statement. Authors are supposed to disclose any funding or institutional relationships that might bias their findings.
There's nothing wrong with Barilla funding nutrition studies, but there's a lot wrong with news organizations obtaining their understanding of nutrition from Barilla PR efforts promoting Barilla-funded research. PR efforts *always* misrepresent how conclusive studies are.
In a subject as complex as nutrition on a question as vague as "healthy" you will always, always find conflicting evidence. Nearly every snake oil remedy sold by the supplement industry is represented as having scientific support... because it has. The supplement hucksters just leave out all the ambiguous and contradictory evidence.
"Evidence-based" means supported by the totality of evidence. Industry-funded research has its place, but it's nothing anyone but a researcher in the field should be paying attention to. In fact it's a bad idea to take any media reports of scientific papers at face value, since very few media outlets have a dedicated science desk anymore, much less reporters who are keeping up with specific fields.
The gold standard for the layman ought to be systematic reviews published in high impact factor journals. After that, technical reports by scientific commissions and panels tasked with reviewing evidence. General media reports of individual studies are worthless, and worse than worthless when they "news" source is allowing itself to be used as the mouthpiece of a PR firm.
Rubbing peoples' noses in it was a mistake. The smartest thing would be to stage a crisis and shut down the business. Even if people saw through it, I suspect they'd be less angry if they weren't openly mocked.
And the thing about scamming people is that if you do it nicely, you can even scam them more than once. It goes like this, "Just to show there's no hard feelings, I'll let you in on this scam I'm running on that other guy over there." Of course, to get in the scam they'll have to put a little skin in the game...
We say blunt and undiplomatic things, and are comfortable with other people like ourselves because it's easy to know what's on their mind. Of course that's a stereotype; it represents the extreme of the scale, but most of us at least lean a bit toward that end of the spectrum.
The thing is as you get older you realize that sustainable success in life has two sides: exploiting your strengths and compensating for your weaknesses, and a preference for bluntness over social nuance is both a strength and a weakness. The dangers of social nuance are a fact, as objective as any other fact, and that means you can't blythely ignore other peoples' feelings and consider yourself a realist.
Mark Zuckerberg is 33, an age which, back in the day, a bright young guy would maybe have just clawed his way onto the bottom rung of the upper management. Now he's one of the masters of the universe, and still making the kind of mistakes that didn't prevent him from getting where he is today. The thing about mistakes though is that they don't always get you right away. Sometimes they catch up with you. But he's a young dog yet; maybe he'll learn new tricks.
The dramatic reduction in visble smog levels since the 1970s is mostly due to the elimination of pollutants that are invisible at the tailpipe. Stuff like NOx and sulfur oxides react with volatile organic compounds to produce the familiar brownish haze. Aerosolized particulates also aren't necessarily visible at the tailpipe but collected in the atmosphere they produce visible effects over long distances.
So while it's true that you can't see most of the bad stuff coming out of your tailpipe, you can certainly see the effect of everyone dumping those bad things into the air. The elimination of routine smog events in most of the country is a real regulatory achievement, but over half of Americans are not old enough to remember the status quo ante. It was, by modern standards, pretty awful.
I understand the feeling: it shouldn't be that easy to do something illegal. That does not mean that something is automatically legal because it's easy. In order for there to be a crime, you need two components, an act and intent. If you run over someone with your car, whether or not you intended to do that is what determines if there is a crime, not how easy it was to do.
The problem is that a juror has to infer intent, and this is where biases come into play. To people like us nothing could be more natural than fiddling around with URL parameters; other people can't wrap their brain around why anyone would do that. That means to see if there's a crime you have to set aside what seems natural and obvious to you, and look at the specific circumstances of an act.
Now I think most (although not all) people realize that if a bank made this same mistake, it'd be a crime to download the transaction information for hundreds of other peoples' accounts. What's a grayer area is if you tried it with one or two randomly chosen accounts. People like us would do that with the non-criminal intent of figuring out if our bank's security is that bad. But it's risky, because if you're detected there are people who simply don't understand that; you have to hope they've got an open mind.
In this case the most important detail is that the kid was downloading what a reasonable person would assume is public information. I think you'd have to show that there was also information that wasn't in the public domain and that the kid knew it. The problem is that some people are by nature so incurious that curious behavior strikes them as suspicious.
You go after the largest achievable net reductions.
Globally 50 million tons of airfreight cargo are carried. Container ships alone carry 1.7 billion tons of cargo annually, and bulk container ships like ore carriers and tankers carry even more than that. You're going to have to achieve huge net increases in airplane efficiency to equal a marginal improvement in ship efficiency, and it's not like people have been ignoring aircraft.
Oh there's a number of ways you could arrive at it. You could believe that it's immoral to charge somebody more than an item is "worth", for example.
It actually takes quite a bit of economic sophistication to realize that what an item is "worth" varies from person to person and the exact circumstances the person is in.
Not without knowing the criteria the Pentagon is using to brand an actor as a "troll".
That said, I doubt an increase in activity of that magnitude from state agents is feasible. You don't keep 95% of your workforce slack. So for this to be true, either they hired a lot of people in a hurry, or they moved a lot of their trolls off of other projects onto the anti-America beat. But the thing is, that takes specialized language skills and training for a Russian.
I don't doubt that paid Russian anti-American trolls are working overtime, but I very much doubt they've upped their output by 21x. We are very likely to be looking at an increase in activity by a mix of paid mindfuckers and Internet randos who are doing it for their own reasons.
It's pretty much impossible NOT to reveal your social connections using social media, but it's the combination of insight into the nodes in that graph with the network that gives people with that data power over you.
So any kind of game, app or quiz where you reveal things about yourself or personal preferences is a bad thing. Forwarding and commenting on political news is probably a bad thing -- not in itself, but combined with the analytical power a social connection graph provides; it's one thing to exercise your free speech, it's another to contribute to a the greatest political surveillance network in history.
You might want to think twice about face tagging and geotagging your photographs too -- going by the Categorical Imperative. If enough people do that they've got a covert body tracking network.
People use social media because they serve a useful purpose, but they aren't aware of the unintended consequences; exploiting unintended consequences is those companies' entire business model.
"Can" might mean, (1) "Is it physically or logically possible?" Or "can" might mean, (2) "Is it feasible to do?" Or "can" might mean, (3) "Will we make money trying to do this?"
The thing is as you go down the list it gets harder and harder to say "yes", both in overcoming the possible objections and in the work you have to do to get to certainty. I am quite certain that a farm along these line could be built. I wouldn't be surprised if, given sufficient money, it could produce crops. I'd be astonished if it paid for itself in five years as promised.
I particularly like the 13 state solution, which restores a senate which operates as the founders would have intended. The house, on the other hand, should go with many, many more representatives, so that you'd have a decent chance of knowing your local rep, as would have been the case in 1787. Sure, you might end up with a *huge* House, but who cares? You could debate legislation by blog, complete with uprating and downrating posts.
Well, I don't know about this guy, but looking at his map I see he includes San Francisco and San Mateo in "NorCal", so you're right. NorCal would be dominated by the Bay Area.
I actually agree that coastal/inland in many ways makes sense, although that would create basically permanent and unsolvable inter-state water rights disputes unless the coastal states had non-contiguous inland territories -- something that isn't unprecedented.
I doubt there's any way to divide California into equally sized pieces without favoring the Democrats. As it stands California's massive size favors the Republicans in national power and Democrats locally.
The Constitution was built that way, to give smaller states excessive representation. This scheme is obviously designed, not to mitigate that feature, but to exploit it. It creates two sparsely populated Republican leaning states and one extremely densely populated Democratic leaning state.
This tilts the Senate and presidential elections toward Republicans while leaving the House untouched.
Here's an alternative: split California in two -- uniting the NorCal and SoCal proposed in this scheme -- and admit Puerto Rico as a state as well.
This is the problem with the SWAT response scenario: it's inherently dangerous. You can mitigate the danger with training, but you can never make it safe.
Hold your thumb out at arm's length and note the size of your thumbnail. That's roughly half the angular area in which you have sufficient visual acuity to distinguish between a handgun and a coffee mug. The way you "see" a scene is that your fovea flits around your field of vision, filling in details to update the scene you have already constructed in your brain. If you go into a scene "knowing" that a person has a gun, you aren't instinctively going to double check. Your reptilian brain will be prioritizing possible signs that the person is about to use the gun you "know" is there.
I don't think this can be "fixed" by training. You're fighting evolution. You've got to control the development of dangerous scenarios in the first place.
Actually that's true. They refurbished the old mobile launch platform at more than the cost it would have taken to build a new one, and now they're building the new one anyway. The problem is all that spending is bound to be in only one or two Congressional districts.
Take the F35, the most politically refractory corporate welfare program in history. The economic impact of that program is spread of 46 states, the four that miss out accounting for 7 Congressional seats out of 435.
Even if it's true NASA has become more risk averse, which I don't believe, that's not what's going on here. The problem is that they tried to save money and ended up spending more.
They refurbished the mobile launch platform they built for the cancelled Ares rocket to carry the SLS rockets, but when they finished the design of the larger SLS 1B rocket it no longer fit. And it's not like you can go down to the local welding shop and have them whip up one of these. So they're limited to the smaller Block 1 rockets until they can build another one.
NASA was plenty risk-averse in the Space Race days. They delayed the Apollo program for 20 months after the Apollo 1 fire, which pretty much used up all the program slack they had if they were to land a man on the Moon "before the decade was out." Lunar module Eagle landed on July 20, 1969. The big advantages back then was that they had a clear goal everyone was committed to, and were willing to spend fabulous amounts of money achieving it.
Adjusted for inflation, NASA budgets in the 60s were over twice the size of the current budget, and the majority of that budget was going to Apollo. That's over 20 billion a year in current dollars. Throw 20 billion dollars a year at Mars for as along as it takes to get there, and we'd have a good chance of seeing a manned landing attempted in the 2035 launch window. The problem is 17 years may be within most of our lifetimes, but that's too long for politicians to delay gratification.
That's why the Moon. Sure we already did it fifty years ago, and there's not many compelling reasons to land massive human habitats down in that particular gravity well now that we're so good at robotics. But it's something that could be done with spare change in the political lifetimes of people now in office.
The US represents about 4% of the global population. China is 19%. If China ever got its political head out of the wrong end of its anatomy it would crush us. Even if they only manage not to be stubbornly stupid they'll be tough to keep up with in the 21st Century.
So how can the US maintain it's scientific and technological preeminence? The same way it got it in the first place: immigration. US 20th century STEM preeminence is built mostly by people who came here looking for religious and political toleration, especially around WW2.
No immigrants means no Manhattan Project or US space program. No Admiral Hyman Rickover, so no US nuclear navy. No Sikorsky helicopters. No US Steel, Bell Telephone, or Westinghouse Electric. Just excluding John von Neumann alone would leave a huge hole in US scientific prestige. And today, if you waved a magic wand and eliminated all immigrants in the US, more than half of the scientists and engineers working in the US would disappear.
Immigration doesn't bring the worst people here, it brings the best, or at least the most enterprising. Nearly half of US fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
I actually read, not the full TPP treaty, but the executive summaries for each section of the treaty, which was still a lot of reading but possible for a person to do in his spare time over a couple of weeks.
The treaty was a mixed bag, but which parts you consider good or bad depended on where you stood on things like environmental and labor protections, vs. things like stricter intellectual property rules. Take out the stricter IP rules and the treaty looks a lot better to a lot of people.
Now one thing that's interesting if you look at who was in on the TPP, China isn't included. That's because the whole point of the TPP was to counter the growing influence of China. That's definitely a good thing for the US.
Slashdot Mirror
statement. Authors are supposed to disclose any funding or institutional relationships that might bias their findings.
There's nothing wrong with Barilla funding nutrition studies, but there's a lot wrong with news organizations obtaining their understanding of nutrition from Barilla PR efforts promoting Barilla-funded research. PR efforts *always* misrepresent how conclusive studies are.
In a subject as complex as nutrition on a question as vague as "healthy" you will always, always find conflicting evidence. Nearly every snake oil remedy sold by the supplement industry is represented as having scientific support... because it has. The supplement hucksters just leave out all the ambiguous and contradictory evidence.
"Evidence-based" means supported by the totality of evidence. Industry-funded research has its place, but it's nothing anyone but a researcher in the field should be paying attention to. In fact it's a bad idea to take any media reports of scientific papers at face value, since very few media outlets have a dedicated science desk anymore, much less reporters who are keeping up with specific fields.
The gold standard for the layman ought to be systematic reviews published in high impact factor journals. After that, technical reports by scientific commissions and panels tasked with reviewing evidence. General media reports of individual studies are worthless, and worse than worthless when they "news" source is allowing itself to be used as the mouthpiece of a PR firm.
"Bad Penny".
Rubbing peoples' noses in it was a mistake. The smartest thing would be to stage a crisis and shut down the business. Even if people saw through it, I suspect they'd be less angry if they weren't openly mocked.
And the thing about scamming people is that if you do it nicely, you can even scam them more than once. It goes like this, "Just to show there's no hard feelings, I'll let you in on this scam I'm running on that other guy over there." Of course, to get in the scam they'll have to put a little skin in the game...
We're nerds.
We say blunt and undiplomatic things, and are comfortable with other people like ourselves because it's easy to know what's on their mind. Of course that's a stereotype; it represents the extreme of the scale, but most of us at least lean a bit toward that end of the spectrum.
The thing is as you get older you realize that sustainable success in life has two sides: exploiting your strengths and compensating for your weaknesses, and a preference for bluntness over social nuance is both a strength and a weakness. The dangers of social nuance are a fact, as objective as any other fact, and that means you can't blythely ignore other peoples' feelings and consider yourself a realist.
Mark Zuckerberg is 33, an age which, back in the day, a bright young guy would maybe have just clawed his way onto the bottom rung of the upper management. Now he's one of the masters of the universe, and still making the kind of mistakes that didn't prevent him from getting where he is today. The thing about mistakes though is that they don't always get you right away. Sometimes they catch up with you. But he's a young dog yet; maybe he'll learn new tricks.
Maybe start with a pilot program.
... if you set standards that require the workers to use it unsafely.
The dramatic reduction in visble smog levels since the 1970s is mostly due to the elimination of pollutants that are invisible at the tailpipe. Stuff like NOx and sulfur oxides react with volatile organic compounds to produce the familiar brownish haze. Aerosolized particulates also aren't necessarily visible at the tailpipe but collected in the atmosphere they produce visible effects over long distances.
So while it's true that you can't see most of the bad stuff coming out of your tailpipe, you can certainly see the effect of everyone dumping those bad things into the air. The elimination of routine smog events in most of the country is a real regulatory achievement, but over half of Americans are not old enough to remember the status quo ante. It was, by modern standards, pretty awful.
I understand the feeling: it shouldn't be that easy to do something illegal. That does not mean that something is automatically legal because it's easy. In order for there to be a crime, you need two components, an act and intent. If you run over someone with your car, whether or not you intended to do that is what determines if there is a crime, not how easy it was to do.
The problem is that a juror has to infer intent, and this is where biases come into play. To people like us nothing could be more natural than fiddling around with URL parameters; other people can't wrap their brain around why anyone would do that. That means to see if there's a crime you have to set aside what seems natural and obvious to you, and look at the specific circumstances of an act.
Now I think most (although not all) people realize that if a bank made this same mistake, it'd be a crime to download the transaction information for hundreds of other peoples' accounts. What's a grayer area is if you tried it with one or two randomly chosen accounts. People like us would do that with the non-criminal intent of figuring out if our bank's security is that bad. But it's risky, because if you're detected there are people who simply don't understand that; you have to hope they've got an open mind.
In this case the most important detail is that the kid was downloading what a reasonable person would assume is public information. I think you'd have to show that there was also information that wasn't in the public domain and that the kid knew it. The problem is that some people are by nature so incurious that curious behavior strikes them as suspicious.
Yes, and if we only stopped talking about it they'd stop doing it.
You go after the largest achievable net reductions.
Globally 50 million tons of airfreight cargo are carried. Container ships alone carry 1.7 billion tons of cargo annually, and bulk container ships like ore carriers and tankers carry even more than that. You're going to have to achieve huge net increases in airplane efficiency to equal a marginal improvement in ship efficiency, and it's not like people have been ignoring aircraft.
So, .75 vehicles per person -- a little less than the ratio in the US of vehicles on the road to population.
Every time you think about India you've got to recalibrate your mental scales.
Oh there's a number of ways you could arrive at it. You could believe that it's immoral to charge somebody more than an item is "worth", for example.
It actually takes quite a bit of economic sophistication to realize that what an item is "worth" varies from person to person and the exact circumstances the person is in.
Not without knowing the criteria the Pentagon is using to brand an actor as a "troll".
That said, I doubt an increase in activity of that magnitude from state agents is feasible. You don't keep 95% of your workforce slack. So for this to be true, either they hired a lot of people in a hurry, or they moved a lot of their trolls off of other projects onto the anti-America beat. But the thing is, that takes specialized language skills and training for a Russian.
I don't doubt that paid Russian anti-American trolls are working overtime, but I very much doubt they've upped their output by 21x. We are very likely to be looking at an increase in activity by a mix of paid mindfuckers and Internet randos who are doing it for their own reasons.
It's pretty much impossible NOT to reveal your social connections using social media, but it's the combination of insight into the nodes in that graph with the network that gives people with that data power over you.
So any kind of game, app or quiz where you reveal things about yourself or personal preferences is a bad thing. Forwarding and commenting on political news is probably a bad thing -- not in itself, but combined with the analytical power a social connection graph provides; it's one thing to exercise your free speech, it's another to contribute to a the greatest political surveillance network in history.
You might want to think twice about face tagging and geotagging your photographs too -- going by the Categorical Imperative. If enough people do that they've got a covert body tracking network.
People use social media because they serve a useful purpose, but they aren't aware of the unintended consequences; exploiting unintended consequences is those companies' entire business model.
The word "can" in "can we X?" is ambiguous.
"Can" might mean, (1) "Is it physically or logically possible?"
Or "can" might mean, (2) "Is it feasible to do?"
Or "can" might mean, (3) "Will we make money trying to do this?"
The thing is as you go down the list it gets harder and harder to say "yes", both in overcoming the possible objections and in the work you have to do to get to certainty. I am quite certain that a farm along these line could be built. I wouldn't be surprised if, given sufficient money, it could produce crops. I'd be astonished if it paid for itself in five years as promised.
They brought Patrick Moore back from the dead to narrate.
Like here.
I particularly like the 13 state solution, which restores a senate which operates as the founders would have intended. The house, on the other hand, should go with many, many more representatives, so that you'd have a decent chance of knowing your local rep, as would have been the case in 1787. Sure, you might end up with a *huge* House, but who cares? You could debate legislation by blog, complete with uprating and downrating posts.
Well, I don't know about this guy, but looking at his map I see he includes San Francisco and San Mateo in "NorCal", so you're right. NorCal would be dominated by the Bay Area.
I actually agree that coastal/inland in many ways makes sense, although that would create basically permanent and unsolvable inter-state water rights disputes unless the coastal states had non-contiguous inland territories -- something that isn't unprecedented.
I doubt there's any way to divide California into equally sized pieces without favoring the Democrats. As it stands California's massive size favors the Republicans in national power and Democrats locally.
The Constitution was built that way, to give smaller states excessive representation. This scheme is obviously designed, not to mitigate that feature, but to exploit it. It creates two sparsely populated Republican leaning states and one extremely densely populated Democratic leaning state.
This tilts the Senate and presidential elections toward Republicans while leaving the House untouched.
Here's an alternative: split California in two -- uniting the NorCal and SoCal proposed in this scheme -- and admit Puerto Rico as a state as well.
This is the problem with the SWAT response scenario: it's inherently dangerous. You can mitigate the danger with training, but you can never make it safe.
Hold your thumb out at arm's length and note the size of your thumbnail. That's roughly half the angular area in which you have sufficient visual acuity to distinguish between a handgun and a coffee mug. The way you "see" a scene is that your fovea flits around your field of vision, filling in details to update the scene you have already constructed in your brain. If you go into a scene "knowing" that a person has a gun, you aren't instinctively going to double check. Your reptilian brain will be prioritizing possible signs that the person is about to use the gun you "know" is there.
I don't think this can be "fixed" by training. You're fighting evolution. You've got to control the development of dangerous scenarios in the first place.
... to a SuperMax facility, that is.
Actually that's true. They refurbished the old mobile launch platform at more than the cost it would have taken to build a new one, and now they're building the new one anyway. The problem is all that spending is bound to be in only one or two Congressional districts.
Take the F35, the most politically refractory corporate welfare program in history. The economic impact of that program is spread of 46 states, the four that miss out accounting for 7 Congressional seats out of 435.
Even if it's true NASA has become more risk averse, which I don't believe, that's not what's going on here. The problem is that they tried to save money and ended up spending more.
They refurbished the mobile launch platform they built for the cancelled Ares rocket to carry the SLS rockets, but when they finished the design of the larger SLS 1B rocket it no longer fit. And it's not like you can go down to the local welding shop and have them whip up one of these. So they're limited to the smaller Block 1 rockets until they can build another one.
NASA was plenty risk-averse in the Space Race days. They delayed the Apollo program for 20 months after the Apollo 1 fire, which pretty much used up all the program slack they had if they were to land a man on the Moon "before the decade was out." Lunar module Eagle landed on July 20, 1969. The big advantages back then was that they had a clear goal everyone was committed to, and were willing to spend fabulous amounts of money achieving it.
Adjusted for inflation, NASA budgets in the 60s were over twice the size of the current budget, and the majority of that budget was going to Apollo. That's over 20 billion a year in current dollars. Throw 20 billion dollars a year at Mars for as along as it takes to get there, and we'd have a good chance of seeing a manned landing attempted in the 2035 launch window. The problem is 17 years may be within most of our lifetimes, but that's too long for politicians to delay gratification.
That's why the Moon. Sure we already did it fifty years ago, and there's not many compelling reasons to land massive human habitats down in that particular gravity well now that we're so good at robotics. But it's something that could be done with spare change in the political lifetimes of people now in office.
The US represents about 4% of the global population. China is 19%. If China ever got its political head out of the wrong end of its anatomy it would crush us. Even if they only manage not to be stubbornly stupid they'll be tough to keep up with in the 21st Century.
So how can the US maintain it's scientific and technological preeminence? The same way it got it in the first place: immigration. US 20th century STEM preeminence is built mostly by people who came here looking for religious and political toleration, especially around WW2.
No immigrants means no Manhattan Project or US space program. No Admiral Hyman Rickover, so no US nuclear navy. No Sikorsky helicopters. No US Steel, Bell Telephone, or Westinghouse Electric. Just excluding John von Neumann alone would leave a huge hole in US scientific prestige. And today, if you waved a magic wand and eliminated all immigrants in the US, more than half of the scientists and engineers working in the US would disappear.
Immigration doesn't bring the worst people here, it brings the best, or at least the most enterprising. Nearly half of US fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
I actually read, not the full TPP treaty, but the executive summaries for each section of the treaty, which was still a lot of reading but possible for a person to do in his spare time over a couple of weeks.
The treaty was a mixed bag, but which parts you consider good or bad depended on where you stood on things like environmental and labor protections, vs. things like stricter intellectual property rules. Take out the stricter IP rules and the treaty looks a lot better to a lot of people.
Now one thing that's interesting if you look at who was in on the TPP, China isn't included. That's because the whole point of the TPP was to counter the growing influence of China. That's definitely a good thing for the US.