I would LOVE to go on and work on a Master's or PhD.
But, I like to eat, see. ..
At the graduate level, provided you're pursuing a "research" degree, most North American university departments provide standard entrance packages (departmental scholarships plus teaching-assistant duties) which cover fees plkus living expenses. However if you rely on those you will not live luxuriously.
My department has a package of approx. $20k/year for PhD students; while this isn't a lot to live off, it is effectively tax-free and thus is equivalent to a slightly higher working salary.
Hmm, the immediate implications here seem to be mostly for our relationship with orangutans and chimps, and less so for our chimp relatedness. If true, this gives us a lower bound on the number of years since the divergence between the human/chimp line and the gorilla line, but we still don't know when we diverged from chimps.
I expect they will adjust the molecular clocks to reflect the new knowledge and make a new guess. But the lesson of this whole discovery is that the current models for molecular clocks seem to be a bit lacking.
I think the important effect is that more people will chose to major in these fields just because it is cheaper even if they could afford the degree without the grant.
Well, that's a given.
Whether a person is credential motivated or not, they will still learn the material, and I expect that either the material itself or the side benefits (logical thinking, problem solving) will benefit society. Also, people that start out with a credential motivation may come to love the subject.
There will be societal benefits in any case: there are always societal benefits when you encourage more people to become educated. And you're quite right that credential-directed types may be drawn into research; I probably would not have studied pure mathematics had it not been in the same faculty as my credential-directed computer science program.
That said, my last point (the segregation of credential-directed and research-directed students) means that it will be harder for credential-directed types to discover the world of research.
I would think it would be easy to argue that engineering, science, and mathematics majors are more useful to society than philosophy and rhetoric majors. It seems reasonable to assume that the "usefulness" of a person to a company is very strongly correlated to his or her pay. (Not that I dislike philosophy majors. I would have loved to have been a philosophy major, but I restricted myself to 3 courses in that area because it seemed impractical.)
Easy for you, maybe. I was talking about "usefulness" to society, and it's telling that you interpret that to be usefulness to a company. And if you think mathematicians are all well-paid, well, you probably don't know many mathematicians!
(PS: The phrase "a little disturbingly utilitarian" seems like an oxymoron to me.)
Yes, given everything else you write, that makes sense. But the word "utilitarian" has a negative side: a "utilitarian" word is one concerned with practicality, with the immediate and quantifiable usefulness of an idea. A utilitarian world is not a world for time-wasters or daydreamers.
It's this which is really the problem. A huge part of the past achievements of our species would have been difficult or impossible to justify on utilitarian grounds. Much of pure mathematics, not to mention the arts and the humanities. It won't make anyone a lot of money, at least not in the short term, but it's worth doing anyway.
A policy like this, ruling out free tuition for arts and humanities students, would be tantamount to a government statement that the usefulness of a student is correlated to their expected later pay. They already do this in a number of ways, but this would be an extra reinforcement of that. I have a hard time believing that such a policy would fund blue-sky pure mathematicians to the same degree.
Do you truly believe, in your heart of hearts, that this surveillance is merely politically motivated?
No, but I believe that politics are part of the motivation. (Though determining what the boundaries of "politics" are in this context is a tricky question.)
That a cynical government engages in it for a purpose different from the stated one?
Yes. At the risk of being insulting, I would say that believing otherwise at this point is evidence of a staggering degree of political naïvité.
That it is unreasonable for the government to suspect that watching the movements and actions of people actively and vocally opposed to the "War on Terror" policies could gather useful information on the stated targets of those policies?
Cast a large net, and you might catch some sharks, sure.
But there are two problems with this:
First, do you agree there are limits, of any kind, to what the government is permitted to do in the name of terror prevention? If North-America-wide martial law aided in the capture of terror suspects, should we attempt that?
I believe there are limits, and that they lie well below what is currently practised.
Second, as you mentioned before, there is a fair bit of evidence that the motives that the administration has for their data-collection schemes are selfish partisan ones, rather than in the interests of terror prevention.
I personally believe this; while you may not, you can at least understand that my conclusions stem from my belief.
Libertarians, as opposed to anarchists, still believe in "providing for the common defense."
If the "common defense" requires the near-complete abdication of privacy and various individual rights for an indefinite period, in what way can a "libertarian" supporter of this position be regarded as libertarian?
One major issue in my own undergraduate education (in mathematics and computer science) was the gulf between those who were comtemplating a future academic career in the subject, and those who merely wanted a credential to progress on to industry.
Yes, there are some students who straddle the fence — in a way, I was one myself — but for the most part the undergraduate student population is rather sharply divided between the research-directed and the credential-directed. The fact that programs have to accomodate both lead to conflicts — the research-directed students complain bitterly about dumbing-down of material and excessive commercial influence on the curriculum, while the credential-directed complain about having to learn a ton of useless theory which will be irrelevant to their future.
I mention this because I speculate that Max Baucus' proposal would certainly change the current equilibrium between these two camps, particularly if free tuition is only for science/engineering students. True, there would be a lot more research-directed types who can't get into university now for lack of funds, but I imagine most of the people who'd come who aren't there now would be credential-directed.
There's also another reason they'd be credential-directed, which is the tone set by the policy itself. There's something a little disturbingly utilitarian about the proposal of granting free tuition only to those people. This sort of philosophy makes me wonder whether the line would be drawn around science/engineering as a whole, or around only those science/engineering programs that have a utilitarian (read: "commercial") appeal. I would think it would be hard for the government to argue that engineering and category theory are "useful" but that philosophy and rhetoric are not.
If, however, research-directed programs are ruled out, the result would likely be a forcible segragation of research-directed and credential-directed students, even more than there is now. Maybe this is where we're headed anyway, but it would be regrettable as the forced mingling of the two has been hugely productive for both in the past.
Can whomever applied the "slashdotliberalwhining" tag to this article, presumably a self-described conservative or libertarian, please explain how a government that engages in surveillance of provably nonviolent political activism is exactly "small"?
Given that there aren't any.svg files on that page, only links to them, and uses.png previews instead pretty much proves the point of SVG not having made it as a main-stream in situ web graphics format, no?
I didn't realize that MediaWiki used png previews: I'll concede that pretty severely undermines my example.
Nothing to do with your post really, but in visiting the SCO website through the link I stumbled across this very amusing "Business Jive" podcast by Darl McBride.
If only someone outside regular Slashdot/Groklaw readers would know who Darl McBride is, the "can you dig it?" bit by Darl would be begging for sampling.
If only they had sent a hummer up there instead, especially one of those robotically controlled hummers from the DARPA automation contests. Then we wouldn't have to worry about dust storms... the dust would have had to worry about its butt getting kicked by the hummer. The hummer is man enough for anything Mars can throw at it.
You might have some trouble finding a gas station...
Or is your point perhaps that the fact that competitor would up with the building is a blow? As if Apple were to get bought out by Microsoft, or something like that.
This was a charter school and not part of the regular public school system. So, it was actually a competitor to the district, similar to private schools.
Right, exactly, so the public school system couldn't and shouldn't care less about it.
Or is your point perhaps that the fact that competitor would up with the building is a blow? As if Apple were to get bought out by Microsoft, or something like that.
Adding insult to the poor HTH kids' injury, the local public H.S. district plunked down $8.6M to snatch up their abandoned school and will turn it over to a brand new crop of kids in the fall.
How on earth could this possibly be considered an insult? Because the public school district is so apparently awash in cash yet didn't subsidize their extremely specialized and (apparently) financially unsuccessful school, but instead let it flounder? Cry me a goddamned river.
I read it, and also interpreted as your saying that the complaints were because the U.S. is rich and powerful, i.e. being hypocritical and criminal didn't necessarily come into it.
While I do think the grandparent was obviously contriving an excuse to mention the School of the Americas, it's not so crazy a link as you seem to think. A lot of South American dictators went to the School of the Americas, graduated to become their country's local American stooges, and seized/held power with the help of the CIA. Noriega is a good example.
Well, I agree with your basic point that a "podcast" is certainly not something that really needed a newly-coined name.
But a podcast is certainly not streaming audio. IPods don't have wifi, so listening to streamed audio on an iPod would require it to be connected to a computer at all times: this defeats the entire purpose of a portable audio player.
This is certainly consistent with the selfish-gene explanation for selfless behaviour: there is an evolutionary advantage, from the perspective of the genes, to co-operating with your siblings because your siblings also bear some of your genes.
This is the same reason hy such "nepotism" exists elsewhere in biology; there's no reason why one would expect plants to be any different, though I imagine the problem of recognizing your siblings is somewhat harder.
I suspect strongly that it's the first. Most Slashdot readers have very little clue what is going on in India, and probably didn't read past the first few sentences before modding.
The act of stridently assigning blame for political ills to Communists and Islamists (as those first few sentences do) will strike a chord with most Americans, and echoes a lot of the rhetoric (historical and modern) from their own leaders. The idea that this sort of rhetoric would be happening in very different and faraway place turns the familiarity of such statements into humour.
Hence the "funny" mod. I really think that's a much more plausible explanation than deliberately abusive modding.
The entire thing has been awesome, with no detectable dragging at all.
Oh, come on. Black Market, Hero, The Woman King? BSG has its occasional duds and plotline-of-the-week moments too. It's just lucky that they're relatively few and far between.
My biggest complaint about BSG is the seat-of-the-pants writing. Moore has pretty much said he only decided at the time of writing Crossroads that Roslin would get cancer again, and who the Final Five really were. He can usually pull it off, put sometimes the cracks show.
what about Pegasus then? How did it manage to survive? It was a modern ship and yet seemed to have networked computers. Clearly they managed to secure their networks because they survived encounters with the Cyclons.
They survived because they made a random FTL jump to the middle of nowhere and had time to figure out what went wrong (i.e. Six's virus in Baltar's program). They had also already been tipped off to the fact that something was wrong with their computers by the fact that the rest of the fleet had been slaughtered.
As implausible events go in BSG, the explanation here is one of the most sensible.
Every time a cancer patient is saved the gene pool is degraded. Genetic engineering might be the only future the human race has since we are currently devolving.
There's no such thing as "devolving".
And the survival of cancer patients is hardly the central thing freeing us from the selective forces to which we used to be exposed.
In the past, people often died from other things before cancer could kill them, meaning a resistance to cancer was not selected for. And many of the cancers which we now suffer from are produced by modern toxins anyway, so they would not have occurred in these numbers in antiquity.
Silent Spring has been debunked. 2000 people die in Africa from Malaria EVERY DAY.
Whether or not Silent Spring was overly sensationalist or exaggerated is separate from the question of whether DDT has an environmental impact. There are a reasonable number of references in the Wikipedia article on DDT suggesting it has a significant effect on the populations of certain birds and other predators.
Africans WANT to use DDT, to save their lives.
They want to, and do: DDT has never been banned there. I said "blanket Africa with DDT", suggesting a more widespread use than is currently practised, with a correspondingly larger environmental impact.
What you say about rich white granola-munching hippies in rich countries is frequently true. This is symptomatic of Western idealism in general: lots of interest in ideas, too little interest in their implementation. How many kindred spirits have communed about the evils of exploitation in the Third World over lattés at Starbuck's?
But you seem to be concluding that just because many Western idealists are disgusting hypocrites that the science must be wrong. Why?
Slashdot Mirror
I would LOVE to go on and work on a Master's or PhD.
.
But, I like to eat, see. .
At the graduate level, provided you're pursuing a "research" degree, most North American university departments provide standard entrance packages (departmental scholarships plus teaching-assistant duties) which cover fees plkus living expenses. However if you rely on those you will not live luxuriously.
My department has a package of approx. $20k/year for PhD students; while this isn't a lot to live off, it is effectively tax-free and thus is equivalent to a slightly higher working salary.
Steve
Hmm, the immediate implications here seem to be mostly for our relationship with orangutans and chimps,
Gah, that should read "orangutans and gorillas,".
Hmm, the immediate implications here seem to be mostly for our relationship with orangutans and chimps, and less so for our chimp relatedness. If true, this gives us a lower bound on the number of years since the divergence between the human/chimp line and the gorilla line, but we still don't know when we diverged from chimps.
I expect they will adjust the molecular clocks to reflect the new knowledge and make a new guess. But the lesson of this whole discovery is that the current models for molecular clocks seem to be a bit lacking.
I think the important effect is that more people will chose to major in these fields just because it is cheaper even if they could afford the degree without the grant.
Well, that's a given.
Whether a person is credential motivated or not, they will still learn the material, and I expect that either the material itself or the side benefits (logical thinking, problem solving) will benefit society. Also, people that start out with a credential motivation may come to love the subject.
There will be societal benefits in any case: there are always societal benefits when you encourage more people to become educated. And you're quite right that credential-directed types may be drawn into research; I probably would not have studied pure mathematics had it not been in the same faculty as my credential-directed computer science program.
That said, my last point (the segregation of credential-directed and research-directed students) means that it will be harder for credential-directed types to discover the world of research.
I would think it would be easy to argue that engineering, science, and mathematics majors are more useful to society than philosophy and rhetoric majors. It seems reasonable to assume that the "usefulness" of a person to a company is very strongly correlated to his or her pay. (Not that I dislike philosophy majors. I would have loved to have been a philosophy major, but I restricted myself to 3 courses in that area because it seemed impractical.)
Easy for you, maybe. I was talking about "usefulness" to society, and it's telling that you interpret that to be usefulness to a company. And if you think mathematicians are all well-paid, well, you probably don't know many mathematicians!
(PS: The phrase "a little disturbingly utilitarian" seems like an oxymoron to me.)
Yes, given everything else you write, that makes sense. But the word "utilitarian" has a negative side: a "utilitarian" word is one concerned with practicality, with the immediate and quantifiable usefulness of an idea. A utilitarian world is not a world for time-wasters or daydreamers.
It's this which is really the problem. A huge part of the past achievements of our species would have been difficult or impossible to justify on utilitarian grounds. Much of pure mathematics, not to mention the arts and the humanities. It won't make anyone a lot of money, at least not in the short term, but it's worth doing anyway.
A policy like this, ruling out free tuition for arts and humanities students, would be tantamount to a government statement that the usefulness of a student is correlated to their expected later pay. They already do this in a number of ways, but this would be an extra reinforcement of that. I have a hard time believing that such a policy would fund blue-sky pure mathematicians to the same degree.
Do you truly believe, in your heart of hearts, that this surveillance is merely politically motivated?
No, but I believe that politics are part of the motivation. (Though determining what the boundaries of "politics" are in this context is a tricky question.)
That a cynical government engages in it for a purpose different from the stated one?
Yes. At the risk of being insulting, I would say that believing otherwise at this point is evidence of a staggering degree of political naïvité.
That it is unreasonable for the government to suspect that watching the movements and actions of people actively and vocally opposed to the "War on Terror" policies could gather useful information on the stated targets of those policies?
Cast a large net, and you might catch some sharks, sure.
But there are two problems with this:
First, do you agree there are limits, of any kind, to what the government is permitted to do in the name of terror prevention? If North-America-wide martial law aided in the capture of terror suspects, should we attempt that?
I believe there are limits, and that they lie well below what is currently practised.
Second, as you mentioned before, there is a fair bit of evidence that the motives that the administration has for their data-collection schemes are selfish partisan ones, rather than in the interests of terror prevention.
I personally believe this; while you may not, you can at least understand that my conclusions stem from my belief.
Libertarians, as opposed to anarchists, still believe in "providing for the common defense."
If the "common defense" requires the near-complete abdication of privacy and various individual rights for an indefinite period, in what way can a "libertarian" supporter of this position be regarded as libertarian?
One major issue in my own undergraduate education (in mathematics and computer science) was the gulf between those who were comtemplating a future academic career in the subject, and those who merely wanted a credential to progress on to industry.
Yes, there are some students who straddle the fence — in a way, I was one myself — but for the most part the undergraduate student population is rather sharply divided between the research-directed and the credential-directed. The fact that programs have to accomodate both lead to conflicts — the research-directed students complain bitterly about dumbing-down of material and excessive commercial influence on the curriculum, while the credential-directed complain about having to learn a ton of useless theory which will be irrelevant to their future.
I mention this because I speculate that Max Baucus' proposal would certainly change the current equilibrium between these two camps, particularly if free tuition is only for science/engineering students. True, there would be a lot more research-directed types who can't get into university now for lack of funds, but I imagine most of the people who'd come who aren't there now would be credential-directed.
There's also another reason they'd be credential-directed, which is the tone set by the policy itself. There's something a little disturbingly utilitarian about the proposal of granting free tuition only to those people. This sort of philosophy makes me wonder whether the line would be drawn around science/engineering as a whole, or around only those science/engineering programs that have a utilitarian (read: "commercial") appeal. I would think it would be hard for the government to argue that engineering and category theory are "useful" but that philosophy and rhetoric are not.
If, however, research-directed programs are ruled out, the result would likely be a forcible segragation of research-directed and credential-directed students, even more than there is now. Maybe this is where we're headed anyway, but it would be regrettable as the forced mingling of the two has been hugely productive for both in the past.
Can whomever applied the "slashdotliberalwhining" tag to this article, presumably a self-described conservative or libertarian, please explain how a government that engages in surveillance of provably nonviolent political activism is exactly "small"?
The cognitive dissonance here is just staggering.
Given that there aren't any .svg files on that page, only links to them, and uses .png previews instead pretty much proves the point of SVG not having made it as a main-stream in situ web graphics format, no?
I didn't realize that MediaWiki used png previews: I'll concede that pretty severely undermines my example.
Yes, clearly the fact that SVG wasn't used in the manner foreseen indicates it has failed utterly.
I never randomly stumble upon SVGs while browsing the web. Yes, never.
Without a way of testing for the existence of the supernatural force, it shouldn't even be given the status of hypothesis.
I think the appropriate term is "not even wrong".
Nothing to do with your post really, but in visiting the SCO website through the link I stumbled across this very amusing "Business Jive" podcast by Darl McBride.
If only someone outside regular Slashdot/Groklaw readers would know who Darl McBride is, the "can you dig it?" bit by Darl would be begging for sampling.
If only they had sent a hummer up there instead, especially one of those robotically controlled hummers from the DARPA automation contests. Then we wouldn't have to worry about dust storms... the dust would have had to worry about its butt getting kicked by the hummer. The hummer is man enough for anything Mars can throw at it.
You might have some trouble finding a gas station...
Or is your point perhaps that the fact that competitor would up with the building is a blow? As if Apple were to get bought out by Microsoft, or something like that.
sorry, "would" should be "wound".
This was a charter school and not part of the regular public school system. So, it was actually a competitor to the district, similar to private schools.
Right, exactly, so the public school system couldn't and shouldn't care less about it.
Or is your point perhaps that the fact that competitor would up with the building is a blow? As if Apple were to get bought out by Microsoft, or something like that.
Adding insult to the poor HTH kids' injury, the local public H.S. district plunked down $8.6M to snatch up their abandoned school and will turn it over to a brand new crop of kids in the fall.
How on earth could this possibly be considered an insult? Because the public school district is so apparently awash in cash yet didn't subsidize their extremely specialized and (apparently) financially unsuccessful school, but instead let it flounder? Cry me a goddamned river.
I read it, and also interpreted as your saying that the complaints were because the U.S. is rich and powerful, i.e. being hypocritical and criminal didn't necessarily come into it.
While I do think the grandparent was obviously contriving an excuse to mention the School of the Americas, it's not so crazy a link as you seem to think. A lot of South American dictators went to the School of the Americas, graduated to become their country's local American stooges, and seized/held power with the help of the CIA. Noriega is a good example.
Don't paint us all with the prude brush.
well, I'm not defending the OP, but implying that most online prudes are Americans is not the same as saying most Americans are prudes.
E.g. "Streaming Audio" -> "Podcast"
Well, I agree with your basic point that a "podcast" is certainly not something that really needed a newly-coined name.
But a podcast is certainly not streaming audio. IPods don't have wifi, so listening to streamed audio on an iPod would require it to be connected to a computer at all times: this defeats the entire purpose of a portable audio player.
This is certainly consistent with the selfish-gene explanation for selfless behaviour: there is an evolutionary advantage, from the perspective of the genes, to co-operating with your siblings because your siblings also bear some of your genes.
This is the same reason hy such "nepotism" exists elsewhere in biology; there's no reason why one would expect plants to be any different, though I imagine the problem of recognizing your siblings is somewhat harder.
I suspect it's the second and/or third.
I suspect strongly that it's the first. Most Slashdot readers have very little clue what is going on in India, and probably didn't read past the first few sentences before modding.
The act of stridently assigning blame for political ills to Communists and Islamists (as those first few sentences do) will strike a chord with most Americans, and echoes a lot of the rhetoric (historical and modern) from their own leaders. The idea that this sort of rhetoric would be happening in very different and faraway place turns the familiarity of such statements into humour.
Hence the "funny" mod. I really think that's a much more plausible explanation than deliberately abusive modding.
The entire thing has been awesome, with no detectable dragging at all.
Oh, come on. Black Market, Hero, The Woman King? BSG has its occasional duds and plotline-of-the-week moments too. It's just lucky that they're relatively few and far between.
My biggest complaint about BSG is the seat-of-the-pants writing. Moore has pretty much said he only decided at the time of writing Crossroads that Roslin would get cancer again, and who the Final Five really were. He can usually pull it off, put sometimes the cracks show.
what about Pegasus then? How did it manage to survive? It was a modern ship and yet seemed to have networked computers. Clearly they managed to secure their networks because they survived encounters with the Cyclons.
They survived because they made a random FTL jump to the middle of nowhere and had time to figure out what went wrong (i.e. Six's virus in Baltar's program). They had also already been tipped off to the fact that something was wrong with their computers by the fact that the rest of the fleet had been slaughtered.
As implausible events go in BSG, the explanation here is one of the most sensible.
Every time a cancer patient is saved the gene pool is degraded. Genetic engineering might be the only future the human race has since we are currently devolving.
There's no such thing as "devolving".
And the survival of cancer patients is hardly the central thing freeing us from the selective forces to which we used to be exposed.
In the past, people often died from other things before cancer could kill them, meaning a resistance to cancer was not selected for. And many of the cancers which we now suffer from are produced by modern toxins anyway, so they would not have occurred in these numbers in antiquity.
Silent Spring has been debunked. 2000 people die in Africa from Malaria EVERY DAY.
Whether or not Silent Spring was overly sensationalist or exaggerated is separate from the question of whether DDT has an environmental impact. There are a reasonable number of references in the Wikipedia article on DDT suggesting it has a significant effect on the populations of certain birds and other predators.
Africans WANT to use DDT, to save their lives.
They want to, and do: DDT has never been banned there. I said "blanket Africa with DDT", suggesting a more widespread use than is currently practised, with a correspondingly larger environmental impact.
What you say about rich white granola-munching hippies in rich countries is frequently true. This is symptomatic of Western idealism in general: lots of interest in ideas, too little interest in their implementation. How many kindred spirits have communed about the evils of exploitation in the Third World over lattés at Starbuck's?
But you seem to be concluding that just because many Western idealists are disgusting hypocrites that the science must be wrong. Why?