That's a claim, not the claim. You can easily find people who will assert that it's flat-out unconstitutional to have an income tax and completely ignore the amendment.
What's amusing about the flap is that I'd be willing to bet that at least some, if not many, of the people upset by this have no problem at all with warning labels on biology textbooks.
Ah, but it depends on whether the F-150 driver really, truly needs the F-150. You and I both have seen plenty of people driving pickups who don't display any apparent need of them. (When the truck is shiny and in pristine condition for years, I really wonder.) So while moving to a more efficient version of their vehicle is better, it's still doing plenty of harm.
I doubt minimum fuel standards would work, except in a class-by-class basis, and then you'll still probably have very low standards for the cars that are the biggest problem. (Standards which will also probably be evaded by Detroit, as it has done in the past, by reclassifying vehicles to more permissive classes.) Of course, maybe I'm just too cynical. I actually hope I am.
So is the book based solely on interviews? Because interviewing the subject himself with no other sources will nearly always give you a favorable picture of the subject. We all craft our own favorable narratives, consciously or not, and that's even more so what we share with the world.
The Time article doesn't really delve into the other research that Mr. Kirkpatrick might have done, so it's very difficult to judge the quality of the book.
But like it or not, lots and lots and lots of Americans need large vehicles for their jobs, their families, and their lives.
There's some serious weasel word action going on in there ("lots and lots" is horribly unspecific and leaves the author lots of room to wiggle out of fact-checking, but it sure sounds important to the reader), but let's be honest: only a small percentage of us need big cars. Most people seem to buy cars based on maximum anticipated usage ("You know, I do landscaping once or twice a year, I should get the SUV," or "We get the neighbors together and go camping once a year, we need the room.") rather than what they use the vast majority of the time. While I certainly know people who need the large vehicle, most of the people I know how have them practically never need the size or power.
One thing we can do to help the fuel efficiency overall is not buy this way and plan on renting the larger vehicle now and then we need it. It's getting easier: I've noticed a lot of hardware stores rent pickups now.
The article actually generally pissed me off because it presents a false dichotomy. Yes, going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg saves more gas than going from 33 to 50 mpg. But how many people face that decision? Most of us are either buying a new car entirely (so not replacing one at all) or we're replacing a specific existing car, so the first mileage is fixed. You'll always do the most improvement by going to the highest mileage, in either case.
The only times this comparison matters is if you're asking which vehicle to replace (when you have a free choice) or if you're asking where the auto industry should focus on improvement. The latter is mostly out of our hands and the former practically never comes up, in my experience.
More likely, they didn't appreciate the insurance liability of not at least appearing to disapprove of such shenanigans. Students getting up onto roofs, for example, probably makes insurers have fits.
Sadly, the administration took it down fairly quickly. It was up for several hours (minimum, 2-3, since that's how long I saw it up). But it's just a fun memory now.
So we need to know how many bubbles they missed. If around half of the sample population was bubbles to begin with, it's still no better than guessing to get 50% in the four they picked.
Yes, that aspect is broken. But anchoring the score at 0 wouldn't really fix that, would it? Actually, the best fix to that (other than rejecting any forms with neglected questions) would be to make neutral a 0 and add or deduct points from there.
Right, but given that the test is easy to second-guess, does a change in scores over time indicate a real chance or that people are being more/less honest or even that they perceive a different expectation on their answers (which may or may not equate to a real change in their behavior)?
OK, while I can imagine a lot of reasons why the current generation of college kids might be less empathetic than 20 years ago*, this is not a good way to measure that. For all the researchers know, students are just more self-aware and self-critical today than they were 20 years ago. In some ways, getting a high score might be more likely to say that you're less empathetic and just oblivious to your callousness.
* This isn't my experience, though. I feel, as a college professor, like my students behave just as empathetically towards each other as we did 15 years ago.
That's taken into account in the rating, though. You can't really judge a score (if you can at all) without context of the rest of the population anyway. So floating the bottom score above zero points doesn't change much any more than having an effective minimum score on the SAT does.
Which party is that? The two sponsors represents both major parties.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
First of all, that's now that the grandparent is saying at all. The GP is talking about what the CEO is saying, not the decisions made that caused this disaster. (And he's joking, at that. That much should have been obvious.)
So really, you're off on a tangent to grind your own ax, here.
There's a big difference between blaming someone and actually holding them to accounts. If the BP CEO is willing to pay for the cleanup and potentially go to prison for any malfeasance, then sure, he deserves the massive salary. However, past experience shows that this never actually happens and that the CEOs get a huge salary and take none of the real consequences. It's more likely the little guys with the low salaries who get canned, fined, or jailed.
Either way, I doubt that the GP can do anything against the CEO of BP, so again, you're sort of off on a tangent of your own making here.
Anyone setting up a tripod gets what they deserve, although I don't see why it causes the food to be colder. It's not like you can't have the tripod ready to go before the food shows up. (And tripods are really what's slowing people down, then banning flashes is the opposite of what you want to do. Ban the tripods instead, they're probably a menace to navigation between tables anyway.)
Frankly the whole article smells of creating journalism out of a weak, rare concern. I've never noticed anyone else taking pictures of their food in a restaurant, which suggests that few people are really doing it, or that most of them are quick and discrete.
That interpretation, which became promient after the South rose back to political power in the early 20th century, seems to rather ignore the inconvenient fact that the Southern state sure loved the centralized federal government (and it's pro-slavery bent) right up until the moment they lost control over it. Suddenly, they were all about "state's rights".
A careful reading of history doesn't leave a lot of room to interpret that war's causes, but by god, ideologues sure have made an impressive effort.
while the Democrats where trying to keep their right to chose, slavery.
And this right, you think it's one that the South really should have ever had?
Context also matters. A picture from my collection means something different in the context of my other pictures and my site in general than it does as a stand-alone picture. Off of my site, I can't control that context.
There's also copyright issues: when you (illegally) copy my pictures and put them on your site without comment or notice, other people are liable to expect that they are free to use howsoever they chose. Imagine having a picture of you, ripped from your site, appear in a political ad for something you despise.
It's not clear what Lineweaver is trying to say, here. Even when I took graduate astrobiology nearly 10 years ago, we were taught that you needed three things for life: raw elements (CHON, in particular), water, and an energy source. From the article, it sounds like he thinks he's had this revelatory notion just now.
Of the three ingredients, water does seem to be the hardest to find in sufficient abundance for a good likelihood of life arising anywhere. There are certain the raw materials and often energy sources available in many places, but water seems to be the missing factor in most of the solar system. So it's not a sufficient condition, it does seem like the smart thing to look for first.
(Also, his 12% figure confuses me. Is he including the entire mantle, for example? Because there isn't a lot of water there, as I recall, so you wouldn't expect to find a lot of life there. That alone would pretty easily throw the calculation in favor of his result. However, we have found life in deep rocks under the Earth, which is still pretty amazing and suggests that it's danged hardy.)
Your analogy fails rather wildly and, frankly, you should be ashamed of it. You can't even show that these devices hit that threshold, and I don't believe your simplistic claim to begin with. I find it neigh impossible to believe that x lumens of 464 nm light will trigger a response instantly, so there is almost certainly an exposure duration in place. (And what of 0.99*x lumens? Is that threshold magical?) How long? 1 minute? 10 minutes? 2 hours?
Finally, showing something in the lab is a far cry from showing it has any real effects in real life. It's an excellent start and calls for further study, but how many promising treatments have been demonstrated in the lab, but never worked in reality?
This wouldn't be a hard study to run. Computers have been around long enough that it really ought to have been done by now. (And maybe it has been, but it'd behoove the article -- and you now -- to point the study out, then.)
I think that this line from the article says it all:
While there has been research to show that light -- even artificial light -- can affect human melatonin production, no research has been done specifically on whether the iPad and laptops disrupt sleep cycles.
Basically, we'll speculate wildly about what might be harming you (threats sell news!) without any actual research. I'm not saying that the claims are improbable, just that it can't be that hard to do some studies on the effects of iPads and other gadgets on sleep. This isn't even a multi-year study, it ought to take a few months (max) to run and probably a few more to work over the data.
Some (publicly-funded) research found that ulcers were actually caused by bacteria not stomach acid, and could be cured with an extremely cheap course of ant-biotics. The drug companies had done some basic research on this and did not publish. There was more than half a decade when drug companies knew that cheap antibiotics could cure ulcers but did nothing about it. It finally took government-funded researchers to publish and within half a year, the anti-ulcer drugs fell off the top ten, and even the top 100 of prescribed drugs.
Not that I really doubt your point that corporations don't really care about costumers, but I have to ask: source? This is a fairly egregious example of lying by omission and before I repeat it, I want a solid source.
It goes up, it comes down. In addition, when water is in the form of CLOUDS, it COOLS the planet.
Actually, not necessarily. It depends on the altitude of the clouds, to start with.
On the other hand, the water bands are fairly saturated in our atmosphere, as I recall. So adding more water does relatively little for the greenhouse effect.
On the third hand (where did that come from?), we'd need to keep the clouds up (assuming the cool us) until the CO2 is flushed from the atmosphere in 150 years. So it doesn't seem like a very good long-term solution. (Plus, energy concerns, crop concerns, etc. that have been noted already.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's a claim, not the claim. You can easily find people who will assert that it's flat-out unconstitutional to have an income tax and completely ignore the amendment.
So was income tax, but I've heard quite a few Tea Party folks claiming it's unconstitutional.
What's amusing about the flap is that I'd be willing to bet that at least some, if not many, of the people upset by this have no problem at all with warning labels on biology textbooks.
Ah, but it depends on whether the F-150 driver really, truly needs the F-150. You and I both have seen plenty of people driving pickups who don't display any apparent need of them. (When the truck is shiny and in pristine condition for years, I really wonder.) So while moving to a more efficient version of their vehicle is better, it's still doing plenty of harm.
I doubt minimum fuel standards would work, except in a class-by-class basis, and then you'll still probably have very low standards for the cars that are the biggest problem. (Standards which will also probably be evaded by Detroit, as it has done in the past, by reclassifying vehicles to more permissive classes.) Of course, maybe I'm just too cynical. I actually hope I am.
So is the book based solely on interviews? Because interviewing the subject himself with no other sources will nearly always give you a favorable picture of the subject. We all craft our own favorable narratives, consciously or not, and that's even more so what we share with the world.
The Time article doesn't really delve into the other research that Mr. Kirkpatrick might have done, so it's very difficult to judge the quality of the book.
From the article:
But like it or not, lots and lots and lots of Americans need large vehicles for their jobs, their families, and their lives.
There's some serious weasel word action going on in there ("lots and lots" is horribly unspecific and leaves the author lots of room to wiggle out of fact-checking, but it sure sounds important to the reader), but let's be honest: only a small percentage of us need big cars. Most people seem to buy cars based on maximum anticipated usage ("You know, I do landscaping once or twice a year, I should get the SUV," or "We get the neighbors together and go camping once a year, we need the room.") rather than what they use the vast majority of the time. While I certainly know people who need the large vehicle, most of the people I know how have them practically never need the size or power.
One thing we can do to help the fuel efficiency overall is not buy this way and plan on renting the larger vehicle now and then we need it. It's getting easier: I've noticed a lot of hardware stores rent pickups now.
The article actually generally pissed me off because it presents a false dichotomy. Yes, going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg saves more gas than going from 33 to 50 mpg. But how many people face that decision? Most of us are either buying a new car entirely (so not replacing one at all) or we're replacing a specific existing car, so the first mileage is fixed. You'll always do the most improvement by going to the highest mileage, in either case.
The only times this comparison matters is if you're asking which vehicle to replace (when you have a free choice) or if you're asking where the auto industry should focus on improvement. The latter is mostly out of our hands and the former practically never comes up, in my experience.
More likely, they didn't appreciate the insurance liability of not at least appearing to disapprove of such shenanigans. Students getting up onto roofs, for example, probably makes insurers have fits.
Sadly, the administration took it down fairly quickly. It was up for several hours (minimum, 2-3, since that's how long I saw it up). But it's just a fun memory now.
So we need to know how many bubbles they missed. If around half of the sample population was bubbles to begin with, it's still no better than guessing to get 50% in the four they picked.
Yes, that aspect is broken. But anchoring the score at 0 wouldn't really fix that, would it? Actually, the best fix to that (other than rejecting any forms with neglected questions) would be to make neutral a 0 and add or deduct points from there.
Those data obviously exist and your raw score doesn't tell you that either way, so I don't understand your point, I guess.
Right, but given that the test is easy to second-guess, does a change in scores over time indicate a real chance or that people are being more/less honest or even that they perceive a different expectation on their answers (which may or may not equate to a real change in their behavior)?
OK, while I can imagine a lot of reasons why the current generation of college kids might be less empathetic than 20 years ago*, this is not a good way to measure that. For all the researchers know, students are just more self-aware and self-critical today than they were 20 years ago. In some ways, getting a high score might be more likely to say that you're less empathetic and just oblivious to your callousness.
* This isn't my experience, though. I feel, as a college professor, like my students behave just as empathetically towards each other as we did 15 years ago.
That's taken into account in the rating, though. You can't really judge a score (if you can at all) without context of the rest of the population anyway. So floating the bottom score above zero points doesn't change much any more than having an effective minimum score on the SAT does.
Which party is that? The two sponsors represents both major parties.
First of all, that's now that the grandparent is saying at all. The GP is talking about what the CEO is saying, not the decisions made that caused this disaster. (And he's joking, at that. That much should have been obvious.)
So really, you're off on a tangent to grind your own ax, here.
There's a big difference between blaming someone and actually holding them to accounts. If the BP CEO is willing to pay for the cleanup and potentially go to prison for any malfeasance, then sure, he deserves the massive salary. However, past experience shows that this never actually happens and that the CEOs get a huge salary and take none of the real consequences. It's more likely the little guys with the low salaries who get canned, fined, or jailed.
Either way, I doubt that the GP can do anything against the CEO of BP, so again, you're sort of off on a tangent of your own making here.
Anyone setting up a tripod gets what they deserve, although I don't see why it causes the food to be colder. It's not like you can't have the tripod ready to go before the food shows up. (And tripods are really what's slowing people down, then banning flashes is the opposite of what you want to do. Ban the tripods instead, they're probably a menace to navigation between tables anyway.)
Frankly the whole article smells of creating journalism out of a weak, rare concern. I've never noticed anyone else taking pictures of their food in a restaurant, which suggests that few people are really doing it, or that most of them are quick and discrete.
That interpretation, which became promient after the South rose back to political power in the early 20th century, seems to rather ignore the inconvenient fact that the Southern state sure loved the centralized federal government (and it's pro-slavery bent) right up until the moment they lost control over it. Suddenly, they were all about "state's rights".
A careful reading of history doesn't leave a lot of room to interpret that war's causes, but by god, ideologues sure have made an impressive effort.
while the Democrats where trying to keep their right to chose, slavery.
And this right, you think it's one that the South really should have ever had?
Context also matters. A picture from my collection means something different in the context of my other pictures and my site in general than it does as a stand-alone picture. Off of my site, I can't control that context.
There's also copyright issues: when you (illegally) copy my pictures and put them on your site without comment or notice, other people are liable to expect that they are free to use howsoever they chose. Imagine having a picture of you, ripped from your site, appear in a political ad for something you despise.
It's not clear what Lineweaver is trying to say, here. Even when I took graduate astrobiology nearly 10 years ago, we were taught that you needed three things for life: raw elements (CHON, in particular), water, and an energy source. From the article, it sounds like he thinks he's had this revelatory notion just now.
Of the three ingredients, water does seem to be the hardest to find in sufficient abundance for a good likelihood of life arising anywhere. There are certain the raw materials and often energy sources available in many places, but water seems to be the missing factor in most of the solar system. So it's not a sufficient condition, it does seem like the smart thing to look for first.
(Also, his 12% figure confuses me. Is he including the entire mantle, for example? Because there isn't a lot of water there, as I recall, so you wouldn't expect to find a lot of life there. That alone would pretty easily throw the calculation in favor of his result. However, we have found life in deep rocks under the Earth, which is still pretty amazing and suggests that it's danged hardy.)
Your analogy fails rather wildly and, frankly, you should be ashamed of it. You can't even show that these devices hit that threshold, and I don't believe your simplistic claim to begin with. I find it neigh impossible to believe that x lumens of 464 nm light will trigger a response instantly, so there is almost certainly an exposure duration in place. (And what of 0.99*x lumens? Is that threshold magical?) How long? 1 minute? 10 minutes? 2 hours?
Finally, showing something in the lab is a far cry from showing it has any real effects in real life. It's an excellent start and calls for further study, but how many promising treatments have been demonstrated in the lab, but never worked in reality?
This wouldn't be a hard study to run. Computers have been around long enough that it really ought to have been done by now. (And maybe it has been, but it'd behoove the article -- and you now -- to point the study out, then.)
Yes. If only someone out there funded medical research. But what could be the benefit from such abstract studies of these "humans" and their "sleep"?
I think that this line from the article says it all:
While there has been research to show that light -- even artificial light -- can affect human melatonin production, no research has been done specifically on whether the iPad and laptops disrupt sleep cycles.
Basically, we'll speculate wildly about what might be harming you (threats sell news!) without any actual research. I'm not saying that the claims are improbable, just that it can't be that hard to do some studies on the effects of iPads and other gadgets on sleep. This isn't even a multi-year study, it ought to take a few months (max) to run and probably a few more to work over the data.
Some (publicly-funded) research found that ulcers were actually caused by bacteria not stomach acid, and could be cured with an extremely cheap course of ant-biotics. The drug companies had done some basic research on this and did not publish. There was more than half a decade when drug companies knew that cheap antibiotics could cure ulcers but did nothing about it. It finally took government-funded researchers to publish and within half a year, the anti-ulcer drugs fell off the top ten, and even the top 100 of prescribed drugs.
Not that I really doubt your point that corporations don't really care about costumers, but I have to ask: source? This is a fairly egregious example of lying by omission and before I repeat it, I want a solid source.
It goes up, it comes down. In addition, when water is in the form of CLOUDS, it COOLS the planet.
Actually, not necessarily. It depends on the altitude of the clouds, to start with.
On the other hand, the water bands are fairly saturated in our atmosphere, as I recall. So adding more water does relatively little for the greenhouse effect.
On the third hand (where did that come from?), we'd need to keep the clouds up (assuming the cool us) until the CO2 is flushed from the atmosphere in 150 years. So it doesn't seem like a very good long-term solution. (Plus, energy concerns, crop concerns, etc. that have been noted already.)