It clearly did not amount to sexual assault of a minor. It was found to be an unwarranted search. There was no suggestion that there was any assault or anything approaching it. Furthermore, there was no finding that strip searches are illegal, merely that one was not warranted in these circumstances.
It may be too late in the discussion for this to get any notice, but I have access to the journal where this research was published and I thought I'd share a few details. In summary, it is much better science than the/. crowd seems to think, the researchers have done their homework, and I haven't seen any posts here that raise serious methodological issues that are not somehow addressed in the work. This wasn't just some guys hanging out in a night club asking for cigarettes.
Basically, they had three studies. The first was purely observational -- they "unobtrusively" observed interactions between people in the nightclub that started face-to-face and noted whether these progressed to talking in the right ear or the left ear. They adjusted for gender of speaker/listener, and other bias.
The second study (which they refer to as "quasi-experimental") involved a female aware of the study but unaware of the hypothesis who would approach subjects (equal # male and female) face-to-face and say something unintelligible. If the subject turned one ear, she would then ask for a cigarette in the ear they offered. She always asked the same question, and only asked people whom she had not seen smoking (to prevent social effects that might bias people toward sharing).
In the third study (also "quasi-experimental"), which is the one referred to most here, the female (still unaware of the hypothesis) now approached subjects from the front, but instead of allowing the subject to choose the ear, she selected left or right ear. Again, equal numbers of males/females were approached, and used the same question each time and still only approached subjects she had not seen smoking.
The second and third studies were performed at different times, so there's no effect of people getting sick of this chick bumming cigs, and there were a number of other controls. In the first study, there was a conclusion that there is significant bias toward offering a particular ear. In the second, there was no significant trend for complying with the request for a cigarette in right vs left ear. In the third, several trends were found -- the main result announced in the thread that the right ear resulted in more positive outcomes, and also (not surprisingly) that men were more likely to offer a cigarette to the female when asked.
Anyway, this is not junk science. There's a lot more to the study than the paragraph in the Telegraph told you about.
The authors thought of that (I read the actual paper discussed by the article which goes into detail in their methods). I'm going to make a more comprehensive post about the methods and conclusions in a moment, but because your hypothesis is an important one, I'm posting this. In all of the interactions they included in their analysis, the initial approach was face-on. This should rule out varying comfort based on direction of approach.
The technical term, mistranslated as it may be (I'll take your word for it), says you're "begging the question" to prove itself, the same way you might "beg mommy" to get you that new toy.
It's true that you can "beg x" meaning "beg for x," but that's not a construction that is used nearly so often in my experience. The popularity of the particular phrase "begs the question" clearly results from misuse of the technical term in an attempt to sound academic. Furthermore, it's a trite, over-used construction. Using the term in its technical sense is ok because it is a specific term; using it otherwise is a poor choice of language, IMO.
That said, it sure is fun to rehash this debate every time someone uses a phrase "[verb]s the question" on here, isn't it? Thanks for keeping it civil...
I absolutely agree you should be polite and pleasant to the employees (at least, to a degree compatible with their professionalism; if they're jerks, by all means lay into them). But I don't think you need to make their job "easy" by rolling over and following their script if it doesn't make sense. There's nothing wrong with insisting on getting the help you need. It is part of their job to handle unusual circumstances; certainly if they want to get better paying jobs (i.e., management, etc), the experience is going to be good.
If you're not being polite and/or if you're making an outrageous request, then you're out of line, and that's a major peeve of mine.
Except the "common usage" phrasing doesn't even make sense when parsed. "Raises the question" is not only technically and pedantically correct, it makes more sense as a phrase. I think we're all better served by learning proper and precise language, and I give kudos to the PP who actually gave a helpful, informative, polite correction without the usual pedant's dickitry.
It sounds like when the low-level suckers actually put in a simple call to the higher-ups, he got what he wanted from someone with the authority to bend the rules. It shouldn't take 2 hours of struggle to get them to make that call. Furthermore, if it's possible to make that sort of transaction, the store run by the business you're trying to purchase from ought to be a reasonable place to make first contact.
Also, I bristle at the idea that we owe it to the people working for mismanaged companies to shield them from the pain that results from that mismanagement. Like it or not, they are the point of contact representing that company and that's why they get paid. If they can't provide assistance, then either they're incompetent or the organization is going to lose a sale. I'd say that he did them a favor by talking them into escalating so he could continue purchasing. If he went to the shop next door instead, that doesn't do them any favors either.
The employer is required to pay taxes on the amount he pays his employees. As long as the employees properly accounted for the extra income they obtained by selling their currency above its face value, they would not be violating the law (except perhaps for conspiracy or the like if they were more involved in the employer's scheme). The employer, however, clearly knew of the excess value beyond the face value and that needs to be reported.
It's not that hard, or uncommon, to force reasonable values on exchanges like this. In Massachusetts (and probably other states), when you buy a used car, your sales tax responsibility is based on the blue book value for a car of that age and condition, not the actual selling price. This prevents tax dodging by under-reporting the sale price and using some other transaction or gift to hide the actual price. Even beyond minimum wage, it would not be hard (nor unreasonable) to compare the value of the exchange with the going rate for the service in question. If it's way out of whack then asking why is quite sensible. In this case, it's absolutely clear that the intention is to hide wages, and that violates the law.
If you already have the understanding, why are you taking the class? If you need the particular class for a requirement, and you already have the understanding, it shouldn't be hard to do the work the old fashioned way. In my experience a lot of the people who claim to have such a deep understanding that they shouldn't be bothered to go through the motions are seriously overestimating their own abilities.
So I don't think it's unreasonable for graphing calculators or things like Wolfram Alpha to be disallowed for certain classes. That being said, labelling it academic misconduct is pretty unreasonable.
I agree that it's appropriate for some classes, inappropriate for others. However, if the instructor for the class declares that it's off limits, then it is certainly misconduct to disregard that direct instruction. Much the same way as instructors can set the collaboration policy (at least at some schools), they should be allowed to make the decision about what tools to permit.
No, you don't. But you do need to pay any use tax in your home state, which is usually equal to its sales tax. In the states I'm aware of, you're legally required to self-report these sales to the state and pay along with your income tax at the end of the year.
Unless you were providing them with some sort of service or consideration that a "reasonable person" might consider worth $1M, I don't think any court would uphold such an "agreement." You'd have a huge hurdle to overcome to demonstrate the "meeting of the minds" necessary for a valid contract.
C should always have the slight edge in a fair comparison because Fortran tries to make things easy for the programmer
That's only if you consider "fair" in a nonsensical way -- i.e., if by "fair" you mean that the code in both cases is completely optimal for the language and you're just comparing the efficiency of the CPU's executing the language. That's not what I would call fair -- fair is more along the lines of equal programmer time to generate the solution, since that's a more meaningful real-world metric. In that case, I wouldn't even raise an eyebrow when the more programmer-friendly solution provides the faster performance. This is, after all, part of why Python and other scripting languages have become so popular for numerical processing. The parts that are compute cycle limited are implemented in underlying libraries (Fortran or C) by people who take the time to optimize them. The high level interface makes it easier to assemble those blocks in an efficient way.
Good post, thanks. As you say, and as I alluded to, the very existence of an environment in which you can make a purchase quietly depends on services that your tax dollars provide, and that you can't possibly opt out of.
You're certainly right that there are fantastic private libraries. However, I think funding public libraries is still critically important -- I'm not sure if you were disagreeing with that notion or not. The reason for the value is that it guarantees there will be an entity preserving the information that is beholden to society as a whole, not the particular interests of a person or group.
Whenever I buy something in a store, there is very, very, very, little that the government did for me.
Other than provide the safety regulations to minimize the risk the product harms you, the advertising regulations to minimize the chance you are scammed, etc, etc. Your commercial transaction occurs in a complicated environment, much of which is government funded, much of which serves to protect you (nominally, obviously you can debate the efficacy).
In general, I don't think there are many government services that you can fund on a pay-per-use basis. Fire department? Are you kidding? Many places in the country, they have to put your fire out to keep it from spreading to your neighbors. Having a patchwork of private providers mixed in would be a nightmare. For police, similarly -- take all the issues we have with police brutality, privacy violation, etc, and now throw in groups who are not directly run by a group (nominally, at least) constrained by Constitutional limits? No thanks.
Throw in the fact that you're going to have to construct an enormous infrastructure to monitor who's paying for what, whether you get access to x y or z service, etc, and I think a lot of the purported benefit is going to go out the window. Also, for many of these (e.g., libraries), there is more benefit than simply "what do I get today?" Sure, you could allow for private libraries, but they would be driven solely by profit motive. Public libraries serve as important record-keepers and generally provide a service to society in a more general sense than just a pay-for-service sense. Look at the book selection in your typical bookstore and compare it to that in the library. In my experience, the library is a much better place for obscure or old books-- the purpose of the library is to preserve information. The purpose of the bookstore is to sell books. They're both valuable, but sometimes very different.
Did you hear that sound? That was the fun being sucked out of learning electrical engineering!
Yeah, this is a complicated way to build a sound meter. Yes, it has obvious stability and noise problems and there's certainly a lot left to do. Yes, this is a blatant Slashvertisement. Still, while not news, I think it's both "fun" and "interesting." If the purpose was to build a better, more robust sound meter, yeah, they failed. But it is a cute project you can do to learn something about the CPU and the transistor, which was the point.
Despite your objections, the device worked. The lights light up when the sound gets louder. If you build a couple of these, you might notice that they have different response, or that they light up brighter when they get warmer, or that they get spikes. You might investigate these and learn about some of the problems with the design. But it's a lot more educationally interesting to build the neat gadget that mostly works first, rather than get hung up on the details and never get around to the punch.
That raises the question as to why law enforcement organizations are permitted to buy commercial products. The need for traceable, reliable products ought to compel compliance with a serious standard, where designs are adhered to, testing is complete, etc.
Funny, you "rarely" need to use commercial (what you call "non-free) software. I never need to use free software.
Great for you. Just like the existence of bad free software, the existence of good commercial software doesn't diminish the quantity of good free software.
It is about as meaningless as the signal to noise ration. I bet you can't understand that eiter, eh fanboy?
Wow, nice flame. Your mother must be proud. Why don't you go upstairs and ask her? Funny that you call me the fanboy when you are the one who apparently never uses software you don't pay for, but seem to be an expert on its quantity and quality. Something doesn't add up.
Have you actually looked for free software in the last 5 years? Once upon a time finding a software package actually meant digging through heaps of crap. Now there are enough solid distributions whose staff do that for you. For obscure software needs, it may be more difficult. The same is true of commercial software. Paying for an application is no guarantee of quality...
Anyway, go back and read my first post again. I said there is a lot of good free software. There is. If you're happy paying for software that may or may not work the way you'd like, you're never going to want to make it do something it doesn't already do, then feel free to ignore it.
First of all, you ignore that in that free utopia, someone who did have an interest in the mac might pick up your software and port it for you.
What you say may be true, but there seem to be people who are interested in producing quality free software, even when it means fixing the bastard bugs. After all, many of these people are actually users of the software. If a bug is seriously impeding the software in some way, they'll have their own self-interested reasons to fix it. If a bug is severe enough that it is going to amount to a serious loss in sales, that becomes more and more likely.
Yes. There is. Enough that I very rarely find myself needing to use non-free software.
The existence of bad free software does not reduce the quantity of good free software. Measuring as a ratio of all the free software is silly. Sure, that ratio probably tilts toward commercial software, but that is a meaningless statistic. The question is simply whether with a reasonable amount of effort you can obtain the application you need -- thanks to the hard work of a lot of people, there are a number of reliable Linux distributions that make this a simple task for most ordinary software needs.
Slashdot Mirror
It clearly did not amount to sexual assault of a minor. It was found to be an unwarranted search. There was no suggestion that there was any assault or anything approaching it. Furthermore, there was no finding that strip searches are illegal, merely that one was not warranted in these circumstances.
Except now the law is firmly established by the Supreme Court. That might change the liability question if someone repeated this or a similar action.
It may be too late in the discussion for this to get any notice, but I have access to the journal where this research was published and I thought I'd share a few details. In summary, it is much better science than the /. crowd seems to think, the researchers have done their homework, and I haven't seen any posts here that raise serious methodological issues that are not somehow addressed in the work. This wasn't just some guys hanging out in a night club asking for cigarettes.
Basically, they had three studies. The first was purely observational -- they "unobtrusively" observed interactions between people in the nightclub that started face-to-face and noted whether these progressed to talking in the right ear or the left ear. They adjusted for gender of speaker/listener, and other bias.
The second study (which they refer to as "quasi-experimental") involved a female aware of the study but unaware of the hypothesis who would approach subjects (equal # male and female) face-to-face and say something unintelligible. If the subject turned one ear, she would then ask for a cigarette in the ear they offered. She always asked the same question, and only asked people whom she had not seen smoking (to prevent social effects that might bias people toward sharing).
In the third study (also "quasi-experimental"), which is the one referred to most here, the female (still unaware of the hypothesis) now approached subjects from the front, but instead of allowing the subject to choose the ear, she selected left or right ear. Again, equal numbers of males/females were approached, and used the same question each time and still only approached subjects she had not seen smoking.
The second and third studies were performed at different times, so there's no effect of people getting sick of this chick bumming cigs, and there were a number of other controls. In the first study, there was a conclusion that there is significant bias toward offering a particular ear. In the second, there was no significant trend for complying with the request for a cigarette in right vs left ear. In the third, several trends were found -- the main result announced in the thread that the right ear resulted in more positive outcomes, and also (not surprisingly) that men were more likely to offer a cigarette to the female when asked.
Anyway, this is not junk science. There's a lot more to the study than the paragraph in the Telegraph told you about.
The authors thought of that (I read the actual paper discussed by the article which goes into detail in their methods). I'm going to make a more comprehensive post about the methods and conclusions in a moment, but because your hypothesis is an important one, I'm posting this. In all of the interactions they included in their analysis, the initial approach was face-on. This should rule out varying comfort based on direction of approach.
The technical term, mistranslated as it may be (I'll take your word for it), says you're "begging the question" to prove itself, the same way you might "beg mommy" to get you that new toy.
It's true that you can "beg x" meaning "beg for x," but that's not a construction that is used nearly so often in my experience. The popularity of the particular phrase "begs the question" clearly results from misuse of the technical term in an attempt to sound academic. Furthermore, it's a trite, over-used construction. Using the term in its technical sense is ok because it is a specific term; using it otherwise is a poor choice of language, IMO.
That said, it sure is fun to rehash this debate every time someone uses a phrase "[verb]s the question" on here, isn't it? Thanks for keeping it civil...
It sounds like we are in pretty good agreement.
I absolutely agree you should be polite and pleasant to the employees (at least, to a degree compatible with their professionalism; if they're jerks, by all means lay into them). But I don't think you need to make their job "easy" by rolling over and following their script if it doesn't make sense. There's nothing wrong with insisting on getting the help you need. It is part of their job to handle unusual circumstances; certainly if they want to get better paying jobs (i.e., management, etc), the experience is going to be good.
If you're not being polite and/or if you're making an outrageous request, then you're out of line, and that's a major peeve of mine.
Except the "common usage" phrasing doesn't even make sense when parsed. "Raises the question" is not only technically and pedantically correct, it makes more sense as a phrase. I think we're all better served by learning proper and precise language, and I give kudos to the PP who actually gave a helpful, informative, polite correction without the usual pedant's dickitry.
It sounds like when the low-level suckers actually put in a simple call to the higher-ups, he got what he wanted from someone with the authority to bend the rules. It shouldn't take 2 hours of struggle to get them to make that call. Furthermore, if it's possible to make that sort of transaction, the store run by the business you're trying to purchase from ought to be a reasonable place to make first contact.
Also, I bristle at the idea that we owe it to the people working for mismanaged companies to shield them from the pain that results from that mismanagement. Like it or not, they are the point of contact representing that company and that's why they get paid. If they can't provide assistance, then either they're incompetent or the organization is going to lose a sale. I'd say that he did them a favor by talking them into escalating so he could continue purchasing. If he went to the shop next door instead, that doesn't do them any favors either.
Somehow this is modded "+2 Insightful" -- I think it should probably be "+5 Whoosh!"
The employer is required to pay taxes on the amount he pays his employees. As long as the employees properly accounted for the extra income they obtained by selling their currency above its face value, they would not be violating the law (except perhaps for conspiracy or the like if they were more involved in the employer's scheme). The employer, however, clearly knew of the excess value beyond the face value and that needs to be reported.
It's not that hard, or uncommon, to force reasonable values on exchanges like this. In Massachusetts (and probably other states), when you buy a used car, your sales tax responsibility is based on the blue book value for a car of that age and condition, not the actual selling price. This prevents tax dodging by under-reporting the sale price and using some other transaction or gift to hide the actual price. Even beyond minimum wage, it would not be hard (nor unreasonable) to compare the value of the exchange with the going rate for the service in question. If it's way out of whack then asking why is quite sensible. In this case, it's absolutely clear that the intention is to hide wages, and that violates the law.
If you already have the understanding, why are you taking the class? If you need the particular class for a requirement, and you already have the understanding, it shouldn't be hard to do the work the old fashioned way. In my experience a lot of the people who claim to have such a deep understanding that they shouldn't be bothered to go through the motions are seriously overestimating their own abilities.
So I don't think it's unreasonable for graphing calculators or things like Wolfram Alpha to be disallowed for certain classes. That being said, labelling it academic misconduct is pretty unreasonable.
I agree that it's appropriate for some classes, inappropriate for others. However, if the instructor for the class declares that it's off limits, then it is certainly misconduct to disregard that direct instruction. Much the same way as instructors can set the collaboration policy (at least at some schools), they should be allowed to make the decision about what tools to permit.
No, you don't. But you do need to pay any use tax in your home state, which is usually equal to its sales tax. In the states I'm aware of, you're legally required to self-report these sales to the state and pay along with your income tax at the end of the year.
Shouldn't be too hard, they just have to get Elsevier to create a phony journal for them and they're golden.
Unless you were providing them with some sort of service or consideration that a "reasonable person" might consider worth $1M, I don't think any court would uphold such an "agreement." You'd have a huge hurdle to overcome to demonstrate the "meeting of the minds" necessary for a valid contract.
C should always have the slight edge in a fair comparison because Fortran tries to make things easy for the programmer
That's only if you consider "fair" in a nonsensical way -- i.e., if by "fair" you mean that the code in both cases is completely optimal for the language and you're just comparing the efficiency of the CPU's executing the language. That's not what I would call fair -- fair is more along the lines of equal programmer time to generate the solution, since that's a more meaningful real-world metric. In that case, I wouldn't even raise an eyebrow when the more programmer-friendly solution provides the faster performance. This is, after all, part of why Python and other scripting languages have become so popular for numerical processing. The parts that are compute cycle limited are implemented in underlying libraries (Fortran or C) by people who take the time to optimize them. The high level interface makes it easier to assemble those blocks in an efficient way.
Good post, thanks. As you say, and as I alluded to, the very existence of an environment in which you can make a purchase quietly depends on services that your tax dollars provide, and that you can't possibly opt out of.
You're certainly right that there are fantastic private libraries. However, I think funding public libraries is still critically important -- I'm not sure if you were disagreeing with that notion or not. The reason for the value is that it guarantees there will be an entity preserving the information that is beholden to society as a whole, not the particular interests of a person or group.
Whenever I buy something in a store, there is very, very, very, little that the government did for me.
Other than provide the safety regulations to minimize the risk the product harms you, the advertising regulations to minimize the chance you are scammed, etc, etc. Your commercial transaction occurs in a complicated environment, much of which is government funded, much of which serves to protect you (nominally, obviously you can debate the efficacy).
In general, I don't think there are many government services that you can fund on a pay-per-use basis. Fire department? Are you kidding? Many places in the country, they have to put your fire out to keep it from spreading to your neighbors. Having a patchwork of private providers mixed in would be a nightmare. For police, similarly -- take all the issues we have with police brutality, privacy violation, etc, and now throw in groups who are not directly run by a group (nominally, at least) constrained by Constitutional limits? No thanks.
Throw in the fact that you're going to have to construct an enormous infrastructure to monitor who's paying for what, whether you get access to x y or z service, etc, and I think a lot of the purported benefit is going to go out the window. Also, for many of these (e.g., libraries), there is more benefit than simply "what do I get today?" Sure, you could allow for private libraries, but they would be driven solely by profit motive. Public libraries serve as important record-keepers and generally provide a service to society in a more general sense than just a pay-for-service sense. Look at the book selection in your typical bookstore and compare it to that in the library. In my experience, the library is a much better place for obscure or old books-- the purpose of the library is to preserve information. The purpose of the bookstore is to sell books. They're both valuable, but sometimes very different.
Now now, let's be careful. This thread is already inflammable.
Craigslist has the support of the people. Why wouldn't they? It's free, has no ads, and always works as promised.
If it really had no ads, I don't think that could be described as "working as promised"... ;-P
Did you hear that sound? That was the fun being sucked out of learning electrical engineering!
Yeah, this is a complicated way to build a sound meter. Yes, it has obvious stability and noise problems and there's certainly a lot left to do. Yes, this is a blatant Slashvertisement. Still, while not news, I think it's both "fun" and "interesting." If the purpose was to build a better, more robust sound meter, yeah, they failed. But it is a cute project you can do to learn something about the CPU and the transistor, which was the point.
Despite your objections, the device worked. The lights light up when the sound gets louder. If you build a couple of these, you might notice that they have different response, or that they light up brighter when they get warmer, or that they get spikes. You might investigate these and learn about some of the problems with the design. But it's a lot more educationally interesting to build the neat gadget that mostly works first, rather than get hung up on the details and never get around to the punch.
That raises the question as to why law enforcement organizations are permitted to buy commercial products. The need for traceable, reliable products ought to compel compliance with a serious standard, where designs are adhered to, testing is complete, etc.
Funny, you "rarely" need to use commercial (what you call "non-free) software. I never need to use free software.
Great for you. Just like the existence of bad free software, the existence of good commercial software doesn't diminish the quantity of good free software.
It is about as meaningless as the signal to noise ration. I bet you can't understand that eiter, eh fanboy?
Wow, nice flame. Your mother must be proud. Why don't you go upstairs and ask her? Funny that you call me the fanboy when you are the one who apparently never uses software you don't pay for, but seem to be an expert on its quantity and quality. Something doesn't add up.
Have you actually looked for free software in the last 5 years? Once upon a time finding a software package actually meant digging through heaps of crap. Now there are enough solid distributions whose staff do that for you. For obscure software needs, it may be more difficult. The same is true of commercial software. Paying for an application is no guarantee of quality...
Anyway, go back and read my first post again. I said there is a lot of good free software. There is. If you're happy paying for software that may or may not work the way you'd like, you're never going to want to make it do something it doesn't already do, then feel free to ignore it.
First of all, you ignore that in that free utopia, someone who did have an interest in the mac might pick up your software and port it for you.
What you say may be true, but there seem to be people who are interested in producing quality free software, even when it means fixing the bastard bugs. After all, many of these people are actually users of the software. If a bug is seriously impeding the software in some way, they'll have their own self-interested reasons to fix it. If a bug is severe enough that it is going to amount to a serious loss in sales, that becomes more and more likely.
Yes. There is. Enough that I very rarely find myself needing to use non-free software.
The existence of bad free software does not reduce the quantity of good free software. Measuring as a ratio of all the free software is silly. Sure, that ratio probably tilts toward commercial software, but that is a meaningless statistic. The question is simply whether with a reasonable amount of effort you can obtain the application you need -- thanks to the hard work of a lot of people, there are a number of reliable Linux distributions that make this a simple task for most ordinary software needs.