place for private higher education if there's unfulfilled demand but, given that in the UK you could get one of the best educations money can buy for free, the business case for private education (other than for foreign students) didn't add up. Unfortunately, I can see Oxbridge going private in my lifetime, something that would have denied me the opportunity of going.
Of course, any utopia has its problems, and one of the significant problems the UK had in my day (matriculated Oxford 1989) was that Oxbridge and a few other redbrick universities where heavily overrepresented by public[1] school students and it's not obvious how much that was due to the public school system filtering off the cream early and how much was due to the public school system being better set up to train students to get through the Oxbridge selection system. (I came though the state education system but I was relatively unusual)
[1] In the UK, public schools are fee paying, state schools are free.
It knows, but you don't. You don't because you haven't measured it yet.
No. Well, maybe for the cat, we're not able to do the experiment to tell.
But in the equivalent test using a photon in place of a cat and orthogonal polarization states in place of dead or alive, the photon most certainly does not "know" what state it is in.
This is the essence of Bell's inequality and the fact that there is no local hidden variable theorem compatible with the results of QM.
If they have a mail server running then I'd have expected that to connect. If it's a closed port then I'd expect to get a port reject message back and the connection close.
Only if the connection is being blocked - either because Virgin is blocking all connections to the IP or TPB server is dropping any connections to that port would I expect it to just time out.
Unfortunately, not having used TPB (it's actually surprisingly difficult to even find what the URL is supposed to be) I don't know what the expected behaviour is.
Alice and Bob cannot look at the rate of correlation between their photons unless they know the measurement that Victor has made and the result that Victor got. Even if Victor agrees to always entangle their photons they still cannot test if they're actually entangled until they get Victor's result.
This isn't a particularly interesting or surprising result. What is interesting is that the researchers have managed to turn the theory into a practical experiment which is the first step to building some more counter-intuitive experiments that we can currently describe but cannot do. But even for those more weird results we already "know" what the results will be but some of them are sufficiently bizarre that we'd like confirmation - and, on the very unlikely chance that things don't behave as we expect, a new exciting area of physics to explore.
Someone predicted that QM would behave a particular way and these guys have managed to say "yup, theory agrees with experiment." What would have been surprising - astonishing - is if Alice and Bob's photons hadn't been correlated when Victor entangled his pair. That would have meant either a) there was something wrong with their experiment (probable) or b) there's something wrong with QM.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, this reaction (from HR/Management) is all too common.
They have this "policy" about sexual harassment and they "train" people and then assume that "job done" it won't happen.
Then, when it does (inevitably in a big company) they don't know how to deal with it.
Sure, it's difficult - you can't just fire anyone and everyone that any woman complains about - that's open to abuse - but, IME, women don't complain officially at all until it's very serious.
It seems to me that there are certain "events" that HR ought to have a pre-planned policy for. Some are inevitable - pregnancy, marriage, illness - others you hope will never happen but if they do then you don't want to have to wing it - dealing with the death of a child of an employee is probably the one that would scare me the most if I worked in HR and I'd want guidance - and, hopefully, someone who had specifically trained to deal with this event to hand the problem over to - but if not, at least know what the company policy was. In particular, you need to know what to do straight away to buy some time while deciding on the longer term actions that should be taken.
Tim.
I really can't imagine where these people are working that this is even an issue. I'm a professional in the tech industry and I can't imagine anyone I've worked with having any sort of inappropriate interactions with female colleagues (nor have I ever encountered this happening in almost two decades in the industry).
I think you'd be surprised - or you've only worked at small places where there have been "good" guys. Small places probably tend towards one extreme or another.
Big companies, of course, carry the whole gamut of people. I haven't had any experience of "thin skinned" women taking offence at trivial things but I've been surprised at how much inappropriate behaviour towards women that women have been prepared to put up with without even a murmur of complaint (other than a comment to a friend over coffee about how they wish X would keep his hands to himself sort of thing)
Aren't we at least two or three decades past the transitional "women coming into the workplace" period? Aren't practically all the guys that would be old enough for this to even remotely be a problem for already retired?
Unfortunately not. I've been shocked at how laid back HR are about the problem. I've had knowledge of internal disciplinary action over sexual harassment where the behaviour would be classed as criminal should the women have wanted to take it up with the police but HR treat it as a minor misdemeanor that can be brushed under the carpet. One case in particular, that was so serious, if I had been in HR I'd have been consulting lawyers about whether HR had a duty to report it to the police.
Apart from anything else, I would be uncomfortable working in an environment with blatant sexism in the workplace even if it is all male. Jokes, the odd picture etc are fine - I've looked at my fair share of porn and I've made the odd innuendo - but while you can chose to avoid the people who behave in a way you don't like outside of work, you cannot do so in work and so everyone has a duty to be civil to everyone else inside the workplace.
Finally, I'd have to say that if men started treating women with a bit more respect - and started doing it all the time so it became natural - then they'd probably find they'd have lots more female friends. I have significantly more female friends that I see one on one over lunch or dinner than I do male friends. In fact, I have a lot more difficulty making close male friends than I do close female friends.
Tim.
Around 1000 Tesla has been achieved using destructive measures (explosive compression).
I believe almost 3k Tesla has been reached but that wasn't just destructive of the apparatus but also destructive of the laboratory!
100 Tesla is about the non-destructive limit at present.
Of course, these things are constantly being worked on and it's not something I follow so the above figures might be out of date.
Tim.
Indeed. I've read the abstract now. But 10^5 Tesla is about 100x what can be created in the lab, not 10000x
No idea where that 10000x came from. I might have guessed at the meaning if it hadn't been for that 10000x.
Tim.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-06/german-lab-generates-highest-magnetic-field-ever-created-lab
Using a two-layer, 440-pound copper coil the size of a water bucket, they managed to coax 91.4 teslas from their creation for just a few milliseconds, surpassing the previous record of 89 teslas.
Now I'll have to go and read the abstract...
Tim.
Unless the above arguments have been refuted, I don't know why iron fertilization is still being pushed as a realistic option. It seems to me that many decision makers are nearly completely illiterate in science.
It's more a case that the decision makers - being driven by their electorates - won't even admit there's a problem until it starts to bite catastrophically. When that does happen we still aren't going to be able to stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere instantly and even if we could it would probably be too late anyway for passive measures.
So scientists are looking for last gasp desperate measures that might have a chance of working.
When we finally *have* to deal with the pollution we're dumping into the atmosphere right now we quite possibly won't be able to afford to deal with it and will have to adapt or die (most will die, hopefully enough will adapt) Having something in our toolkit to try is better than having nothing at all.
Tim.
Yes. and that (16) is the problem.
The amp could be *DEFINED* as 6.24150965Ã--10^18 electrons flowing past a point in one second. At the moment it is measured to be that number of electrons.
Tim.
Amperes work just fine, thanks.
They work fine but they're defined in terms of the kg (force between two conductors) which is itself defined in terms of a standard kg.
If you can define the ampere in terms of number of electrons passing a point in a second (and actually count them) then you no longer need that standard kg.
I can calibrate my laboratory instruments using just the properties of the universe and some dimensionless constants.
Tim.
To be prepared for unexpected, unpredictable negative events is the very definition of responsibility. How have we lost that as a society?
Exactly. And health is one of those things that really does come as a roll of the dice. Sure, people can shift the odds a bit but a lot of it is down to who your parents are and how lucky you happen to be.
So a responsible society realizes that and provides a safety net for the less fortunate. The rich don't get a choice, the poor don't get a choice. Everyone pays according to his ability and everyone uses according to his needs.
I think the majority of people in Europe cannot understand at all why universal health care is controversial. Sure, debates about what should be available and what shouldn't abound but not the basic idea.
In my country, the UK, the Victorian elite built the sewer system because so many of the workers were dying or otherwise being unproductive because of communicable diseases that it was actually profitable to improve things for the poor. At some level, health care provides similar benefits.
Unfortunately, the sewers are now in need of expensive maintenance and we have lost the idea of selfish philanthropy. Everyone complains about how much tax they pay.
Tim.
*usually*
As I said originally, sexual offences against the child have special rules.
For your specific example the offence occurs on British soil. The offence is *arranging* for a person to leave the country...
Additionally, British subjects have some protections under British law from other British subjects when outside of the country. The courts will entertain a complaint even though the crime was committed abroad and was not a crime where it was committed.
And there are some things where it's an offence even to try to go abroad in order to commit them - one obvious one would be selling official secrets to China. Just because you do it in China and it's presumably not illegal there, you still commit an offence under British law.
But, in general, if you do something abroad that is legal in the country that you do it in then there is no crime committed at all. Possession of controlled substances is the canonical example.
Tim.
Being outside of the US geographically does not give you carte blanche to do whatever the fuck you want, just because you happen to be in a country [...] where the law says its ok.
I don't see why not. Here in the UK you can usually travel to a foreign country and do something legal there that is illegal in the UK without fear of repercussion when you return to the UK.
In fact, for most crimes, you will not be prosecuted for the crime in the UK even if it's illegal both in the UK and in the country you visited.
TPTB had to make a special change to the law to be able to prosecute child sex tourists in the UK rather than having to rely on the destination country to prosecute.
Tim.
And a derivative is, quite literally, betting on other people's bets. Unlike regular stock investment, it produces nothing, and does not finance production. It simply finances the financiers.
There's so much rubbish being written on this thread but I thought I'd reply to this one.
Derivatives, HFT, the works all have legitimate, valuable reasons for existing. That they *can* be abused for gambling isn't a good reason for getting rid of them completely. Until you understand why they are *needed* saying it's all crap and should just be banned is idiotic.
Derivatives form an essential part of any large multi-national company that needs to hedge exposure to commodity or fx price movements. And once you've got people who want to hedge their exposure, it's *required* to find someone else who will take the opposite bet.
I'm going to receive EUR in six months time and I'm going to pay you in USD. Are you willing to gamble that I can actually afford to pay you when the bill becomes due? I want to find someone who will take that bet and I really don't care if it's one person taking a six month bet or 16 million people each taking a one second bet.
Someone *has* to take the bet - either that or we cannot do business.
Tim.
I think it's more subtle than that.
Back in the last recession companies axed departments wholesale. There were, therefore, lots of great workers losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Also, many of them, once their department was looking to be on the hit list would also then look to jump ship before the axe hit and, because they were good, could get jobs fairly easily even in the recession.
They were, of course, eager to find a new job and were often quite happy to take no pay increase or even a pay cut to get back into the market.
This time companies have been much more sensible. Obviously there are the cases where the whole company goes bust and good people are laid off but I've also noticed that there's been a certain amount of "restructuring" and the best people moved to other departments before the department they used to be in is axed. So the early warning signs that a department might be axed has been when the best people are suddenly transferred to other departments.
So there are fewer good people in the market and those that are are usually not under the same pressure to get a new job that they have been in the past.
Tim.
If they'd tried analyzing Beethoven it would have been even simpler :-)
V I V I V V V I IV V I
Take the slow movement of the seventh symphony. No tune (all on the same note), no rhythmic interest (dah, da, da, dah, dah repeated over and over again) and yet it's a hauntingly beautiful movement.
It's not even the way he uses the orchestra - Liszt's piano transcription is just as haunting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKePu4Je7l4
(while four against three is fairly common in piano music - the chopin fantasy impromptu being the canonical example, this is the only piano work I know of that has four against three in one hand - the recurrence of the main theme before the fugue)
Tim.
I got them both right immediately and via very similar "reasoning" as you although I had to "reverse engineer" my thinking for the bat and ball one because the answer came faster than I could have spoken it.
But I suspect that's related to having a mathematical bias in my thinking and education. These problems aren't just easy, their the sorts of problems I've done thousands of times before.
For an intelligent person from an arts background the problems are also easy but they actually need to bring their mathematical thinking to the fore. Hearing "dollar and ten cents" and then separating into two parts gives them "dollar" and "ten cents".
The redwood tree one, on the other hand was interesting. I've never heard of "anchoring bias" before and I didn't know where the discussion was going. I read the first bit about asking people whether the tallest tree was taller than X for X between 85 feet and 1000 feet. My immediate thought was hmmm, how tall can the tallest tree be. My wild (no supporting evidence whatsoever) guess was maybe 300 feet. A materials scientist might have laughed at that: "don't be daft, there's no way wood can support a structure that tall" or a botanist might have said "don't be daft, the canopy in the amazon is at about 500 feet" although a quick google while writing this suggests that I wasn't out by too much - 370 feet for the tallest tree.
Then we got to the next part of the question - how tall is the tallest tree. But I'd already answered that question by my way of approaching the first part. So I don't see how I could have had "anchoring bias" at least for this question. Of course, if X had been exactly 300 feet on the first part I'd have been a bit stymied because my estimate of the tallest tree would be inconsistent with my answer to whether the tallest tree is taller or shorter than 300 feet. What I think I would have said is "taller than 300 feet" for the first part and then "300 feet" for the second part although I didn't start thinking about this until after I'd looked up the height.
Tim.
Automatic if you know about it and use the same station within two weeks to collect the refund.
Doesn't work well for the people who are making one off journeys - they discover six months or more later that their PAYG card is showing a negative balance by which time there's nothing that can be done to remedy the situation.
Tim.
Often it's more a case that a tax exemption was created to cover a particular (reasonable) case but actually ends up including people who probably weren't intended to be included. It's a "loophole" when the non-intended beneficiaries use the tax exemption.
Of course, it also goes the other way. Extra taxes are created to catch some people who are "unnecessarily benefiting" but also end up hitting those who didn't deserve it.
I'm not sure there's a simple solution to any of this but politicians seem to delight in making systems complicated and "the people" seem to demand that the politicians make it more complicated[1]
My requirement for a fair system (and the UK tax system isn't fair under this model) is that the tax rate on X should be a monotonically increasing function of the size of X. e.g. if we're talking about income tax then the rate of income tax for someone earning X should always be less than or equal to someone earning X+Y for all positive values of Y
[1] For example, in the UK we have something called child benefit that is paid to the mother of every child. This was an untaxed, non-means tested benefit. The public (the daily wail) complained that it wasn't fair that someone earning 50000 a year should be getting this allowance so now it's become means tested. But despite the fact that we have individual taxation in the UK the father (husband?) is taxed if his income is too high even though it goes to the mother. Also we have the situation where a couple each earning 50000 (or whatever the limit is) still get child benefit while a family where one earns 60000 and the other earns 5000 don't get it.
So we've gone from a benefit that was near universally claimed, hard to defraud and easy to understand to something that is possible to defraud, that defrauding can be innocent (especially in the case of estranged couples where each may assume that the other is dealing with it or may deliberately engineer things to try and drop the other party in it), and difficult to know whether you are entitled or not, especially if your income is very variable.
If there was a politician with an IQ in positive figures then they'd have just put a penny on the higher rate of tax. 15 or 20 years later when the next generation is along they can also rinse, lather and repeat.
Tim.
I think it's to try and stop too many riots during the Olympics.
Some stations are expected to have waits of 30 minutes plus to get onto a train due to the sheer number of people trying to use the station.
Warren Street is probably at risk from people thinking "ah ha - I'll avoid Euston underground" but then being unable to get onto trains due to them being already packed.
I'm an avid BBC proms goer and season ticket holder but I'm somewhat resigned to the fact that I might not actually go to very many concerts this year as getting to the Albert Hall from work could be interesting and getting from the Albert Hall to Euston could be almost impossible as I'm not sure it's even going to be possible to walk through hyde park along West Carriage Drive, let alone cycle, and the "zil" lanes on the other roads around that area are going to make the area all but impassable.
While there are lots of exhortations to cycle during the olympics, I'm not sure that the inevitable frustrations and raised tempers of the motorists are going to make cycling either fun or safe. I hope I'm wrong but I'm not looking forward to this summer.
Tim.
However, there is a £5 (refundable) deposit for a PAYG oyster card.
For a very occasional visitor to London making a one off journey this can mean that PAYG oyster doesn't really make sense unless you've got the time to faf around getting a refund.
Refunds can also be problematic. AIUI, if you've used more than one way to top up the card - e.g. credit card plus cash - then the only way to get the deposit refunded is by cheque posted to your home address - which for non British london visitors will cost as much in charges too convert to local currency as it is worth. Your best bet may actually be to find some other tourist to sell your card to.
I also believe that the card is disabled if it's not used for two years. You don't lose any money or the deposit but you need to visit a tube office to get it reenabled before it can be used again.
Finally, while oyster works very well for people who use it regularly, it's surprisingly easy to get caught out and charged a "maximum fare" - one example where you have to be careful - I entered the central line the night before last and just as I entered there was warnings of flooding and major delays and "you are advised to take a bus". Had I turned around and walked straight back out again I would have been charged a £7 maximum fare. Armed with this knowledge I ignored the advice being given and forced my way onto the next train.
Tim.
You're right. It's so just guessing.
I've got a climate model - that the temperatures are higher in the summer than in the winter.
It's complete bunkum. Boy do I wonder why people think the summer should be warm and the winter cold. Obviously you get a far better fit to the results if you just toss a coin to decide whether the winter or summer was warmer in any one year.
There is empirical modelling and physical modelling. Empirical modelling is the curve fitting you allude to and, in certain circumstances can point to underlying physical processes that aren't yet understood - e.g. the Balmer formula in 1885.
Physical modelling is building a model from underlying physical properties and then seeing how closely it fits the actual data. Climate modelling is almost exclusively physical modelling.
In fact AGW in particular was predicted around 150 years ago based on the measuring of the physical properties of IR absorption of CO2 long before there was any signal available to be measured. Most climate models predicting warming *cannot* be empirical models because the models existed before the data.
But I can be very confident that noon will be warmer than midnight. Given enough historical data I can even work out how likely it is that on any given day midnight will be warmer than midday. If I start seeing far too many instances where it isn't the case then I can have a high confidence that something has changed since my historical data was compiled.
Tim.
Because I want a meritocracy.
If she is smart enough to benefit from a university education then I do not want worries about finance to affect her decision to go into further education.
What the taxpayer should be deciding (via his elected representatives) is how many places he wants to fund.
There's still a place for private higher education if there's unfulfilled demand but, given that in the UK you could get one of the best educations money can buy for free, the business case for private education (other than for foreign students) didn't add up. Unfortunately, I can see Oxbridge going private in my lifetime, something that would have denied me the opportunity of going.
Of course, any utopia has its problems, and one of the significant problems the UK had in my day (matriculated Oxford 1989) was that Oxbridge and a few other redbrick universities where heavily overrepresented by public[1] school students and it's not obvious how much that was due to the public school system filtering off the cream early and how much was due to the public school system being better set up to train students to get through the Oxbridge selection system. (I came though the state education system but I was relatively unusual)
[1] In the UK, public schools are fee paying, state schools are free.
Tim.
No. Well, maybe for the cat, we're not able to do the experiment to tell.
But in the equivalent test using a photon in place of a cat and orthogonal polarization states in place of dead or alive, the photon most certainly does not "know" what state it is in.
This is the essence of Bell's inequality and the fact that there is no local hidden variable theorem compatible with the results of QM.
Tim.
If they have a mail server running then I'd have expected that to connect. If it's a closed port then I'd expect to get a port reject message back and the connection close.
Only if the connection is being blocked - either because Virgin is blocking all connections to the IP or TPB server is dropping any connections to that port would I expect it to just time out.
Unfortunately, not having used TPB (it's actually surprisingly difficult to even find what the URL is supposed to be) I don't know what the expected behaviour is.
Tim.
Ditto for me. Looks like they've blocked the IP.
telnet www.thepiratebay.org 25 also just times out.
Tim.
Alice and Bob cannot look at the rate of correlation between their photons unless they know the measurement that Victor has made and the result that Victor got. Even if Victor agrees to always entangle their photons they still cannot test if they're actually entangled until they get Victor's result.
This isn't a particularly interesting or surprising result. What is interesting is that the researchers have managed to turn the theory into a practical experiment which is the first step to building some more counter-intuitive experiments that we can currently describe but cannot do. But even for those more weird results we already "know" what the results will be but some of them are sufficiently bizarre that we'd like confirmation - and, on the very unlikely chance that things don't behave as we expect, a new exciting area of physics to explore.
Someone predicted that QM would behave a particular way and these guys have managed to say "yup, theory agrees with experiment." What would have been surprising - astonishing - is if Alice and Bob's photons hadn't been correlated when Victor entangled his pair. That would have meant either a) there was something wrong with their experiment (probable) or b) there's something wrong with QM.
Tim.