I used a TI-86 back in Junior High, HS, and for my first few semesters of college. It was, at the time, the best numerical calculator TI made and very user friendly compared to the more powerful competitor, the HP-48g. However, it is long deprecated. Presumably, the TI-84 can do everything the TI-86 can and more. Plus, it is currently supported by third-party developers which is a big advantage, and similar to the TI-83 calculator that has become the de facto standard of secondary education and some higher education.
If I ever went back to university and took a test where a calculator was useful, I would stick with my HP-50g. In higher learning, most professors either do not know which calculators have CAS or do not care. They either allow calculators on the test or ban them.
As for standardized tests, many do allow calculators with CAS on their tests. For instance, the SAT allows the TI-89 and HP-50g.
Obviously, I still have my old TI-86 and my HP-35 just in case I ever go back to school or have to take a standardized test with stricter standards.
You are missing the point. You did not actually link to a specific peer reviewed paper to back up a specific point you were making (preferably a metastudy). You linked to the website of some self-proclaimed nutritionist (who, it turns out, had formal training in neither medicine nor nutrition) which was hawking a product.
Also, you seem to misunderstand the point of peer review, which is to establish:
1) The research met minimum scientific standards for the journal. 2) The research produced sufficiently novel and interesting results for the standards of the journal.
It is not to determine whether the research is correct. That is what the scientific community is for. Books are not "peer reviewed" except in the rare cases where they are put out by a scientific journal or publisher with peer reviewed standards for books.
My point is, you were making a lot of claims that go against the current scientific opinion on the subject or are utterly unsupported by the evidence and instead of posting the best peer reviewed studies you could find to back them up, you posted a link to the website of some corporation trying to sell a product.
I am not sure you are understanding my point. My point was that they understand the systems and are responsible for implementing them. They are not necessarily writing the actual code themselves.
In theory, a computer scientist does not even have to have ever written a single line of real-world code and knowing how to code is worthless if you do not understand statistics, linear algebra, calculus, physics, or whatever underlying task the program is relying on.
Ultimately, it all depends on the individual and what their role in a project is. The dirty work of coding and the higher level conceptual work are too very different things.
Obviously Windows and OSX have their own installation services.
Linux is not going to be fragmented on managed computers (unless the system administrator allows it), but it is fragmented across all distributions, which means that a commercial software developer faces a daunting challenge in getting his program to install and run correctly on all current and future installation of Linux.
There have only been four new major releases of Windows since Windows 2000 was released and after the big upgrade to the codebase made in Vista, Microsoft was careful to include the ability to run and install software in legacy mode. Heck, if you had the 32 bit version of Windows, you could still run most 16 bit DOS programs from back in the 1980's.
Look at Ubuntu alone and how many major new revisions it gets. Look at how many desktop managers it has. It can be a nightmare just to make the installation routine of one program compatible with all major past and future installations of Ubuntu, much less all of Debian, much less all of the other distros out there.
Linux's greatest strength (it's diversity and ease of modification) is also its greatest weakness.
Some companies what scientists; some want handymen.
CS degrees are similar to applied mathematics. Many of them tend to focus on how to solve serious problems, often in the natural sciences. Most CS degrees require extensive amounts of science and mathematics courses like physics, biology, Calculus, statistics, discrete mathematics, and linear algebra, courses that don't really come in handy in using programming as a simple tool unless you happen to be working on a scientific project, like analyzing data using complicated physical laws or designing advanced artificial intelligence algorithms for commercial use.
This is also why a lot of companies that want to accomplish these tasks hire people with advanced degrees in subjects like physics, statistics, and astronomy, because while they might not be formally-trained programmers, most have learned programming as a tool and they have the mathematical and scientific knowledge to apply algorithms to real world systems in finance, artificial intelligence, et cetera.
You don't really need someone with an advanced degree in physics, statistics, or computer science to handle most of the low-end programming tasks that are dealt with.
If all you want to do is code, I don't really see the point in going to school for a CS degree other than to "check the box" on a liberal arts education, as many companies require to even be considered.
However, if you want to work on something like AI for Google or analyzing data for NASA, a CS degree is pretty much a requirement.
Well, you may consider it "stupid", but there have certainly been many papers on Modified Newtonian Dynamics by respected physicists.
Kroupa, P.; Pawlowski, M.; Milgrom, M. (31 Dec 2012). "The failures of the standard model of cosmology require a new paradigm". International Journal of Physics D 21 (14).
A modification of the Newtonian dynamics as a possible alternative to the hidden mass hypothesis". Astrophysical Journal 270: 365–370. Bibcode:1983ApJ...270..365M. doi:10.1086/161130.. Milgrom, M. (1983). "A modification of the Newtonian dynamics - Implications for galaxies". Astrophysical Journal 270: 371–389
Riccardo Scarpa (2003). "MOND and the fundamental plane of elliptical galaxies" arXiv:astro-ph/0302445
I don't really blame the vendor for Linux programs being difficult to install.
Windows and MacOS have a centralized installation routine that vendors can use and they have only minor variations across builds.
The installation routines for Linux are fragmented across distributions and there is no single Linux-wide installation routine. Most vendors have to create their own scripts to install software and, even if they extensively test the script on all the major distributions, are likely to run into problems with future releases of those same distributions.
I know a lot of researchers, many of them older people who cut their teeth on UNIX in the 70's-90's, most of whom would never bother with Linux because it takes so much administration time and it can be extremely difficult to install commercial software.
Most of them have switched to OSX, even though some of the packages they use require compiling and tweaking, simply because the overall administration time and learning curve of Linux (not to mention the simple fact that many industry standard commercial programs have OSX versions but no Linux version). Outside of servers, the usage of Linux among researchers has dropped precipitously. Most have switched to OSX.
Interesting that this self-proclaimed (or are you the one proclaiming it) "leading nutrition researcher of the world" does not have any links to peer reviewed studies on his website. Interesting that the website is a commercial site dedicated to selling a product.
It is also interesting that this supposed authority on nutrition studied political science and has no actual formal training in medicine, much less a medical doctorate or research PhD.
That is untrue. There have been plenty of published papers on anti-gravity and modified Newtonian dynamics (which disputes the claim that gravity increases proportional to the inverse square of the distance), for instance:
Bondi, H. (July 1957). "Negative Mass in General Relativity". Rev. Mod. Phys. 29 (3): 423.
Landis, G. (1991). "Comments on Negative Mass Propulsion". J. Propulsion and Power 7 (2): 304
Morris, Michael; Thorne, Kip; Yurtsever, Ulvi (September 1988). "Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition". Physical Review 61 (13): 1446–1449
The scientific community works through continuous and vivid debate, even on issues that a layman may consider "settled", like the theory of gravity. You can often find a wide range of conclusions in the literature. It is rather normal.
In the first part of your post, you talk about how Unix is just as easy to administer, then later, you talk about how Active directory is easier to administer than OpenLDAP.
Also, I tend to disagree about Linux end-users being as easy to administer. Installing commercial software, for instance, on Mac and Windows Desktops is relatively easy but a simple install a Linux machine can be a nightmare. You see this crop up a lot with similar tasks because Windows and OSX have a single centralized installation management system while Linux is fragmented.
Installing a simple program like Matlab is easy on OSX, Windows, and Windows server but can turn into a nightmare on Linux servers and desktops.
If end users were really so scared to learn something new, they would not be switching to OSX in droves or between Android and iOS. OSX is about as different from Windows as it is from Linux, but it is also easy to use and manage, unlike the various Linux desktop managers and problems are typically easier to solve.
Linux is great for a server environment in some circumstances (so is Windows in some circumstances). It is not so great as a desktop OS for the vast majority of users. Outside of very technical areas, Linux desktop is pretty much a non-starter and even in a lot of those fields, you find people adopting OSX over Linux or Windows, even though Linux is arguably much easier to get open source UNIX tools up and running on than OSX or Windows Unix environments (for instance, Debian has repositories of binaries for almost all major open source tools in science, engineering, and computer science whereas you often have to build your own on OSX and in Windows UNIX or CYGWIN).
By contrast, UNIX/LINUX servers are much more difficult to configure and generally require a lot more man-hours and a more experienced (and expensive) staff.
The fact that Windows Server is still able to survive on expensive license fees when Linux and BSD are free is pretty telling. Companies are doing a cost-benefit comparison and finding that they are saving more money going with the paid solution than the free solution.
It is very similar to what you see happening on the desktop with the domination of easy-to-use and configure Mac and Windows over KDE or Gnome, except on the server-side it is mainly an issue of the ease of use for the system administrator, and the fact that a good Unix admin is much more expensive and harder to find than an MCSE certified admin.
Hispanic students did not exist 40 years ago? I'm sure that all the six year old Puerto Rican's living in New York, the Cubans living in Miami, and the Mexicans living in California would be surprised to hear that they were never children.
Also, you present no evidence as to why the cost of education should be decreasing. The real cost of housing prices has been increasing, meaning that the facilities cost much more than they did in the past. The number of first and second generation students in the school system has been increasing. The percentage of students who drop out has been decreasing. The average working hours has increased dramatically. The cost of funding pensions has increased dramatically. The cost of funding healthcare has increased dramatically.
So why exactly is education supposed to be cheaper now? It cost more for the facilities and more for the staff than ever before. We have more students that need additional help than before. More students go to school for longer hours than before. More teachers and staff work longer hours than before.
6% to 85% is not the "chance of being accurate". It is the max and min of individual studies' conclusion.
Studies have found between 0% and 100% chance of gravity always being an attractive force. Does gravity not sound like a very reliable science to you?
Someone that exercises a lot and eats very little is an idiot who is undertaking a very serious health risk. The reality is:
1) Exercise is not a simple "calories out" model, unless you are actually hooked up 24/7 to a machine that measures your metabolism, because both sedentary behavior and exercise trigger short-term and long term metabolic changes beyond the calories that you use to perform the exercise or your resting metabolic rate.
2) Taking food in is not a simple "calories in" model because studies show that how your body treats food energy is highly dependent not only on the raw contents, but things like absorption rate. A large apple has about the same amount of calories as a can of coke and the calories come from almost the exact same chemicals (fructose and glucose mainly, i.e. apple sugar and corn sugar) but your body absorbs the energy of the apple more slowly and seems to be less likely to store it as fat. So, in theory, eating 10 large apples a day should make you as fat as drinking ten cans of coke a day (based on the calories-in, calories-out model), but the reality seems to be very different.
3) Not eating enough food lowers your metabolic rate; so does losing weight. Also, your body will often cannibalize useful tissue such as muscle as much (or more) than it converts fat to energy.
4) People have about as much control over eating as they do over breathing. Sure, some people have the willpower to hold their breath until they pass out, but most of us do not. Likewise, there are some people who can simply ignore hunger, but it is a pretty primal instinct, and it will usually win out over the conscious brain, which is why most diets fail in the long term. The best thing you can probably do is to change WHAT you eat rather than how much. A 3000 Calorie diet rich in vegetables, fruit, nuts, beans, and whole grains is going to be a lot more healthful than a 3000 Calorie diet rich in Twinkies, regardless of how much weight you gain or lose.
Gaining weight itself may not be such a bad thing. After all, we evolved the ability for a reason. What is a bad thing is a poor diet and lack of exercise. We did not evolve to stuff ourselves full of added sugars, saturated fats, and salt, something that is increasingly added to many manufactured foods.
The District of Columbia school district has less students than a small suburb. You are making a form of hasty generalization logical fallacy.
Ideally, you want to completely eliminate any demographic differences, which is what the quality studies do and the right-wing think tank studies do not.
I compared California to New York because it is representative of what the high quality studies found, and because California and New York happen to also share very similar demographics in terms of important factors like: wealth distribution, ethnic makup, foreign-born students, rural:urban, cost of living, New York and California have a very large sample size (~10 million), and have very different per-student funding for public schools (New York spends about double what California does).
There are not a lot of large States whose demographics line up like California and New York.
Making an unqualified statement is not a valid argument. Pretty much all the studies that support your contention are all funded by right-wing or libertarian groups that cherry pick data.
1. Your claim that there is "no result" is so ambiguous as to be meaningless.
2. You assume that demographics are the same today as they were 40-50 years ago, which is false.
For instance, a Hispanic person who turned 18 in 1975 had about a 60% chance of graduating high school, versus 80% today. Furthermore, the demographics of Americans has changed substantially. The foreign-born population in the US was 9.6 million in 1970. In 2010, it had increased to 40 million. Educating foreign born students and their children is typically much more resource-intensive than getting third generation Americans to the same level.
Again, studies have shown a direct correlation between student performance and per-pupil spending among similar demographic groups. I see you present no evidence to dispute that.
1. Exercise changes your metabolism. So does being sedentary. It is not simply a matter of calories-out when it comes to exercise or calories in when it comes to diet. Exercise not only has been shown to boost your overall metabolism (some of it is from repairing damaged tissue and the other is from poorly understood short-term or long term metabolic changes), but also to do things like prevent tissue cannibalization (encouraging fat-burning) and leading to long-term changes in your metabolic rate. Someone who does intense cardiovascular exercise for 30 minutes a day is going to burn a lot more calories than the actual direct energy expenditure.
2. Willpower is something that you either have or you do not. Hunger is a primal instinct, like breathing. Some people can suppress the urge. Some people cannot. You are not going to change that, especially not permanently. It is best to find a solution that works for you, otherwise you get endless failed diets.
3. Studies show that genetics plays a tremendous role, in fact perhaps the predominate role, in obesity. The science is still unclear, with ranges between 6-85% in terms of the genetic role in obesity.[1] Your statement is simply false, especially when it comes to morbid obesity. A person with a normally functioning metabolism cannot eat themselves to being 100 lbs overweight.
4. There is no compelling scientific evidence to back up your claims about "sweeteners" (I am assuming you mean artificial sweeteners). There are some who have made such a hypotheses, but there is no good scientific evidence to support them. Even more absurd are your claims about cancer. I notice you use the weasel word "suspected". I could just as well say, "organic apples are suspected to cause cancer." But, there is zero compelling scientific evidence to CONCLUDE that organic apples cause cancer and the same is true for FDA approved artificial sweeteners. The only sweetener that was "SUSPECTED" by legitimate medical authorities to cause cancer was saccharine, and further studies disproved the modality in humans.
5. Bacterial flora in the human body and its link with obesity is a very new field of study. It is absolutely untrue to claim that there is a high causal effect. Further research is needed.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is no different than any other added sugar. There is nothing special about it. The problem with HFCS is that it has become a cheap way for food manufacturers to add sweetness to products, even products like Apple Sauce which are naturally sweet.
But there is nothing particularly different about corn sugar than cane sugar. They both end up being processed as glucose and fructose by your digestive system.
One thing people don't seem to understand is that, what is important is not how much weight you lose. That is just aesthetics. It is about how you change your long-term health prognosis.
You can be overweight or even obese and still be much healthier than a normal-weight sedentary person. Eating a balanced diet that goes light in foods packed with saturated fats, simple carbohydrates, and little else and getting plenty of exercise is the key to being healthy, and you may even lose a little weight too.
All the fad diets in the world will not improve your health. They will just MAYBE make you skinnier. But remember, most diseases correlated with obesity are not caused by them and you are at a similar rate if you are thin but have the same diet and exercise habits as the average obese person.
The police are supposed to have probable cause that you are an immediate threat to yourself or others before taking you in for mental evaluation. Then, you are supposed to be evaluated by a qualified physician to determine whether to hold you for further observation, and if necessary, not release you until you are no longer a danger.
It seems incredibly unlikely that the police would detain someone simply because of the novel he published. It seems much more likely that the guy actually showed signs of severe mental illness and that the novel was just the impetus for the police to interview him and not the reason that they sought a psychiatric hold.
If the case is as the article is presenting it, that whole department needs serious retraining, but I suspect that there is something else going on here.
Usually these are about capital improvements, such as fixing leaking roofs or moving building permanent buildings instead of portables.
What seems to have the biggest impact is spending per-pupil, and States that spend more money tend to do comparatively better than those that do not. For instance, New York public schools tend to produce better results than California public schools, despite similar challenges, likely because of New York State's higher per-pupil spending.
I realize that people who treat open source as a religion with MS or Apple standing in for the devil will balk at the idea of running Linux under a more user friendly, more compatible, easier to maintain OS, but it actually works quite well for most applications.
It's not perfect. GPU performance takes a huge hit, so you'll probably want to shy away with it for hardcore GPU accelerated tasks, but the overhead in terms of CPU performance is negligible so long as you have the cores and the RAM.
And many distros support standard drivers such as VMWARE's. It's a lot better than running Cygwin or trying to hack OSX to get a good compile for open source Linux software in most cases.
PG&E sets its rates based on AVERAGE demand. The peak demand for the Summer is 1200-1800 (these are the times the grid is typically strained the most) which is why the peak rate occurs at this time.
I'm not sure why you think one data point constitutes some kind of disproof of PG&E's peak-demand rate schedule. It's akin pointing to the declining temperatures in Green Bay between August and February as proof against global warming.
Slashdot Mirror
I used a TI-86 back in Junior High, HS, and for my first few semesters of college. It was, at the time, the best numerical calculator TI made and very user friendly compared to the more powerful competitor, the HP-48g. However, it is long deprecated. Presumably, the TI-84 can do everything the TI-86 can and more. Plus, it is currently supported by third-party developers which is a big advantage, and similar to the TI-83 calculator that has become the de facto standard of secondary education and some higher education.
If I ever went back to university and took a test where a calculator was useful, I would stick with my HP-50g. In higher learning, most professors either do not know which calculators have CAS or do not care. They either allow calculators on the test or ban them.
As for standardized tests, many do allow calculators with CAS on their tests. For instance, the SAT allows the TI-89 and HP-50g.
Obviously, I still have my old TI-86 and my HP-35 just in case I ever go back to school or have to take a standardized test with stricter standards.
You are missing the point. You did not actually link to a specific peer reviewed paper to back up a specific point you were making (preferably a metastudy). You linked to the website of some self-proclaimed nutritionist (who, it turns out, had formal training in neither medicine nor nutrition) which was hawking a product.
Also, you seem to misunderstand the point of peer review, which is to establish:
1) The research met minimum scientific standards for the journal.
2) The research produced sufficiently novel and interesting results for the standards of the journal.
It is not to determine whether the research is correct. That is what the scientific community is for. Books are not "peer reviewed" except in the rare cases where they are put out by a scientific journal or publisher with peer reviewed standards for books.
My point is, you were making a lot of claims that go against the current scientific opinion on the subject or are utterly unsupported by the evidence and instead of posting the best peer reviewed studies you could find to back them up, you posted a link to the website of some corporation trying to sell a product.
I am not sure you are understanding my point. My point was that they understand the systems and are responsible for implementing them. They are not necessarily writing the actual code themselves.
In theory, a computer scientist does not even have to have ever written a single line of real-world code and knowing how to code is worthless if you do not understand statistics, linear algebra, calculus, physics, or whatever underlying task the program is relying on.
Ultimately, it all depends on the individual and what their role in a project is. The dirty work of coding and the higher level conceptual work are too very different things.
Obviously Windows and OSX have their own installation services.
Linux is not going to be fragmented on managed computers (unless the system administrator allows it), but it is fragmented across all distributions, which means that a commercial software developer faces a daunting challenge in getting his program to install and run correctly on all current and future installation of Linux.
There have only been four new major releases of Windows since Windows 2000 was released and after the big upgrade to the codebase made in Vista, Microsoft was careful to include the ability to run and install software in legacy mode. Heck, if you had the 32 bit version of Windows, you could still run most 16 bit DOS programs from back in the 1980's.
Look at Ubuntu alone and how many major new revisions it gets. Look at how many desktop managers it has. It can be a nightmare just to make the installation routine of one program compatible with all major past and future installations of Ubuntu, much less all of Debian, much less all of the other distros out there.
Linux's greatest strength (it's diversity and ease of modification) is also its greatest weakness.
Some companies what scientists; some want handymen.
CS degrees are similar to applied mathematics. Many of them tend to focus on how to solve serious problems, often in the natural sciences. Most CS degrees require extensive amounts of science and mathematics courses like physics, biology, Calculus, statistics, discrete mathematics, and linear algebra, courses that don't really come in handy in using programming as a simple tool unless you happen to be working on a scientific project, like analyzing data using complicated physical laws or designing advanced artificial intelligence algorithms for commercial use.
This is also why a lot of companies that want to accomplish these tasks hire people with advanced degrees in subjects like physics, statistics, and astronomy, because while they might not be formally-trained programmers, most have learned programming as a tool and they have the mathematical and scientific knowledge to apply algorithms to real world systems in finance, artificial intelligence, et cetera.
You don't really need someone with an advanced degree in physics, statistics, or computer science to handle most of the low-end programming tasks that are dealt with.
If all you want to do is code, I don't really see the point in going to school for a CS degree other than to "check the box" on a liberal arts education, as many companies require to even be considered.
However, if you want to work on something like AI for Google or analyzing data for NASA, a CS degree is pretty much a requirement.
Well, you may consider it "stupid", but there have certainly been many papers on Modified Newtonian Dynamics by respected physicists.
Kroupa, P.; Pawlowski, M.; Milgrom, M. (31 Dec 2012). "The failures of the standard model of cosmology require a new paradigm". International Journal of Physics D 21 (14).
A modification of the Newtonian dynamics as a possible alternative to the hidden mass hypothesis". Astrophysical Journal 270: 365–370. Bibcode:1983ApJ...270..365M. doi:10.1086/161130.. Milgrom, M. (1983). "A modification of the Newtonian dynamics - Implications for galaxies". Astrophysical Journal 270: 371–389
Riccardo Scarpa (2003). "MOND and the fundamental plane of elliptical galaxies" arXiv:astro-ph/0302445
I don't really blame the vendor for Linux programs being difficult to install.
Windows and MacOS have a centralized installation routine that vendors can use and they have only minor variations across builds.
The installation routines for Linux are fragmented across distributions and there is no single Linux-wide installation routine. Most vendors have to create their own scripts to install software and, even if they extensively test the script on all the major distributions, are likely to run into problems with future releases of those same distributions.
I know a lot of researchers, many of them older people who cut their teeth on UNIX in the 70's-90's, most of whom would never bother with Linux because it takes so much administration time and it can be extremely difficult to install commercial software.
Most of them have switched to OSX, even though some of the packages they use require compiling and tweaking, simply because the overall administration time and learning curve of Linux (not to mention the simple fact that many industry standard commercial programs have OSX versions but no Linux version). Outside of servers, the usage of Linux among researchers has dropped precipitously. Most have switched to OSX.
Interesting that this self-proclaimed (or are you the one proclaiming it) "leading nutrition researcher of the world" does not have any links to peer reviewed studies on his website. Interesting that the website is a commercial site dedicated to selling a product.
It is also interesting that this supposed authority on nutrition studied political science and has no actual formal training in medicine, much less a medical doctorate or research PhD.
That is untrue. There have been plenty of published papers on anti-gravity and modified Newtonian dynamics (which disputes the claim that gravity increases proportional to the inverse square of the distance), for instance:
Bondi, H. (July 1957). "Negative Mass in General Relativity". Rev. Mod. Phys. 29 (3): 423.
Landis, G. (1991). "Comments on Negative Mass Propulsion". J. Propulsion and Power 7 (2): 304
Morris, Michael; Thorne, Kip; Yurtsever, Ulvi (September 1988). "Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition". Physical Review 61 (13): 1446–1449
Cramer, John; Forward, Robert; Morris, Michael; Visser, Matt; Benford, Gregory; Landis, Geoffrey (1995). "Natural Wormholes as Gravitational Lenses". Phys. Rev. D 51 (6): 3117–3120
The scientific community works through continuous and vivid debate, even on issues that a layman may consider "settled", like the theory of gravity. You can often find a wide range of conclusions in the literature. It is rather normal.
In the first part of your post, you talk about how Unix is just as easy to administer, then later, you talk about how Active directory is easier to administer than OpenLDAP.
Also, I tend to disagree about Linux end-users being as easy to administer. Installing commercial software, for instance, on Mac and Windows Desktops is relatively easy but a simple install a Linux machine can be a nightmare. You see this crop up a lot with similar tasks because Windows and OSX have a single centralized installation management system while Linux is fragmented.
Installing a simple program like Matlab is easy on OSX, Windows, and Windows server but can turn into a nightmare on Linux servers and desktops.
If end users were really so scared to learn something new, they would not be switching to OSX in droves or between Android and iOS. OSX is about as different from Windows as it is from Linux, but it is also easy to use and manage, unlike the various Linux desktop managers and problems are typically easier to solve.
Linux is great for a server environment in some circumstances (so is Windows in some circumstances). It is not so great as a desktop OS for the vast majority of users. Outside of very technical areas, Linux desktop is pretty much a non-starter and even in a lot of those fields, you find people adopting OSX over Linux or Windows, even though Linux is arguably much easier to get open source UNIX tools up and running on than OSX or Windows Unix environments (for instance, Debian has repositories of binaries for almost all major open source tools in science, engineering, and computer science whereas you often have to build your own on OSX and in Windows UNIX or CYGWIN).
By contrast, UNIX/LINUX servers are much more difficult to configure and generally require a lot more man-hours and a more experienced (and expensive) staff.
The fact that Windows Server is still able to survive on expensive license fees when Linux and BSD are free is pretty telling. Companies are doing a cost-benefit comparison and finding that they are saving more money going with the paid solution than the free solution.
It is very similar to what you see happening on the desktop with the domination of easy-to-use and configure Mac and Windows over KDE or Gnome, except on the server-side it is mainly an issue of the ease of use for the system administrator, and the fact that a good Unix admin is much more expensive and harder to find than an MCSE certified admin.
Hispanic students did not exist 40 years ago? I'm sure that all the six year old Puerto Rican's living in New York, the Cubans living in Miami, and the Mexicans living in California would be surprised to hear that they were never children.
Also, you present no evidence as to why the cost of education should be decreasing. The real cost of housing prices has been increasing, meaning that the facilities cost much more than they did in the past. The number of first and second generation students in the school system has been increasing. The percentage of students who drop out has been decreasing. The average working hours has increased dramatically. The cost of funding pensions has increased dramatically. The cost of funding healthcare has increased dramatically.
So why exactly is education supposed to be cheaper now? It cost more for the facilities and more for the staff than ever before. We have more students that need additional help than before. More students go to school for longer hours than before. More teachers and staff work longer hours than before.
Montignac.com is not a respected, peer-reviewed journal.
6% to 85% is not the "chance of being accurate". It is the max and min of individual studies' conclusion.
Studies have found between 0% and 100% chance of gravity always being an attractive force. Does gravity not sound like a very reliable science to you?
Someone that exercises a lot and eats very little is an idiot who is undertaking a very serious health risk. The reality is:
1) Exercise is not a simple "calories out" model, unless you are actually hooked up 24/7 to a machine that measures your metabolism, because both sedentary behavior and exercise trigger short-term and long term metabolic changes beyond the calories that you use to perform the exercise or your resting metabolic rate.
2) Taking food in is not a simple "calories in" model because studies show that how your body treats food energy is highly dependent not only on the raw contents, but things like absorption rate. A large apple has about the same amount of calories as a can of coke and the calories come from almost the exact same chemicals (fructose and glucose mainly, i.e. apple sugar and corn sugar) but your body absorbs the energy of the apple more slowly and seems to be less likely to store it as fat. So, in theory, eating 10 large apples a day should make you as fat as drinking ten cans of coke a day (based on the calories-in, calories-out model), but the reality seems to be very different.
3) Not eating enough food lowers your metabolic rate; so does losing weight. Also, your body will often cannibalize useful tissue such as muscle as much (or more) than it converts fat to energy.
4) People have about as much control over eating as they do over breathing. Sure, some people have the willpower to hold their breath until they pass out, but most of us do not. Likewise, there are some people who can simply ignore hunger, but it is a pretty primal instinct, and it will usually win out over the conscious brain, which is why most diets fail in the long term. The best thing you can probably do is to change WHAT you eat rather than how much. A 3000 Calorie diet rich in vegetables, fruit, nuts, beans, and whole grains is going to be a lot more healthful than a 3000 Calorie diet rich in Twinkies, regardless of how much weight you gain or lose.
Gaining weight itself may not be such a bad thing. After all, we evolved the ability for a reason. What is a bad thing is a poor diet and lack of exercise. We did not evolve to stuff ourselves full of added sugars, saturated fats, and salt, something that is increasingly added to many manufactured foods.
The District of Columbia school district has less students than a small suburb. You are making a form of hasty generalization logical fallacy.
Ideally, you want to completely eliminate any demographic differences, which is what the quality studies do and the right-wing think tank studies do not.
I compared California to New York because it is representative of what the high quality studies found, and because California and New York happen to also share very similar demographics in terms of important factors like: wealth distribution, ethnic makup, foreign-born students, rural:urban, cost of living, New York and California have a very large sample size (~10 million), and have very different per-student funding for public schools (New York spends about double what California does).
There are not a lot of large States whose demographics line up like California and New York.
Making an unqualified statement is not a valid argument. Pretty much all the studies that support your contention are all funded by right-wing or libertarian groups that cherry pick data.
SOURCES:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/artic...
http://247wallst.com/special-r...
1. Your claim that there is "no result" is so ambiguous as to be meaningless.
2. You assume that demographics are the same today as they were 40-50 years ago, which is false.
For instance, a Hispanic person who turned 18 in 1975 had about a 60% chance of graduating high school, versus 80% today. Furthermore, the demographics of Americans has changed substantially. The foreign-born population in the US was 9.6 million in 1970. In 2010, it had increased to 40 million. Educating foreign born students and their children is typically much more resource-intensive than getting third generation Americans to the same level.
Again, studies have shown a direct correlation between student performance and per-pupil spending among similar demographic groups. I see you present no evidence to dispute that.
Care to actually post medical studies in peer-reviewed journals of repute to back up your claims?
Are are you relying on your self-proclaimed mastery of anonymous internet poster "sciense" (whatever that is) to support your beliefs?
1. Exercise changes your metabolism. So does being sedentary. It is not simply a matter of calories-out when it comes to exercise or calories in when it comes to diet. Exercise not only has been shown to boost your overall metabolism (some of it is from repairing damaged tissue and the other is from poorly understood short-term or long term metabolic changes), but also to do things like prevent tissue cannibalization (encouraging fat-burning) and leading to long-term changes in your metabolic rate. Someone who does intense cardiovascular exercise for 30 minutes a day is going to burn a lot more calories than the actual direct energy expenditure.
2. Willpower is something that you either have or you do not. Hunger is a primal instinct, like breathing. Some people can suppress the urge. Some people cannot. You are not going to change that, especially not permanently. It is best to find a solution that works for you, otherwise you get endless failed diets.
3. Studies show that genetics plays a tremendous role, in fact perhaps the predominate role, in obesity. The science is still unclear, with ranges between 6-85% in terms of the genetic role in obesity.[1] Your statement is simply false, especially when it comes to morbid obesity. A person with a normally functioning metabolism cannot eat themselves to being 100 lbs overweight.
4. There is no compelling scientific evidence to back up your claims about "sweeteners" (I am assuming you mean artificial sweeteners). There are some who have made such a hypotheses, but there is no good scientific evidence to support them. Even more absurd are your claims about cancer. I notice you use the weasel word "suspected". I could just as well say, "organic apples are suspected to cause cancer." But, there is zero compelling scientific evidence to CONCLUDE that organic apples cause cancer and the same is true for FDA approved artificial sweeteners. The only sweetener that was "SUSPECTED" by legitimate medical authorities to cause cancer was saccharine, and further studies disproved the modality in humans.
5. Bacterial flora in the human body and its link with obesity is a very new field of study. It is absolutely untrue to claim that there is a high causal effect. Further research is needed.
[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2695662/
High Fructose Corn Syrup is no different than any other added sugar. There is nothing special about it. The problem with HFCS is that it has become a cheap way for food manufacturers to add sweetness to products, even products like Apple Sauce which are naturally sweet.
But there is nothing particularly different about corn sugar than cane sugar. They both end up being processed as glucose and fructose by your digestive system.
One thing people don't seem to understand is that, what is important is not how much weight you lose. That is just aesthetics. It is about how you change your long-term health prognosis.
You can be overweight or even obese and still be much healthier than a normal-weight sedentary person. Eating a balanced diet that goes light in foods packed with saturated fats, simple carbohydrates, and little else and getting plenty of exercise is the key to being healthy, and you may even lose a little weight too.
All the fad diets in the world will not improve your health. They will just MAYBE make you skinnier. But remember, most diseases correlated with obesity are not caused by them and you are at a similar rate if you are thin but have the same diet and exercise habits as the average obese person.
The police are supposed to have probable cause that you are an immediate threat to yourself or others before taking you in for mental evaluation. Then, you are supposed to be evaluated by a qualified physician to determine whether to hold you for further observation, and if necessary, not release you until you are no longer a danger.
It seems incredibly unlikely that the police would detain someone simply because of the novel he published. It seems much more likely that the guy actually showed signs of severe mental illness and that the novel was just the impetus for the police to interview him and not the reason that they sought a psychiatric hold.
If the case is as the article is presenting it, that whole department needs serious retraining, but I suspect that there is something else going on here.
Usually these are about capital improvements, such as fixing leaking roofs or moving building permanent buildings instead of portables.
What seems to have the biggest impact is spending per-pupil, and States that spend more money tend to do comparatively better than those that do not. For instance, New York public schools tend to produce better results than California public schools, despite similar challenges, likely because of New York State's higher per-pupil spending.
I realize that people who treat open source as a religion with MS or Apple standing in for the devil will balk at the idea of running Linux under a more user friendly, more compatible, easier to maintain OS, but it actually works quite well for most applications.
It's not perfect. GPU performance takes a huge hit, so you'll probably want to shy away with it for hardcore GPU accelerated tasks, but the overhead in terms of CPU performance is negligible so long as you have the cores and the RAM.
And many distros support standard drivers such as VMWARE's. It's a lot better than running Cygwin or trying to hack OSX to get a good compile for open source Linux software in most cases.
PG&E sets its rates based on AVERAGE demand. The peak demand for the Summer is 1200-1800 (these are the times the grid is typically strained the most) which is why the peak rate occurs at this time.
I'm not sure why you think one data point constitutes some kind of disproof of PG&E's peak-demand rate schedule. It's akin pointing to the declining temperatures in Green Bay between August and February as proof against global warming.