Definitely people know about the *specifics* of each incident more than they used to. They always knew it happened, but there was a lot of wiggle room and conflicting accounts.
I grew up in an urban neighborhood back in the 60s, before cell phone cameras or even portable videotapes. Cops in my neighborhood had a reputation for roughing guys up and planting evidence. To be fair a lot of the guys they planted evidence on were guilty as sin, but still. My brother ran with a bad crowd, and to this day when he hears about a police beating he still automatically assumes they must have had it coming, which I personally think is naivete posing as experience.
Progress is funny; it's two steps forward if you're lucky, then one step back. We simply took it for granted that the darker your skin the more you got beat up by the cops. It didn't even occur to us that racial parity in rough treatment was something that was even possible, much less desirable. But a lot of darker skinned guys never had any trouble, because we didn't have "stop and frisk". The idea of the cop as an establisher of social conformity hadn't been dreamed up yet. Cops were supposed to fight crime, not create a genteel atmosphere.
I think cops pulled their gun less frequently back then. That's because they worked in pairs and had night sticks. So has there been net progress? You be the judge. I do think the war on drugs has turned a lot of people who used to just be unfortunate into criminals, so cops necessarily have a much bigger bootprint than they used to.
Despite their dirty reputation, I don't think most of the cops in our neighborhood were rough, or corrupt. The cops I knew personally were OK, some of them unsung heroes even. I think there was a combination of a boys will be boys attitude and an us-vs-them climate that empowered a small minority of sociopathic cops to set the tone of community/police relations. And that, apparently, hasn't changed much.
Oh, that's fair. You take a guy who's given thirty years of dedicated, exemplary service and you "hit him where he lives", because of some other guy.
You know, there's a certain mentality, I'd even call it a faith, that harsh measures have to work,because they're harsh. "Look at how much misery we're causing! It must be doing some good." I'd like to say that's a joke, but after years of watching the war on drugs, the the war on Terror, it's a real, enduring feature of the American mindset: harshness as an easy substitute for rational thought.
Why "hit everyone where they live", when you can simply make erasure of audio or visual recordings by a cop of someone else's video a federal felony? A tough measure? Sure. By I don't expect it to work *because* it's tough. I expect it to work because any officer who erased someone else's personal data without a court order would lose his job and be ineligible to work as a cop anywhere else, ever again.
I was pointing this out to a niece who married a police officer the other day. About 3% of the population are sociopaths. That means that if police have just their fair share of sociopaths, a department like Baltimore would have 120 individuals on the payroll with a marked tendency toward criminal and anti-social behavior.
The problem with your idea is that you can fire all 4000 people in the department, but it doesn't help because you're drawing from the same candidate pool that produced the problem in the first place.
What you have to do is focus on eliminating sociopaths from your payroll and from the hiring pool. Any officer found destroying evidence should be fired. Do stuff like that consistently and assiduously and the problem will alleviate itself over time.
What makes you think they took down the criminal mastermind?
Remember this is the government we recently learned abducted a German citizen, beat him, chained him in the Salt Pit where he was rectally violated, only to learn they'd snatched a vacationing car salesman who happened to have the same common Arabic name as the guy they actually wanted. It was like kidnapping and anally raping "John Smiths" until you found the one you wanted.
As Terry Pratchett's "Patrician" is fond of saying, freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Nor does it mean freedom from responsibility.
Saying you have to make your own arrangements for schooling doesn't seem so oppressive to me, so long as the arrangements aren't made in a punitive spirit. Lots of parents do make their own arrangements because of philosophical differences with state-run schooling. Pious parents send their kids to religious schools. Conservative parents send their kids to military schools. Liberal parents send their kids to alternative, unstructured schools.
Schools should make reasonable efforts to accommodate the philosophical preferences of parents, but there simply isn't any way to square this circle. Most parents want their kids going to a school where everyone is vaccinated. If you want something different there's no way to accommodate that preference, unless there's enough of you to set up a parallel program. I have a relative who did just that -- started an alternative school; not for anti-vaxxers, but for anti-regimentation parents who want the kids to go to a school where they do whatever the hell they want all day and where no attention whatsoever is paid to ed-reform mandated standardized tests. And the school works because of the high degree of involvement of the parents, many of whom are high status professionals like doctors and university professors. You *can* have whatever you want for your kid, but you've got to put the effort in to make it work.
What does the professor's "on-line harassment" have to do with the quality and / or value of his lectures?
Nothing. The Institute apparently thinks he's a scumbag and doesn't want to be associated with him, which is their right.
Looking at the lecture, it doesn't seem to be all that special by MIT standards. Everyone there takes at least two semesters of physics, and Physics 8.01, which almost everyone takes in their first semester on campus, is probably the largest course taught. There's a long tradition of lecture showmanship in 8.01, with varying degrees of success. A friend of mine once saw Henry Kendall almost knock himself out with a bowling ball pendulum. He was explaining how the pendulum would only return at most to the point it was released from, but because he was talking he didn't notice that instead of just releasing the pendulum, he'd given it a little push, which was supposed to be the *next* demo. Kendall had to dive out of the way at the last second.
Some countries place a high premium on memorizing and repeating back the teacher's words. These countries still produce their share of good and bad engineers, but they're sometimes bad in unrecognizable ways.
I once hired a software engineer from a third world country who had an encyclopedic knowledge of design patterns. You could name any pattern in the GoF *Design Patterns* book and he could reel off the UML without hesitation and give a convincing sounding explanation of how the pattern worked. But when I started inspecting his code, I quickly realized he had no understanding of what any of it meant. It was just pictures and words he'd memorized, an impressive and prodigious feat, but ultimately useless to me.
Now I should say I've hired some very good software engineers from this country; it's not that they don't make good engineers over there. For most people the discipline to absorb a lot of information yields many benefits. But this guy was an outlier; he managed to get a master's degree over there in a subject he had no practical understanding of whatsoever.
Everybody in my family was a precocious reader -- me, my wife, my kids were all reading on an adult level while we were still quite young. So consequently we *all* have words we mispronounce because we learned them from reading before we heard anyone use them. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my word "sub-tull" and the word "suttle" I sometimes heard were one and the same -- "subtle".
The family will be sitting around and someone will use an unfamiliar word, then there will be a brief pause while everyone else envisions the phonetic spelling of the mispronounced word.
When you hear "drone" you probably are picturing civilian quad copters. While some military drones are that small, others are substantial aircraft. The Air Force's Global Hawk weighs over ten tons and requires a runway 3700 feet long to take off.
Obviously some military drones can be hand launched, but the MQ-1Cs mentioned in the article weigh 2200 lbs fully loaded and requires a minimum runway of 2000 feet.
We didn't let our son play video games at home until he was in second grade -- of course it's nearly impossible to avoid them at other people's houses without moving to a remote village without electricity. Consequently gaming became an obsession with him. When we visited relatives he'd spend all his time talking with his older cousins about games pretty much from the time he could talk. In kindergarten he started taking books out of the library on beating video games. By the time he was in first grade he was the neighborhood gaming consultant: kids would ask their moms to invite him over because they were stuck. But he couldn't play games at home.
Finally I realized that forbidding games was just making him more obsessed (it's a family trait he gets from both parents). We bought a console and it was the best Christmas EVER. He quickly settled down to a pattern where he gets a new game, plays it relentlessly for a few days until he figures out all the interesting ways to beat it, then sets it aside. Now he's a teenager, and gaming is just another thing he does. It's *important* to him, but if you average out his playing time it adds up to maybe four hours a week. The time he plays the most is when his older sister comes back from college. They'll play through a stack of old games, like it's their way of reconnecting.
People worry too much about parenting issues like this. You have to be prepared to be tough if an actual problem arises, but most of the time you're better off relaxing and seeing what happens. Think of it as "agile parenting". You don't have to foresee everything, you just have to be on top of what actually happens.
Well, some kids actually like that -- maybe not talking over the coach, but the practice and camp and such. I had one of each, one who hated organized activities and another who liked them.
And we *did* force both our kids to stick with some things they didn't want to do. In some case it was about commitment -- you asked to join the soccer team, you can't quit just because the team is losing. In other cases it was parental judgment about what's best -- I know you don't like swim lessons but you're going to stick with them until you can swim a hundred yards. And some times it's because kids have to learn to at least make the effort to follow through on their plans. You wanted piano lessons, we bought and moved the piano, so you have to stick with those lessons for at least a year before you switch instruments.
But there is a strong dogma that genetics is not a factor in the observed disparity in measurable intelligence between sub-Saharan Black Africans and Ashkenazi Jews. This dogma doesn't have any scientific basis that I'm aware of;
The first step in addressing the question scientifically is determining whether the question even makes sense. You have to *establish that the question is valid* before answering it.
A hundred years ago scientists didn't know about DNA, couldn't characterize someone's genes. They went with what they could observe: skin color, hair, eye shape etc. And they came up with various compelling three race and five race schemes. But we aren't limited like they were. We can open up someone's genetic black box and characterize his heritage precisely. And when we did that all those compelling, intuitively obvious schemes fell apart.
The problem with the question you pose is that it makes no sense to lump all Sub-Saharan Africans into one "race". Most of the genetic diversity of the human race is in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are ethnic groups in Africa that have more genetic diversity than all human populations originating outside Africa *combined*. So we can't answer the question you pose because it's very assumptions contradict the facts.
If we were to divide humanity into five "great races", they'd probably end up being five *African* races, with the rest of the world tacked on in various ways. What's more it would turn out that there were *other* equally justifiable ways to construct five African races.
Race is like constellations. Humans *will* see patterns in complex, random data. Just because Orion *looks* like an object doesn't mean that the stars in Orion are linked by some process. But boy is that pattern ever compelling.
What you need to do is look at the impact factor of each journal -- a measure of how often articles in that journal are cited. What constitutes a "good" IF varies from field to field, so you want to compare the IF of a journal to the leading journals in that field. In this case the IF for the journals in question are 1.47 (0.3 for a five year period) and 1.15.. By comparison, the ACM Transaction on Intelligent Systems and Technology has an impact factor of 9.39.
There have always been low quality journals, but recently I'm seeing an uptick in pseudo-science advocates like anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists citing "published research" that makes absurdly broad claims. It's important to look up the IF for the journals referenced, they're often predatory journals that function like a "vanity press" for unpublishable papers.
The site http://scholarlyoa.com/ is also very useful. It maintains a list both of predatory journals and predatory publishers in the business of giving a platform to junk scholarship. Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems is not on the list of standalone predatory journals, nor is the publisher American Scientific Publishers on the list of predatory publishers -- yet. Aperito *is* on the list of suspect publishers.
Unforutnately IF isn't infallible. You can't automatically dismiss a paper because it's published in a low IF journal. You have to look at the whole pattern. A new paper making unusual claims is a lot more credible if it's published in a high IF journal like Nature. If it's published in Fred's Research Journal, you have to wait and see whether the paper gets cited by reputable scholars or by papers in more mainline journals.
It's really quite different from a password. And you don't know the meaning of "security through obscurity", either. All cryptographic systems rely upon secrets; a well designed one relies upon a single secret that is impractical to guess. Security through obscurity is relying upon a number of weak secrets, like the methods you are using.
You need to read up on public key cryptography. There's a huge difference between a certificate and a shared password.
Methane photooxidizes with a half life of ~21 days in sunlight at average insolation. It gets released and then breaks down harmlessly and naturally.
... into carbon dioxide and water vapor, eventually, through a of several intermediate products. So the presence of methane is *at least* as important as CO2, because that's what it decays into. Nothing in nature just "goes away", you have to ask what it becomes.
The half-life for tropospheric methane is about 8.5 years by the way (Bergamaschi, P., & Bousquet, P. (2008). Estimating sources and sinks of methane: An atmospheric view. In The Continental-Scale Greenhouse Gas Balance of Europe (pp. 113-133). Springer New York. Photoxidation of CH4 is not a major sink of tropospheric CH4. It does occur in the troposphere in the presence of high concentrations of NO and may be a contributor to the ozone in urban smog.
Well, it is possible for someone to do something we don't like because they disagree with us. It's possible to respect such a person in a way you can't respect someone who lets money trump his principles. There's literally nothing some people won't do for money.
Just because *some* or even *most* profit is reasonable, doesn't mean all profit is reasonable.
The term "profiteer" is used for people who put profit above a higher ethical claim; for example a citizen selling arms to an enemy during wartime. It's not that profit per se is unreasonable, but that the citizen has a higher duty of loyalty to his country than to his profits. Likewise people who profit by helping governments undermine civil liberties can reasonably be called "profiteers".
The issue isn't *that* we dislike them. It's *why* we dislike them that makes them profiteers.
Keep in mind that the guy was probably told that he was replacing you because you were incompetent and had a bad work attitude. That's what some of them are told, they're here because of the low technical skills and poor work ethic of American workers. So why should he listen to your opinion?
Another thing to consider is that your replacement may come from a culture which is not as egalitarian as yours, and at the moment your status was pretty low. In America a junior programmer fresh out of school can tell a senior engineer with twenty years experience he's full of shit, and that's something we admire. But in other cultures accepting this kind of behavior is seen as weakness. I've dealt with this first hand. I once had to take over a troubled programming team full of H1Bs (not my choice, we inherited the team) that had been shipping really bad code. It turned out to be full of terrific talent, only the lead programmer was incompetent.
Well, there's that too. If there's an impoundment with houses on it some resident will have stocked it. But there's still no diversity; they're stocking it with the descendents of hatchery fish.
Meanwhile here in New England, the alewives' natural range, shad and alewives are so endangered it's illegal to take one except in a few larger rivers. The springtime herring run are largely gone, along with the massive influx of marine nutrients they brought to fresh waters.
One of the things that always mystified me growing up fishing here was the incredible uniformity of freshwater fish species across water bodies with very little geographic connection. New England is dotted with thousands of small ponds, and they all have more or less the same fish. Even tiny little ponds of a few acres with no major tributaries and only seasonal outlets will have bluegill, yellow perch, and probably a few black bass lurking somewhere and reportedly some pike or muskellenge. How did they get there? And why aren't fish like bluegill from different watersheds distinctive, the way the finches Darwin found in different Galapagos islands were different? Surely natural dispersion of these fish across the whole region would have taken thousands of years.
I was recently reading about the history of dams in the US, and got the answer. In the late 1800s inland fisheries across the country were collapsing because of dam building for powering mills, so the federal government set about restocking ponds and streams across the country. The scale must have been mind boggling, because you can find the same fish in tiny, isolated ponds that don't show up except on detailed topographical maps. Even the neighbors seem scarcely aware of these ponds, but at some point maybe a hundred years ago the federal government planted fish there.
Looked at one way it was an astonishingly successful effort. There's almost no body of water in New England larger than a persistent puddle where a competent angler will catch *nothing*. And there are ponds not ten miles from Boston I can be certain of catching a half dozen crappie in a day and one or two largemouth bass -- certainly not trophy size, but enough to put up a game fight. But I often wonder what was in these waters before we crashed and rebooted the fish populations.
While I agree in principle, I would consider the nature of a felony and its relevance to the job. For example I wouldn't hire someone convicted of embezzlement for a job where he has access to sensitive financial data, no matter how long ago that offense was. I would tend to overlook certain drug related charges because of the long history of overzealous prosecution of "drug offenses" in this country.
I'd also consider the amount of time since the offense, particularly for offenses committed by people when they were in their teens. Research shows that many peoples' brains don't develop impulse control until they are out of their teen years. At thirty they're almost literally different people than they were at 16. And I would strongly discount misdemeanors that occurred a long time ago.
But hiring someone with a criminal record, or not hiring someone because of that record -- that's not an easy decision, nor should it be. As a hiring manager you have a responsibility to society, certainly. But you have other responsibilities, to your employer, customers, and coworkers that you have to honor as well. You should try to make a decision that is as fair as possible to everyone affected, and sometimes the candidate may come up holding the short stick, which is too bad.
I don't think criminal record should be used as an automatic screen, that's just lazy. As a manager I'm paid *not* to be lazy, and to make good decisions, so that's what I should do.
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Definitely people know about the *specifics* of each incident more than they used to. They always knew it happened, but there was a lot of wiggle room and conflicting accounts.
I grew up in an urban neighborhood back in the 60s, before cell phone cameras or even portable videotapes. Cops in my neighborhood had a reputation for roughing guys up and planting evidence. To be fair a lot of the guys they planted evidence on were guilty as sin, but still. My brother ran with a bad crowd, and to this day when he hears about a police beating he still automatically assumes they must have had it coming, which I personally think is naivete posing as experience.
Progress is funny; it's two steps forward if you're lucky, then one step back. We simply took it for granted that the darker your skin the more you got beat up by the cops. It didn't even occur to us that racial parity in rough treatment was something that was even possible, much less desirable. But a lot of darker skinned guys never had any trouble, because we didn't have "stop and frisk". The idea of the cop as an establisher of social conformity hadn't been dreamed up yet. Cops were supposed to fight crime, not create a genteel atmosphere.
I think cops pulled their gun less frequently back then. That's because they worked in pairs and had night sticks. So has there been net progress? You be the judge. I do think the war on drugs has turned a lot of people who used to just be unfortunate into criminals, so cops necessarily have a much bigger bootprint than they used to.
Despite their dirty reputation, I don't think most of the cops in our neighborhood were rough, or corrupt. The cops I knew personally were OK, some of them unsung heroes even. I think there was a combination of a boys will be boys attitude and an us-vs-them climate that empowered a small minority of sociopathic cops to set the tone of community/police relations. And that, apparently, hasn't changed much.
Oh, that's fair. You take a guy who's given thirty years of dedicated, exemplary service and you "hit him where he lives", because of some other guy.
You know, there's a certain mentality, I'd even call it a faith, that harsh measures have to work,because they're harsh. "Look at how much misery we're causing! It must be doing some good." I'd like to say that's a joke, but after years of watching the war on drugs, the the war on Terror, it's a real, enduring feature of the American mindset: harshness as an easy substitute for rational thought.
Why "hit everyone where they live", when you can simply make erasure of audio or visual recordings by a cop of someone else's video a federal felony? A tough measure? Sure. By I don't expect it to work *because* it's tough. I expect it to work because any officer who erased someone else's personal data without a court order would lose his job and be ineligible to work as a cop anywhere else, ever again.
I was pointing this out to a niece who married a police officer the other day. About 3% of the population are sociopaths. That means that if police have just their fair share of sociopaths, a department like Baltimore would have 120 individuals on the payroll with a marked tendency toward criminal and anti-social behavior.
The problem with your idea is that you can fire all 4000 people in the department, but it doesn't help because you're drawing from the same candidate pool that produced the problem in the first place.
What you have to do is focus on eliminating sociopaths from your payroll and from the hiring pool. Any officer found destroying evidence should be fired. Do stuff like that consistently and assiduously and the problem will alleviate itself over time.
What makes you think they took down the criminal mastermind?
Remember this is the government we recently learned abducted a German citizen, beat him, chained him in the Salt Pit where he was rectally violated, only to learn they'd snatched a vacationing car salesman who happened to have the same common Arabic name as the guy they actually wanted. It was like kidnapping and anally raping "John Smiths" until you found the one you wanted.
As Terry Pratchett's "Patrician" is fond of saying, freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Nor does it mean freedom from responsibility.
Saying you have to make your own arrangements for schooling doesn't seem so oppressive to me, so long as the arrangements aren't made in a punitive spirit. Lots of parents do make their own arrangements because of philosophical differences with state-run schooling. Pious parents send their kids to religious schools. Conservative parents send their kids to military schools. Liberal parents send their kids to alternative, unstructured schools.
Schools should make reasonable efforts to accommodate the philosophical preferences of parents, but there simply isn't any way to square this circle. Most parents want their kids going to a school where everyone is vaccinated. If you want something different there's no way to accommodate that preference, unless there's enough of you to set up a parallel program. I have a relative who did just that -- started an alternative school; not for anti-vaxxers, but for anti-regimentation parents who want the kids to go to a school where they do whatever the hell they want all day and where no attention whatsoever is paid to ed-reform mandated standardized tests. And the school works because of the high degree of involvement of the parents, many of whom are high status professionals like doctors and university professors. You *can* have whatever you want for your kid, but you've got to put the effort in to make it work.
What does the professor's "on-line harassment" have to do with the quality and / or value of his lectures?
Nothing. The Institute apparently thinks he's a scumbag and doesn't want to be associated with him, which is their right.
Looking at the lecture, it doesn't seem to be all that special by MIT standards. Everyone there takes at least two semesters of physics, and Physics 8.01, which almost everyone takes in their first semester on campus, is probably the largest course taught. There's a long tradition of lecture showmanship in 8.01, with varying degrees of success. A friend of mine once saw Henry Kendall almost knock himself out with a bowling ball pendulum. He was explaining how the pendulum would only return at most to the point it was released from, but because he was talking he didn't notice that instead of just releasing the pendulum, he'd given it a little push, which was supposed to be the *next* demo. Kendall had to dive out of the way at the last second.
Some countries place a high premium on memorizing and repeating back the teacher's words. These countries still produce their share of good and bad engineers, but they're sometimes bad in unrecognizable ways.
I once hired a software engineer from a third world country who had an encyclopedic knowledge of design patterns. You could name any pattern in the GoF *Design Patterns* book and he could reel off the UML without hesitation and give a convincing sounding explanation of how the pattern worked. But when I started inspecting his code, I quickly realized he had no understanding of what any of it meant. It was just pictures and words he'd memorized, an impressive and prodigious feat, but ultimately useless to me.
Now I should say I've hired some very good software engineers from this country; it's not that they don't make good engineers over there. For most people the discipline to absorb a lot of information yields many benefits. But this guy was an outlier; he managed to get a master's degree over there in a subject he had no practical understanding of whatsoever.
Everybody in my family was a precocious reader -- me, my wife, my kids were all reading on an adult level while we were still quite young. So consequently we *all* have words we mispronounce because we learned them from reading before we heard anyone use them. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my word "sub-tull" and the word "suttle" I sometimes heard were one and the same -- "subtle".
The family will be sitting around and someone will use an unfamiliar word, then there will be a brief pause while everyone else envisions the phonetic spelling of the mispronounced word.
When you hear "drone" you probably are picturing civilian quad copters. While some military drones are that small, others are substantial aircraft. The Air Force's Global Hawk weighs over ten tons and requires a runway 3700 feet long to take off.
Obviously some military drones can be hand launched, but the MQ-1Cs mentioned in the article weigh 2200 lbs fully loaded and requires a minimum runway of 2000 feet.
We didn't let our son play video games at home until he was in second grade -- of course it's nearly impossible to avoid them at other people's houses without moving to a remote village without electricity. Consequently gaming became an obsession with him. When we visited relatives he'd spend all his time talking with his older cousins about games pretty much from the time he could talk. In kindergarten he started taking books out of the library on beating video games. By the time he was in first grade he was the neighborhood gaming consultant: kids would ask their moms to invite him over because they were stuck. But he couldn't play games at home.
Finally I realized that forbidding games was just making him more obsessed (it's a family trait he gets from both parents). We bought a console and it was the best Christmas EVER. He quickly settled down to a pattern where he gets a new game, plays it relentlessly for a few days until he figures out all the interesting ways to beat it, then sets it aside. Now he's a teenager, and gaming is just another thing he does. It's *important* to him, but if you average out his playing time it adds up to maybe four hours a week. The time he plays the most is when his older sister comes back from college. They'll play through a stack of old games, like it's their way of reconnecting.
People worry too much about parenting issues like this. You have to be prepared to be tough if an actual problem arises, but most of the time you're better off relaxing and seeing what happens. Think of it as "agile parenting". You don't have to foresee everything, you just have to be on top of what actually happens.
Well, some kids actually like that -- maybe not talking over the coach, but the practice and camp and such. I had one of each, one who hated organized activities and another who liked them.
And we *did* force both our kids to stick with some things they didn't want to do. In some case it was about commitment -- you asked to join the soccer team, you can't quit just because the team is losing. In other cases it was parental judgment about what's best -- I know you don't like swim lessons but you're going to stick with them until you can swim a hundred yards. And some times it's because kids have to learn to at least make the effort to follow through on their plans. You wanted piano lessons, we bought and moved the piano, so you have to stick with those lessons for at least a year before you switch instruments.
But there is a strong dogma that genetics is not a factor in the observed disparity in measurable intelligence between sub-Saharan Black Africans and Ashkenazi Jews. This dogma doesn't have any scientific basis that I'm aware of;
The first step in addressing the question scientifically is determining whether the question even makes sense. You have to *establish that the question is valid* before answering it.
A hundred years ago scientists didn't know about DNA, couldn't characterize someone's genes. They went with what they could observe: skin color, hair, eye shape etc. And they came up with various compelling three race and five race schemes. But we aren't limited like they were. We can open up someone's genetic black box and characterize his heritage precisely. And when we did that all those compelling, intuitively obvious schemes fell apart.
The problem with the question you pose is that it makes no sense to lump all Sub-Saharan Africans into one "race". Most of the genetic diversity of the human race is in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are ethnic groups in Africa that have more genetic diversity than all human populations originating outside Africa *combined*. So we can't answer the question you pose because it's very assumptions contradict the facts.
If we were to divide humanity into five "great races", they'd probably end up being five *African* races, with the rest of the world tacked on in various ways. What's more it would turn out that there were *other* equally justifiable ways to construct five African races.
Race is like constellations. Humans *will* see patterns in complex, random data. Just because Orion *looks* like an object doesn't mean that the stars in Orion are linked by some process. But boy is that pattern ever compelling.
What you need to do is look at the impact factor of each journal -- a measure of how often articles in that journal are cited. What constitutes a "good" IF varies from field to field, so you want to compare the IF of a journal to the leading journals in that field. In this case the IF for the journals in question are 1.47 (0.3 for a five year period) and 1.15.. By comparison, the ACM Transaction on Intelligent Systems and Technology has an impact factor of 9.39.
There have always been low quality journals, but recently I'm seeing an uptick in pseudo-science advocates like anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists citing "published research" that makes absurdly broad claims. It's important to look up the IF for the journals referenced, they're often predatory journals that function like a "vanity press" for unpublishable papers.
The site http://scholarlyoa.com/ is also very useful. It maintains a list both of predatory journals and predatory publishers in the business of giving a platform to junk scholarship. Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems is not on the list of standalone predatory journals, nor is the publisher American Scientific Publishers on the list of predatory publishers -- yet. Aperito *is* on the list of suspect publishers.
Unforutnately IF isn't infallible. You can't automatically dismiss a paper because it's published in a low IF journal. You have to look at the whole pattern. A new paper making unusual claims is a lot more credible if it's published in a high IF journal like Nature. If it's published in Fred's Research Journal, you have to wait and see whether the paper gets cited by reputable scholars or by papers in more mainline journals.
It's really quite different from a password. And you don't know the meaning of "security through obscurity", either. All cryptographic systems rely upon secrets; a well designed one relies upon a single secret that is impractical to guess. Security through obscurity is relying upon a number of weak secrets, like the methods you are using.
You need to read up on public key cryptography. There's a huge difference between a certificate and a shared password.
Methane photooxidizes with a half life of ~21 days in sunlight at average insolation. It gets released and then breaks down harmlessly and naturally.
... into carbon dioxide and water vapor, eventually, through a of several intermediate products. So the presence of methane is *at least* as important as CO2, because that's what it decays into. Nothing in nature just "goes away", you have to ask what it becomes.
The half-life for tropospheric methane is about 8.5 years by the way (Bergamaschi, P., & Bousquet, P. (2008). Estimating sources and sinks of methane: An atmospheric view. In The Continental-Scale Greenhouse Gas Balance of Europe (pp. 113-133). Springer New York. Photoxidation of CH4 is not a major sink of tropospheric CH4. It does occur in the troposphere in the presence of high concentrations of NO and may be a contributor to the ozone in urban smog.
In practice, a certificate is nothing more than a long password that's impossible for a normal human to memorize. So it ends up in a file somewhere,
In other words you have no idea how they work, and you deal with that by calling people who advocate them "crazy".
Well, it is possible for someone to do something we don't like because they disagree with us. It's possible to respect such a person in a way you can't respect someone who lets money trump his principles. There's literally nothing some people won't do for money.
Just because *some* or even *most* profit is reasonable, doesn't mean all profit is reasonable.
The term "profiteer" is used for people who put profit above a higher ethical claim; for example a citizen selling arms to an enemy during wartime. It's not that profit per se is unreasonable, but that the citizen has a higher duty of loyalty to his country than to his profits. Likewise people who profit by helping governments undermine civil liberties can reasonably be called "profiteers".
The issue isn't *that* we dislike them. It's *why* we dislike them that makes them profiteers.
Keep in mind that the guy was probably told that he was replacing you because you were incompetent and had a bad work attitude. That's what some of them are told, they're here because of the low technical skills and poor work ethic of American workers. So why should he listen to your opinion?
Another thing to consider is that your replacement may come from a culture which is not as egalitarian as yours, and at the moment your status was pretty low. In America a junior programmer fresh out of school can tell a senior engineer with twenty years experience he's full of shit, and that's something we admire. But in other cultures accepting this kind of behavior is seen as weakness. I've dealt with this first hand. I once had to take over a troubled programming team full of H1Bs (not my choice, we inherited the team) that had been shipping really bad code. It turned out to be full of terrific talent, only the lead programmer was incompetent.
Well, there's that too. If there's an impoundment with houses on it some resident will have stocked it. But there's still no diversity; they're stocking it with the descendents of hatchery fish.
Meanwhile here in New England, the alewives' natural range, shad and alewives are so endangered it's illegal to take one except in a few larger rivers. The springtime herring run are largely gone, along with the massive influx of marine nutrients they brought to fresh waters.
One of the things that always mystified me growing up fishing here was the incredible uniformity of freshwater fish species across water bodies with very little geographic connection. New England is dotted with thousands of small ponds, and they all have more or less the same fish. Even tiny little ponds of a few acres with no major tributaries and only seasonal outlets will have bluegill, yellow perch, and probably a few black bass lurking somewhere and reportedly some pike or muskellenge. How did they get there? And why aren't fish like bluegill from different watersheds distinctive, the way the finches Darwin found in different Galapagos islands were different? Surely natural dispersion of these fish across the whole region would have taken thousands of years.
I was recently reading about the history of dams in the US, and got the answer. In the late 1800s inland fisheries across the country were collapsing because of dam building for powering mills, so the federal government set about restocking ponds and streams across the country. The scale must have been mind boggling, because you can find the same fish in tiny, isolated ponds that don't show up except on detailed topographical maps. Even the neighbors seem scarcely aware of these ponds, but at some point maybe a hundred years ago the federal government planted fish there.
Looked at one way it was an astonishingly successful effort. There's almost no body of water in New England larger than a persistent puddle where a competent angler will catch *nothing*. And there are ponds not ten miles from Boston I can be certain of catching a half dozen crappie in a day and one or two largemouth bass -- certainly not trophy size, but enough to put up a game fight. But I often wonder what was in these waters before we crashed and rebooted the fish populations.
While I agree in principle, I would consider the nature of a felony and its relevance to the job. For example I wouldn't hire someone convicted of embezzlement for a job where he has access to sensitive financial data, no matter how long ago that offense was. I would tend to overlook certain drug related charges because of the long history of overzealous prosecution of "drug offenses" in this country.
I'd also consider the amount of time since the offense, particularly for offenses committed by people when they were in their teens. Research shows that many peoples' brains don't develop impulse control until they are out of their teen years. At thirty they're almost literally different people than they were at 16. And I would strongly discount misdemeanors that occurred a long time ago.
But hiring someone with a criminal record, or not hiring someone because of that record -- that's not an easy decision, nor should it be. As a hiring manager you have a responsibility to society, certainly. But you have other responsibilities, to your employer, customers, and coworkers that you have to honor as well. You should try to make a decision that is as fair as possible to everyone affected, and sometimes the candidate may come up holding the short stick, which is too bad.
I don't think criminal record should be used as an automatic screen, that's just lazy. As a manager I'm paid *not* to be lazy, and to make good decisions, so that's what I should do.
Apparently Cisco can't compete in the marketplace or buy Arista (bad blood between Arista founders and Cisco brass
So then wouldn't it be Cisco that is brazen?
I was in the supermarket just today and at the deli "grab and go" there were packages of cheese slices labelled "LOL American Cheese".
My immediate reaction was "I don't get it."
Not snobbish, just different. The idea of tolerating people who like different things seems to never have caught on.