There never was a "communist threat." The only threat was the two sides goading each other during the cold war and risking doing something stupid. The Eastern Bloc was too busy fucking itself up to be a threat to anyone. It crumbled because it was not stable.
The Chinese were invaded by Western powers in the recent past, so you can see why they're touchy on the subject. They're pissed about the opium wars, and they're pissed at the exploitative and heavy-handed behaviour of the West up to the point when they left. At the summer palace near Beijing there are signs everywhere showing you what it was like before it was torched by the French and the English. They don't forget this shit. The cultures gelled less in China than they did in India. At least there was some cross-cultural understanding in India (especially early on). There was fuck all understanding in China from the get-go. Literally the first thing the English did was piss of the emperor and each side looked down upon the other.
Whilst it's not a competition and there are no "winners", culturally, violence is arguably more alien to the Chinese than it is to us Westerners. Whilst both Europeans and the Chinese have had their share of internal fighting and bloody revolutions, it's only us Westerners who have a long history of violent, expansionist, imperialism. Westerners destroyed almost all of the native culture in the Americas (in the Andes almost the entire native population was wiped out) and Australia. We've also fucked up huge swathes of Africa, the English committed plenty of atrocities in India and had no qualms about getting the Chinese hooked on opium. Our meddling in the Middle East after the first world war has left a legacy of violence and social problems. We constructed the state of Isreal, which has been nothing but violence and trouble. We've been building economies and riches using slave labour for millennia. Vast quantities of wealth poured in the UK, and other European countries, from slave plantations (a lot of it sugar).
I'd like to see about a hybrid truck as well, perhaps a hybrid TDI because of the inherent fuel economy advantages of a modern diesel.
Exactly: diesel. Fuck hybdrids. A good diesel has relatively low emissions, will produce better MPG than a Prius (e.g. http://www.carpages.co.uk/guide/skoda/skoda-octavia-estate-s-1.6-tdi-cr.asp), and doesn't have cart around a heavy battery. Furthermore, the environmental costs of making that battery outweigh the fuel savings (http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101018/OEM01/310189979). The Prius is just a status symbol for "green" conspicuous consumers.
I live in a big metro area (Memphis, TN) and it doesn't seem to work that way here anymore, the author of TFA could be living in my neighborhood. The only time I ever see kids or teens outdoors is if the school bus has just dropped them off, and more often than not, there's a big line of cars waiting at the bus stop so that Precious Snowflake doesn't have to walk more than a block until their parents can usher them back home.
Here too (LI) they drop off the kids with the bus that has the stupid flappy stop sign. But in the evenings it's common to see teens on Main St or at the mall. None of the fun stuff you mention happens here either, but it's not the case that teens don't socialise with each other. Of course they do.
The "precious snowflake" syndrome is real but I think we need to consider why it's happening, rather than just call parents over-protective and consider that the explanation. Personally, I think this over-protectiveness is a mix of various factors; you can't explain it with one thing. In no particular order:
- People are generally having fewer kids and having them later in life. It might seem crass to say it, but that makes a child more valuable nowadays. The extreme of this is in China where, although parents tend to be younger, they're mostly only allowed one kid. Plus, it HAS to be a boy or everyone is very upset. So you get a lot of very pampered, very spoilt, and very useless little boys in China. There are also a lot of girls that given away. My partner's Chinese, so I'm not pulling this out of my ass. We know people like this.
- It's more common for both parents to have to work to make ends meet, since children are now more expensive due to higher costs for healthcare and education. So having a child is something most people have plan carefully. The flipside of that is that one parent may have to sacrifice a career to raise the kid. Again, making the child a bigger investment.
- The media have a love of scare stories, particularly kiddie fiddlers. Although it's always been like this, it's probably worse now. Especially in the US, TV news has become reality TV (preferably with shock value) and so they ham up the "human stories" over the boring political ones. The atypical stories stand out and make people think it's more dangerous out there than it really is. People forget that most cases of child abuse are perpetrated by family members or close friends, not by strangers.
- Kids themselves are more sedentary and go out less. TV, internet, video games, too much shool work, etc. Parents don't need to "stop" kids running wild: they stop themselves.
Teens aren't addicted to social media. They're addicted to each other," Boyd says. "They're not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they've moved it online."
What a load of horse shit. Has this woman got eyes?
Of course teens are allowed to hang out. I live in a medium sized town and Main Street is full of teenagers wondering about in groups... and playing with their smart phones at the same time. They play with them in the cinema too (fuckers), instead of watching the movie (which they went to with their friends). They play with them when they're out on dates. I see this in my town and I see it elsewhere too.
No, the problem is social media. It's vacuous and addictive. My girlfriend wastes hours and hours on it; procrastinating when she should be getting on with finishing her thesis. She claims she needs social media to communicate with the her friends who are abroad. Now that's a valid use of social media, but does she really need to spend 3 hours a day on it?
The article's title is patently false and provable as such. Time to report reality.
The Earth's orbital changes around the Sun varies from more circular to more elliptical and its axis wobble changes and the net effect is that the different solar inputs are what causes the major climate shift on about a 110,000 year cycle.
The Sun rules. Eventually as the Sun becomes a Red Giant, the Earth will become hotter until all life and water evaporates and eventually the Sun will effectively consume the Earth.
In a very short period of time, other factors may cause climate changes including asteroids, volcanism, forest fires and mankind's creation of soot, CO2 and such.
Your post is moot. In the title the term "climate change" is obviously a shorthand for the recent warming we have been observing and are trying to explain. It is obviously not a reference to the events you mention, which occur over much longer time courses.
Oh, maybe when the peers stop denying the sole energy source for the planet has any effect.
Weasel words. No scientist is saying the sun is insignificant and has "no effect" (whatever that means). They're saying something very specific: that the sun has played no significant role in driving the planetary warming we've seen in recent human history. In other words, they're saying that if we hadn't been pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the mean global temperature would be lower than it is today.
Frankly, I think the biggest problem would be all the shots looking the same. What makes a good photo is the composition: it's what you choose to leave out as well as what you include. This ball is a one-trick pony and the photos it produces are bland.
I started on a daily multivitamin about a year ago, and have since generally felt better.
Sounds like the placebo effect in action. Not that this a "bad" thing. If you feel better, keep doing it. But the fact that you feel better doesn't mean the pills themselves provide a bona fide nutritional advantage.
The only reason I can think why we have the sharing button is as a misguided response to tablet and phone games. We keep hearing how casual gamers are sucked into those and diverted away from consoles (this, etc: http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/05/16/google-play-alone-about-to-overtake-entire-portable-console-game-market-wake-up-nintendo/. A lot of these iOS and Android titles have sharing features and offer to upload your performance to Facebook. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, it seems that Sony and MS have decided to try to integrate their consoles into the phone experience as much as possible. So now we have a sharing button and a PS4 app (http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/ps4-playstation-app-launches-for-ios-and-android). Doesn't change the fact that tablet and phone games are almost all shit, or that people will continue to play them because they're there and they're mindless.
That's what killed the 3DS for me.
Fine tune the latency, resolution, and head tracking all you want, but if I can't play it for more than twenty minutes, I'm not interested.
3DS is a totally different ballgame. The 3DS display has to be in exactly the right spot for the effect to work. It's easy for it to leave that sweetspot, which is possibly where your headache came from. Also, with the 3DS the display isn't all that's in your field of view. The rest of the world is there too. I can imagine that may cause problems for some users. With a head-mounted 3D display, both of those issues go away: the 3D effect will be robust and always present. No sweetspot issues. It will also be all you can see. So long as the strength of the effect is tunable (altering inter-ocular disparity), I think it will be a lot less less problematic than what we saw with the 3DS.
Really, I can't figure out the animosity here. If Ubuntu used to be so plain, then move to another plain distro and stop attacking Canonical with nonsense. They have the right to fork stuff, and even a moral duty to do so given the ineptitude of the venerable 'upstream'.
I agree with you. I continue to use Ubuntu because I like the availability of packages and the package manager. No fucking about, I can get on with my work. I don't care about all this privacy/advertising/Amazon FUD in Ubuntu: I don't use Unity so it's a non-issue. There's no tracking in other window managers. I uninstall the tracking-related packages anyway, just to be sure. I don't see the point in switching distros to get away from it. Talk about babies and bathwater...
It does mean National Institute of Health, yes. They're the people who pay my salary, so I know about them. I don't know what they have to do with Ubuntu's predicament, however.:)
The statistics from Britain, where something like 30% Muslims want the UK to become a SA-like theocracy, speak a little different. Or are you suggesting that the majority of Muslims in other countries is less extreme than those living in the relatively liberal UK?
That sounds like crap to me. Is there a credible, robust, citation to that?
Duh, it's not so hard. The scientists could actually bother to replicate more than a tiny sliver of all results published, and citations of papers not replicated could be treated at damning with faint praise.
Firstly, you're addressing a different a problem--repeatability in science--not how to evaluate the performance of an individual. Saying, for example, that a researcher can't get tenure until their results are replicated is too high a bar. Furthermore, what credit to do the people doing the direct replication experiments get? Not a whole lot. Neither can you wait for the field as a whole to validate a researcher's findings, that can take decades. Science often works on a longer time scale than one person's career.
Secondly, important findings generally are replicated, it's just that it's usually not by dedicated replication studies. They're replicated in the context of studies that build on them. They might do this by extending the original study (perhaps adding new experimental conditions), repeating it a new experimental model, repeating them with a different data acquisition strategy, etc. If these later studies start floundering it will be obvious pretty quickly that the original was wrong. In my field there's a lot of this sort of replication and it routinely exposes past mistakes. I would say it's a misconception to state that only a tiny sliver of published results are replicated.
I blame everyone, including academics. Academics are probably at the bottom of the blame list, but they're still on the blame list. Perhaps there are too many administrators now; but if so, where did they come from and why isn't something being done about it? If academics don't like the way they're being assessed then they need to get together and come up with a viable alternative instead of continuing to play the game.
Articles are submitted anonymously to a central site. Perhaps rough statistics on the author's past work can be included but nothing more. Each paper sits there for a fixed time period, maybe 3 or 4 weeks. Editors scour the site and bid for which papers they want to put through peer review at their journal. The community can assign ratings (1 to 10 stars in 2 or 3 different categories) to papers to help guide editors. At the end of the 3 or 4 weeks, the authors choose which journal of the ones which applied should get their submission. Journal sends paper to reviewers. Reviewers know which journal sent them the paper but obviously don't know the author names. Reviewers aren't allowed to reject a paper due to it being not novel (the journal already made that value judgement). The reviewers can only make objective scientific critiques. If it fails to get in, authors can send their paper and (optionally) reviews to the next journal on the list. That journal is not allowed to ask for new reviewers if the authors have already supplied reviews and addressed criticisms. Adding too many reviewers invariably results in unrealistic demands on authors. The final anonymous reviews are available as supplemental info following publication; this may decrease the incidence of shitty, biased, reviews.
So this is somewhat like arXiv, but papers not accepted get pulled down (they can be resubmitted) and it's intended to be a gateway to publication.
Slashdot Mirror
There never was a "communist threat." The only threat was the two sides goading each other during the cold war and risking doing something stupid. The Eastern Bloc was too busy fucking itself up to be a threat to anyone. It crumbled because it was not stable.
The Chinese were invaded by Western powers in the recent past, so you can see why they're touchy on the subject. They're pissed about the opium wars, and they're pissed at the exploitative and heavy-handed behaviour of the West up to the point when they left. At the summer palace near Beijing there are signs everywhere showing you what it was like before it was torched by the French and the English. They don't forget this shit. The cultures gelled less in China than they did in India. At least there was some cross-cultural understanding in India (especially early on). There was fuck all understanding in China from the get-go. Literally the first thing the English did was piss of the emperor and each side looked down upon the other.
Whilst it's not a competition and there are no "winners", culturally, violence is arguably more alien to the Chinese than it is to us Westerners. Whilst both Europeans and the Chinese have had their share of internal fighting and bloody revolutions, it's only us Westerners who have a long history of violent, expansionist, imperialism. Westerners destroyed almost all of the native culture in the Americas (in the Andes almost the entire native population was wiped out) and Australia. We've also fucked up huge swathes of Africa, the English committed plenty of atrocities in India and had no qualms about getting the Chinese hooked on opium. Our meddling in the Middle East after the first world war has left a legacy of violence and social problems. We constructed the state of Isreal, which has been nothing but violence and trouble. We've been building economies and riches using slave labour for millennia. Vast quantities of wealth poured in the UK, and other European countries, from slave plantations (a lot of it sugar).
I'd like to see about a hybrid truck as well, perhaps a hybrid TDI because of the inherent fuel economy advantages of a modern diesel.
Exactly: diesel. Fuck hybdrids. A good diesel has relatively low emissions, will produce better MPG than a Prius (e.g. http://www.carpages.co.uk/guide/skoda/skoda-octavia-estate-s-1.6-tdi-cr.asp), and doesn't have cart around a heavy battery. Furthermore, the environmental costs of making that battery outweigh the fuel savings (http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101018/OEM01/310189979). The Prius is just a status symbol for "green" conspicuous consumers.
I live in a big metro area (Memphis, TN) and it doesn't seem to work that way here anymore, the author of TFA could be living in my neighborhood. The only time I ever see kids or teens outdoors is if the school bus has just dropped them off, and more often than not, there's a big line of cars waiting at the bus stop so that Precious Snowflake doesn't have to walk more than a block until their parents can usher them back home.
Here too (LI) they drop off the kids with the bus that has the stupid flappy stop sign. But in the evenings it's common to see teens on Main St or at the mall. None of the fun stuff you mention happens here either, but it's not the case that teens don't socialise with each other. Of course they do.
The "precious snowflake" syndrome is real but I think we need to consider why it's happening, rather than just call parents over-protective and consider that the explanation. Personally, I think this over-protectiveness is a mix of various factors; you can't explain it with one thing. In no particular order:
- People are generally having fewer kids and having them later in life. It might seem crass to say it, but that makes a child more valuable nowadays. The extreme of this is in China where, although parents tend to be younger, they're mostly only allowed one kid. Plus, it HAS to be a boy or everyone is very upset. So you get a lot of very pampered, very spoilt, and very useless little boys in China. There are also a lot of girls that given away. My partner's Chinese, so I'm not pulling this out of my ass. We know people like this.
- It's more common for both parents to have to work to make ends meet, since children are now more expensive due to higher costs for healthcare and education. So having a child is something most people have plan carefully. The flipside of that is that one parent may have to sacrifice a career to raise the kid. Again, making the child a bigger investment.
- The media have a love of scare stories, particularly kiddie fiddlers. Although it's always been like this, it's probably worse now. Especially in the US, TV news has become reality TV (preferably with shock value) and so they ham up the "human stories" over the boring political ones. The atypical stories stand out and make people think it's more dangerous out there than it really is. People forget that most cases of child abuse are perpetrated by family members or close friends, not by strangers.
- Kids themselves are more sedentary and go out less. TV, internet, video games, too much shool work, etc. Parents don't need to "stop" kids running wild: they stop themselves.
Teens aren't addicted to social media. They're addicted to each other," Boyd says. "They're not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they've moved it online."
What a load of horse shit. Has this woman got eyes?
Of course teens are allowed to hang out. I live in a medium sized town and Main Street is full of teenagers wondering about in groups... and playing with their smart phones at the same time. They play with them in the cinema too (fuckers), instead of watching the movie (which they went to with their friends). They play with them when they're out on dates. I see this in my town and I see it elsewhere too.
No, the problem is social media. It's vacuous and addictive. My girlfriend wastes hours and hours on it; procrastinating when she should be getting on with finishing her thesis. She claims she needs social media to communicate with the her friends who are abroad. Now that's a valid use of social media, but does she really need to spend 3 hours a day on it?
The article's title is patently false and provable as such. Time to report reality.
The Earth's orbital changes around the Sun varies from more circular to more elliptical and its axis wobble changes and the net effect is that the different solar inputs are what causes the major climate shift on about a 110,000 year cycle.
The Sun rules. Eventually as the Sun becomes a Red Giant, the Earth will become hotter until all life and water evaporates and eventually the Sun will effectively consume the Earth.
In a very short period of time, other factors may cause climate changes including asteroids, volcanism, forest fires and mankind's creation of soot, CO2 and such.
Your post is moot. In the title the term "climate change" is obviously a shorthand for the recent warming we have been observing and are trying to explain. It is obviously not a reference to the events you mention, which occur over much longer time courses.
Oh, maybe when the peers stop denying the sole energy source for the planet has any effect.
Weasel words. No scientist is saying the sun is insignificant and has "no effect" (whatever that means). They're saying something very specific: that the sun has played no significant role in driving the planetary warming we've seen in recent human history. In other words, they're saying that if we hadn't been pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the mean global temperature would be lower than it is today.
Now add Perl to your graph...
Frankly, I think the biggest problem would be all the shots looking the same. What makes a good photo is the composition: it's what you choose to leave out as well as what you include. This ball is a one-trick pony and the photos it produces are bland.
Or "Made in the USA" for that matter.
I wish I had mod points.
I started on a daily multivitamin about a year ago, and have since generally felt better.
Sounds like the placebo effect in action. Not that this a "bad" thing. If you feel better, keep doing it. But the fact that you feel better doesn't mean the pills themselves provide a bona fide nutritional advantage.
It's just a pre-crimbo publicity stunt.
The only reason I can think why we have the sharing button is as a misguided response to tablet and phone games. We keep hearing how casual gamers are sucked into those and diverted away from consoles (this, etc: http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/05/16/google-play-alone-about-to-overtake-entire-portable-console-game-market-wake-up-nintendo/. A lot of these iOS and Android titles have sharing features and offer to upload your performance to Facebook. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, it seems that Sony and MS have decided to try to integrate their consoles into the phone experience as much as possible. So now we have a sharing button and a PS4 app (http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/ps4-playstation-app-launches-for-ios-and-android). Doesn't change the fact that tablet and phone games are almost all shit, or that people will continue to play them because they're there and they're mindless.
That's what killed the 3DS for me. Fine tune the latency, resolution, and head tracking all you want, but if I can't play it for more than twenty minutes, I'm not interested.
3DS is a totally different ballgame. The 3DS display has to be in exactly the right spot for the effect to work. It's easy for it to leave that sweetspot, which is possibly where your headache came from. Also, with the 3DS the display isn't all that's in your field of view. The rest of the world is there too. I can imagine that may cause problems for some users. With a head-mounted 3D display, both of those issues go away: the 3D effect will be robust and always present. No sweetspot issues. It will also be all you can see. So long as the strength of the effect is tunable (altering inter-ocular disparity), I think it will be a lot less less problematic than what we saw with the 3DS.
So kill hundreds in a subway, shutting down the system for a while, then take it back and do your dirty bomb the next day.
Except you won't because you'll be dead too from handling the thing.
Really, I can't figure out the animosity here. If Ubuntu used to be so plain, then move to another plain distro and stop attacking Canonical with nonsense. They have the right to fork stuff, and even a moral duty to do so given the ineptitude of the venerable 'upstream'.
I agree with you. I continue to use Ubuntu because I like the availability of packages and the package manager. No fucking about, I can get on with my work. I don't care about all this privacy/advertising/Amazon FUD in Ubuntu: I don't use Unity so it's a non-issue. There's no tracking in other window managers. I uninstall the tracking-related packages anyway, just to be sure. I don't see the point in switching distros to get away from it. Talk about babies and bathwater...
It does mean National Institute of Health, yes. They're the people who pay my salary, so I know about them. I don't know what they have to do with Ubuntu's predicament, however. :)
It's weird how a project that consists of repackaging everything Debian has developed such a NIH problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here Because I didn't know what it meant.
The statistics from Britain, where something like 30% Muslims want the UK to become a SA-like theocracy, speak a little different. Or are you suggesting that the majority of Muslims in other countries is less extreme than those living in the relatively liberal UK?
That sounds like crap to me. Is there a credible, robust, citation to that?
Thank you for sharing that.
Duh, it's not so hard. The scientists could actually bother to replicate more than a tiny sliver of all results published, and citations of papers not replicated could be treated at damning with faint praise.
Firstly, you're addressing a different a problem--repeatability in science--not how to evaluate the performance of an individual. Saying, for example, that a researcher can't get tenure until their results are replicated is too high a bar. Furthermore, what credit to do the people doing the direct replication experiments get? Not a whole lot. Neither can you wait for the field as a whole to validate a researcher's findings, that can take decades. Science often works on a longer time scale than one person's career.
Secondly, important findings generally are replicated, it's just that it's usually not by dedicated replication studies. They're replicated in the context of studies that build on them. They might do this by extending the original study (perhaps adding new experimental conditions), repeating it a new experimental model, repeating them with a different data acquisition strategy, etc. If these later studies start floundering it will be obvious pretty quickly that the original was wrong. In my field there's a lot of this sort of replication and it routinely exposes past mistakes. I would say it's a misconception to state that only a tiny sliver of published results are replicated.
Oh... Affiliation meaning "Nobel." I interpreted it as the institution to which the person belongs. i.e. Harvard vs Bognor College.
I blame everyone, including academics. Academics are probably at the bottom of the blame list, but they're still on the blame list. Perhaps there are too many administrators now; but if so, where did they come from and why isn't something being done about it? If academics don't like the way they're being assessed then they need to get together and come up with a viable alternative instead of continuing to play the game.
Articles are submitted anonymously to a central site. Perhaps rough statistics on the author's past work can be included but nothing more. Each paper sits there for a fixed time period, maybe 3 or 4 weeks. Editors scour the site and bid for which papers they want to put through peer review at their journal. The community can assign ratings (1 to 10 stars in 2 or 3 different categories) to papers to help guide editors. At the end of the 3 or 4 weeks, the authors choose which journal of the ones which applied should get their submission. Journal sends paper to reviewers. Reviewers know which journal sent them the paper but obviously don't know the author names. Reviewers aren't allowed to reject a paper due to it being not novel (the journal already made that value judgement). The reviewers can only make objective scientific critiques. If it fails to get in, authors can send their paper and (optionally) reviews to the next journal on the list. That journal is not allowed to ask for new reviewers if the authors have already supplied reviews and addressed criticisms. Adding too many reviewers invariably results in unrealistic demands on authors. The final anonymous reviews are available as supplemental info following publication; this may decrease the incidence of shitty, biased, reviews.
So this is somewhat like arXiv, but papers not accepted get pulled down (they can be resubmitted) and it's intended to be a gateway to publication.
Both are important. Believe me, the name matters a lot.