So maybe a few homeopathic solutions or healing herbs would come in handy to the doctor who wants return business, but doesn't want to prescribe unneeded antibiotics. And who knows, the patient might get well faster because he feels better: the doctor clearly cares about his welfare, he's been given "medicine", all should be well. People aren't machines; they don't respond well to being treated as though they were. Whatever happened to the art of medicine?
It went away with modern medical ethics. A doctor is ethically required to prescribe medicine which he or she honestly believes will address the problem, and tell the patient why that is. It's about informed consent. If a medical doctor prescribed a homeopathic remedy, how do you imagine the conversation going?
"Well, the remedy I'm giving you has no active ingredient--it's actually diluted so far down that it's just water! Nevertheless, I think it will reduce your pain/swelling/etc because of the placebo effect. Which requires that you think this is a real medicine--oops."
This is the same reason that doctors are now taught that sugar pills and other placebos are ethical only in medical trials, in which the priority is the testing of a treatment rather than the actual treatment. Using placebos in place of tested treatments in actual practice is equivalent to lying to the patient.
I'm glad acupuncture helps you feel better. However: do you know why your back is hurting? Have you had a doctor actually look at your back to make sure the symptom isn't a symptom of a real, serious condition? Or do you just trust your "personal experience" which says that acupuncture makes pain go away?
The real danger of alternative medicine isn't that it doesn't work, but that it makes people less likely to look deeper into their problems. In your case and most others, it probably doesn't matter, but from time to time you really do need that "proven" treatment.
Re:Electronic referendums are -VITAL- next step
on
The First E-President
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· Score: 1
That's right, let us kill any policy >50% dislike! Like civil rights, or gay marriage, or taxes....
There's plenty of good science that isn't important science, but the place for it isn't Science or Nature: it's in Journal of Tiny Sub-field. Most of the time, when a good article is rejected by a broad or high-impact journal, it later appears in a more specialized one which is read only by people working on the same type of thing.
This is not a bad thing! This is the kind of sorting that is supposed to happen, and the existence of lower-tier journals is vitally important when you're looking for specialized work. I know I read articles form these journals at least as often as I read the big names, because they include details vital to my work. By the same token, we expect articles in the broad-based journals to have enough general interest that they will spark ideas in people outside their own tiny fields.
Journals act as a combination of quality control and aggregation/filtering of "interesting" material. When you read an article which has been published by an academic journal, you have some assurance both that the content is of reasonably high quality and that it is likely to be important and interesting to someone interested in the field the journal covers. The journal also assures you that these evaluations have been made by competent experts in the field who do not have a conflict of interest in evaluating the work. The system also gives scientists access to reviewers they may not be personally familiar with, who frequently make recommendations to improve the work before publication. Obviously there are problems on occasion (conflicts of interest occur, or bad articles make it in/good articles are rejected) but journals still act as a pretty decent filtering mechanism.
Is it possible that this could be handled purely online in some decentralized manner? I suppose so, but I expect that the signal to noise ratio would be much lower and the quality of reviewing would be likely to suffer.
Note that I'm not defending the current expensive paper-publication restricted-access model: the jury is out on how well that will survive. But I think it's worth noticing that even online open-access journals like PLoS ONE still follow a recognizable editor-reviewer model, and still charge submission fees to operate.
Actually, there is no inherent reason why a democratic society should be any more tolerant than a dictatorship. We (the U.S.) keep focusing on the democracy part, and bringing democracy to the world, when in fact what makes the U.S. special is the constitution that protects the right to free speech and equal treatment by law. Without a well drafted constitution, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. I would go further and say that even a constitution can't ensure tolerant and free behavior in the absence of a populace which cares about those principles. The major reason that democracy, tolerance and free expression flourish in the US and Europe is that many citizens would fight back if those principles were attacked. As they are on a regular basis (USA PATRIOT Act, anyone?), and notice the outcry which occurs.
By and large, regions such as India, China and the Middle East did not develop democracy from the citizenry in the same manner as the Western world; often, what democratic governments exist were established by withdrawing colonial powers. There is no reason to expect a similar respect for those principles.
Appreciated, sure. But CEO-dude isn't looking to be nice, he's looking for an advantage. And especially he doesn't want to help competitors. Where's the concrete incentive?
I see the same kind of rational Mac users, but I'm also in a science-oriented environment. The reason for the different behavior is the different rationale: a physicist using a Mac likes it because it can run Unix-style software easily and doesn't crash every ten minutes, especially when all it has to talk to is other Macs. It's based on technology.
Your average home or business user of a Mac, otoh, is likely to have made the choice for reasons of style. Sure, they like that it might crash less than their old Dell, but they don't need a machine to run data-processing libraries. They need a machine with a white case which looks cool. That kind of judgment is more likely to create fanboy-ism, because they feel the need to come up with better reasons than "it looks cool!" and they have trouble doing so.
Which matters if the end goal of the artist is to "make it big", in the sense of a nationwide presence and the top of the charts. But a lot of the musicians I know or encounter have a different goal: "do well enough to quit the day job." Which many of them have managed, through a combination of paying gigs, CD sales online and at those gigs, and free or cheap song downloads.
You have always needed a label to be a "big star", but it's only recently that you could actually make a living on your own, and that's the goal for many or most.
Except that according to TFA, the light hasn't actually "stopped". Instead it's been trapped in resonators, so in a crude picture it's bouncing back and forth within the fluid. The time effects observed relative to light should remain as they usually are, per relativity.
I wonder if storing photons should be actually seen as storing their energy (say, as that of an electron in an atom), rather than "storing" the photons themselves, as particles.
It's not just the energy. If I understand the article properly, and it works like other photon-storage schemes, the phase, polarization, etc. of the photons are also preserved, so that the light which is released is equivalent to the original light. It's possible there could be some frequency-changing effects, as in non-linear optics, but that's speculation.
Two main reasons: critics of evolution tend not to take the time to thoroughly understand the concept, and they do not propose useful alternatives. What people call "evolution" is less a theory than a framework which incorporates many individual theories and ideas about natural selection, mutation mechanisms, genetic recombination, etc. You're right, natural selection does not explain how information is added to the genome, but there are theories which do propose explanations for that! All of these fall under the header of evolution, but most critics stop at natural selection and start complaining.
(Also, while "historical" evolution is more difficult or impossible to test directly, it can be evaluated in a reasonable fashion by attempting to apply known mutation/selection data from current species.)
In terms of alternatives, the best critics have come up with is "intelligent design", which does not propose an alternative mechanism at all. Instead it simply says, "intelligence must have been involved". That's not really a testable proposition, and it's not even a useful explanation; intelligent design gives up on the idea of a detailed explanation at all. Participation in science requires a good-faith effort to find theories with descriptive and predictive power, and you can't expect to be taken seriously when your best argument amounts to "It's too hard!"
Yes: the torrent distributor was involved in legal proceedings, currently in the discovery phase. This was a specific court order for the purposes of trying a particular case, rather than some blanket "Everyone must use Windows so we can spy on them!"
So, for a company to reach out to the Open Source community, they have to open up everything? Or is it just the stuff that some subset of the community really really wants?
One argument in support of differential pricing is that professors in engineering and business are more expensive than in other fields.
Don't science and engineering professors, at least, usually bring in lots of money in research grants? Most professors I've known brought in enough money to pay for their grad assistants as well as subsidize their own salaries. It's hard to believe they could be a drain on the university, so that we'd have to charge students more for their classes.
Alternate question: do you think there is as much value returned to society when a music copyright expires, as when a medical patent expires?
Not saying that music should have a long term, but there's a reason for making patent terms short: so that the rest of society can derive value from the idea. This is especially valid for your hypothetical "cure for AIDS".
Do you actually think that most people who use pirated software would use open source if only "genuine Windows" were available?
Most people I know who pirate Windows aren't anti-Microsoft or even violently cheap. Instead, such "crimes" are usually crimes of opportunity: someone at school or the office offers to let them borrow their Windows disk, or hands out cracked CDs because it amuses them. It's obviously cheaper, so of course they'll use the illegal disk. But if such a thing weren't available, most people will bite the bullet and pay for Windows because it's what they're comfortable with.
I'm too tired to do the math, but as for disadvantages: living in 2x gravity for a long time would put a tremendous stress on your body. A short fall, maybe even simply tripping, could result in broken bones. Your heart would have to work much harder, possibly weakening it in the long term; your risk for cardiac problems would certainly increase. And so on.
In the long run, your heart would get used to it and your bones might get stronger, but some damage would almost certainly be done. OTOH, you'd likely emerge much stronger physically; but unless you worked out quite a bit, you'd stand no chance of keeping it long-term in "low" gravity.
Let us not forget that Bill Gates went to India in 2002 and gave $100 million to fight AIDS, which received great press. What the main-stream media failed to report was that $421 million of Microsoft's money at the time went to fight Linux and Free Software.
Because of course the man's personal spending habits and those of his company are a valid comparison, and he has total control over every action Microsoft takes.
Whatever else you may think of the man, you can't make a comparison like this to show his priorities. Many others are involved in decisions of where to spend Microsoft's money, and as rich as he is, I imagine $100 million means more to him than $400 million to Microsoft.
Makes me wonder if it would make more sense to nationalize Google's index and share it amongst competitors (just like it makes more sense for goverments to build airports and share them amongst airlines rather than every airline building its own airports).
Or, better yet, Google or another indexer could index all the information itself, thus driving competitors out of business. The difference between your cases is that while governments build airports to share, Google has already built the index which would be "nationalized"--therefore taking away almost all the company's benefit for having done so. Good for all their competitors (free information!), but incredibly bad for the company that did the work.
Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.
I agree with most of your points, but not with this one. A national curriculum works well only when the panel of "leaders" is selected based on some objective measure of success... instead of popularity or political beliefs, as is more often the case. If a national panel was appointed now to decide biology curricula, it would most likely include a section on "intelligent design", limited details on evolution and a special topic on the evils of stealing biological intellectual property.
Local curriculum decisions can be just as stupid, but there are a lot of local school boards. Different decisions will be made in different cities, so that someone at least will probably get it right, and someone will be trained in every side of issues where there really is no consensus. Sometimes variation is good. It doesn't necessarily do much for the student whose school board is chronically idiotic, but does make it more likely that nation as a whole will have a supply of well-trained students.
Note that this view is pretty well confined to K-12 education: I agree on the need for higher-level standards in professional qualifications, such as medical or engineering professions (though even there I'd say state, not national). But in general, encouraging independent thought and variation between communities is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
So maybe a few homeopathic solutions or healing herbs would come in handy to the doctor who wants return business, but doesn't want to prescribe unneeded antibiotics. And who knows, the patient might get well faster because he feels better: the doctor clearly cares about his welfare, he's been given "medicine", all should be well. People aren't machines; they don't respond well to being treated as though they were. Whatever happened to the art of medicine?
It went away with modern medical ethics. A doctor is ethically required to prescribe medicine which he or she honestly believes will address the problem, and tell the patient why that is. It's about informed consent. If a medical doctor prescribed a homeopathic remedy, how do you imagine the conversation going?
"Well, the remedy I'm giving you has no active ingredient--it's actually diluted so far down that it's just water! Nevertheless, I think it will reduce your pain/swelling/etc because of the placebo effect. Which requires that you think this is a real medicine--oops."
This is the same reason that doctors are now taught that sugar pills and other placebos are ethical only in medical trials, in which the priority is the testing of a treatment rather than the actual treatment. Using placebos in place of tested treatments in actual practice is equivalent to lying to the patient.
I'm glad acupuncture helps you feel better. However: do you know why your back is hurting? Have you had a doctor actually look at your back to make sure the symptom isn't a symptom of a real, serious condition? Or do you just trust your "personal experience" which says that acupuncture makes pain go away?
The real danger of alternative medicine isn't that it doesn't work, but that it makes people less likely to look deeper into their problems. In your case and most others, it probably doesn't matter, but from time to time you really do need that "proven" treatment.
That's right, let us kill any policy >50% dislike! Like civil rights, or gay marriage, or taxes....
Health provider? Probably not for a while. "Experimental treatment", after all.
There's plenty of good science that isn't important science, but the place for it isn't Science or Nature: it's in Journal of Tiny Sub-field. Most of the time, when a good article is rejected by a broad or high-impact journal, it later appears in a more specialized one which is read only by people working on the same type of thing.
This is not a bad thing! This is the kind of sorting that is supposed to happen, and the existence of lower-tier journals is vitally important when you're looking for specialized work. I know I read articles form these journals at least as often as I read the big names, because they include details vital to my work. By the same token, we expect articles in the broad-based journals to have enough general interest that they will spark ideas in people outside their own tiny fields.
Journals act as a combination of quality control and aggregation/filtering of "interesting" material. When you read an article which has been published by an academic journal, you have some assurance both that the content is of reasonably high quality and that it is likely to be important and interesting to someone interested in the field the journal covers. The journal also assures you that these evaluations have been made by competent experts in the field who do not have a conflict of interest in evaluating the work. The system also gives scientists access to reviewers they may not be personally familiar with, who frequently make recommendations to improve the work before publication. Obviously there are problems on occasion (conflicts of interest occur, or bad articles make it in/good articles are rejected) but journals still act as a pretty decent filtering mechanism.
Is it possible that this could be handled purely online in some decentralized manner? I suppose so, but I expect that the signal to noise ratio would be much lower and the quality of reviewing would be likely to suffer.
Note that I'm not defending the current expensive paper-publication restricted-access model: the jury is out on how well that will survive. But I think it's worth noticing that even online open-access journals like PLoS ONE still follow a recognizable editor-reviewer model, and still charge submission fees to operate.
By and large, regions such as India, China and the Middle East did not develop democracy from the citizenry in the same manner as the Western world; often, what democratic governments exist were established by withdrawing colonial powers. There is no reason to expect a similar respect for those principles.
Appreciated, sure. But CEO-dude isn't looking to be nice, he's looking for an advantage. And especially he doesn't want to help competitors. Where's the concrete incentive?
I see the same kind of rational Mac users, but I'm also in a science-oriented environment. The reason for the different behavior is the different rationale: a physicist using a Mac likes it because it can run Unix-style software easily and doesn't crash every ten minutes, especially when all it has to talk to is other Macs. It's based on technology.
Your average home or business user of a Mac, otoh, is likely to have made the choice for reasons of style. Sure, they like that it might crash less than their old Dell, but they don't need a machine to run data-processing libraries. They need a machine with a white case which looks cool. That kind of judgment is more likely to create fanboy-ism, because they feel the need to come up with better reasons than "it looks cool!" and they have trouble doing so.
How about, they don't get the diseases the vaccines are designed to prevent?
Which matters if the end goal of the artist is to "make it big", in the sense of a nationwide presence and the top of the charts. But a lot of the musicians I know or encounter have a different goal: "do well enough to quit the day job." Which many of them have managed, through a combination of paying gigs, CD sales online and at those gigs, and free or cheap song downloads.
You have always needed a label to be a "big star", but it's only recently that you could actually make a living on your own, and that's the goal for many or most.
Except that according to TFA, the light hasn't actually "stopped". Instead it's been trapped in resonators, so in a crude picture it's bouncing back and forth within the fluid. The time effects observed relative to light should remain as they usually are, per relativity.
Two main reasons: critics of evolution tend not to take the time to thoroughly understand the concept, and they do not propose useful alternatives. What people call "evolution" is less a theory than a framework which incorporates many individual theories and ideas about natural selection, mutation mechanisms, genetic recombination, etc. You're right, natural selection does not explain how information is added to the genome, but there are theories which do propose explanations for that! All of these fall under the header of evolution, but most critics stop at natural selection and start complaining.
(Also, while "historical" evolution is more difficult or impossible to test directly, it can be evaluated in a reasonable fashion by attempting to apply known mutation/selection data from current species.)
In terms of alternatives, the best critics have come up with is "intelligent design", which does not propose an alternative mechanism at all. Instead it simply says, "intelligence must have been involved". That's not really a testable proposition, and it's not even a useful explanation; intelligent design gives up on the idea of a detailed explanation at all. Participation in science requires a good-faith effort to find theories with descriptive and predictive power, and you can't expect to be taken seriously when your best argument amounts to "It's too hard!"
Yes: the torrent distributor was involved in legal proceedings, currently in the discovery phase. This was a specific court order for the purposes of trying a particular case, rather than some blanket "Everyone must use Windows so we can spy on them!"
So, for a company to reach out to the Open Source community, they have to open up everything? Or is it just the stuff that some subset of the community really really wants?
Alternate question: do you think there is as much value returned to society when a music copyright expires, as when a medical patent expires?
Not saying that music should have a long term, but there's a reason for making patent terms short: so that the rest of society can derive value from the idea. This is especially valid for your hypothetical "cure for AIDS".
Do you actually think that most people who use pirated software would use open source if only "genuine Windows" were available?
Most people I know who pirate Windows aren't anti-Microsoft or even violently cheap. Instead, such "crimes" are usually crimes of opportunity: someone at school or the office offers to let them borrow their Windows disk, or hands out cracked CDs because it amuses them. It's obviously cheaper, so of course they'll use the illegal disk. But if such a thing weren't available, most people will bite the bullet and pay for Windows because it's what they're comfortable with.
...with more information, pictures, and a little video. Oh! And a link to a PDF of the actual article.
http://www.mvac.uiuc.edu/network.html
I'm too tired to do the math, but as for disadvantages: living in 2x gravity for a long time would put a tremendous stress on your body. A short fall, maybe even simply tripping, could result in broken bones. Your heart would have to work much harder, possibly weakening it in the long term; your risk for cardiac problems would certainly increase. And so on.
In the long run, your heart would get used to it and your bones might get stronger, but some damage would almost certainly be done. OTOH, you'd likely emerge much stronger physically; but unless you worked out quite a bit, you'd stand no chance of keeping it long-term in "low" gravity.
Let us not forget that Bill Gates went to India in 2002 and gave $100 million to fight AIDS, which received great press. What the main-stream media failed to report was that $421 million of Microsoft's money at the time went to fight Linux and Free Software.
Because of course the man's personal spending habits and those of his company are a valid comparison, and he has total control over every action Microsoft takes.
Whatever else you may think of the man, you can't make a comparison like this to show his priorities. Many others are involved in decisions of where to spend Microsoft's money, and as rich as he is, I imagine $100 million means more to him than $400 million to Microsoft.
Makes me wonder if it would make more sense to nationalize Google's index and share it amongst competitors (just like it makes more sense for goverments to build airports and share them amongst airlines rather than every airline building its own airports).
Or, better yet, Google or another indexer could index all the information itself, thus driving competitors out of business. The difference between your cases is that while governments build airports to share, Google has already built the index which would be "nationalized"--therefore taking away almost all the company's benefit for having done so. Good for all their competitors (free information!), but incredibly bad for the company that did the work.
Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.
I agree with most of your points, but not with this one. A national curriculum works well only when the panel of "leaders" is selected based on some objective measure of success... instead of popularity or political beliefs, as is more often the case. If a national panel was appointed now to decide biology curricula, it would most likely include a section on "intelligent design", limited details on evolution and a special topic on the evils of stealing biological intellectual property.
Local curriculum decisions can be just as stupid, but there are a lot of local school boards. Different decisions will be made in different cities, so that someone at least will probably get it right, and someone will be trained in every side of issues where there really is no consensus. Sometimes variation is good. It doesn't necessarily do much for the student whose school board is chronically idiotic, but does make it more likely that nation as a whole will have a supply of well-trained students.
Note that this view is pretty well confined to K-12 education: I agree on the need for higher-level standards in professional qualifications, such as medical or engineering professions (though even there I'd say state, not national). But in general, encouraging independent thought and variation between communities is a good thing.