Notice that I said they had to sell for a digital print run a minimum number as well as make it available for a minimum amount of time. Implicit is that they need to make the requirement before the 'disuse' period is up, and the phrasing requires that both the minimum period and minimum sales requirements be met. You will have to price a token digital print run so it will sell enough copies before the drop-dead date, and start offering it sufficiently ahead of time for the 'period of time' requirement to be met.
Both conditions are picked to prevent exactly that: using an exorbitantly-priced digital download, or a reasonably-priced one for 3AM-6AM on 1/1 as a dodge. The same goes for the 'significant print run' rule on physical copies, because otherwise you could just sell a dozen copies and call it quits.
A physical print run will generally result in cheap copies if they overprice it initially, simply because it costs money to warehouse it--especially if the rules are that you can't count copies pulped as part of the print run. (You want to ensure, after all, that they only bother when they can actually break even or make a profit off of holding onto the copyright.) A print-on-demand run probably would have to be done on the same rules as a digital one: you've got to have it on the market for a certain amount of time, and sell enough copies, for it to be counted as a significant print run.
Actually, at least in the US, 'personal connection' is sufficient justification for a judge to not be involved in a given case--the expectation, however, is that the judge will have the sense and ethical standing to remove himself/herself from the case in favor of, say, extra time golfing, reading, visiting sex workers, whatever said judge does for fun. I can't recall any specific cases being overturned in the US due to this, though, as it seems that the current view is that it is better generally to err on the side of caution...
No idea about European standards, though I know at points at least it was considered safe to suspect that the judge and prosecutor were in bed with each other, perhaps alone, perhaps with a freshly-strangled underage sex worker...
You might have an easier time first making it so that disuse can cause expiration: instead of a flat term, it becomes whichever happens first, the flat term or a significantly smaller number of years since a significant print run. An electronic release would probably have to be under an inverted rule--a minimum number of sales or period of time, whichever qualification is met last--for counting as a significant print run.
You could also include a mechanism for a copyright's owner to release prematurely an item into the public domain, and write it off as a loss. It'd serve as a bit of encouragement for the larger companies to consider it possibly better for their bottom line to not do the token print run. You might even see some particularly disastrous bombs hit public domain quite swiftly...
Actually, I think the idea of having the advertisements be picked to be more of the sorts of things I'm interested in sounds attractive. Think about it: would you rather be pestered with ads for services you don't want or need, or at least know there's a reasonable chance of it being for things you want to buy? A lot of sites have their running costs covered by ads, so I don't really expect to see them going away; the reason I run an adblocker is because a lot of them are outright dadaistic in their ad selection (pr0n of guys in Rabbi costumes hitting fat women with pork?) and very, very few seem to care to practice some responsibility about the safety of the ads.
That said, it'd certainly be nice if it didn't rely on tracking you but instead let you actually actively tell it what to try to sell you. Consider how different it would be if you could just tell the adserv that you're in the market for a new car or a new computer, instead of having to deal with the sites that have developed the habits of particularly dumb salesdroids or actual salesdroids who are too painfully obviously both paid on commission & ignorant of they're selling. Yes, ads are annoying--but are they more annoying?
Meanwhile, I cannot see the FBI getting backdoors into all secure electronic systems, with its history of abuse, misuse, leaks, and Luddite tendencies (Thank you Mr Hoover), as possibly being a Good Thing for anybody.
It is probably worth noting here that, historically, self-interest is far and away the most reliable way to get people to behave in the interest of the common good. The one popular with lawmakers, however, is their own good--which basically means voting the way of whomever bribes them best & keeping the voters from noticing that they're not benefiting, since this hasn't been made something that can bar you from running again.
The problem with the suggestions of restoring function to her existing one is that it ignores that there is a definite time limit to being a candidate for any sort of nerve restoration or, for that matter, any form of electrostim manipulation--if her hand is withered as the article says, she's out of this window. Once the muscles have atrophied away practically entirely (and she's been without movement of it for over a decade, so this is likely) the odds of getting it restored to more usefulness than a permanently attached blunt object is...somewhere up there with an angel coming down from Heaven and giving you a spaceship, ownership of an Earth-sized mass of precious metals, and magic powers. (No, aliens that look like angels would not count. The odds of the existence of supernatural beings from the afterlife who appear in nighties with bird wings is part of the calculation of the probability of the cited event.)
More importantly, once you start getting phantom limb pains, the window for getting the nerves reconnected is definitely gone. Phantom limb comes from your brain reassigning the blocks that had been originally used by the now-lost part of the body (or what it is 'reading' as lost) to new places. Yes, you could probably take terrible advantage of this and find the patch of skin that has been granted use of that part of the somatosensory map, but it tends to be somewhere on the face. (2nd choice is probably the hands, if that wasn't what was lost, followed by either the feet or...let's call it the crotch, OK?) This would be probably less desirable, from a purely aesthetic point of view, especially if the phantom limb sensations are actually due to your underwear irritating the area between your legs as opposed to your cheek or foot being itchy.
Incidentally, the model she's interested in would be reading the lower arm, not the back muscles for its 'input.' Given that you actually use the muscles in your forearm for much of your hand motions, it might actually give her a decent chance should we be able to regrow hands within her lifetime at actually being able to get a flesh-and-blood hand that's as functional as a bionic one would be. Her current one is definitely shot if it's withered--implanting new muscle to any great extent is probably a significantly more complex task than regrowing or even transplanting--and keeping it would actually likely lower the chances of success with a regrown as she will keep losing muscles and nerve supply to the part. (The classic mnemonic here is that you use it or lose it.) The bionic hand might be able to at least slow the rate of loss.
If those MDs don't have the slightest clue about statistics, hypothesis testing, selection bias, ect. then it's because they either forgot or didn't take one of the traditional premed majors. I can personally testify that biochem/chem and psychology degrees have at least some understanding of statistics required--at the university I'm attending, psych majors have a two-semester 300-level course explicitly on statistics (including in the first half everything listed) and those parts that are relevant to chemistry & biochemistry are covered within the courses (not as a separate course).
It may be worth noting that I've been quite able to snooze through the first half of the 300-level course on statistics for the behavioral sciences, in large part because while it covers the entire list given--all of it is material I have had to cover in some way in the biology, chemistry, and biochemistry classes I have already taken. I've been snoozing and getting high As with minimal effort, and listening to classmates fail to understand things covered in 100-level biology...at the same university. (To give some idea: tomorrow is the last lecture of the semester. So far, the amount of material that is new to me could have been covered in one lecture, with quite a bit of time to spare.)
The measures you've just given are actually a wonderful example of the effects of a bad understanding of statistics--very, very few countries have the sheer level of variation in their populations that the US does, as most have rather less ethnic variety. It doesn't help in the least that sometimes it's actually quite impossible to compare the statistics with any reasonable expectation for it being an accurate comparison--for example, in the US what counts as a live birth is exactly what it sounds like (the infant was alive at birth), no more or less, while others do not count any infant that dies soon after...and 'soon' sometimes can be in the days range. As my stats class's professor has repeatedly explained for the sake of my slower classmates, it's very important if you're comparing statistics to actually be in agreement about what you're counting...
On the other hand: many US medical schools don't require you graduate from college--you can apply and be accepted without an undergraduate degree, as long as you got sufficiently high MCAT scores and took the prerequisite courses at your undergraduate institution. This can be done in two years. (From personal experience: it's highly stressful, mentally and physically, to pull off & not worth doing if even one of the medical schools you are strongly considering is among those that do require a BA/BS.)
FYI: The British MD is an equivalent of an academic doctorate. The undergrad degree, MBBS, takes approximately 5-6 years to get, and is pretty much a purely practical degree--the graduate degrees in the medical sciences are, much like graduate degrees in nursing in the US, primarily for those focusing on research.
Hey you businesses! Any of you want to pay a decent wage for all those vocational/technical jobs you're screaming for?
(crickets)
(Hmmm...I wonder if there's a correlation there...)
Seriously.
If there's a shortage of qualified people in a field, the answer isn't to "encourage" (read: throw money at) the schools teaching in the field. The answer is for employers to man up, quit whining to the government, and pay the clearing wage.
Some of those fields, you get the qualifications and you right off the bat are earning a significant salary--as in, "more than some college graduates" significant.
The problem? Well, the qualifications aren't college degrees, they're certifications gotten through tech and vocational schools...and parents get really weird when a high school guidance councilor actually starts suggesting to their children that, y'know, maybe their child ought to consider a technical or vocational school instead of college, because it'll be a much better fit?
Maybe what needs to be done is mot encouraging the technical schools, but rather discouraging parents & others from feeling that little Johnny and Suzie must go to college, no matter how much better served they might be by going a different route.
My psych department has flat-out told every single student who is taking much above the 100-level that it's pretty much necessary to go on to either grad school or to get a professional degree. A bachelors in psychology is simply too general--and there's not much to be done about it.
This overall makes it a really lousy place to shuffle your undecideds--which is probably why the place I'm at doesn't do that. (I haven't that much of a clue where they end up, though I do know they don't end up where I am. I suspect US History...)
Though, it does raise some questions: To what extent is the problem is its unemployability as a bachelors caused by it being a default major? Would it perhaps be better to avoid there being any such thing as a 'default major'--to have a 'general studies' major for those people, or even outright encourage them to leave at, say, the end of their sophomore year (so you can give them an associates) & return when they are no longer undecided?
A surgeon will recommend to operate. A lawyer to do legal work. A soldier to kill...this guy
I strongly object extrajudicial killings. Brain surgery looks like a human and compassionate way to deal with this guy.
I agree with you on extrajudicial killings, but...brain surgery? I know what the state of the art (and the effects & things that can go Horribly Wrong) is there well enough to consider just killing the person a more humane option. It's like yanking hardware out of a computer while it's running--while blindfolded, with not even a glance at the particular computer's insides before you started reaching in. (On the up side, since it's running you'll quickly know what just got fried.)
Possibly just as importantly--what are you supposed to do if you want certain information to be available to emergency personnel? At least with the 'locks' that come on Blackberries and Android phones, there's no (easily located) option to have an emergency contacts list left out of the lock...and it would eliminate one potential excuse for wanting to crack the phone in the first place.
They wanted all the stores to be clones, right down to stock, never mind if certain types of books simply wouldn't sell in a given location. This meant that many locations ended up having to give shelf space over to things that simply would stay on the shelves until either sold ultra-cheap or returned, and doing so in favor of stocking more copies of things that would sell.
They chased off the employees who knew the stock. This is the main reason to go to a brick-and-mortar bookstore, in many cases--Amazon's recommendations are sometimes very strange, when you get down to it, and a live human is still better than it when you're trying to find a good reference book most times. Worse, this was in favor of ones who might as well been asking you if you wanted fries with that, and would forget to ring up items...but not forget to deactivate the security tags & bag them. (This doesn't inspire customers to go out of their way to mention surprise free items, either.)
They were just as friendly to authors, too, who would come into signings to find, if they were lucky, only a few copies of any of their books on the shelf--and get told to please not sign any books not being bought that day because they then can't be returned if not sold. The latter might be excusable if the policy is to basically have the signed-by-the-author copies be something you have to turn up on the day the author visits to get, but if you're doing it because you're worried the book won't sell in the first place when autographed copies are easier to sell...and there's really no excuse for not thinking ahead when you've arranged a signing and making sure there's copies of the book(s) to sign.
Bottom line? I stopped going to Borders well before I started using Amazon regularly.
That's no different than going to a federal prison to visit an inmate and talk with them.
And then having someone who saw you maliciously write a letter to your employer a few years later saying that you were in [the] jail.
No, it's not. The example given is of being--albeit innocently--involved in an actual crime. The fact that you didn't know your supposed friends were given to stealing cars is not particularly relevant to the law, in large part because it's an easy claim to make. The assumption is that you acted sensibly afterwards, or at least had a sensible attorney whose advice you took, and opted to testify against them so the least sh*t hits you.
Not only that, the bottom line in your example is that you were inside the jail--which may make it an even purer example of what the original intent of the law was to protect against. If the letter simply states that the author saw you inside the jail, the statement is, in and of itself, entirely true. It's not even a half-truth, if the person really did see you there and is careful to stick to the literal truth. The court is not expected to be telepathic, nor is it supposed to assume that malice was intended.
Perhaps more importantly, you seem to have slander mixed up with libel.
You're leaving out the one major problem with 1 & 2 -- working in engineering or in R&D for a company (small or large) has lousy working conditions. You covered the upside, but the downside is that is all you get unless it's decided to be a major scientific discovery. You will be expected to repeat your success, regardless of if this is a reasonable expectation or a good use of your time, effort, and skills. (It might be wiser to have you focusing on refining your revolutionary new design than to expect you to come up with another.)
Do not expect any recognition for your successes outside of your field and perhaps within your company. Don't expect your employers to grasp just how major an invention or discovery you have made.
Don't expect too much credit: they're legally required to admit who did the work on some of the legal forms, but that's it.
Basically, we're running off the Edison Labs model, where somebody hires a bunch of engineers and scientists to do the actual inventing, and then gets the credit & money. We've just cut out most of the (meager) rewards of the original version, by having management become disconnected from the employees & all too often from the practical reality of what they're managing.
A lot of the suggestions here come off as sheer railroading: "Let's make the alternate career paths sucky!" It ignores the fact that, frankly, the problem is that engineering & inventing are thankless, unrewarding jobs and about the only way to make it the most appealing job to be gotten with those degrees will make the degrees themselves unappealing--why get an engineering degree if you're only going to be everybody's bitch, and not even a well-paid one?
Yes, because we all have the right to instant gratification when it comes to the truth.
I'm mostly on the side of civil disobedience here, I just wish I got the feeling that the idea that there are sometimes going to be nasty consequences was not alien to those speaking the loudest for it. Just imagine what, say, what would be the consequences of leaking a law enforcement organization's list of moles and contacts. As it is, some of the diplomatic communications that got leaked may have rather destroyed the ability to grant the sorts of concessions being discussed in them--as long as it wasn't publicly known, it was possible to do so without losing face. (Think of it as like having to pay lip service to your boss & his unreasoning hate of The Competition, while working quietly with them to ensure that the systems are mutually compatible. If your boss finds out, it's not going to happen.)
This entire post was written deceptively, since it all but explicitly says that the suit was for libel.
Now we are to where details that are essential--did the blogger know the person? were there extenuating circumstances?--which are...not appearing on this site, apparently. Extenuating circumstances here would be along the lines of "My 'friends' thoughtfully neglected to inform me the car was stolen when they picked me up." You'd still be involved in a car theft, but your level of culpability goes down (just remember, 'friends' who do that aren't friends)...
Now, imagine that one of these (hopefully now-former) 'friends' is unhappy with you, because you ought to have been simply amused by their wacky hijinks & you chose to turn on them because you have this far-right notion that people have a right to keep their property... Let's say he goes and tells your employer, who has been quite clear about needing employees whose noses are clean, that you were involved in a car theft. Since he did this without mentioning that your involvement consisted of, well, Being In A Stolen Car...you were fired.
This would not constitute libel, at least under the most conservative definition of libel: you were. (In fact, theoretically it could be true even if your involvement was purely as the car's owner.) However, the truth was conveyed in a malicious and--more importantly--deceptive manner.
It is, however, malicious misconstruing of the situation, and if he knows that your employer will consider the version told you as a reason to fire you...
Disclaimer: This is purely intended to provide an example of the law and the reasoning behind it. The author of this post does not know (nor particularly care) about the facts of the case that inspired this gem of bad reporting on/.--which is also an example of deceptive, yet truthful, recounting of events. The author of this post, in fact, is inclined to suspect that either judge was yet another example of why it needs to be less impossible to displace bad judges, or that the law itself was poorly written...and thus, as the Supreme Court once put it, ought to be enforced so it will be so obvious even a politician cannot fail to notice it's a bad law.
Nah, most of the productivity losses were actually due to the simple effects of messing with everybody's circadian rhythms -- this causes more accidents, as people are (understandably) tired and underslept for the first week or so after the 'lost' hour...and the week after the 'gained' hour is not much better; the fact that it generally results in lots more people heading to work in the dark while underslept just adds to the fun. (Mind you, it certainly does help certain businesses--car repair, hospitals, undertakers...) It never made sense.
Why be nice? Make it so the random number comes from one of a set of random number servers, depending on the day of the week, the phase of the moon, and how long it's been since some little kids' cricket team in an obscure town in Australia won a game? (Just to add an element of chance to the whole question.)
That's actually in large part an illusion -- China's simply growing at a very high rate. The real problem here is that the growth rate is mostly in the form of a huge bubble; they're spending money on things like building cities for nobody to live in.
Japan actually had something very much like this going on in the 70s or so; they didn't actually need to invent stuff, they could just freeload off the US, and since regulations in the US actually (functionally) actively discourage modernizing your factories unless it's absolutely impossible not to... Well, Japan had no problems building more modern, more efficient factories than the US.
Then Japan's bubble burst, and they're still in a recession.
China's bubble? Much, much bigger, and the Chinese government is pumping money into it to make it bigger. It's suspected that this is because they want to have their yuan, converted into a different current & stashed away in Swiss banks, and be out (of the country) before it bursts.
Drop daylight saving/summer time entirely. Possibly even pass legislation to discourage reinstatement--perhaps require some sort of sufficiently embarrassing and arduous task (several hours straight public naked Funky Chicken dance? perhaps with ceremonial body paint?) which must be performed in public by the politician in order to introduce the legislation?
And of course the politician must be certain that, come the next election, footage shall get run, possibly under a humorous tune.
So, basically, the tourist boards believe it will cause extra hours of daylight to magically appear?
The problem with the theory that it will result in more people getting out in the evening is that the more likely result is that more people will be getting up to go to work before sunrise. This can be quite effective at deterring people from spending time out, even if you're working the same hours--your body doesn't care if the clock says you're keeping the same hours. What it notices is that you're up before the sun. You might get more of a boost by dropping daylight savings entirely & developing your after-sunset attractions...
The US public education system has low science scores even compared to homeschoolers--yeah, that means it turns out that somebody who believes in Creationism scores better than somebody who...believes whatever got taught in the public schools. I have no idea what it was, just that it was not the modern synthesis of evolution. (For those who do not know: the modern synthesis of evolution is the, well, modern version of the theory. Aside from a few tweaks, it's over half a century old. It's not terribly hard to understand, especially for people used to computer technology: microevolution is the biology equivalent to version changes. Macroevolution is how species fork. You are now ahead of most freshman biology majors...)
...Bibliography (title/author/journal/vol/year will suffice) of these empirical studies you cite, please.
No offense intended, but--this is Slashdot. You are, therefore, most likely a geek. (2nd choice: Nerd.) According to what you say the studies found, geeks have very poor recall. If we grant you the assumption that your claims as to their findings is correct, your memory cannot be trusted. Strangely, support for this assumption can be found in the fact that, despite the use of the plural (empirical studies), this appears to be a (poor) description of the results and conclusions section of a single study.
That said: of course we don't have an 'exact neurochemical reason.' That would require having some clear understanding of how memory itself works on a cellular level. Science has marched on, and discovered it had the wrong map. Fun times for anybody interested in a degree in the field, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice that I said they had to sell for a digital print run a minimum number as well as make it available for a minimum amount of time. Implicit is that they need to make the requirement before the 'disuse' period is up, and the phrasing requires that both the minimum period and minimum sales requirements be met. You will have to price a token digital print run so it will sell enough copies before the drop-dead date, and start offering it sufficiently ahead of time for the 'period of time' requirement to be met.
Both conditions are picked to prevent exactly that: using an exorbitantly-priced digital download, or a reasonably-priced one for 3AM-6AM on 1/1 as a dodge. The same goes for the 'significant print run' rule on physical copies, because otherwise you could just sell a dozen copies and call it quits.
A physical print run will generally result in cheap copies if they overprice it initially, simply because it costs money to warehouse it--especially if the rules are that you can't count copies pulped as part of the print run. (You want to ensure, after all, that they only bother when they can actually break even or make a profit off of holding onto the copyright.) A print-on-demand run probably would have to be done on the same rules as a digital one: you've got to have it on the market for a certain amount of time, and sell enough copies, for it to be counted as a significant print run.
Actually, at least in the US, 'personal connection' is sufficient justification for a judge to not be involved in a given case--the expectation, however, is that the judge will have the sense and ethical standing to remove himself/herself from the case in favor of, say, extra time golfing, reading, visiting sex workers, whatever said judge does for fun. I can't recall any specific cases being overturned in the US due to this, though, as it seems that the current view is that it is better generally to err on the side of caution...
No idea about European standards, though I know at points at least it was considered safe to suspect that the judge and prosecutor were in bed with each other, perhaps alone, perhaps with a freshly-strangled underage sex worker...
You might have an easier time first making it so that disuse can cause expiration: instead of a flat term, it becomes whichever happens first, the flat term or a significantly smaller number of years since a significant print run. An electronic release would probably have to be under an inverted rule--a minimum number of sales or period of time, whichever qualification is met last--for counting as a significant print run.
You could also include a mechanism for a copyright's owner to release prematurely an item into the public domain, and write it off as a loss. It'd serve as a bit of encouragement for the larger companies to consider it possibly better for their bottom line to not do the token print run. You might even see some particularly disastrous bombs hit public domain quite swiftly...
Actually, I think the idea of having the advertisements be picked to be more of the sorts of things I'm interested in sounds attractive. Think about it: would you rather be pestered with ads for services you don't want or need, or at least know there's a reasonable chance of it being for things you want to buy? A lot of sites have their running costs covered by ads, so I don't really expect to see them going away; the reason I run an adblocker is because a lot of them are outright dadaistic in their ad selection (pr0n of guys in Rabbi costumes hitting fat women with pork?) and very, very few seem to care to practice some responsibility about the safety of the ads.
That said, it'd certainly be nice if it didn't rely on tracking you but instead let you actually actively tell it what to try to sell you. Consider how different it would be if you could just tell the adserv that you're in the market for a new car or a new computer, instead of having to deal with the sites that have developed the habits of particularly dumb salesdroids or actual salesdroids who are too painfully obviously both paid on commission & ignorant of they're selling. Yes, ads are annoying--but are they more annoying?
Meanwhile, I cannot see the FBI getting backdoors into all secure electronic systems, with its history of abuse, misuse, leaks, and Luddite tendencies (Thank you Mr Hoover), as possibly being a Good Thing for anybody.
It is probably worth noting here that, historically, self-interest is far and away the most reliable way to get people to behave in the interest of the common good. The one popular with lawmakers, however, is their own good--which basically means voting the way of whomever bribes them best & keeping the voters from noticing that they're not benefiting, since this hasn't been made something that can bar you from running again.
The problem with the suggestions of restoring function to her existing one is that it ignores that there is a definite time limit to being a candidate for any sort of nerve restoration or, for that matter, any form of electrostim manipulation--if her hand is withered as the article says, she's out of this window. Once the muscles have atrophied away practically entirely (and she's been without movement of it for over a decade, so this is likely) the odds of getting it restored to more usefulness than a permanently attached blunt object is...somewhere up there with an angel coming down from Heaven and giving you a spaceship, ownership of an Earth-sized mass of precious metals, and magic powers. (No, aliens that look like angels would not count. The odds of the existence of supernatural beings from the afterlife who appear in nighties with bird wings is part of the calculation of the probability of the cited event.)
More importantly, once you start getting phantom limb pains, the window for getting the nerves reconnected is definitely gone. Phantom limb comes from your brain reassigning the blocks that had been originally used by the now-lost part of the body (or what it is 'reading' as lost) to new places. Yes, you could probably take terrible advantage of this and find the patch of skin that has been granted use of that part of the somatosensory map, but it tends to be somewhere on the face. (2nd choice is probably the hands, if that wasn't what was lost, followed by either the feet or...let's call it the crotch, OK?) This would be probably less desirable, from a purely aesthetic point of view, especially if the phantom limb sensations are actually due to your underwear irritating the area between your legs as opposed to your cheek or foot being itchy.
Incidentally, the model she's interested in would be reading the lower arm, not the back muscles for its 'input.' Given that you actually use the muscles in your forearm for much of your hand motions, it might actually give her a decent chance should we be able to regrow hands within her lifetime at actually being able to get a flesh-and-blood hand that's as functional as a bionic one would be. Her current one is definitely shot if it's withered--implanting new muscle to any great extent is probably a significantly more complex task than regrowing or even transplanting--and keeping it would actually likely lower the chances of success with a regrown as she will keep losing muscles and nerve supply to the part. (The classic mnemonic here is that you use it or lose it.) The bionic hand might be able to at least slow the rate of loss.
If those MDs don't have the slightest clue about statistics, hypothesis testing, selection bias, ect. then it's because they either forgot or didn't take one of the traditional premed majors. I can personally testify that biochem/chem and psychology degrees have at least some understanding of statistics required--at the university I'm attending, psych majors have a two-semester 300-level course explicitly on statistics (including in the first half everything listed) and those parts that are relevant to chemistry & biochemistry are covered within the courses (not as a separate course).
It may be worth noting that I've been quite able to snooze through the first half of the 300-level course on statistics for the behavioral sciences, in large part because while it covers the entire list given--all of it is material I have had to cover in some way in the biology, chemistry, and biochemistry classes I have already taken. I've been snoozing and getting high As with minimal effort, and listening to classmates fail to understand things covered in 100-level biology...at the same university. (To give some idea: tomorrow is the last lecture of the semester. So far, the amount of material that is new to me could have been covered in one lecture, with quite a bit of time to spare.)
The measures you've just given are actually a wonderful example of the effects of a bad understanding of statistics--very, very few countries have the sheer level of variation in their populations that the US does, as most have rather less ethnic variety. It doesn't help in the least that sometimes it's actually quite impossible to compare the statistics with any reasonable expectation for it being an accurate comparison--for example, in the US what counts as a live birth is exactly what it sounds like (the infant was alive at birth), no more or less, while others do not count any infant that dies soon after...and 'soon' sometimes can be in the days range. As my stats class's professor has repeatedly explained for the sake of my slower classmates, it's very important if you're comparing statistics to actually be in agreement about what you're counting...
On the other hand: many US medical schools don't require you graduate from college--you can apply and be accepted without an undergraduate degree, as long as you got sufficiently high MCAT scores and took the prerequisite courses at your undergraduate institution. This can be done in two years. (From personal experience: it's highly stressful, mentally and physically, to pull off & not worth doing if even one of the medical schools you are strongly considering is among those that do require a BA/BS.)
FYI: The British MD is an equivalent of an academic doctorate. The undergrad degree, MBBS, takes approximately 5-6 years to get, and is pretty much a purely practical degree--the graduate degrees in the medical sciences are, much like graduate degrees in nursing in the US, primarily for those focusing on research.
Hey you businesses! Any of you want to pay a decent wage for all those vocational/technical jobs you're screaming for?
(crickets)
(Hmmm...I wonder if there's a correlation there...)
Seriously.
If there's a shortage of qualified people in a field, the answer isn't to "encourage" (read: throw money at) the schools teaching in the field. The answer is for employers to man up, quit whining to the government, and pay the clearing wage.
Some of those fields, you get the qualifications and you right off the bat are earning a significant salary--as in, "more than some college graduates" significant.
The problem? Well, the qualifications aren't college degrees, they're certifications gotten through tech and vocational schools...and parents get really weird when a high school guidance councilor actually starts suggesting to their children that, y'know, maybe their child ought to consider a technical or vocational school instead of college, because it'll be a much better fit?
Maybe what needs to be done is mot encouraging the technical schools, but rather discouraging parents & others from feeling that little Johnny and Suzie must go to college, no matter how much better served they might be by going a different route.
My psych department has flat-out told every single student who is taking much above the 100-level that it's pretty much necessary to go on to either grad school or to get a professional degree. A bachelors in psychology is simply too general--and there's not much to be done about it.
This overall makes it a really lousy place to shuffle your undecideds--which is probably why the place I'm at doesn't do that. (I haven't that much of a clue where they end up, though I do know they don't end up where I am. I suspect US History...)
Though, it does raise some questions: To what extent is the problem is its unemployability as a bachelors caused by it being a default major? Would it perhaps be better to avoid there being any such thing as a 'default major'--to have a 'general studies' major for those people, or even outright encourage them to leave at, say, the end of their sophomore year (so you can give them an associates) & return when they are no longer undecided?
A surgeon will recommend to operate. A lawyer to do legal work. A soldier to kill ...this guy
I strongly object extrajudicial killings. Brain surgery looks like a human and compassionate way to deal with this guy.
I agree with you on extrajudicial killings, but...brain surgery? I know what the state of the art (and the effects & things that can go Horribly Wrong) is there well enough to consider just killing the person a more humane option. It's like yanking hardware out of a computer while it's running--while blindfolded, with not even a glance at the particular computer's insides before you started reaching in. (On the up side, since it's running you'll quickly know what just got fried.)
...what's wrong if she managed to pull a twofer?
Possibly just as importantly--what are you supposed to do if you want certain information to be available to emergency personnel? At least with the 'locks' that come on Blackberries and Android phones, there's no (easily located) option to have an emergency contacts list left out of the lock...and it would eliminate one potential excuse for wanting to crack the phone in the first place.
Borders was killed by horrible management.
They wanted all the stores to be clones, right down to stock, never mind if certain types of books simply wouldn't sell in a given location. This meant that many locations ended up having to give shelf space over to things that simply would stay on the shelves until either sold ultra-cheap or returned, and doing so in favor of stocking more copies of things that would sell.
They chased off the employees who knew the stock. This is the main reason to go to a brick-and-mortar bookstore, in many cases--Amazon's recommendations are sometimes very strange, when you get down to it, and a live human is still better than it when you're trying to find a good reference book most times. Worse, this was in favor of ones who might as well been asking you if you wanted fries with that, and would forget to ring up items...but not forget to deactivate the security tags & bag them. (This doesn't inspire customers to go out of their way to mention surprise free items, either.)
They were just as friendly to authors, too, who would come into signings to find, if they were lucky, only a few copies of any of their books on the shelf--and get told to please not sign any books not being bought that day because they then can't be returned if not sold. The latter might be excusable if the policy is to basically have the signed-by-the-author copies be something you have to turn up on the day the author visits to get, but if you're doing it because you're worried the book won't sell in the first place when autographed copies are easier to sell...and there's really no excuse for not thinking ahead when you've arranged a signing and making sure there's copies of the book(s) to sign.
Bottom line? I stopped going to Borders well before I started using Amazon regularly.
That's no different than going to a federal prison to visit an inmate and talk with them. And then having someone who saw you maliciously write a letter to your employer a few years later saying that you were in [the] jail.
No, it's not. The example given is of being--albeit innocently--involved in an actual crime. The fact that you didn't know your supposed friends were given to stealing cars is not particularly relevant to the law, in large part because it's an easy claim to make. The assumption is that you acted sensibly afterwards, or at least had a sensible attorney whose advice you took, and opted to testify against them so the least sh*t hits you.
Not only that, the bottom line in your example is that you were inside the jail--which may make it an even purer example of what the original intent of the law was to protect against. If the letter simply states that the author saw you inside the jail, the statement is, in and of itself, entirely true. It's not even a half-truth, if the person really did see you there and is careful to stick to the literal truth. The court is not expected to be telepathic, nor is it supposed to assume that malice was intended.
Perhaps more importantly, you seem to have slander mixed up with libel.
Do not expect any recognition for your successes outside of your field and perhaps within your company. Don't expect your employers to grasp just how major an invention or discovery you have made.
Don't expect too much credit: they're legally required to admit who did the work on some of the legal forms, but that's it.
Basically, we're running off the Edison Labs model, where somebody hires a bunch of engineers and scientists to do the actual inventing, and then gets the credit & money. We've just cut out most of the (meager) rewards of the original version, by having management become disconnected from the employees & all too often from the practical reality of what they're managing.
A lot of the suggestions here come off as sheer railroading: "Let's make the alternate career paths sucky!" It ignores the fact that, frankly, the problem is that engineering & inventing are thankless, unrewarding jobs and about the only way to make it the most appealing job to be gotten with those degrees will make the degrees themselves unappealing--why get an engineering degree if you're only going to be everybody's bitch, and not even a well-paid one?
Yes, because we all have the right to instant gratification when it comes to the truth.
I'm mostly on the side of civil disobedience here, I just wish I got the feeling that the idea that there are sometimes going to be nasty consequences was not alien to those speaking the loudest for it. Just imagine what, say, what would be the consequences of leaking a law enforcement organization's list of moles and contacts. As it is, some of the diplomatic communications that got leaked may have rather destroyed the ability to grant the sorts of concessions being discussed in them--as long as it wasn't publicly known, it was possible to do so without losing face. (Think of it as like having to pay lip service to your boss & his unreasoning hate of The Competition, while working quietly with them to ensure that the systems are mutually compatible. If your boss finds out, it's not going to happen.)
Now we are to where details that are essential--did the blogger know the person? were there extenuating circumstances?--which are...not appearing on this site, apparently. Extenuating circumstances here would be along the lines of "My 'friends' thoughtfully neglected to inform me the car was stolen when they picked me up." You'd still be involved in a car theft, but your level of culpability goes down (just remember, 'friends' who do that aren't friends)...
Now, imagine that one of these (hopefully now-former) 'friends' is unhappy with you, because you ought to have been simply amused by their wacky hijinks & you chose to turn on them because you have this far-right notion that people have a right to keep their property... Let's say he goes and tells your employer, who has been quite clear about needing employees whose noses are clean, that you were involved in a car theft. Since he did this without mentioning that your involvement consisted of, well, Being In A Stolen Car...you were fired.
This would not constitute libel, at least under the most conservative definition of libel: you were. (In fact, theoretically it could be true even if your involvement was purely as the car's owner.) However, the truth was conveyed in a malicious and--more importantly--deceptive manner.
It is, however, malicious misconstruing of the situation, and if he knows that your employer will consider the version told you as a reason to fire you...
/.--which is also an example of deceptive, yet truthful, recounting of events. The author of this post, in fact, is inclined to suspect that either judge was yet another example of why it needs to be less impossible to displace bad judges, or that the law itself was poorly written...and thus, as the Supreme Court once put it, ought to be enforced so it will be so obvious even a politician cannot fail to notice it's a bad law.
Disclaimer: This is purely intended to provide an example of the law and the reasoning behind it. The author of this post does not know (nor particularly care) about the facts of the case that inspired this gem of bad reporting on
Nah, most of the productivity losses were actually due to the simple effects of messing with everybody's circadian rhythms -- this causes more accidents, as people are (understandably) tired and underslept for the first week or so after the 'lost' hour...and the week after the 'gained' hour is not much better; the fact that it generally results in lots more people heading to work in the dark while underslept just adds to the fun. (Mind you, it certainly does help certain businesses--car repair, hospitals, undertakers...) It never made sense.
Or we could just switch to decimal time and lengthen the workweek...
Why be nice? Make it so the random number comes from one of a set of random number servers, depending on the day of the week, the phase of the moon, and how long it's been since some little kids' cricket team in an obscure town in Australia won a game? (Just to add an element of chance to the whole question.)
Japan actually had something very much like this going on in the 70s or so; they didn't actually need to invent stuff, they could just freeload off the US, and since regulations in the US actually (functionally) actively discourage modernizing your factories unless it's absolutely impossible not to... Well, Japan had no problems building more modern, more efficient factories than the US.
Then Japan's bubble burst, and they're still in a recession.
China's bubble? Much, much bigger, and the Chinese government is pumping money into it to make it bigger. It's suspected that this is because they want to have their yuan, converted into a different current & stashed away in Swiss banks, and be out (of the country) before it bursts.
And of course the politician must be certain that, come the next election, footage shall get run, possibly under a humorous tune.
So, basically, the tourist boards believe it will cause extra hours of daylight to magically appear? The problem with the theory that it will result in more people getting out in the evening is that the more likely result is that more people will be getting up to go to work before sunrise. This can be quite effective at deterring people from spending time out, even if you're working the same hours--your body doesn't care if the clock says you're keeping the same hours. What it notices is that you're up before the sun. You might get more of a boost by dropping daylight savings entirely & developing your after-sunset attractions...
The US public education system has low science scores even compared to homeschoolers--yeah, that means it turns out that somebody who believes in Creationism scores better than somebody who...believes whatever got taught in the public schools. I have no idea what it was, just that it was not the modern synthesis of evolution. (For those who do not know: the modern synthesis of evolution is the, well, modern version of the theory. Aside from a few tweaks, it's over half a century old. It's not terribly hard to understand, especially for people used to computer technology: microevolution is the biology equivalent to version changes. Macroevolution is how species fork. You are now ahead of most freshman biology majors...)
...Bibliography (title/author/journal/vol/year will suffice) of these empirical studies you cite, please.
No offense intended, but--this is Slashdot. You are, therefore, most likely a geek. (2nd choice: Nerd.) According to what you say the studies found, geeks have very poor recall. If we grant you the assumption that your claims as to their findings is correct, your memory cannot be trusted. Strangely, support for this assumption can be found in the fact that, despite the use of the plural (empirical studies), this appears to be a (poor) description of the results and conclusions section of a single study.
That said: of course we don't have an 'exact neurochemical reason.' That would require having some clear understanding of how memory itself works on a cellular level. Science has marched on, and discovered it had the wrong map. Fun times for anybody interested in a degree in the field, though.