The infant mortality rate for non-Hispanic black women was 2.4 times the rate for non-Hispanic white women. Rates were also elevated for Puerto Rican and American Indian or Alaska Native women. Increases in preterm birth and preterm-related infant mortality account for much of the lack of decline in the United States infant mortality rate from 2000 to 2005.
Seems to me that it's related to lack of access to healthcare than anything like vaccines. If I were to be generous, maybe it's giving vaccines to pre-term infants on the full-term infant schedule (perhaps we should be relying on herd immunity intially and delay vaccines for pre-term babies to match with their gestational age instead)... However who knows, unles syou do a study...
However, if you want to hear a rant about this topic, you can look here. I guess you can find anything on the internet these days (pro and con)....
And some things are built far better than they were in ye olden days - cars being the best example. Show me a car from the 50s, 60s, or 70s that could go 100,000 miles with just oil changes and brake pads. Show me a 5 year, 50,000 mile warranty from back then.
Perhaps cars aren't the best example. At least in the US, for a time cars were used to be specifically designed for planned obsolescense. For example, the Ford model T was a highly reliable rugged car that used advanced technology and materials and manufacturing techniques of the era to achieve that reliability. Unfortunatly the US car makers eventually decided that a consumption business model would be more profitable than a manufacturing based business model. US car makers then designed cars to wear out and seeded extensive dealer and parts distribution networks to capitalize on this business model.
When the Japanese decided they wanted to enter the US market in the '60s they didn't have all the parts distributors and repair resources that the incumbant US manufacturers had, they also had tax and distribution expenses to deliver products to the US, so they had to design their cars to last longer and be more reliable to justify higher initial product prices and repair prices to penetrate the market. The consumers eventually caught on to the value proposition for this business model and this led to the Japanese car manufacturers caputuring a larger part of the market in the '70s and '80s (the oil prices spiking during that time favoring the smaller Japanese cars didn't hurt either). After suffering major market declines, the US manufacturers essentially had to up their quality game to remain competitive which is why you see all the high quality cars from all manufacturers today.
It wasn't because the car manufacturers couldn't do the high reliability before (they started out that way), it's because they thought the planned obsolescence business model allowed them to make more money (sell, it cheaper, make spare parts, and encourage them to replace the product sooner). It's only after the Japanese car companies forced the US manufacturers away from that model that we get to where we are today.
You might impress a stogy old prof on an admissions committee with a latin class on your course transcript, but I doubt it will help you get a jump start on your medical degree more than learning conversational skills in a non-dead foreign language in preparation for patient care in our now increasingly multicultural society.
Apologies to Dr Sheldon Cooper of course, advanced biology courses are probably a better investment of time if one is aiming towards a jump start on a medical degree;^) Physics, although important, hasn't changed much in it's application to medicine (other than perhaps radiology), but being on top of genetics and cell biology is becoming increasingly important. Getting the basics down early allow time to learn all the new stuff that is coming down the pipe.
This UV problem is mostly related to older generation IOLs (intraocular lenses). For citation, consider this article from 2005
There is ample evidence that suggests that blocking UV is good, and, because we are not aware of any downside to using a UV-absorber, cataract surgeons for the most part have adopted this technology; virtually 100% of IOLs now contain UV-absorbers.
Last month, my wife (who is also an optometrist) had IOL replacement in both eyes. The opthamologist noted that there were no options worth considering that didn't have UV protection.
Of course different lenses offer differing amounts of UV protection, though, so chosing wisely is still a requirement (as always).
FWIW, I think most folks are just thinking about things wrong when they talk about velocity of space vehicles. It's often better to think of things in terms of work and kinetic energy (force x distance). For example, interestingly, once you are in geosync** orbit***, the "escape" speed (aka escape velocity) is even lower than on the ground (since escape_speed ~ sqrt(2GM/r), bigger "r" means lower escape speed), but moving a certain distance and having a certain kinetic energy in the gravitational potential well are more intuitive notions.
Besides, velocity is "generally" relative anyhow;^) Acceleration is the interesting notion. Standing on earth we are already all going 65,000mph relative to the sun because the earth is in orbit (meaning the earth is balanced between falling into the sun and flinging away). It's only the difficulty of maintaining a chosen velocity on earth where there's lots of friction that warps our perception of velocity. Under constant acceleration in a vaccuum, acheiving high velocity is just a matter of waiting for some time.
**Geosync is just the orbit you have to get to so that the gravitational acceleration matches the centripital acceleration needed to maintain the same relative position on the ground. Of course for a satellite still on the ground, that's easy, static frictional forces provide the needed acceleration to maintain the same relative position on the ground. When the satellite is launched above the ground, there aren't any static frictional forces, so you need to rely on gravity to apply the appropriate gravitational acceleration. If mass and the gravitational constant are invarient, you really only have the radius to play with. You then get whatever "circular" velocity you get at that radius (or you don't stay in orbit very long) w/o applying additional forces over the gravitational force.
***In orbit, you sweep out equal areas in equal time, so in a highly eccentric orbit (or even a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit that you get with gravity assist), you can get really, really, high velocities at some points in the orbit. Of course these types of orbits aren't geosync orbits anymore.
Ironically, the same packet-switch revolution that made all the real estate available to be retasked, has also served to scuttle the long term value of that real estate.
So what would that supposedly prime real estate be used for?
Housing office folk (now office workers can telecommute thanks to packet switched communications like the internet) Retail brick and mortar (now people can buy on-line thanks to packet switched communciations like the internet) Housing people (now that offices don't need prime real estate, nor retail brick and mortar isn't there, what's the attraction?, so it is really prime anymore).
Perhaps, the commercial real estate folks try to fill that space with bars, restaurants and clubs, but these types of businesses only want ground level space, so that high rise is uneconomical to build anymore w/o the upstairs tenants. So much for it necessarily being prime real estate anymore. About the only thing left that make it "prime" would be great access to mass transit. But w/o the office workers, will that be still true over time?
Obviously, this won't happen overnight, but I think many commercial real estate folks are in about as much denial as the xburb and suburb housing real estate folks were about 5 years ago. The packet switched revolution has changed the world and the buggy whip factories aren't needed anymore, but the people selling hay to the horses don't think that it matters to them. They can sell hay to other industries, right?
I agree about the honor system vs honor code. When I was in school, we had an honor system which resulted in practically 100% take-home tests. I'm sure there were people who "cheated", but since most tests like mid-terms and finals were 6 hours in length, the pure length of the test and the requirement to show work meant that mechanical variations to disguise a plagerized exam were fairly easy to spot by graders. I was one of the students on the undergraduate standards and honors committee, so cheating things that bubbled up to that level were few and far in-between and tended to be solved by "neutralization" (forcing a re-take of the class) rather than expulsion for first time offenders.
In contrast, many of my high-school friends went to service academies (airforce, anapolis, and west point) where they have strict honor codes. Basically more stick, less carrot. I doubt there was any less cheating, but since almost all tests were proctored, they were short in duration and thus determining cheating by analytical methods really wasn't that effective (I've been told that they tried, but back then, there weren't too many computer geniuses and the methods used were more subjective).
Of course in my case, it didn't hurt that professors sometimes just tossed in questions along the lines of "for this problem, that doesn't yet have a known closed form solution, derive an approximation that uses [blah] technique..." where it was expected that you didn't figure them out, but spent 2/6 hours and 5 pages of paper writing down random equations. Then again, sometime they got an answer that they were looking for.. Cheap labor for the professors;^)
I would say to avoid short answer questions like multiple choice or one word answers. Essays are probably harder to cheat on without getting caught.
Or...
Make every question 20-multiple choice w/ different sets of 20 answers out of 100 on every test. Picking correct one by collusion is more difficult. To actually force the problem solving, interspersing questions where the correct answer is not listed and "none-of-the-above" is correct makes collusion even more difficult.
Bonus points for giving a test that where all the correct answers, but 1, on a 20 question multiple-choice test are "none-of-the-above". My high-school calculus teacher did that and I really, really had to think hard about that one question (which happened to be the last one) that wasn't none-of-the-above like all the other ones...
Short history lesson: The ARPANET (1970-1990) and the start of the NSFNET (1985-1995) and the attachment of CERN to NSFNET (1989) and the writing of the first WorldWideWeb browser (1990) predated Gore's involvement (HPC&Com act of 1991). The stuff that Gore's bill funded essentially funded optical links (the information superhighway) to update/expand the NSFNET and provided funds for the NCSA @UI which made the Mosaic web browser (1992)
However, the commercial internet (the network) that we know of really came out of CIX which was an attempt by various US commercial network providers to avoid the acceptable use policy of the NSFnet backbone. Originally, the government allowed some such "non-acceptable" traffic through a third party company (called ANS), but they charged too much so CIX was formed by UUNET, PCINET, and CERFNET to bypass the NSFnet backbone all together. The concept of "peering" traffic was also rolled out at that time.
One might argue that the bill written by Gore providing the "taste" of an internet was done to spur corporations to develop the CIX backbone themselves, but having lived through those intitial times pre-CIX, I can say that it was more like how the existance of the Post Office spurred the creation of FedEx than any direct monetary benefit from the funding that the NSFnet backbone folks got... You might argue that the research that made FedEx (commercial internet) was possible was "funded" by the PostOffice (ANS/NSFnet), but that's a tenuous argument at best.
The biggest issue that is being illustrated here is what is called "step-up-in-basis". As was correctly pointed out, you generally only pay taxes when you sell stock and only on the gain (the sale price minus the purchase price) not when it appreciates in value\ when you sell. This basically means the goverment would theoretically eventually get the money when you eventually sell it and realize the gain.
The problem is that there is this GAPING BIG TAX LOOPHOLE where when you die, you can leave assets to your spouse (or kids), and the effective purchase price of that asset for tax purposes is the market value the day you die, not when it was originaly purchased by you. The original theory behind this so-called "step-up-in-basis" was to avoid the situation where the govt could theoretically collect inheritance tax on the original gain when the person died, and then again collect the tax when the person who inherited the asset sold it. However, because of all the estate tax exclusions available, this is essentially a gigantic loophole for rich folks who pass down assets through many generations w/o selling them and can hire accountants to navigate all the estate tax laws.
Also, the conversion between a privately held company stock and a publicly held company stock is also a change in form of an asset. This can also be considered income as the stock is now liquid. Currently stock options that are converted to actual stock have this interpretation and are taxed as income, but restricted stock converted to common stock does not have this interpretation (thanks to heavy lobbying).
Also, there are already forms of "wealth" taxes such as real estate assets (called property tax). If you buy real estate and hold it, you have to pay money every year to the government for the right to the title to that property. Right to have the government enforce the title to securities and bonds that a person owns, however do not have such a tax. You can argue that there are differences between rights to title to real property and rights to title to securitites and bonds, but in principle, there doesn't seem to be a compelling argument for this discrepency other than it is arbitrary.
If wealthy folks want to keep bricks of gold or cash under their matresses and pay for their own security of that gold, I can see an argument that wealth of that form may not have a compelling goverment interest to be taxed, but if someone wants the government's help in defending that wealth in the form of a title, that is fair game for a tax. Today, securities are only taxed when they are re-titled, but I don't really see how it's fundamentally different than real-estate, and real-estate is taxed today on a recurring basis even when it is not re-titled, After all protection offered by the government for titles is on-going, not just when the ownership changes.
Let's see, do any of these require exotic particle theory?
Synchrotron light source? Uses good old maxwell equations to steer electron beams with magnetic fields to make x-ray radiation...
Super conducting wire? The most viable theory behind cooper pairing is QM electron-phonon interaction which doesn't need any exotic particle theory...
PET? That uses simple radioactive sugar (where glucose is fluoridated with radioactive fluorine-18) and the resulting gamma ray decays are imaged...
Not to say that standard-model exotic particle theory isn't interesting, or doesn't explain certain physical things or certain astrophysical phenomena, but unlike QM, theoretical work on exotic particles has yet to prove economically useful. Century old QM theory on the other hand has helped us design flash memory, lasers, GMR disk drive heads, IC lithographic equipment, and has proven useful for racetrack memory, spintronics, quantum dot memory and maybe some day (economical) quantum computers.
Perhaps the time will come for standard-model sub-atomic theory being a big economic payback, but it hasn't happened yet. This might have a lot to do with the fact that other than the standard Hadrons (proton, neutron), and the electron and photons, and practically invisible neutrino, we don't see much, if any, of the other ones except as cosmic radiation or inside particle accelerators, which means economically they are more of nuisance than something to exploit. Who knows, maybe the even the standard model is wrong and we won't see anything economically useful from this theory on exotic particles, but maybe its sucessor theory. We just don't know yet.
It's easy to overestimate the impact of new theories. I'll wager that most cars today are still designed mostly assuming newtonian dynamics, and even more primitively, they got to the moon with a very low precision value for pi. Someday theories prove their worth, just like QM so it's worth investing, but overstating the case isn't being intellectually honest.
To bring a more understandable analogy to the current audience. If you are a computer programmer, your boss may indirectly use Turing computability theory to claim that it isn't impossible for you to write a program to do what he wants it to do, and perhaps P~NP might be something in the back of your mind when you look for algorithms, but the latest computability theory about NP-intermediate set problems probably doesn't yet have any economic value to anyone (after all, they are still NP problems even if not NP-complete). Might be valueable some day, though...
Many of those millionaire investment bankers aren't taking risks with their money.
I didn't say it was their money they were risking, I said it was their income/jobs. I understand your point that in some situations the commissions are essentially pre-paid, but how long does an investment banker who continues losing money keep getting paid?
I think you may be missing the main point. The typical deal an investment banker does is say set up a deal that matches investors with investment vehicles (corporations for sale, derivative securities, etc). These deals are measured in millions of dollars. The investment bank charges a percentage fee to broker these transactions and bankers get a commission on that fee. The company that employs the investment banker gets the fee regardless of how well the investment turns out for the investors. Thus any investment banker that continues to close deals generates revenue for the investment bank regardless of how well the investments went thus they continue to get paid.
There is a small issue on the "buy-side" of an investment bank in that if the broker continues to recommend investement strategies that do no perform, that broker may get "fired" by the investor, but there is usually enough business on the "sell-side" of the investment bank to make up for that. Note that many of the deals made by investment banks are confidential, so it's tough to research if the broker is doing well or not.
As a specific example, derivative securitized debt obligations in home morgages were both aggressively sold to investors, and investors were often just specifically asking brokers for this investment and this activity fueled the run-up to the 2008 collapse. Like the "house" in las vegas, the investment banks (and thus the investment bankers) made out skimming the action during this run-up. Just like the real-estate agent that sold houses in 2007 at inflated prices. They got their commissions, regardless of how the value of the house held up and how good of an investment it was.
Of course now that the market is down, lots of folks lost their jobs, but it wasn't necessarily the same folks that gave any specific advice. So what is the motivation for them to give any good investment advice as long as they are closing deals and making money for the firm? Why not get investors to take the maximum risk where the investment bank generates the most profit?
Further, those millionaire investment bankers don't make money by just taking a nice, safe and predictable salary... their compensation is almost entirely performance-based, and the nature of their business is that performing well requires taking risks. If those risks don't pan out, they get very little and lose their jobs. Lots of people go that route and wash out, but we don't hear about them.
Many of those millionaire investment bankers aren't taking risks with their money. They are taking risks and getting rewarded based on "expected-value" payments based on the leverage for those risks (commission is essentially a percentage of expected-value). The actual risks are borne by the people that actually have the money invested, but they have already payed out the commission when the deals close. The problem with this is that sometimes the "research" or "models" they have to support the "expected-value" is often done in collusion (e.g., CDOs and the risk rating agencies). That is the real difference.
Say if someone writes a paper on how my new avionics architecture will save lots of money and I show that paper to some avionics design house and they pay me up-front on a percentage of that potential savings in advance (say buys my patent), then that's the same model as the investment banker. However, if I have to go start a company and build the device and only get rewarded if the company is a success, well that's an engineering model. Notice that how easy that first model works if I'm in collusion with the author of the paper or say write the paper myself...
I don't know what the analogous risk-taking, shoot-for-the-moon career path looks like in, say, aviation engineering, but working for Boeing isn't it.
I guess parroting questionable sources like the ny times is a bad habit of mine as they are well known for always asserting dumb facts. Sorry, I'll do more fact checking in the future...
Not so sure that Napoleon saved France during the revolution, so much as he saved France from the revolution. There were of course some post Revolution sucesses, but then again there was Waterloo, and that whole Russian retreat thing (snatching defeat from the jaws of victory)...
Hopefully you weren't talking about WWI Escadrille Lafayette... Those were mostly American pilots, I've been told...Maybe you mean Lafayette from the American Revolution? I think he eventually became a US citizen...
The problem wasn't really the key exchange (which is also problematic as it uses the A3 authentication technique similar to SIM), but the actual cipher itself was weak.
As an example, you could use DHKE to exchange keys, but if you cipher is E(data) = ROT13(data^key), you have a problem.
Of course they didn't use that poor a cipher, but the cipher they did use was running in software on a dsp, so it had to be simple, so for GMR-1, they chose to XOR the data with a jittered LFSR (similar to GSM encryption). The techniques used to break GSM encryption apparently work great for GMR as well. I don't yet know many details about GMR-2, but it appears to have different weaknesses than GMR-1 (something related to being based on 8-bit math and incomplete key-data mixing).
However, yet they could have done better, but they probably just wanted something that could run on a low-power DSP that already existed on the phone.
(...taking into account what has happened with other algorithms (DES, anyone?))
Not sure you really have a good example there. Apparently, the NSA helped IBM select the S-box for DES and didn't give any explaination for this. Contemporary cryptographers (e.g, Diffie and Hellman) were up-in-arms that the NSA was trying to put a backdoor into DES and questioned the secrecy of the development of the process. Little did they know that the NSA was just collaborating with IBM to avoid a potential weakness in the random S-boxes to be more robust against differential analysis attacks.
Certainly as a general rule security through obscurity is not a great general strategy, however, DES probably isn't a good example to illustrate this since at the time, the NSA knew much more about breaking encryption than contemporary public cryptographers.
To me, it's like you're a CPA/EA and letting your know-it-all teenager check over your tax return. Maybe they'd find some mistake or deduction that you didn't find, or maybe they will figure out how much money you make and want a raise in their allowance. It's a tradeoff for sure. But it isn't like taking your return to H&R Block and asking them to check it over. Maybe it's more like the H&R Block situation now, but with DES back in the 70's, it was sorta more like the teenager situation.
Although RDRAM was good at providing high bandwidth, being serial and having more logic between row activation and the last data bit of the cache line propagated through the complicated deserialization logic on the way to the front side bus, it sucked at latency. Unfortunatly, what misses and evictions that dribbles out of the typical CPU cache are often pretty random, so although RDRAM generally had more banks than standard SDRAM of the time, for most use cases, the randomness of the access patterns cause it to have more average latency than DRAM.
This probably would NOT have gotten better over time even if intel had continued to invest in it as caches got bigger and the dribbles got even more random and regular DRAM grew more banks to catch up.
Even the i820 "camino" chipset from intel which used PC800 RDRAM, was slower than using the previous generation "BX" chipset which used PC133 SDRAM. Of course if you were working on a large data set with lots of cache misses, RDRAM was faster, but it would be a mistake to say that RDRAM was better for the average user in the average case.
There has also been studies showing you can make a selective filter by making nanotubes with the right diameter to let water through but not larger molecules. In addition because the walls are so "smooth" there is much less pressure to flow the water through then expected.
Although I doubt this orientation will allow for filtering out "helium" as the original posting.
The mechanims that the original posting paper is speculating, it that the way they made the graphene oxide (not pure graphene) membrane, it is has embedded capilaries which when wet (filled with water) allow for nearly unimpeded transport of water, but when these capilaries dry out, their diameter constricts so that nothing gets through (even helium).
So to contrast, the "tubes" are not rigid and the walls are not so "smooth" in this case, the "tubes" are sort of like chinese finger puzzles. When filled with water, allow water to pass easily, but when you try to pull the last bit of water out of them, the diameter constricts and nothing can get past.. Well maybe the chinese finger puzzle analogy was a bad one, but I couldn't think of anything else...
It's sorta sad to see how a few generations really changed weddings. Although it's not really fair to generalize, historically, weddings were not at all about the bride or groom, in most cultures, it used to be about the parents and the extended family. The families are celebrating (or at least memorializing), you joining with another family and passing in another stage of your live, not necessarily celebrating your love for each other (although of course hoping for your happiness).
The notion of romantic love with a soulmate is really more of a recent addition to this mix, as is the notion that the party is somehow for the bride (or groom, I've seen that too). I doubt the enduring little girl "fantasy" wedding is really too much about some sort of unusual narcissitic behavior than it just a pretend-grown-up play activity (like I want to be an astronaut when I grow up, or even I want go grow up and get married like _fill_in_the_blank_role_model_ and move out of the house someday)... However, if a child somehow find her or himself in a situation that was related to some childhood pretend-grown-up play activity that was enjoyable, I'm sure many folks would find it amost irresitable to revert a bit to being a child even if they weren't the narcissistic type.
As for me, my wife and I would have probably just done the courthouse thing if it we didn't care at all about our parents feelings or our culture. As it happened, we sucked it up and threw a big wedding to let our parents enjoy inviting people and paying back all the wedding invitations they got from their friends over the year. I really wasn't about us at all, but it was still an important day about us remembering and honoring our culture and our parents.
I fail to see why your Matrix example should be considered infringement.
Most of the early first person shooters were straight copies of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D and I see no problem with that, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that. If your standard were universally applied, new romantic comedies would no longer be created since their plots are essentially copies of each other and often even the actors and settings look very much alike.
Perhaps you should read my example more carefully. If the plot was copied, then probably not, but if the copied movie had bullet time special effects and digitial rain and called themselves the "Tensor", then I think many folks would say that it crossed the line. However if they didn't use bullet time effects, but say $6M "bionic" effects and didn't use digital rain, but used pixelization effects, well, that is using different movie that has a different artistic content (that matrix plot has been done many times before e.g. Logan's Run anyone?).
Feeding that back to the "bus&ben" picture, you can make another "bus&ben" picture, but you shouldn't copy the "look" of the art, you should apply your own artistic element to make it transformative to avoid copyright law problems.
You don't get it (nor do many of the folks on this thread).
Let's put this into other terms. Let's say there is a movie (say the matrix for argument's sake), and someone watches the movie in Brazil and says, "hey, I like that movie, I'd like to license that movie and sell it in Brazil". Then they try to negotiate a license to distribute the movie, but can't come to an agreement on price. Then they get another studio to make a movie about a future world where machines take over and use people as batteries and trick them into not committing suicide by putting them in a virtual reality world. Probably won't get sued. However, if they make the same movie and put in bullet time special effects into the movie and the script has similar scene order and shot perspective and they end up calling the movie "The Tensor", many folks might think they crossed the line (maybe).
Why? it would have copied so many aspect of what made the Matrix, the Matrix, that it is considered a derivative work that lacks any transformativeness. If they, however, added some artistic element (say like make it a parody like space balls vs star wars), such that the work could be considered a new work under copyright law. Similarly, if the movie had the bullet time effects, but say was a movie about terminators, well, that's not the same movie. Or if the movie didn't have digital rain, or bullet time effects, but was say a movie with a plot like say dark city, that had a different effect say like moving buildings... etc...
It doesn't have to be an exact copy to be a "copy" under copyright law. Otherwize, someone could hire an army of people from some 3rd world country, give them the linux source code after the pre-processor and have each person memorize a function and type in another version from memory with variables converted to camelCase reverseHungarian and all the for loops turned into while loops and maybe some switch statements converted to if/else, run it through a pretty-printer and re-intepreted by a few code cleaning scripts and auto-doc tools to make some comments, and voila! a non GPL version of Linux could emerge! NOT! That work would also likley be inspired enough by linux that it wouldn't pass the test of being a new work (unless say they made it a microkernel instead of a megakernel which would be "new" or maybe "old" depending on your point of view)
No one goes out for american food either. Unless you count hamburgers and deep fried meat related products. AKA junk food. American may be good at exporting culture, but your 'cuisine' doesn't compare well.
I think this part of the english-speaking country cuisine curse.
In the UK (the mother land) and as a rule no-one don't go out for "english" food either. One of the most popular pub foods in the UK is curry and they have some of the best indian and pakistani restaurants. In vancouver, some of the chinese restaurants compare wel to their HK counterparts. Also, I don't think the Aussies contribute much to the equation with vegimite either;^P
Then again, there's texas BBQ and steaks in Banff, so there are exceptions to every rule...
Slashdot Mirror
Correlation is not causation.
Other studies indicate...
The infant mortality rate for non-Hispanic black women was 2.4 times the rate for non-Hispanic white women. Rates were also elevated for Puerto Rican and American Indian or Alaska Native women.
Increases in preterm birth and preterm-related infant mortality account for much of the lack of decline in the United States infant mortality rate from 2000 to 2005.
Seems to me that it's related to lack of access to healthcare than anything like vaccines. If I were to be generous, maybe it's giving vaccines to pre-term infants on the full-term infant schedule (perhaps we should be relying on herd immunity intially and delay vaccines for pre-term babies to match with their gestational age instead)... However who knows, unles syou do a study...
However, if you want to hear a rant about this topic, you can look here. I guess you can find anything on the internet these days (pro and con)....
And some things are built far better than they were in ye olden days - cars being the best example. Show me a car from the 50s, 60s, or 70s that could go 100,000 miles with just oil changes and brake pads. Show me a 5 year, 50,000 mile warranty from back then.
Perhaps cars aren't the best example. At least in the US, for a time cars were used to be specifically designed for planned obsolescense. For example, the Ford model T was a highly reliable rugged car that used advanced technology and materials and manufacturing techniques of the era to achieve that reliability. Unfortunatly the US car makers eventually decided that a consumption business model would be more profitable than a manufacturing based business model. US car makers then designed cars to wear out and seeded extensive dealer and parts distribution networks to capitalize on this business model.
When the Japanese decided they wanted to enter the US market in the '60s they didn't have all the parts distributors and repair resources that the incumbant US manufacturers had, they also had tax and distribution expenses to deliver products to the US, so they had to design their cars to last longer and be more reliable to justify higher initial product prices and repair prices to penetrate the market. The consumers eventually caught on to the value proposition for this business model and this led to the Japanese car manufacturers caputuring a larger part of the market in the '70s and '80s (the oil prices spiking during that time favoring the smaller Japanese cars didn't hurt either). After suffering major market declines, the US manufacturers essentially had to up their quality game to remain competitive which is why you see all the high quality cars from all manufacturers today.
It wasn't because the car manufacturers couldn't do the high reliability before (they started out that way), it's because they thought the planned obsolescence business model allowed them to make more money (sell, it cheaper, make spare parts, and encourage them to replace the product sooner). It's only after the Japanese car companies forced the US manufacturers away from that model that we get to where we are today.
For example, I don't even see latin mentioned in any of these...
http://hms.harvard.edu/admissions/default.asp?page=requirements
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dcal/documents/TSS_NEJM_reading
http://www.hhmi.org/grants/pdf/08-209_AAMC-HHMI_report.pdf
You might impress a stogy old prof on an admissions committee with a latin class on your course transcript, but I doubt it will help you get a jump start on your medical degree more than learning conversational skills in a non-dead foreign language in preparation for patient care in our now increasingly multicultural society.
Apologies to Dr Sheldon Cooper of course, advanced biology courses are probably a better investment of time if one is aiming towards a jump start on a medical degree ;^) Physics, although important, hasn't changed much in it's application to medicine (other than perhaps radiology), but being on top of genetics and cell biology is becoming increasingly important. Getting the basics down early allow time to learn all the new stuff that is coming down the pipe.
This UV problem is mostly related to older generation IOLs (intraocular lenses). For citation, consider this article from 2005
There is ample evidence that suggests that blocking UV is good, and, because we are not aware of any downside to using a UV-absorber, cataract surgeons for the most part have adopted this technology; virtually 100% of IOLs now contain UV-absorbers.
Last month, my wife (who is also an optometrist) had IOL replacement in both eyes. The opthamologist noted that there were no options worth considering that didn't have UV protection.
Of course different lenses offer differing amounts of UV protection, though, so chosing wisely is still a requirement (as always).
FWIW, I think most folks are just thinking about things wrong when they talk about velocity of space vehicles. It's often better to think of things in terms of work and kinetic energy (force x distance). For example, interestingly, once you are in geosync** orbit***, the "escape" speed (aka escape velocity) is even lower than on the ground (since escape_speed ~ sqrt(2GM/r), bigger "r" means lower escape speed), but moving a certain distance and having a certain kinetic energy in the gravitational potential well are more intuitive notions.
Besides, velocity is "generally" relative anyhow ;^) Acceleration is the interesting notion. Standing on earth we are already all going 65,000mph relative to the sun because the earth is in orbit (meaning the earth is balanced between falling into the sun and flinging away). It's only the difficulty of maintaining a chosen velocity on earth where there's lots of friction that warps our perception of velocity. Under constant acceleration in a vaccuum, acheiving high velocity is just a matter of waiting for some time.
**Geosync is just the orbit you have to get to so that the gravitational acceleration matches the centripital acceleration needed to maintain the same relative position on the ground. Of course for a satellite still on the ground, that's easy, static frictional forces provide the needed acceleration to maintain the same relative position on the ground. When the satellite is launched above the ground, there aren't any static frictional forces, so you need to rely on gravity to apply the appropriate gravitational acceleration. If mass and the gravitational constant are invarient, you really only have the radius to play with. You then get whatever "circular" velocity you get at that radius (or you don't stay in orbit very long) w/o applying additional forces over the gravitational force.
***In orbit, you sweep out equal areas in equal time, so in a highly eccentric orbit (or even a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit that you get with gravity assist), you can get really, really, high velocities at some points in the orbit. Of course these types of orbits aren't geosync orbits anymore.
Ironically, the same packet-switch revolution that made all the real estate available to be retasked, has also served to scuttle the long term value of that real estate.
So what would that supposedly prime real estate be used for?
Housing office folk (now office workers can telecommute thanks to packet switched communications like the internet)
Retail brick and mortar (now people can buy on-line thanks to packet switched communciations like the internet)
Housing people (now that offices don't need prime real estate, nor retail brick and mortar isn't there, what's the attraction?, so it is really prime anymore).
Perhaps, the commercial real estate folks try to fill that space with bars, restaurants and clubs, but these types of businesses only want ground level space, so that high rise is uneconomical to build anymore w/o the upstairs tenants. So much for it necessarily being prime real estate anymore. About the only thing left that make it "prime" would be great access to mass transit. But w/o the office workers, will that be still true over time?
Obviously, this won't happen overnight, but I think many commercial real estate folks are in about as much denial as the xburb and suburb housing real estate folks were about 5 years ago. The packet switched revolution has changed the world and the buggy whip factories aren't needed anymore, but the people selling hay to the horses don't think that it matters to them. They can sell hay to other industries, right?
I agree about the honor system vs honor code. When I was in school, we had an honor system which resulted in practically 100% take-home tests. I'm sure there were people who "cheated", but since most tests like mid-terms and finals were 6 hours in length, the pure length of the test and the requirement to show work meant that mechanical variations to disguise a plagerized exam were fairly easy to spot by graders. I was one of the students on the undergraduate standards and honors committee, so cheating things that bubbled up to that level were few and far in-between and tended to be solved by "neutralization" (forcing a re-take of the class) rather than expulsion for first time offenders.
In contrast, many of my high-school friends went to service academies (airforce, anapolis, and west point) where they have strict honor codes. Basically more stick, less carrot. I doubt there was any less cheating, but since almost all tests were proctored, they were short in duration and thus determining cheating by analytical methods really wasn't that effective (I've been told that they tried, but back then, there weren't too many computer geniuses and the methods used were more subjective).
Of course in my case, it didn't hurt that professors sometimes just tossed in questions along the lines of "for this problem, that doesn't yet have a known closed form solution, derive an approximation that uses [blah] technique..." where it was expected that you didn't figure them out, but spent 2/6 hours and 5 pages of paper writing down random equations. Then again, sometime they got an answer that they were looking for.. Cheap labor for the professors ;^)
I would say to avoid short answer questions like multiple choice or one word answers.
Essays are probably harder to cheat on without getting caught.
Or...
Make every question 20-multiple choice w/ different sets of 20 answers out of 100 on every test. Picking correct one by collusion is more difficult. To actually force the problem solving, interspersing questions where the correct answer is not listed and "none-of-the-above" is correct makes collusion even more difficult.
Bonus points for giving a test that where all the correct answers, but 1, on a 20 question multiple-choice test are "none-of-the-above". My high-school calculus teacher did that and I really, really had to think hard about that one question (which happened to be the last one) that wasn't none-of-the-above like all the other ones...
Short history lesson:
The ARPANET (1970-1990) and the start of the NSFNET (1985-1995) and the attachment of CERN to NSFNET (1989) and the writing of the first WorldWideWeb browser (1990) predated Gore's involvement (HPC&Com act of 1991). The stuff that Gore's bill funded essentially funded optical links (the information superhighway) to update/expand the NSFNET and provided funds for the NCSA @UI which made the Mosaic web browser (1992)
However, the commercial internet (the network) that we know of really came out of CIX which was an attempt by various US commercial network providers to avoid the acceptable use policy of the NSFnet backbone. Originally, the government allowed some such "non-acceptable" traffic through a third party company (called ANS), but they charged too much so CIX was formed by UUNET, PCINET, and CERFNET to bypass the NSFnet backbone all together. The concept of "peering" traffic was also rolled out at that time.
One might argue that the bill written by Gore providing the "taste" of an internet was done to spur corporations to develop the CIX backbone themselves, but having lived through those intitial times pre-CIX, I can say that it was more like how the existance of the Post Office spurred the creation of FedEx than any direct monetary benefit from the funding that the NSFnet backbone folks got... You might argue that the research that made FedEx (commercial internet) was possible was "funded" by the PostOffice (ANS/NSFnet), but that's a tenuous argument at best.
Several things are being conflated here.
The biggest issue that is being illustrated here is what is called "step-up-in-basis". As was correctly pointed out, you generally only pay taxes when you sell stock and only on the gain (the sale price minus the purchase price) not when it appreciates in value\ when you sell. This basically means the goverment would theoretically eventually get the money when you eventually sell it and realize the gain.
The problem is that there is this GAPING BIG TAX LOOPHOLE where when you die, you can leave assets to your spouse (or kids), and the effective purchase price of that asset for tax purposes is the market value the day you die, not when it was originaly purchased by you. The original theory behind this so-called "step-up-in-basis" was to avoid the situation where the govt could theoretically collect inheritance tax on the original gain when the person died, and then again collect the tax when the person who inherited the asset sold it. However, because of all the estate tax exclusions available, this is essentially a gigantic loophole for rich folks who pass down assets through many generations w/o selling them and can hire accountants to navigate all the estate tax laws.
Also, the conversion between a privately held company stock and a publicly held company stock is also a change in form of an asset. This can also be considered income as the stock is now liquid. Currently stock options that are converted to actual stock have this interpretation and are taxed as income, but restricted stock converted to common stock does not have this interpretation (thanks to heavy lobbying).
Also, there are already forms of "wealth" taxes such as real estate assets (called property tax). If you buy real estate and hold it, you have to pay money every year to the government for the right to the title to that property. Right to have the government enforce the title to securities and bonds that a person owns, however do not have such a tax. You can argue that there are differences between rights to title to real property and rights to title to securitites and bonds, but in principle, there doesn't seem to be a compelling argument for this discrepency other than it is arbitrary.
If wealthy folks want to keep bricks of gold or cash under their matresses and pay for their own security of that gold, I can see an argument that wealth of that form may not have a compelling goverment interest to be taxed, but if someone wants the government's help in defending that wealth in the form of a title, that is fair game for a tax. Today, securities are only taxed when they are re-titled, but I don't really see how it's fundamentally different than real-estate, and real-estate is taxed today on a recurring basis even when it is not re-titled, After all protection offered by the government for titles is on-going, not just when the ownership changes.
Let's see, do any of these require exotic particle theory?
Synchrotron light source? Uses good old maxwell equations to steer electron beams with magnetic fields to make x-ray radiation...
Super conducting wire? The most viable theory behind cooper pairing is QM electron-phonon interaction which doesn't need any exotic particle theory...
PET? That uses simple radioactive sugar (where glucose is fluoridated with radioactive fluorine-18) and the resulting gamma ray decays are imaged...
Not to say that standard-model exotic particle theory isn't interesting, or doesn't explain certain physical things or certain astrophysical phenomena, but unlike QM, theoretical work on exotic particles has yet to prove economically useful. Century old QM theory on the other hand has helped us design flash memory, lasers, GMR disk drive heads, IC lithographic equipment, and has proven useful for racetrack memory, spintronics, quantum dot memory and maybe some day (economical) quantum computers.
Perhaps the time will come for standard-model sub-atomic theory being a big economic payback, but it hasn't happened yet. This might have a lot to do with the fact that other than the standard Hadrons (proton, neutron), and the electron and photons, and practically invisible neutrino, we don't see much, if any, of the other ones except as cosmic radiation or inside particle accelerators, which means economically they are more of nuisance than something to exploit. Who knows, maybe the even the standard model is wrong and we won't see anything economically useful from this theory on exotic particles, but maybe its sucessor theory. We just don't know yet.
It's easy to overestimate the impact of new theories. I'll wager that most cars today are still designed mostly assuming newtonian dynamics, and even more primitively, they got to the moon with a very low precision value for pi. Someday theories prove their worth, just like QM so it's worth investing, but overstating the case isn't being intellectually honest.
To bring a more understandable analogy to the current audience. If you are a computer programmer, your boss may indirectly use Turing computability theory to claim that it isn't impossible for you to write a program to do what he wants it to do, and perhaps P~NP might be something in the back of your mind when you look for algorithms, but the latest computability theory about NP-intermediate set problems probably doesn't yet have any economic value to anyone (after all, they are still NP problems even if not NP-complete). Might be valueable some day, though...
Apparently, the superbowl coin toss "experiment" has generated nearly as large a statistical anomaly... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/02/04/a-3-8-sigma-anomaly/
Right now they are sorting through the math on old experimental data.
I'm sure they are waiting for at least 6 sigma to acutally claim anything...
Many of those millionaire investment bankers aren't taking risks with their money.
I didn't say it was their money they were risking, I said it was their income/jobs. I understand your point that in some situations the commissions are essentially pre-paid, but how long does an investment banker who continues losing money keep getting paid?
I think you may be missing the main point. The typical deal an investment banker does is say set up a deal that matches investors with investment vehicles (corporations for sale, derivative securities, etc). These deals are measured in millions of dollars. The investment bank charges a percentage fee to broker these transactions and bankers get a commission on that fee. The company that employs the investment banker gets the fee regardless of how well the investment turns out for the investors. Thus any investment banker that continues to close deals generates revenue for the investment bank regardless of how well the investments went thus they continue to get paid.
There is a small issue on the "buy-side" of an investment bank in that if the broker continues to recommend investement strategies that do no perform, that broker may get "fired" by the investor, but there is usually enough business on the "sell-side" of the investment bank to make up for that. Note that many of the deals made by investment banks are confidential, so it's tough to research if the broker is doing well or not.
As a specific example, derivative securitized debt obligations in home morgages were both aggressively sold to investors, and investors were often just specifically asking brokers for this investment and this activity fueled the run-up to the 2008 collapse. Like the "house" in las vegas, the investment banks (and thus the investment bankers) made out skimming the action during this run-up. Just like the real-estate agent that sold houses in 2007 at inflated prices. They got their commissions, regardless of how the value of the house held up and how good of an investment it was.
Of course now that the market is down, lots of folks lost their jobs, but it wasn't necessarily the same folks that gave any specific advice. So what is the motivation for them to give any good investment advice as long as they are closing deals and making money for the firm? Why not get investors to take the maximum risk where the investment bank generates the most profit?
Further, those millionaire investment bankers don't make money by just taking a nice, safe and predictable salary... their compensation is almost entirely performance-based, and the nature of their business is that performing well requires taking risks. If those risks don't pan out, they get very little and lose their jobs. Lots of people go that route and wash out, but we don't hear about them.
Many of those millionaire investment bankers aren't taking risks with their money. They are taking risks and getting rewarded based on "expected-value" payments based on the leverage for those risks (commission is essentially a percentage of expected-value). The actual risks are borne by the people that actually have the money invested, but they have already payed out the commission when the deals close. The problem with this is that sometimes the "research" or "models" they have to support the "expected-value" is often done in collusion (e.g., CDOs and the risk rating agencies). That is the real difference.
Say if someone writes a paper on how my new avionics architecture will save lots of money and I show that paper to some avionics design house and they pay me up-front on a percentage of that potential savings in advance (say buys my patent), then that's the same model as the investment banker. However, if I have to go start a company and build the device and only get rewarded if the company is a success, well that's an engineering model. Notice that how easy that first model works if I'm in collusion with the author of the paper or say write the paper myself...
I don't know what the analogous risk-taking, shoot-for-the-moon career path looks like in, say, aviation engineering, but working for Boeing isn't it.
Maybe it's SpaceX or Scaled Composites...
P.P.S.: As for becoming U.S.A. citizen, it happened... in 2002...
FWIW, apparently, Lafayette was made a citizen long before 2002 (in 1784 by the maryland legislature, and subsequenly in other states as well)
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9E00EFDE1F3BEE3ABC4F53DFBF668382609EDE
I guess parroting questionable sources like the ny times is a bad habit of mine as they are well known for always asserting dumb facts. Sorry, I'll do more fact checking in the future...
Not so sure that Napoleon saved France during the revolution, so much as he saved France from the revolution. There were of course some post Revolution sucesses, but then again there was Waterloo, and that whole Russian retreat thing (snatching defeat from the jaws of victory)...
Hopefully you weren't talking about WWI Escadrille Lafayette... Those were mostly American pilots, I've been told...Maybe you mean Lafayette from the American Revolution? I think he eventually became a US citizen...
The problem wasn't really the key exchange (which is also problematic as it uses the A3 authentication technique similar to SIM), but the actual cipher itself was weak.
As an example, you could use DHKE to exchange keys, but if you cipher is E(data) = ROT13(data^key), you have a problem.
Of course they didn't use that poor a cipher, but the cipher they did use was running in software on a dsp, so it had to be simple, so for GMR-1, they chose to XOR the data with a jittered LFSR (similar to GSM encryption). The techniques used to break GSM encryption apparently work great for GMR as well. I don't yet know many details about GMR-2, but it appears to have different weaknesses than GMR-1 (something related to being based on 8-bit math and incomplete key-data mixing).
However, yet they could have done better, but they probably just wanted something that could run on a low-power DSP that already existed on the phone.
(...taking into account what has happened with other algorithms (DES, anyone?))
Not sure you really have a good example there. Apparently, the NSA helped IBM select the S-box for DES and didn't give any explaination for this. Contemporary cryptographers (e.g, Diffie and Hellman) were up-in-arms that the NSA was trying to put a backdoor into DES and questioned the secrecy of the development of the process. Little did they know that the NSA was just collaborating with IBM to avoid a potential weakness in the random S-boxes to be more robust against differential analysis attacks.
Certainly as a general rule security through obscurity is not a great general strategy, however, DES probably isn't a good example to illustrate this since at the time, the NSA knew much more about breaking encryption than contemporary public cryptographers.
To me, it's like you're a CPA/EA and letting your know-it-all teenager check over your tax return. Maybe they'd find some mistake or deduction that you didn't find, or maybe they will figure out how much money you make and want a raise in their allowance. It's a tradeoff for sure. But it isn't like taking your return to H&R Block and asking them to check it over. Maybe it's more like the H&R Block situation now, but with DES back in the 70's, it was sorta more like the teenager situation.
obligitory http://xkcd.com/743/ http://xkcd.com/792/
Although RDRAM was good at providing high bandwidth, being serial and having more logic between row activation and the last data bit of the cache line propagated through the complicated deserialization logic on the way to the front side bus, it sucked at latency. Unfortunatly, what misses and evictions that dribbles out of the typical CPU cache are often pretty random, so although RDRAM generally had more banks than standard SDRAM of the time, for most use cases, the randomness of the access patterns cause it to have more average latency than DRAM.
This probably would NOT have gotten better over time even if intel had continued to invest in it as caches got bigger and the dribbles got even more random and regular DRAM grew more banks to catch up.
Even the i820 "camino" chipset from intel which used PC800 RDRAM, was slower than using the previous generation "BX" chipset which used PC133 SDRAM. Of course if you were working on a large data set with lots of cache misses, RDRAM was faster, but it would be a mistake to say that RDRAM was better for the average user in the average case.
There has also been studies showing you can make a selective filter by making nanotubes with the right diameter to let water through but not larger molecules. In addition because the walls are so "smooth" there is much less pressure to flow the water through then expected.
Although I doubt this orientation will allow for filtering out "helium" as the original posting.
The mechanims that the original posting paper is speculating, it that the way they made the graphene oxide (not pure graphene) membrane, it is has embedded capilaries which when wet (filled with water) allow for nearly unimpeded transport of water, but when these capilaries dry out, their diameter constricts so that nothing gets through (even helium).
So to contrast, the "tubes" are not rigid and the walls are not so "smooth" in this case, the "tubes" are sort of like chinese finger puzzles. When filled with water, allow water to pass easily, but when you try to pull the last bit of water out of them, the diameter constricts and nothing can get past.. Well maybe the chinese finger puzzle analogy was a bad one, but I couldn't think of anything else...
It's sorta sad to see how a few generations really changed weddings. Although it's not really fair to generalize, historically, weddings were not at all about the bride or groom, in most cultures, it used to be about the parents and the extended family. The families are celebrating (or at least memorializing), you joining with another family and passing in another stage of your live, not necessarily celebrating your love for each other (although of course hoping for your happiness).
The notion of romantic love with a soulmate is really more of a recent addition to this mix, as is the notion that the party is somehow for the bride (or groom, I've seen that too). I doubt the enduring little girl "fantasy" wedding is really too much about some sort of unusual narcissitic behavior than it just a pretend-grown-up play activity (like I want to be an astronaut when I grow up, or even I want go grow up and get married like _fill_in_the_blank_role_model_ and move out of the house someday)... However, if a child somehow find her or himself in a situation that was related to some childhood pretend-grown-up play activity that was enjoyable, I'm sure many folks would find it amost irresitable to revert a bit to being a child even if they weren't the narcissistic type.
As for me, my wife and I would have probably just done the courthouse thing if it we didn't care at all about our parents feelings or our culture. As it happened, we sucked it up and threw a big wedding to let our parents enjoy inviting people and paying back all the wedding invitations they got from their friends over the year. I really wasn't about us at all, but it was still an important day about us remembering and honoring our culture and our parents.
I fail to see why your Matrix example should be considered infringement.
Most of the early first person shooters were straight copies of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D and I see no problem with that, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that. If your standard were universally applied, new romantic comedies would no longer be created since their plots are essentially copies of each other and often even the actors and settings look very much alike.
Perhaps you should read my example more carefully. If the plot was copied, then probably not, but if the copied movie had bullet time special effects and digitial rain and called themselves the "Tensor", then I think many folks would say that it crossed the line. However if they didn't use bullet time effects, but say $6M "bionic" effects and didn't use digital rain, but used pixelization effects, well, that is using different movie that has a different artistic content (that matrix plot has been done many times before e.g. Logan's Run anyone?).
Feeding that back to the "bus&ben" picture, you can make another "bus&ben" picture, but you shouldn't copy the "look" of the art, you should apply your own artistic element to make it transformative to avoid copyright law problems.
You don't get it (nor do many of the folks on this thread).
Let's put this into other terms. Let's say there is a movie (say the matrix for argument's sake), and someone watches the movie in Brazil and says, "hey, I like that movie, I'd like to license that movie and sell it in Brazil". Then they try to negotiate a license to distribute the movie, but can't come to an agreement on price. Then they get another studio to make a movie about a future world where machines take over and use people as batteries and trick them into not committing suicide by putting them in a virtual reality world. Probably won't get sued. However, if they make the same movie and put in bullet time special effects into the movie and the script has similar scene order and shot perspective and they end up calling the movie "The Tensor", many folks might think they crossed the line (maybe).
Why? it would have copied so many aspect of what made the Matrix, the Matrix, that it is considered a derivative work that lacks any transformativeness. If they, however, added some artistic element (say like make it a parody like space balls vs star wars), such that the work could be considered a new work under copyright law. Similarly, if the movie had the bullet time effects, but say was a movie about terminators, well, that's not the same movie. Or if the movie didn't have digital rain, or bullet time effects, but was say a movie with a plot like say dark city, that had a different effect say like moving buildings... etc...
It doesn't have to be an exact copy to be a "copy" under copyright law. Otherwize, someone could hire an army of people from some 3rd world country, give them the linux source code after the pre-processor and have each person memorize a function and type in another version from memory with variables converted to camelCase reverseHungarian and all the for loops turned into while loops and maybe some switch statements converted to if/else, run it through a pretty-printer and re-intepreted by a few code cleaning scripts and auto-doc tools to make some comments, and voila! a non GPL version of Linux could emerge! NOT! That work would also likley be inspired enough by linux that it wouldn't pass the test of being a new work (unless say they made it a microkernel instead of a megakernel which would be "new" or maybe "old" depending on your point of view)
No one goes out for american food either. Unless you count hamburgers and deep fried meat related products. AKA junk food. American may be good at exporting culture, but your 'cuisine' doesn't compare well.
I think this part of the english-speaking country cuisine curse.
In the UK (the mother land) and as a rule no-one don't go out for "english" food either. One of the most popular pub foods in the UK is curry and they have some of the best indian and pakistani restaurants. In vancouver, some of the chinese restaurants compare wel to their HK counterparts. Also, I don't think the Aussies contribute much to the equation with vegimite either ;^P
Then again, there's texas BBQ and steaks in Banff, so there are exceptions to every rule...