[...] Some advocate implementing something like quotas or other such measures which favor people who fall into "disadvantaged" buckets based on race, gender, or other criteria. [...]
This is explicitly the system made illegal--and the definition of Affirmative Action that I get from Wikipedia is "Affirmative action or positive discrimination (known as employment equity in Canada, reservation in India, and positive action in the UK) is the policy of providing special opportunities for, and favoring members of, a disadvantaged group who suffer from discrimination."
Here's the relevant portion of the law we're talking about:
The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
California actually has a law very much like this, and the statistics so far seem to suggest that while it lowers the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos applying and admitted (which may simply be due to fewer applying), the percent of them graduating goes up when the law requires equality of opportunity.
I am, frankly, with people who think that the important number is the number who graduate--the higher education system should not be made the scapegoat for the failures of lower education system. That just allows the K12 system to get away with continuing to fail.
Its not just asians, Most people here forget how bad the irish had it when they came here years ago. Hell we stil lget called drunks and no one bats an eye to that stereotype. 100 years ago it was not uncommon to see help wanted signs that said "irish need not apply" you dont see the irish out there fighting for affirmative action for the irish do you? You dont see the irish demanding reparations for the way our grandparents were treated when they got here do you?
Some of the earliest race riots were Irish rioting over the fact that employers preferred to hire African-Americans. The stereotypes were that African-Americans were hard-workers and sometimes with touches of being childlike. Irish, meanwhile, were considered drunken, lazy, and dishonest...
Remember: historically white in the US meant "Protestant of Germanic/Scandinavian descent," especially once scientific racism hit.
Seven million extra doctors' visits are hardly inconsequential, especially considering that only about 1 in 175 would actually be suicidal.
An interesting attitude. Compare this to Foxconn, which reduced the suicide rate among its workforce from 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 400,000 in three years.
All things considered, I think they did it by making it harder to commit suicide, and possibly also by improving labor conditions.
The usual process is to place somebody thought suicidal on a suicide watch. This can actually be very intrusive, and a test like this certainly is less than ideal if you're applying it at large--the accuracy here is for this population, and rather close to chance already. In a wider population, of a different makeup, its accuracy will be different, and probably lower.
More importantly, if you read the PLOS one article, they're discussing data mining the clinical notes themselves, and they admit that this is a branch of research that has been rather neglected: certain factors were deemed to have predictive value, without anybody really checking to see if that was true.
Let's say you're sitting in the entry way of an office building, and you notice that most people who come in to the building are men. This does not mean you can necessarily predict that a man walking past is going to enter the building; it might turn out that, in fact, of the people passing by the building, any given woman is more likely to come in--it's just that most of the people passing by right now are men.
It does not follow that if "Most of the people who do x are y" is true that "Most people who are y do x" is also true, for any set of x and y.
65% accuracy is not good, it's a start and it's better than what we currently have. In fact, the paper outright says that currently, they haven't even managed to validate the tool. In fact, I can easily give you the tl;dr version of this paper:
The indications for the future of this path of research are promising. Please fund the next phase so we can get it closer to practical application(s).
In less scientific phrasing:
We haven't reached a dead in, give us money so we can keep going!
It's not as much a breakthrough as a status report on the progress towards a breakthrough...
I don't understand why these top business people keep trying to say that we need to push more CS type stuff into grades k-12. Why would we tailor such early education specifically to one career choice? What happens if we now have too many programmers, and that is all these young people have been trained for? Other countries do not do this.
I almost compltely agree with you.
The problem is not that we need to specifically push this stuff on children. The problem is that as society, we do not allow children to believe that those who would pursue a technical career are in any way shape of form, interesting or cool. In some subcultures, being smart is actually looked upon as being a bad thing.
Shhh, we're not allowed to talk about that.
Cultural icons for modern citizens are more in line with unearned wealth, celebrities famous for being famous, and little else. Science, if it is addressed, has morphed into "Ancient Aliens" or apocalyptic predictions (beyond all possible belief, I've seen that some of the mayan apocalypse shows have been re-running. This seems pathological, that some are upset it didn't happen, and longing for the good old days when we had our utter destruction to look forward to.
It gets even more hilarious when it gets brought up that, in fact, the largest known Mayan calendar apparently will not cycle until the universe is several times its current estimated age.
So those Mayan apocalypse predictions? Are based off the Mayan equivalent to a pocket calendar...
so in other words you were not in a similar situation.
Merely because they decided against? This isn't the first time a sperm donor has been gone after for child support, and it doesn't even take much effort to know this...
They had signed legal documents with the donor's name and address. Had they chosen to withhold that information and the state found out I'm sure the same sex couple could have been found guilty of lying to the court or fraud. Even if the donor chose to donate annonymously through an attorney I'm sure the attorney had the information and would have to give it to the state.
Actually, it's quite possible to get an anonymous donor for IVF, through sperm banks that pay donors. The problem is when you actually do want the possibility of contacting the donor or would prefer a friend or male relative as a donor--if nothing else, I'd feel it polite to let somebody who did me the courtesy of providing me sperm if it turns out that they're a carrier for a genetic defect. (Getting the testing done can sometimes require the catch 22 of knowing you have a blood relative who has it; this is actually a reason why adoptees argue they do have a right to know their biological parents.)
Ideally, it ought to be possible to have the records of a sperm or ovum donor sealed until either the resultant child turns 18 or medical necessity occurs--and those who 'sign' for the procedure being legally held as the child's guardian(s).
You can let them sort out exactly what they want the relationship to be: will it make any actual difference if they view themselves as siblings in all but blood or as a couple, as long as they're taking responsibility?
What concerns me is that the assorted 'multicultural' bullshit described in TFA sounds more like some kind of racist farce than like an actual inclusion strategy: "Hey, black kid, you 'urban' types like skatesboards and graffiti, right? How about some programming with skateboards and graffiti?" and will do absolutely nothing to address the 'entire class looks you up and down, because you are not one of us and/or we are interested only in fucking you' school of dissuading people from taking up technical subjects.
I'd like to note that the complaint about racism is, as is traditional, ignoring the fact that Asian and Middle Eastern groups are represented--with the traditional not-so-subtle implication that they're not 'real' minorities--and ignoring the fact that the problem could easily be a lack of people from the underrepresented groups who want to turn up. The social stigma placed on being interested in technical subjects is not limited to white males.
But the more important this is that these kinds of programs can--when done like a sexist/racist farce, which is also traditional--make it worse because it reinforces the stereotypes, and add a generous helping of resentment. Better would be a program that simply views everybody involved as people interested in whatever the technical subject is--and expects everybody to be up to the work & treat everybody else as a person.
And if they do want to actually have projects encouraging, say, Native Americans to code--why not sponsor coding projects whose results will be useful to those communities, to help show those communities why they should value those skills? This would be most efficiently done by actually having the ideas for these projects come out of the community, and favoring sponsorship of those projects where at least some of the coders will need to be members of the community in order to understand what the program needs to do...
Okay, time to check other things, because it's clearly not you taking in more calories than you use, so it's actually not a disease but a symptom
Thermodynamics being what it is, it certainly is that. What's not obvious are that you may be mis-estimating how many calories you're taking in, or making incorrect assumptions about how many calories you're burning. There are various conditions that can affect the latter, although all that really means is that (a) you should see a doctor about them and (b) you should adjust your intake accordingly until they're corrected.
There are tons of excuses but that's all most of them are - excuses. I was overweight for much of my adult life until dropping 80+ pounds and used to say all the same things.
Estimating wrong how many calories you're consuming & how many you're burning is why the first phase includes keeping track of it--it helps you make good estimates and gives both you and the doctor useful information. A lot of the things for which obesity may be a symptom of can be treated, if not cured, and the best outcomes tend to come from early detection.
Simply throwing drugs blindly at the problem is not optimal treatment, and it's only going to be worse if it's not even being thrown at the actual problem.
Perhaps you meant to say "It's not complicated." It is quite obviously difficult for many people.
That's what you need to try first, at least. A couple weeks or a month of "eat less move more," keeping track of what you ate & how much you moved, then check to see if it helped. If it did, yay, you're overweight because of your lifestyle! Maybe diet drugs can help, maybe they won't, but either way you definitely will need to adjust your lifestyle.
It didn't work? Okay, time to check other things, because it's clearly not you taking in more calories than you use, so it's actually not a disease but a symptom. Lifestyle might certainly be more painful to try to change, but lower-calorie diets are much easier to live with than ones resulting from, say, food intolerances. (I have to read the labels on all the food I buy, because of this sort of issue; living in a household where certain people can't eat certain things is educational.)
Diet drugs shouldn't be handed out automatically, and I'd prefer that the primary care physician just not hand out the diet drug prescriptions instead of assuming always that obesity is the disease instead of possibly a symptom...especially since insurance companies tend to believe they're excellent diagnosticians, just like an undertrained field technicians believes they know everything there is to know about the system they're sent out to repair.
(The best thing here? If you're lucky enough that your problem is entirely eating more calories than you burn, then you literally don't need to change anything about your diet other than the total number of calories. Eating healthier will lower the risk of malnutrition, but it isn't necessary...)
Windows 8 is a transitional operating system and those are messy. Metro by itself running Metro applications on appropriate hardware is no harder than any other tablet operating system. Windows 8 doesn't solve the problem for end users, it has created a platform for hardware OEMs to target and now developers. Once a good chunk of the ecosystem has moved over, then the problem of legacy desktop becomes much more manageable essentially it becomes a guest OS.
And users are not part of the ecosystem?
Microsoft's job is to produce an operating system that does not sell the competition--Android tablets, iPads, and Macs. Metro by itself running Metro applications was what sold me on not buying a Win8 machine: my several-year-old Android tablet already did it all, did it better, and did more. I saw no indication of how to get to the desktop--this, in and of itself, is Bad Design. Several of the reviews I've read commented on this particular problem.
The hardware OEMs and developers are simply not going to migrate over if nobody's going to buy it. Look at what's happened to the Microsoft tablets: nobody's buying, nobody's willing to make them 'cept for Microsoft...and it looks like even Microsoft's realizing they're not selling.
I'm not saying that the transition wasn't necessary, I'm saying that the design is bad, nearly unusably so, and it's not old fogies. I'm part of the 'younger generation' you talked about and it was making me miss command line interfaces. (I'm a geek. Of course I can use them; it's very do not want, but I can.)
It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one".
Why would someone living on such slim margins buy a smartphone and its expensive data plan in the first place instead of buying a dumbphone? A lot of smartphone customers are paying $80 per month; I pay that much per year for my dumbphone.
You're assuming that's the only cost to consider here.
There's quite a few people whose primary sales are at shows, fairs, and the ilk who, if they did go with a dumbphone as you suggest, would lose sales because they would not be able to accept plastic--and many of whom certainly would not be accepting checks, because they can't afford the risk of bad checks. I've been seeing some that have permanent locations going the same route, suggesting that the system is proving to be overall a better choice than the traditional ones.
I also know people who use their smartphone to minimize time they have to spend in the office doing paperwork--or even eliminate the need for an actual office--which makes a difference when what actually brings in the money is field work. (This can be really important when they're in business for themselves or work as a subcontractor.)
The other thing is that, due to certain court decisions, cell companies actually can't charge you extra to use your smartphone as a tethered modem/portable hotspot, at least in the US...which is actually one of the major reasons to have one if it costs you more money to be tethered to a physical office and/or dependent on being able to locate WiFi hotspots while mobile. For me, it's generally been the case that a short response sent quickly has always been better than long sent later--even if the short, quickly-sent response is primarily intended to acknowledge I got the email and the long response will be sent later...
That's just not true. They don't grasp the paradigms. The data on literacy is clear cut. They weren't successfully adapting to 1990s style interfaces.
And Windows 8 manages to combine only the worst of both tablets and Windows, like a teacup-sized pony being sold to do the job of both a draft horse and a poodle. It can't actually do the work of the draft horse, and what with being a horse does an unsurprisingly bad job of being a dog.
It may skip a few of the bad things each does, but that isn't enough to keep me from not wanting to have had to pay for an expensive OS that I will be replacing practically immediately.
Never read any medical experiments have you? Nor the experiment in question right?
Just admit it, you're just assuming it's on shaky ground because that's what you read and you have no clue about how 'real' research is done.
I routinely read medical research, and it's not really necessary to have read the paper in question because the main reason for me to read it would be to know how to best set up my experiment to 'prove' my theory...and I already know how to do that.
In a small population, any individual's impact on the results is greater; this is why it is important to give the alpha used in the statistical analysis. (Using a small alpha reduces influence of sampling error.) It is something to avoid if at all possible within the constraints of ethics and resources. Medical research tends to have to live with small sample sizes, simply because of the ethics of inducing disease on purpose in humans.
This was an experiment on rats. A large number of rats could have been used, unless this study's purpose was actually more in the lines of what engineering calls a 'proof of concept,' done to test a method and published to lay the groundwork for the large-scale study. ("Hey, look, this works, can we do it bigger?") This is not the case.
More importantly, a line of rats known for good health certainly ought to have been selected if for some reason they could not use a large population. The effects of breed choice are less important when there are a large number of subjects, because the large number will compensate for sampling error as well. If you are limited to a small sample, the effects of sampling bias upon external validity--the ability to generalize results to the population--become more significant, and can even result in it being scientifically worthless.
These flaws do not, of course, mean it was intentionally deceptive or misrepresenting anything. It is not necessarily malice to choose a small sample size from a population already prone to the disease you are studying. It is, however, certainly a bad experimental design with significant systemic error if your goal is to honestly test "X causes Y Disease."
Unfortunately, some people would rather believe that some *thing* - the vaccination - caused their child to "get" Autism rather than living with the understanding that it was genetic - and came from them.
Actually, autism is not purely genetic: it is a condition with multiple causes, lumped together for diagnostic purposes since often there is no way to be certain which particular cause or combination of causes is involved in any given case & tradition within the field of psychology.
If God exists, however, He is quite a fan of irony as it turns out that there is a very easy thing you can do to prevent autism: get your MMR vaccine--in utero exposure to Rubella can cause autism. (Depeche Mode's thesis has a lot going for it.)
The real lesson here (if there is one) is that the folks who are attempting to make a living giving career advice to young people haven't changed significantly in many decades.
That's half of the lesson: the other half is that it is unfortunately repeatedly necessary career advice, many people failing to grasp the difference between formal and informal language & behavior before reaching adulthood.
It is, unfortunately, too often necessary to remind people of this, and the real question is if Gen Y will deal with the fact that this is a long-term and rather ubiquitous memo.
But they should NOT. That is ridiculous. If someone is so emotionally scared than a person of the gender that raped them, bumping into them in the conference is probably just as likely if not more likely to make them uncomfortable.
If you are a psychological wreck and need others to work around your weaknesses then go live in a padded white room in an asylum.
I'm sure that's easy to say if neither you nor anyone you love has ever been the victim of a violent sexual assault.
Go volunteer at your local women's shelter, then try and come back here with that attitude.
I am rather certain I would be hurt, badly, by the person close to me who has been, if I walked on eggshells around her. I pay attention, and she knows I can recognize a panic attack even when it is not the dramatic shit Hollywood thinks all panic attacks are as both of us tend towards distinctly quieter ones.
The padded white room at the asylum will come with professional aid--people who are licensed psychologists trained in how to treat mental disorders, who can provide you expert & trained help. If somebody is really such a wreck that they need other people to work around their weaknesses, they need that level of treatment.
Mental illness deserves to be taken seriously, and that includes treating severe trauma disorders as being just as deserving much and & in as much need of focused, professional care as such things as advanced cancers.
Feel free to google "trauma trigger" or "PTSD trigger" for more.
That you've never heard of something and can't wrap your head around it immediately doesn't mean that is must be bullshit.
The feminist/social justice activist usage is, as far as I can tell from sightings in the wild, "Anything that we think might be offensive."
Actual trauma triggers can be highly eclectic, ideosyncratic, and individualistic, and thus are not really something that can necessarily be predicted. (Smells, sounds, and sights that somehow recall the trauma are well-known categories, and really should give you a good hint.) Having them hit is not a pleasant experience, but neither is having somebody blithely assume that they already know yours & infantilizing you by making a show of avoiding what they presume are yours. (It is particularly bad when they are not only wrong but also horribly incapable of recognizing actual panic attack. Protip: They're not always dramatic.)
In some ways it's probably actually best if the claims are being used knowingly for censorship purposes; if it is in earnest, it comes off as rather like saying you understand how deprived a kid whose parents forgot to feed & clothe them was, because your parents got you the roan pony instead of the black pony you had your heart set on.
The fact that it is actually being used to suppress discussion of risk management--ways to lessen your chances of being assaulted, among other things--does seem to be getting ignored, and crossover of hackers who have focused on social engineering would probably be very beneficial. (Let's see, people who study why J Random specifically got victimized instead of some other random, and people who focus on practical manipulation of psychology...) It would be sufficient to ensure any actual rape survivor is able to choose not attend the talk. The fact is that they did invite Violet Blue--whom a brief check on reveals would be at least likely to choose such issues--and if the Ada Initiative had problems they ought to have voiced them beforehand, perhaps after the SanFran BSides where this talk was originally given.
There's the issue of how the child, if an actual existent child is depicted in the pornography, feels.
If it's a kid who doesn't exist anywhere--we're talking animated or otherwise virtual depictions as opposed to live-action video or photography--then there's evidence that can haunt the victim. This is why some murder victims' families have requested that the particularly graphic images not be widely distributed...and why there's occasionally issues caused by the victim, once older, wishing to not have the evidence existing outside of the proper hands.
In journals and the like, unless it's an especially famous case, the identity of the victim will be cloaked: Little Alice Smith will become A.S. or even Female Child A. Releasing the victim's identity is a violation of ethics when the victim is under the age of majority because, legally, minors cannot give their consent...to having their names shared. (This is also why most places you cannot be in pornography until you're 18: you may be able to legally consent to the sex acts but not the rest!)
However, this still makes the actual laws overall bad ideas. Making accounts of child abuse illegal to possess means that you are basically condemning any abused children & those abused as children from being unable to be treated--because you're making illegal the journals and reference works used by those in the health professions to identify & treat the victims!
You're also going to cause problems for those studying, for example, what the sexual fantasies of pedophiles are; how exactly would you go about figuring out the common threads in what a group of people wanks to without examining the wank material?
Wide distribution of iffy materials that contain sufficient identifying information to track down the victim should definitely be discouraged, but making it an offense is overkill. Just encourage hosting sites to have a procedure they will actually follow through with for requesting the removal of such materials.
I did get into a discussion with a professor on the topic once. He was against any use of Wikipedia.
I use Wikipedia to get the correct terms to stick in the journal searches. For example, if I want articles on robins, I actually want to run the search using the scientific name for the species instead of the common one, because that will get me more useful results.
I don't really use it much for background information--the citations tend to be more useful, and technically they ought to cover anything not general knowledge in the field in the introduction, if it's a scientific paper.
Depends on the state and local laws--where I live, there was nothing that kept me from walking into a bar when I was underage, they just wouldn't sell me alcohol. It's certainly feasible to campaign for a move towards having bars not required to simply refuse admittance to those below the drinking age, and once the desired change to the laws is made, to make sure venues are aware of the change & boycott any who continue to refuse underage admittance anyway, so they're undesirable gigs for musicians even if they don't lose significant enough business.
If they want to be lazy about checking IDs...if the local government sponsors any events that includes some area with alcoholic drinks, how they handle it ought to be acceptable to them. (Where I live, they use wristbands that certainly are not removable intact; the sticky section shreds.)
Bit late to the party, but... If your goal is quick prototyping/customization curve, possibly cheaper manufacture of properly-customized limbs, and ensuring as much of the base tissue is preserved, this actually would be feasible. You use it as a temporary solution--especially since we're moving more and more towards integration with the nervous system, the sooner that you can get a prosthetic slapped on the better--and perhaps have final versions done via a combo of mass-produced parts and use of a professional 3D printer for anything that isn't shelf. (Or keep the 'temporary' going which is, in countries where the concern for human quality of life is often low, better than you could otherwise expect.)
Of course, given the levels of testing required in the US for a medical device, this is not workable as long as the FDA is doing its best to prove that no, really, they need every single one of their employees, even when there are questions on if they understand the science involved better than a randomly-selected 6th grader from a public school in one of Chicago's bad neighborhoods. (One of the ones who isn't a member of Future Meth Cooks of America.) It appears that it is not true that those who can't teach; they regulate instead.
Set it up so that you have a 'lesser copyright' for the automatic ones--perhaps shorter period, certainly lesser damages outside of somebody filing a false registration (which ought to be classed as a type of fraud), and no official legal date of registration. It possibly would be worth adding the requirement that no transfer of title to a registered copyright will be legally recognized unless the registration is changed to reflect it, much like you do have to file paperwork to transfer title to a car or to real estate.
It probably would be worth making it awkward at best to use copyright in place of trademark, ultimately -- perhaps by having it so that you are going to have, if you try it, potentially the loss of both copyright and trademark over the property, pay significant penalties, and a judge annoyed at having your waste of the court's time.
The real problem is that Disney wishes perpetual copyright over everything with their rodent on it. This only exists legally in one place for one thing: the play Peter Pan, and the fees it collects apparently provide a not insignificant chunk of the costs of the children's hospital that was given it by the author. This is about the only place I'd be particularly comfortable giving perpetual copyright, and please note that they've only got ownership of the original play. No, I do not think Disney had given them a shilling...
Slashdot Mirror
[...] Some advocate implementing something like quotas or other such measures which favor people who fall into "disadvantaged" buckets based on race, gender, or other criteria. [...]
This is explicitly the system made illegal--and the definition of Affirmative Action that I get from Wikipedia is "Affirmative action or positive discrimination (known as employment equity in Canada, reservation in India, and positive action in the UK) is the policy of providing special opportunities for, and favoring members of, a disadvantaged group who suffer from discrimination."
Here's the relevant portion of the law we're talking about:
The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
[The Constitution of Michigan of 1963, 26.2, quoted in full.]
California actually has a law very much like this, and the statistics so far seem to suggest that while it lowers the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos applying and admitted (which may simply be due to fewer applying), the percent of them graduating goes up when the law requires equality of opportunity.
I am, frankly, with people who think that the important number is the number who graduate--the higher education system should not be made the scapegoat for the failures of lower education system. That just allows the K12 system to get away with continuing to fail.
Its not just asians, Most people here forget how bad the irish had it when they came here years ago. Hell we stil lget called drunks and no one bats an eye to that stereotype. 100 years ago it was not uncommon to see help wanted signs that said "irish need not apply" you dont see the irish out there fighting for affirmative action for the irish do you? You dont see the irish demanding reparations for the way our grandparents were treated when they got here do you?
Some of the earliest race riots were Irish rioting over the fact that employers preferred to hire African-Americans. The stereotypes were that African-Americans were hard-workers and sometimes with touches of being childlike. Irish, meanwhile, were considered drunken, lazy, and dishonest...
Remember: historically white in the US meant "Protestant of Germanic/Scandinavian descent," especially once scientific racism hit.
Seven million extra doctors' visits are hardly inconsequential, especially considering that only about 1 in 175 would actually be suicidal.
An interesting attitude. Compare this to Foxconn, which reduced the suicide rate among its workforce from 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 400,000 in three years.
All things considered, I think they did it by making it harder to commit suicide, and possibly also by improving labor conditions.
The usual process is to place somebody thought suicidal on a suicide watch. This can actually be very intrusive, and a test like this certainly is less than ideal if you're applying it at large--the accuracy here is for this population, and rather close to chance already. In a wider population, of a different makeup, its accuracy will be different, and probably lower.
More importantly, if you read the PLOS one article, they're discussing data mining the clinical notes themselves, and they admit that this is a branch of research that has been rather neglected: certain factors were deemed to have predictive value, without anybody really checking to see if that was true.
Let's say you're sitting in the entry way of an office building, and you notice that most people who come in to the building are men. This does not mean you can necessarily predict that a man walking past is going to enter the building; it might turn out that, in fact, of the people passing by the building, any given woman is more likely to come in--it's just that most of the people passing by right now are men.
It does not follow that if "Most of the people who do x are y" is true that "Most people who are y do x" is also true, for any set of x and y.
65% accuracy is not good, it's a start and it's better than what we currently have. In fact, the paper outright says that currently, they haven't even managed to validate the tool. In fact, I can easily give you the tl;dr version of this paper:
The indications for the future of this path of research are promising. Please fund the next phase so we can get it closer to practical application(s).
In less scientific phrasing:
We haven't reached a dead in, give us money so we can keep going!
It's not as much a breakthrough as a status report on the progress towards a breakthrough...
I don't understand why these top business people keep trying to say that we need to push more CS type stuff into grades k-12. Why would we tailor such early education specifically to one career choice? What happens if we now have too many programmers, and that is all these young people have been trained for? Other countries do not do this.
I almost compltely agree with you.
The problem is not that we need to specifically push this stuff on children. The problem is that as society, we do not allow children to believe that those who would pursue a technical career are in any way shape of form, interesting or cool. In some subcultures, being smart is actually looked upon as being a bad thing.
Shhh, we're not allowed to talk about that.
Cultural icons for modern citizens are more in line with unearned wealth, celebrities famous for being famous, and little else. Science, if it is addressed, has morphed into "Ancient Aliens" or apocalyptic predictions (beyond all possible belief, I've seen that some of the mayan apocalypse shows have been re-running. This seems pathological, that some are upset it didn't happen, and longing for the good old days when we had our utter destruction to look forward to.
It gets even more hilarious when it gets brought up that, in fact, the largest known Mayan calendar apparently will not cycle until the universe is several times its current estimated age.
So those Mayan apocalypse predictions? Are based off the Mayan equivalent to a pocket calendar...
so in other words you were not in a similar situation.
Merely because they decided against? This isn't the first time a sperm donor has been gone after for child support, and it doesn't even take much effort to know this...
Yeah, lesbians are really likely to have hooked up with so many men in the time period in question that they don't know who the father is....
The state hounded the biological mother to name the father precisely because "I don't know" would have been pretty implausible.
"I don't know his name, I didn't ask and he didn't tell me. All I know is I still don't like d**k."
They had signed legal documents with the donor's name and address. Had they chosen to withhold that information and the state found out I'm sure the same sex couple could have been found guilty of lying to the court or fraud. Even if the donor chose to donate annonymously through an attorney I'm sure the attorney had the information and would have to give it to the state.
Actually, it's quite possible to get an anonymous donor for IVF, through sperm banks that pay donors. The problem is when you actually do want the possibility of contacting the donor or would prefer a friend or male relative as a donor--if nothing else, I'd feel it polite to let somebody who did me the courtesy of providing me sperm if it turns out that they're a carrier for a genetic defect. (Getting the testing done can sometimes require the catch 22 of knowing you have a blood relative who has it; this is actually a reason why adoptees argue they do have a right to know their biological parents.)
Ideally, it ought to be possible to have the records of a sperm or ovum donor sealed until either the resultant child turns 18 or medical necessity occurs--and those who 'sign' for the procedure being legally held as the child's guardian(s).
You can let them sort out exactly what they want the relationship to be: will it make any actual difference if they view themselves as siblings in all but blood or as a couple, as long as they're taking responsibility?
What concerns me is that the assorted 'multicultural' bullshit described in TFA sounds more like some kind of racist farce than like an actual inclusion strategy: "Hey, black kid, you 'urban' types like skatesboards and graffiti, right? How about some programming with skateboards and graffiti?" and will do absolutely nothing to address the 'entire class looks you up and down, because you are not one of us and/or we are interested only in fucking you' school of dissuading people from taking up technical subjects.
I'd like to note that the complaint about racism is, as is traditional, ignoring the fact that Asian and Middle Eastern groups are represented--with the traditional not-so-subtle implication that they're not 'real' minorities--and ignoring the fact that the problem could easily be a lack of people from the underrepresented groups who want to turn up. The social stigma placed on being interested in technical subjects is not limited to white males.
But the more important this is that these kinds of programs can--when done like a sexist/racist farce, which is also traditional--make it worse because it reinforces the stereotypes, and add a generous helping of resentment. Better would be a program that simply views everybody involved as people interested in whatever the technical subject is--and expects everybody to be up to the work & treat everybody else as a person.
And if they do want to actually have projects encouraging, say, Native Americans to code--why not sponsor coding projects whose results will be useful to those communities, to help show those communities why they should value those skills? This would be most efficiently done by actually having the ideas for these projects come out of the community, and favoring sponsorship of those projects where at least some of the coders will need to be members of the community in order to understand what the program needs to do...
Okay, time to check other things, because it's clearly not you taking in more calories than you use, so it's actually not a disease but a symptom
Thermodynamics being what it is, it certainly is that. What's not obvious are that you may be mis-estimating how many calories you're taking in, or making incorrect assumptions about how many calories you're burning. There are various conditions that can affect the latter, although all that really means is that (a) you should see a doctor about them and (b) you should adjust your intake accordingly until they're corrected.
There are tons of excuses but that's all most of them are - excuses. I was overweight for much of my adult life until dropping 80+ pounds and used to say all the same things.
Estimating wrong how many calories you're consuming & how many you're burning is why the first phase includes keeping track of it--it helps you make good estimates and gives both you and the doctor useful information. A lot of the things for which obesity may be a symptom of can be treated, if not cured, and the best outcomes tend to come from early detection.
Simply throwing drugs blindly at the problem is not optimal treatment, and it's only going to be worse if it's not even being thrown at the actual problem.
It's not difficult. Eat less, move more.
Perhaps you meant to say "It's not complicated." It is quite obviously difficult for many people.
That's what you need to try first, at least. A couple weeks or a month of "eat less move more," keeping track of what you ate & how much you moved, then check to see if it helped. If it did, yay, you're overweight because of your lifestyle! Maybe diet drugs can help, maybe they won't, but either way you definitely will need to adjust your lifestyle.
It didn't work? Okay, time to check other things, because it's clearly not you taking in more calories than you use, so it's actually not a disease but a symptom. Lifestyle might certainly be more painful to try to change, but lower-calorie diets are much easier to live with than ones resulting from, say, food intolerances. (I have to read the labels on all the food I buy, because of this sort of issue; living in a household where certain people can't eat certain things is educational.)
Diet drugs shouldn't be handed out automatically, and I'd prefer that the primary care physician just not hand out the diet drug prescriptions instead of assuming always that obesity is the disease instead of possibly a symptom...especially since insurance companies tend to believe they're excellent diagnosticians, just like an undertrained field technicians believes they know everything there is to know about the system they're sent out to repair.
(The best thing here? If you're lucky enough that your problem is entirely eating more calories than you burn, then you literally don't need to change anything about your diet other than the total number of calories. Eating healthier will lower the risk of malnutrition, but it isn't necessary...)
Windows 8 is a transitional operating system and those are messy. Metro by itself running Metro applications on appropriate hardware is no harder than any other tablet operating system. Windows 8 doesn't solve the problem for end users, it has created a platform for hardware OEMs to target and now developers. Once a good chunk of the ecosystem has moved over, then the problem of legacy desktop becomes much more manageable essentially it becomes a guest OS.
And users are not part of the ecosystem?
Microsoft's job is to produce an operating system that does not sell the competition--Android tablets, iPads, and Macs. Metro by itself running Metro applications was what sold me on not buying a Win8 machine: my several-year-old Android tablet already did it all, did it better, and did more. I saw no indication of how to get to the desktop--this, in and of itself, is Bad Design. Several of the reviews I've read commented on this particular problem.
The hardware OEMs and developers are simply not going to migrate over if nobody's going to buy it. Look at what's happened to the Microsoft tablets: nobody's buying, nobody's willing to make them 'cept for Microsoft...and it looks like even Microsoft's realizing they're not selling.
I'm not saying that the transition wasn't necessary, I'm saying that the design is bad, nearly unusably so, and it's not old fogies. I'm part of the 'younger generation' you talked about and it was making me miss command line interfaces. (I'm a geek. Of course I can use them; it's very do not want, but I can.)
It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one".
Why would someone living on such slim margins buy a smartphone and its expensive data plan in the first place instead of buying a dumbphone? A lot of smartphone customers are paying $80 per month; I pay that much per year for my dumbphone.
You're assuming that's the only cost to consider here.
There's quite a few people whose primary sales are at shows, fairs, and the ilk who, if they did go with a dumbphone as you suggest, would lose sales because they would not be able to accept plastic--and many of whom certainly would not be accepting checks, because they can't afford the risk of bad checks. I've been seeing some that have permanent locations going the same route, suggesting that the system is proving to be overall a better choice than the traditional ones.
I also know people who use their smartphone to minimize time they have to spend in the office doing paperwork--or even eliminate the need for an actual office--which makes a difference when what actually brings in the money is field work. (This can be really important when they're in business for themselves or work as a subcontractor.)
The other thing is that, due to certain court decisions, cell companies actually can't charge you extra to use your smartphone as a tethered modem/portable hotspot, at least in the US...which is actually one of the major reasons to have one if it costs you more money to be tethered to a physical office and/or dependent on being able to locate WiFi hotspots while mobile. For me, it's generally been the case that a short response sent quickly has always been better than long sent later--even if the short, quickly-sent response is primarily intended to acknowledge I got the email and the long response will be sent later...
That's just not true. They don't grasp the paradigms. The data on literacy is clear cut. They weren't successfully adapting to 1990s style interfaces.
And Windows 8 manages to combine only the worst of both tablets and Windows, like a teacup-sized pony being sold to do the job of both a draft horse and a poodle. It can't actually do the work of the draft horse, and what with being a horse does an unsurprisingly bad job of being a dog.
It may skip a few of the bad things each does, but that isn't enough to keep me from not wanting to have had to pay for an expensive OS that I will be replacing practically immediately.
Never read any medical experiments have you? Nor the experiment in question right?
Just admit it, you're just assuming it's on shaky ground because that's what you read and you have no clue about how 'real' research is done.
I routinely read medical research, and it's not really necessary to have read the paper in question because the main reason for me to read it would be to know how to best set up my experiment to 'prove' my theory...and I already know how to do that.
In a small population, any individual's impact on the results is greater; this is why it is important to give the alpha used in the statistical analysis. (Using a small alpha reduces influence of sampling error.) It is something to avoid if at all possible within the constraints of ethics and resources. Medical research tends to have to live with small sample sizes, simply because of the ethics of inducing disease on purpose in humans.
This was an experiment on rats. A large number of rats could have been used, unless this study's purpose was actually more in the lines of what engineering calls a 'proof of concept,' done to test a method and published to lay the groundwork for the large-scale study. ("Hey, look, this works, can we do it bigger?") This is not the case.
More importantly, a line of rats known for good health certainly ought to have been selected if for some reason they could not use a large population. The effects of breed choice are less important when there are a large number of subjects, because the large number will compensate for sampling error as well. If you are limited to a small sample, the effects of sampling bias upon external validity--the ability to generalize results to the population--become more significant, and can even result in it being scientifically worthless.
These flaws do not, of course, mean it was intentionally deceptive or misrepresenting anything. It is not necessarily malice to choose a small sample size from a population already prone to the disease you are studying. It is, however, certainly a bad experimental design with significant systemic error if your goal is to honestly test "X causes Y Disease."
Unfortunately, some people would rather believe that some *thing* - the vaccination - caused their child to "get" Autism rather than living with the understanding that it was genetic - and came from them.
Actually, autism is not purely genetic: it is a condition with multiple causes, lumped together for diagnostic purposes since often there is no way to be certain which particular cause or combination of causes is involved in any given case & tradition within the field of psychology.
If God exists, however, He is quite a fan of irony as it turns out that there is a very easy thing you can do to prevent autism: get your MMR vaccine--in utero exposure to Rubella can cause autism. (Depeche Mode's thesis has a lot going for it.)
The real lesson here (if there is one) is that the folks who are attempting to make a living giving career advice to young people haven't changed significantly in many decades.
That's half of the lesson: the other half is that it is unfortunately repeatedly necessary career advice, many people failing to grasp the difference between formal and informal language & behavior before reaching adulthood.
It is, unfortunately, too often necessary to remind people of this, and the real question is if Gen Y will deal with the fact that this is a long-term and rather ubiquitous memo.
But they should NOT. That is ridiculous. If someone is so emotionally scared than a person of the gender that raped them, bumping into them in the conference is probably just as likely if not more likely to make them uncomfortable.
If you are a psychological wreck and need others to work around your weaknesses then go live in a padded white room in an asylum.
I'm sure that's easy to say if neither you nor anyone you love has ever been the victim of a violent sexual assault.
Go volunteer at your local women's shelter, then try and come back here with that attitude.
I am rather certain I would be hurt, badly, by the person close to me who has been, if I walked on eggshells around her. I pay attention, and she knows I can recognize a panic attack even when it is not the dramatic shit Hollywood thinks all panic attacks are as both of us tend towards distinctly quieter ones.
The padded white room at the asylum will come with professional aid--people who are licensed psychologists trained in how to treat mental disorders, who can provide you expert & trained help. If somebody is really such a wreck that they need other people to work around their weaknesses, they need that level of treatment.
Mental illness deserves to be taken seriously, and that includes treating severe trauma disorders as being just as deserving much and & in as much need of focused, professional care as such things as advanced cancers.
Triggers are not an invention of SF Hippies or Feminists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_trigger
Feel free to google "trauma trigger" or "PTSD trigger" for more.
That you've never heard of something and can't wrap your head around it immediately doesn't mean that is must be bullshit.
The feminist/social justice activist usage is, as far as I can tell from sightings in the wild, "Anything that we think might be offensive."
Actual trauma triggers can be highly eclectic, ideosyncratic, and individualistic, and thus are not really something that can necessarily be predicted. (Smells, sounds, and sights that somehow recall the trauma are well-known categories, and really should give you a good hint.) Having them hit is not a pleasant experience, but neither is having somebody blithely assume that they already know yours & infantilizing you by making a show of avoiding what they presume are yours. (It is particularly bad when they are not only wrong but also horribly incapable of recognizing actual panic attack. Protip: They're not always dramatic.)
In some ways it's probably actually best if the claims are being used knowingly for censorship purposes; if it is in earnest, it comes off as rather like saying you understand how deprived a kid whose parents forgot to feed & clothe them was, because your parents got you the roan pony instead of the black pony you had your heart set on.
The fact that it is actually being used to suppress discussion of risk management--ways to lessen your chances of being assaulted, among other things--does seem to be getting ignored, and crossover of hackers who have focused on social engineering would probably be very beneficial. (Let's see, people who study why J Random specifically got victimized instead of some other random, and people who focus on practical manipulation of psychology...) It would be sufficient to ensure any actual rape survivor is able to choose not attend the talk. The fact is that they did invite Violet Blue--whom a brief check on reveals would be at least likely to choose such issues--and if the Ada Initiative had problems they ought to have voiced them beforehand, perhaps after the SanFran BSides where this talk was originally given.
There's the issue of how the child, if an actual existent child is depicted in the pornography, feels.
If it's a kid who doesn't exist anywhere--we're talking animated or otherwise virtual depictions as opposed to live-action video or photography--then there's evidence that can haunt the victim. This is why some murder victims' families have requested that the particularly graphic images not be widely distributed...and why there's occasionally issues caused by the victim, once older, wishing to not have the evidence existing outside of the proper hands.
In journals and the like, unless it's an especially famous case, the identity of the victim will be cloaked: Little Alice Smith will become A.S. or even Female Child A. Releasing the victim's identity is a violation of ethics when the victim is under the age of majority because, legally, minors cannot give their consent...to having their names shared. (This is also why most places you cannot be in pornography until you're 18: you may be able to legally consent to the sex acts but not the rest!)
However, this still makes the actual laws overall bad ideas. Making accounts of child abuse illegal to possess means that you are basically condemning any abused children & those abused as children from being unable to be treated--because you're making illegal the journals and reference works used by those in the health professions to identify & treat the victims!
You're also going to cause problems for those studying, for example, what the sexual fantasies of pedophiles are; how exactly would you go about figuring out the common threads in what a group of people wanks to without examining the wank material?
Wide distribution of iffy materials that contain sufficient identifying information to track down the victim should definitely be discouraged, but making it an offense is overkill. Just encourage hosting sites to have a procedure they will actually follow through with for requesting the removal of such materials.
I'd rather make my announcements via somewhere more reputable than Wikipedia, anyway.
I did get into a discussion with a professor on the topic once. He was against any use of Wikipedia.
I use Wikipedia to get the correct terms to stick in the journal searches. For example, if I want articles on robins, I actually want to run the search using the scientific name for the species instead of the common one, because that will get me more useful results.
I don't really use it much for background information--the citations tend to be more useful, and technically they ought to cover anything not general knowledge in the field in the introduction, if it's a scientific paper.
Depends on the state and local laws--where I live, there was nothing that kept me from walking into a bar when I was underage, they just wouldn't sell me alcohol. It's certainly feasible to campaign for a move towards having bars not required to simply refuse admittance to those below the drinking age, and once the desired change to the laws is made, to make sure venues are aware of the change & boycott any who continue to refuse underage admittance anyway, so they're undesirable gigs for musicians even if they don't lose significant enough business.
If they want to be lazy about checking IDs...if the local government sponsors any events that includes some area with alcoholic drinks, how they handle it ought to be acceptable to them. (Where I live, they use wristbands that certainly are not removable intact; the sticky section shreds.)
Bit late to the party, but... If your goal is quick prototyping/customization curve, possibly cheaper manufacture of properly-customized limbs, and ensuring as much of the base tissue is preserved, this actually would be feasible. You use it as a temporary solution--especially since we're moving more and more towards integration with the nervous system, the sooner that you can get a prosthetic slapped on the better--and perhaps have final versions done via a combo of mass-produced parts and use of a professional 3D printer for anything that isn't shelf. (Or keep the 'temporary' going which is, in countries where the concern for human quality of life is often low, better than you could otherwise expect.)
Of course, given the levels of testing required in the US for a medical device, this is not workable as long as the FDA is doing its best to prove that no, really, they need every single one of their employees, even when there are questions on if they understand the science involved better than a randomly-selected 6th grader from a public school in one of Chicago's bad neighborhoods. (One of the ones who isn't a member of Future Meth Cooks of America.) It appears that it is not true that those who can't teach; they regulate instead.
Set it up so that you have a 'lesser copyright' for the automatic ones--perhaps shorter period, certainly lesser damages outside of somebody filing a false registration (which ought to be classed as a type of fraud), and no official legal date of registration. It possibly would be worth adding the requirement that no transfer of title to a registered copyright will be legally recognized unless the registration is changed to reflect it, much like you do have to file paperwork to transfer title to a car or to real estate.
It probably would be worth making it awkward at best to use copyright in place of trademark, ultimately -- perhaps by having it so that you are going to have, if you try it, potentially the loss of both copyright and trademark over the property, pay significant penalties, and a judge annoyed at having your waste of the court's time.
The real problem is that Disney wishes perpetual copyright over everything with their rodent on it. This only exists legally in one place for one thing: the play Peter Pan, and the fees it collects apparently provide a not insignificant chunk of the costs of the children's hospital that was given it by the author. This is about the only place I'd be particularly comfortable giving perpetual copyright, and please note that they've only got ownership of the original play. No, I do not think Disney had given them a shilling...