Just because you can face your accuser in this case doesn't make what he's doing any WORSE than other surveilance. But people feel it is because they associate it with a person. Any strong power that can make use of this advantage will have a very strong position of power due to the information imbalance.
The output of surveillance cameras are vastly different than regular cameras. They provide an unappealing high-above kind of view. They are as exciting as watching the satellite views of cities, informative but ugly. Security guards will have to be trained to comprehend the output of these videos rather than these videos producing a vision of peeping tom's fantasy. I don't see surveillance video monitoring security guard more appealing a job than a plain old security guard job.
In the future, everyone will have wearable cameras and record everything. In Russia, dashcams are required by law and I'm sure it will be the same in the US as well in the future. Cyclists and runners are advised to have some sort of helmet or chest cam in case of accidents. Flash memory storage is getting cheaper and as low power video encoding boards come to market, it will be a part of our cellphone computing environment we carry around. In the future, it won't be just one person recording but everyone doing it.
You're also overestimating China's position. There are plenty of rare earth metals outside of China. It's actually to China's detriment that they're the chief supplier right now. As the supply of easily accessible minerals goes down, the value will go up -- the countries that wait the longest before ramping production will benefit the most. As for consumer electronics, what are they going to do? Stop making iPhones? If anything, that could be a short term boon to our economy, as we would suddenly have a motive to build a bunch of new factories and hire a bunch of workers. The increased cost of electronics would bug people for a while, but eventually they'd get used to it, and maybe even stop throwing away perfectly good phones every couple years. Meanwhile, what happens to China's economy when they cut out their largest trade partner?
They can use it give an advantage to their local industry. China is behind technologically and everyone is actively trying to make sure the Chinese don't get their hands on it. If China can give a slight advantage to their home industry and hope that the future leaders in electronics industry might be born from this. Even a tiny advantage might have a multiplier effect and take China to par with the rest of the world technologically.
As for paranoia, the US should be paranoid about Cisco stuff be made in China. It certainly gives me the willies.
Don't worry, the generation after you won't share the same sentiment. Each successive generation have seen larger and larger portions of the world as their "empathy circle". People identifying themselves by country is just a few generations old; before that people identified themselves more by the city or province they were from and before that a clan they belonged to. The future generations will see the a Chinese as just another person living their lives and trying to generally make things better. They certainly won't get willies imagining them as enemies fervently trying to take something away from you.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Japan was the one copying, making knockouts and whatnot. But what happened is exactly what you described: they learned. And that is exactly what is happening to China right now.
Just because China and Japan share some similarities does not mean they will keep increasing their similarity. The world is at a different stage now than when Japan was starting out. Power was manufacturing then but now it's information and knowledge. It was about making stuff back then but now it's about creating stuff. The modern environment may not take China where Japan went.
On one side, when China is sufficiently ahead technologically, China may decide not to be the factory of the world and dedicate millions of people and billions of yuan to research into curing cancer, solving clean energy problems and so on and generally making the lives better instead chasing consumerism. The Chinese authorities have to make things better for the population every year for everyone to be quiet and maybe everyone will have quality of life above the west European countries eventually because of this.
Or they may the big Japan producing gizmos for the world, slowly producing mega-corporations.
Or they may crash and burn.
There is a lot of murmur that capitalism has served well in the manufacturing phase of our human history but might not be best suited for post-manufacturing economies. Sitting around waiting for someone somewhere to make some breakthrough and creating industries out of it might not be the best way forward. Maybe national and global push towards solving the world's problems might be the way instead of hoping the invisible hand fixes it. Maybe a system like China where large central decisions are made and pseudo-capitalism creates efficiencies in those central pushes is the best way forward, or maybe the old communist ugliness will rear it's ugly head and create massive inefficiencies. I guess we have to wait and see where the world is headed and in that frame where China will be.
.. Only difference between us and them is their supply of sweets ran out pretty quick, then they had to spend a huge amount of that energy to chase down some creature that didn't want to be ate.
Which animal is made of "sweets"? You imagining running down chocolate bunnies?
And, besides the body uses fat as fuel as well; esp for running where training the body for metabolizing fat efficiently is considered a vital step for running performance.
Cravings is body's method of telling us it needs a certain type of nutrient. We have sweet cravings and cravings of oily food, sour food etc etc.
Craving for sweet is natural but modern sweets are not natural. The amount of sugar present far exceeds that is found in natural food and is not mixed in with dietary fiber like in natural sweet foods. Eating these modern foods completely disrupts our natural system and thus, the source of the problems.
The daily reference intake for sugar states that added sugar should nto exceed 25% of calories.
For a 2000 Cal intake that is 500 Cal. The 7-eleven shitty "super gulps" and whatever exceed this
in a single serving.
If you run/bike an hour in the morning, then the equation completely changes. Some people train in endurance sports, some have jobs that requires a constant use of the body muscles. That equation only holds for desk job people who don't exercise.
Sometimes people buy it and split it among two.
If you ask me they should just go and make a law that a single serving cannot contain more than
50% of the reference intake. That way you can sell those stupid 5 pint "drinks". You just would not
be allowed to have half a pound of sugar in them.
The government reference tables are already messed up because of the daily percentage requirement on the labels.
People crave sugar because it kept their ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors alive. Those who sought and consumed high energy foods when they were available stored up energy to last them through the harsh times. This continues into modern times. Humans are genetically programmed to desire foods laden with fat and sugar above all else. All that has changed is the availability - where those ancestors would have had to search for unpicked fruit or brave the bees to steal honey, modern man just guzzles down coke whenever he wants to. He always wants to.
For fuck's sake! This is why some people hate evolution.
I can make this argument using evolutionary theory: hunter gatherers didn't eat sweet stuff, they were primarily meat eaters since fruits are seasonal and not available all year round. Sugar is an artificial modern creation and modern fruits are breeds with the most sugar. We crave sugar because eating modern sweet foods messes up our system that was never designed to eat sweet stuff.
Evolutionary theory can be used to explain anything. Please don't fall into that trap of justifying your position using the theory of evolution.
people with high cholesterol have more heart attacks; lipitor reduces cholesterol
There is a tacit assumption here that high cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. It has been suggested that heart disease is the cause of high cholesterol - the body is circulating more cholesterol in the blood to repair heart damage. In this scenario, reducing the cholesterol with liptor does not make sense.
It's the sort of empty-headed 'gotcha' phrase that's so popular and so often used without real thought behind it.
Some researchers believe that the belief that dietary cholesterol causes heart disease is borne out of a faulty correlation-causation study. Heat disease is the largest killer in the United States and it could be that the foundation of what we believe of this disease is false. You think that's empty headed?
National policies are based on studies which are based on statistics. The national obesity epidemic is believed to be caused by policies based on studies with bad foundations.
This is one of the most serious errors that can be made in scientific studies and there are still many many studies that still make this error.
If you hear something like coffee lowers the risk of cancer/Alzheimer/diabetes/heart disease etc. they are correlation studies where the researches are speculating on the causation but the media is reporting the causation as the result of the study.
In what sense, exactly does science grow more powerful? In my experience, sciences grows more expensive, less funded, more hyped, less understood, and overall less heeded.
The answer lies in the origins of the phrase "paradigm shift" by Kuhn.
The advancement of science does not work the way you say it does completely as investigated by Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". When a new field is introduced, it grows more expensive, complicated etc with time but real scientific advancements come from "breakthroughs" that create a new field. What Kuhn coined "paradigm shift" (but now has been kinda bastardized by business speak).
To put it another way: correlation is an *observed* behaviour, causation is a *tested* behaviour.
The problem with this is what "tested" means. There many infinite variables that have to be fixed and a finite set varied on each test (making the testing time infinite).
Most researchers assume something does not affect something and ignore it as a variable. There are many results that have false causation because an ignored variable was hiding there.
Liking fast food is essentially chemistry. Science (yay, science!) has basically figured out what tastes good on the human taste bud. Fast food supplies this. Sure, you gourmands out there will choke and puke at the thought of fast food, but that is purely social conditioning (the kind that intelligent people insist they're too smart to fall for). Take someone with no preconceptions, say a barbarian from a pre-modern society, and serve them two meals: one of a Big Mac and the other Thai-Burmese-Argentinian fusion or whatever is considered haute cuisine these days, and the barbie will pick the Big Mac every time.
Fast food, at least in the USA, is just not about hacking the human taste but doing so at the cheapest possible price point. Cooking oil is used longer than it should be and sourced from lower qualities. There is an indelible taste of cheap ingredients and methods in fast food.
As long as the cuisine is not restricted to be being low in fat or low in sugar, it will easily blow away fast food. Just using genuine butter and quality cheese to a burger will make it better. Easy to make better fries and drinks by using sugar for sweetening and for fries good quality oils, animal fat or butter for frying. Use crispier vegetables, use flavorings better than ketchup etc. Then, there is numerous ways to make the meat taste better and add flavorings to the bun.
I think fast food is addictive because of the convenience and low cost. In the taste department, it's allright but you could make fast food yourself in minutes that's about the same quality if you set up your kitchen. A place to quickly grill meat and those small frying machines will get your fast food fix at similar quality in 5-10 minutes. If you're generous with the cheese, dressing and fats, it will even taste better.
I don't really share your adulation for fast food.
You will be no more valuable, economically, than a dishwasher, a fry cook or a gardener. What will you do then? Sorry, I had to ask.
You also say that breakthroughs in computer visions combined with robotics will make the job of a dishwasher, fry cook and gardener obsolete.
The key point is that those breakthroughs that would make that happen hasn't occurred yet. Breakthroughs don't happen on a time table so soon might turn to be a long long time.
I wonder how that will work out? Seriously, since at least a century, we often had the best and brightest immigrants and I wonder how much that is skewing results? Something that MAY NOT continue. Especially if our fortunes go down, or our IP laws appear too restrictive.
Most of the immigrants are college level and beyond. I doubt they are doing scientific reasoning testing on college and graduate students. So, I don't think that factor plays into it. Or, did you mean that the kids of the best and brightest immigrants do better on the scientific reasoning test? Or maybe they do test it on college students? It doesn't say from the article.
Perhaps it's too early to measure China, or they suffer from too rigid a school system, or like Japan, their language is cumbersome it takes up a significant portion of schooling to just learn it, or as the one Ted Talks suggest - normal schools built on the factory model kill creativity, and so the asian ones must be doing that to an even greater degree.
I'm sick and tired of all the pet theories people have about China. Seems like everyone has a handful of these now.
But at least, like the fast food model, they ensure a minimum standard coming out. But that is public school's entire downfall. One size fits all. The person who wants to become the next doctor or scientific researcher is forced to do the same basic schooling as the person who just wants to fix cars until a ridiculously high grade.
Suburb public schools are miles better than downtown city public schools. Then, there are private schools and prep schools. Public schooling has a whole spectrum of quality.
I'm pretty sure by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be, who is mediocre and who the lazy slobs are. But that's 6th grade and still 3-4 more years are wasted on keeping everyone more or less the same. I'm pretty sure gymnastic teams or iceskating coaches need that long to spot who will be the talent and who will be the also ran.
This where the college you go to comes in. MIT, Caltech like schools choose the top students in engineering, others in athletics and so on.
But this is more than spotting stars in order to nurture them. Not everyone who does bad in school does bad in life. But the answer for them isn't always perpetually more years of school. We bought into the hype that formal education is the answer to everything that HR departments are requiring degrees for every little job and totally ignoring education outside the classroom that may be much better suited for training towards the work at hand. (I.e. the German model of apprenticeships).
Most jobs are given through word of mouth and not through HR departments. HR departments are there to find out what's wrong with you and not what's right with you.
The US is littered with policies and regulations built up on shaky statistical evidence. As an example, the policy of student confidence correlation with academic achievement. The idea was that since they are correlated if we increase student confidence we will increase academic achievement. We rank freakishly highest in student confidence but academic achievement isn't increasing.
The nation of the top scientific reasoners are satisfied with such statistical garbage is beyond belief. Does any of these statistical measures mean anything? How much is theories POTA (pulled out of the azule) and how much is statistically tested with all the factors accounted for. Even respectable papers do a bit of factor hiding. There was a paper that found that overweight patients in hospitals survive more from illness than normal weight patients - completely hiding the age factor in the statistical analysis. Normal weight patients who are admitted for illness were much much older than overweight patients!
Then the reaction of these news stories is always the same patterns: people with preconceived world view trying to fix the news to their views. Ooh, it doesn't say what happens 10 years into the future, ooh it shows public school policy X is bad etc etc.
My biggest fear with these UAV's is that we take the human factor out. I'm not talking about a human's ability to not kill innocent people--we know that is subjective--I'm talking about the military's decisions to carry out certain types of strikes when we literally have no "skin" in the game. It's already an issue with super accurate missiles and current generation of UAV's, these roomba-bombs may only make it worse.
Why do people keep saying this?
One of the major reasons for the effectiveness of the military is to be able to kill as thoughtlessly as possible. Before, it used to be a big problem that draftees or volunteers would not fire their weapons at enemies during battle. They implemented training routines to teach to shoot other human beings without thought to eliminate that problem.
You can see this everywhere in the military. For example, the military uses sanitized words for the process of killing. It's not enemies, it's hostiles. It's not killed, it's neutralized and so on.
What you describes still makes it a correlation study, just a well organized correlation study.
Taking your own quotes,
At any rate, what they don't know is what other chemical is causing this
blood caffeine levels, and found that those who drink a lot of coffee had the SAME identifiable immune response as the mice did, and that this immune response is also strongly correlated with protecting from further mental decline in humans.
It is still correlation.
Assuming there is causation, correlation is two way but causation might not be. Just because blood caffeine levels correlates with reduction of mental decline doesn't mean drinking more coffee will reduce mental decline. It could very well be that the reduced mental decline leads to the immune system pattern (or blood caffeine level).
Anyway, what you describe up there is not in the original article so you must know the research work from beyond the article I read.
Maybe coffee drinkers are correlated with something else that prevents Alzheimer's. I see no mention in the article that this is more than statistical correlation they have found.
Doing a controlled experiment where the only dietetic difference is the coffee is near impossible due to the cost.
Most recently, they reported that caffeine interacts with a yet unidentified component of coffee to boost blood levels of a critical growth factor that seems to fight off the Alzheimer’s disease process.
Typical conclusion section speculation from a correlation study IMHO.
I think it would be dangerous for people to drinking coffee assuming they are warding off Alzheimer's. Coffee has know to have bad effects on the body. It is a diuretic and a stimulant.
Most recently, they reported that caffeine interacts with a yet unidentified component of coffee to boost blood levels of a critical growth factor that seems to fight off the Alzheimer’s disease process.
to see that human relationship skills take practice and effort
Nope. Cats will catch a mouse if they've never seen a mouse before and will shadow hunt even if they've never seen a mouse before.
Human relationships skills are hard coded into us. Even if we don't have a relationship, we still shadow practice those skills and have mock conversations.
2. Drive for an hour and then pay for parking/drive around to find parking.
3. Arrive there 8PM and wait outside in a line for 0.5-1 hour (the establishment that you paid over $50 in tickets won't let you use the restroom because nobody is allowed inside until the band is ready).
4. Get inside. Wait indefinite time (from 1-1.5 hours) until the opening band starts.
5. After opening band finishes, wait another 1-1.5 hours for the band you paid tickets to start.
6. Show finishes.
You start around 6PM and you are done at 1-2AM. Eight hours to listen to a 1.5 hour set from the band you're supporting. Meanwhile, all this empty time you end up buying junk food and alcohol from the establishment.
I hate going to live shows because of this reason - it's a time sink. Why don't the musicians start their shows on time and print the time each band will be starting on the tickets so I arrive and enjoy the show and leave.
It's amazing to me how irrational people become as soon as the subject of food comes up. Science? Evidence? What's that? People convince themselves of all kinds of ridiculous ideas about food and nutrition, none of which have even the slightest shred of evidence to back them up. Probably because people don't want it to be simply a matter of calories. It's another example of intellectual hedonism. People don't want to believe that the quantity of food they are eating is just too much. So they simply choose not to believe it. Instead they invent some simple rule that does not rely on calorie counting or ever being hungry. Fat doesn't make you fat. Sugar doesn't make you fat. Preservatives and MSG don't make you fat. "Refined" foods don't make you fat. Fast food doesn't make you fat. Burgers and donuts don't make you fat. Even insulin doesn't make you fat. If you are overweight (as I am) the only thing you can blame is your own lack of self-control. It's calories that make you fat. Fat people simply eat too much for the amount of physical activity they engage in. You could live on pure fat or pure sugar and huge amounts of preservatives and lots of MSG and as long as you didn't exceed 1000 calories per day you wouldn't gain weight. In fact you would probably lose it.
Every set of observable statistics has infinite theories to explain it, from which only one is right. Since our nutritionists and scientists can't give us a straight answer and we are drowning in obesity, everyone is looking for alternate theories. Everyone has their own little pet theory on why we get fat and unless you have been designing and running experiments, analyzing data to confirm or deny your problem, you're part of the problem you mention.
Look at what we were able to achieve with HIV and AIDS. We should be putting our resources like that to the obesity epidemic and once and for all, figure out what the right theory to explain everything is.
Fat burning is meant to be an additional energy source, not the primary one.
Wrong!. It has already been shown (with isotopic tracking) that fat cells were meant to be a temporary buffer, not a storage device. Fat molecules don't get stored away, they go into fat cells and come out like in a buffer, no isotopic fats really get stored away in the fat cells.
As for going through the rest of your posts and going point through point and arguing about it, let me say that settling these kinds of arguments are the job of scientists not random slashdot posters.
The only reason why these "carbs are bad" - posts are marked as insightful is that most people don't want to admit that their own behaviour is a part of the problem.
Or maybe that people don't want to admit that they are genetic dinosaurs, their bodies not being able to handle modern foods is evolution bitslapping them into selection pressure.
Slashdot Mirror
The output of surveillance cameras are vastly different than regular cameras. They provide an unappealing high-above kind of view. They are as exciting as watching the satellite views of cities, informative but ugly. Security guards will have to be trained to comprehend the output of these videos rather than these videos producing a vision of peeping tom's fantasy. I don't see surveillance video monitoring security guard more appealing a job than a plain old security guard job.
In the future, everyone will have wearable cameras and record everything. In Russia, dashcams are required by law and I'm sure it will be the same in the US as well in the future. Cyclists and runners are advised to have some sort of helmet or chest cam in case of accidents. Flash memory storage is getting cheaper and as low power video encoding boards come to market, it will be a part of our cellphone computing environment we carry around. In the future, it won't be just one person recording but everyone doing it.
They can use it give an advantage to their local industry. China is behind technologically and everyone is actively trying to make sure the Chinese don't get their hands on it. If China can give a slight advantage to their home industry and hope that the future leaders in electronics industry might be born from this. Even a tiny advantage might have a multiplier effect and take China to par with the rest of the world technologically.
Don't worry, the generation after you won't share the same sentiment. Each successive generation have seen larger and larger portions of the world as their "empathy circle". People identifying themselves by country is just a few generations old; before that people identified themselves more by the city or province they were from and before that a clan they belonged to. The future generations will see the a Chinese as just another person living their lives and trying to generally make things better. They certainly won't get willies imagining them as enemies fervently trying to take something away from you.
Just because China and Japan share some similarities does not mean they will keep increasing their similarity. The world is at a different stage now than when Japan was starting out. Power was manufacturing then but now it's information and knowledge. It was about making stuff back then but now it's about creating stuff. The modern environment may not take China where Japan went.
On one side, when China is sufficiently ahead technologically, China may decide not to be the factory of the world and dedicate millions of people and billions of yuan to research into curing cancer, solving clean energy problems and so on and generally making the lives better instead chasing consumerism. The Chinese authorities have to make things better for the population every year for everyone to be quiet and maybe everyone will have quality of life above the west European countries eventually because of this.
Or they may the big Japan producing gizmos for the world, slowly producing mega-corporations.
Or they may crash and burn.
There is a lot of murmur that capitalism has served well in the manufacturing phase of our human history but might not be best suited for post-manufacturing economies. Sitting around waiting for someone somewhere to make some breakthrough and creating industries out of it might not be the best way forward. Maybe national and global push towards solving the world's problems might be the way instead of hoping the invisible hand fixes it. Maybe a system like China where large central decisions are made and pseudo-capitalism creates efficiencies in those central pushes is the best way forward, or maybe the old communist ugliness will rear it's ugly head and create massive inefficiencies. I guess we have to wait and see where the world is headed and in that frame where China will be.
Which animal is made of "sweets"? You imagining running down chocolate bunnies?
And, besides the body uses fat as fuel as well; esp for running where training the body for metabolizing fat efficiently is considered a vital step for running performance.
Cravings is body's method of telling us it needs a certain type of nutrient. We have sweet cravings and cravings of oily food, sour food etc etc.
Craving for sweet is natural but modern sweets are not natural. The amount of sugar present far exceeds that is found in natural food and is not mixed in with dietary fiber like in natural sweet foods. Eating these modern foods completely disrupts our natural system and thus, the source of the problems.
If you run/bike an hour in the morning, then the equation completely changes. Some people train in endurance sports, some have jobs that requires a constant use of the body muscles. That equation only holds for desk job people who don't exercise.
Sometimes people buy it and split it among two.
The government reference tables are already messed up because of the daily percentage requirement on the labels.
What flaw in human psychology?
Has it been verified outside laboratory conditions?
For fuck's sake! This is why some people hate evolution.
I can make this argument using evolutionary theory: hunter gatherers didn't eat sweet stuff, they were primarily meat eaters since fruits are seasonal and not available all year round. Sugar is an artificial modern creation and modern fruits are breeds with the most sugar. We crave sugar because eating modern sweet foods messes up our system that was never designed to eat sweet stuff.
Evolutionary theory can be used to explain anything. Please don't fall into that trap of justifying your position using the theory of evolution.
There is a tacit assumption here that high cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. It has been suggested that heart disease is the cause of high cholesterol - the body is circulating more cholesterol in the blood to repair heart damage. In this scenario, reducing the cholesterol with liptor does not make sense.
Some researchers believe that the belief that dietary cholesterol causes heart disease is borne out of a faulty correlation-causation study. Heat disease is the largest killer in the United States and it could be that the foundation of what we believe of this disease is false. You think that's empty headed?
National policies are based on studies which are based on statistics. The national obesity epidemic is believed to be caused by policies based on studies with bad foundations.
This is one of the most serious errors that can be made in scientific studies and there are still many many studies that still make this error.
If you hear something like coffee lowers the risk of cancer/Alzheimer/diabetes/heart disease etc. they are correlation studies where the researches are speculating on the causation but the media is reporting the causation as the result of the study.
The answer lies in the origins of the phrase "paradigm shift" by Kuhn.
The advancement of science does not work the way you say it does completely as investigated by Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". When a new field is introduced, it grows more expensive, complicated etc with time but real scientific advancements come from "breakthroughs" that create a new field. What Kuhn coined "paradigm shift" (but now has been kinda bastardized by business speak).
The problem with this is what "tested" means. There many infinite variables that have to be fixed and a finite set varied on each test (making the testing time infinite).
Most researchers assume something does not affect something and ignore it as a variable. There are many results that have false causation because an ignored variable was hiding there.
Fast food, at least in the USA, is just not about hacking the human taste but doing so at the cheapest possible price point. Cooking oil is used longer than it should be and sourced from lower qualities. There is an indelible taste of cheap ingredients and methods in fast food.
As long as the cuisine is not restricted to be being low in fat or low in sugar, it will easily blow away fast food. Just using genuine butter and quality cheese to a burger will make it better. Easy to make better fries and drinks by using sugar for sweetening and for fries good quality oils, animal fat or butter for frying. Use crispier vegetables, use flavorings better than ketchup etc. Then, there is numerous ways to make the meat taste better and add flavorings to the bun.
I think fast food is addictive because of the convenience and low cost. In the taste department, it's allright but you could make fast food yourself in minutes that's about the same quality if you set up your kitchen. A place to quickly grill meat and those small frying machines will get your fast food fix at similar quality in 5-10 minutes. If you're generous with the cheese, dressing and fats, it will even taste better.
I don't really share your adulation for fast food.
You also say that breakthroughs in computer visions combined with robotics will make the job of a dishwasher, fry cook and gardener obsolete.
The key point is that those breakthroughs that would make that happen hasn't occurred yet. Breakthroughs don't happen on a time table so soon might turn to be a long long time.
Most of the immigrants are college level and beyond. I doubt they are doing scientific reasoning testing on college and graduate students. So, I don't think that factor plays into it. Or, did you mean that the kids of the best and brightest immigrants do better on the scientific reasoning test? Or maybe they do test it on college students? It doesn't say from the article.
I'm sick and tired of all the pet theories people have about China. Seems like everyone has a handful of these now.
Suburb public schools are miles better than downtown city public schools. Then, there are private schools and prep schools. Public schooling has a whole spectrum of quality.
This where the college you go to comes in. MIT, Caltech like schools choose the top students in engineering, others in athletics and so on.
Most jobs are given through word of mouth and not through HR departments. HR departments are there to find out what's wrong with you and not what's right with you.
The US is littered with policies and regulations built up on shaky statistical evidence. As an example, the policy of student confidence correlation with academic achievement. The idea was that since they are correlated if we increase student confidence we will increase academic achievement. We rank freakishly highest in student confidence but academic achievement isn't increasing.
The nation of the top scientific reasoners are satisfied with such statistical garbage is beyond belief. Does any of these statistical measures mean anything? How much is theories POTA (pulled out of the azule) and how much is statistically tested with all the factors accounted for. Even respectable papers do a bit of factor hiding. There was a paper that found that overweight patients in hospitals survive more from illness than normal weight patients - completely hiding the age factor in the statistical analysis. Normal weight patients who are admitted for illness were much much older than overweight patients!
Then the reaction of these news stories is always the same patterns: people with preconceived world view trying to fix the news to their views. Ooh, it doesn't say what happens 10 years into the future, ooh it shows public school policy X is bad etc etc.
Why do people keep saying this?
One of the major reasons for the effectiveness of the military is to be able to kill as thoughtlessly as possible. Before, it used to be a big problem that draftees or volunteers would not fire their weapons at enemies during battle. They implemented training routines to teach to shoot other human beings without thought to eliminate that problem.
You can see this everywhere in the military. For example, the military uses sanitized words for the process of killing. It's not enemies, it's hostiles. It's not killed, it's neutralized and so on.
What you describes still makes it a correlation study, just a well organized correlation study.
Taking your own quotes,
It is still correlation.
Assuming there is causation, correlation is two way but causation might not be. Just because blood caffeine levels correlates with reduction of mental decline doesn't mean drinking more coffee will reduce mental decline. It could very well be that the reduced mental decline leads to the immune system pattern (or blood caffeine level).
Anyway, what you describe up there is not in the original article so you must know the research work from beyond the article I read.
And then you crash and you are fatigued, depressed, irritated, ravenous, edgy and anxious until you ride the caffeine train again.
Maybe coffee drinkers are correlated with something else that prevents Alzheimer's. I see no mention in the article that this is more than statistical correlation they have found.
Doing a controlled experiment where the only dietetic difference is the coffee is near impossible due to the cost.
Typical conclusion section speculation from a correlation study IMHO.
I think it would be dangerous for people to drinking coffee assuming they are warding off Alzheimer's. Coffee has know to have bad effects on the body. It is a diuretic and a stimulant.
Nope. Cats will catch a mouse if they've never seen a mouse before and will shadow hunt even if they've never seen a mouse before.
Human relationships skills are hard coded into us. Even if we don't have a relationship, we still shadow practice those skills and have mock conversations.
1. Get tickets to show that says 8PM.
2. Drive for an hour and then pay for parking/drive around to find parking.
3. Arrive there 8PM and wait outside in a line for 0.5-1 hour (the establishment that you paid over $50 in tickets won't let you use the restroom because nobody is allowed inside until the band is ready).
4. Get inside. Wait indefinite time (from 1-1.5 hours) until the opening band starts.
5. After opening band finishes, wait another 1-1.5 hours for the band you paid tickets to start.
6. Show finishes.
You start around 6PM and you are done at 1-2AM. Eight hours to listen to a 1.5 hour set from the band you're supporting. Meanwhile, all this empty time you end up buying junk food and alcohol from the establishment.
I hate going to live shows because of this reason - it's a time sink. Why don't the musicians start their shows on time and print the time each band will be starting on the tickets so I arrive and enjoy the show and leave.
Every set of observable statistics has infinite theories to explain it, from which only one is right. Since our nutritionists and scientists can't give us a straight answer and we are drowning in obesity, everyone is looking for alternate theories. Everyone has their own little pet theory on why we get fat and unless you have been designing and running experiments, analyzing data to confirm or deny your problem, you're part of the problem you mention.
Look at what we were able to achieve with HIV and AIDS. We should be putting our resources like that to the obesity epidemic and once and for all, figure out what the right theory to explain everything is.
Wrong!. It has already been shown (with isotopic tracking) that fat cells were meant to be a temporary buffer, not a storage device. Fat molecules don't get stored away, they go into fat cells and come out like in a buffer, no isotopic fats really get stored away in the fat cells.
As for going through the rest of your posts and going point through point and arguing about it, let me say that settling these kinds of arguments are the job of scientists not random slashdot posters.
Or maybe that people don't want to admit that they are genetic dinosaurs, their bodies not being able to handle modern foods is evolution bitslapping them into selection pressure.