The OP mentioned that getting copies of dissertations is difficult. Let me provide some more background on the problem.
First, the copyright is not the issue so much as the language concerning copying and distribution of the dissertation.University libraries almost always have copies of dissertations (theses are different), but the lack of clear language or law regarding copies makes them extremely reluctant to copy them.
Even if they will make arrangements for duplication there are often other hurdles. Most universities use ProQuest (UMI) who microfilms and sells copies for ~$50. Unfortunately, these are extremely low quality black and white reproductions that are often unsuitable for research. Often I end up having to order a copy from ProQuest, then go back to the university and ask them to make better copies of all the images and plates.
Universities that do not use ProQuest have a large range of policies. Some will simply not make copies (Stanford). Others will make copies only after getting permission in writing from the author (University of Michigan). Still others will make copies, but only at a high cost (~$1100 in one case from a certain public university in Colorado).
Finally, there are some cases where the university will neither copy or lend a dissertation, so your only option is to travel there to read it.
Feel free to reply if you have any questions about the process as I have learned far more about it than I ever wanted to.
Five years ago I had the opportunity to experience the military hospital system when I broke several bones. The entirety of the treatment program (about a dozen doctor visits plus about thirty physical therapy visits) resulted in only a dozen pages of scribbles (~10 words to each page) from the doctor visits plus the intake paperwork (~4 pages). There were no records of the physical therapy sessions (PS: The VA has refused to cover the injury citing a lack of documentation!)
Compare this to the civilian care I received a few months later for the same injury which had complete descriptions and detailed records of every visit.
So unless there have been radical changes in staff and their practices, all you will end up with is junk in electronic form instead of on paper.
A major part of my job is tracking down research that has been done on various topics and passing it along to a user. Every time I do a search for one of my users I use about 30 different databases (ScienceDirect, Worldcat, Google Scholar, etc.). What can I use for Chinese journals? Yes, there are a few databases (whose names I can't recall off the top of my head), but they are extremely limited. I don't have the sorting and filtering abilities I do with other databases. Oftentimes the title and abstract are translated to English but the abstract is no more than three sentences. For comparison, most of the journals in my field from say Germany are also fully translated (often side-by-side) into English.
In short, if I can't find it I can't pass it along to my users for their evaluation. For those that do make it to my users, most will be dismissed as useless.
Am I the only one disturbed by comments like this? It has been almost eight years now and many people are acting like it happened yesterday. Clinging to what happened that day to form your identity and world outlook eight years later would seem to point to severe psychological issues to me.
"For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted."
Slashdot is not exactly going to be a sympathetic crowd here. What we have is an intelligent person who ignored every single bit of advice from a multitude of sources in favor of outright greed. So now she wants to warn people, but is it really going to do any good? She clearly would have ignored the advice she is now giving.
You can not compare say chemical pollution in the US during the 70's to Chemical pollution in China today for a number of reasons. Technologies for both production and pollution are drastically different today than they were even a decade ago, much less four. China has the lessons learned and the technology developed by other countries to work with. Them NOT using it is not a case of honest ignorance or lack of alternatives but a CHOICE to have pollution this bad for the sake of economic development.
Good god, if this is corruption then about 95% of the people in middle and upper management should be in jail. When I read the headline I thought he had been caught embezzling a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars. I don't think that there are too many people who are innocent of having their company pay for an expense that was not 100% appropriate.
Get real, this is small time stuff that is not even worth making it to the news much less/.
I skimmed the full report and it would appear that the writers are making assumptions. There is an assumption that the presence of laptops is what has lead to increased standardized test scores. This ignores the dozens of major changes that have been taking place in education over the last decade.
While I would agree that the small business owner plays a role, the IT staff play a bigger one. Most shops of less than 10-20 people will not have their own IT staff. In these cases, you often have someone come in and create the network and set things up, but nobody is there to do day to day tasks. A side effect is that no employee is likely to even know that they should be keeping detailed records of software purchases and use. You can see this even more in companies that grew from a single person.
Ex: A service business was started eight years ago by a single person. They have the owner and two other employees in an office as well as a dozen field techs. Who manages the software? In all likelihood they contract for someone to do ocassional work. Furthermore, can we really expect a business of this size to have the receipt from when the owner purchased a copy of Photoshop five years ago for his laptop when he was the only employee?
To be reasonable, we have to expect that almost all small businesses will not *technically* be in compliance even if they legally purchased all their software.
IIRC, 275 have died immediately following being shot with a Taser. In at least 30 cases the coroner has stated that the Tasering was the cause. The problem is that there is almost no way to absolutely prove the Taser was the cause. If a person has a heart weakness that has been with them their entire lives and has never caused problems yet kills them after being hit with the Taser, what is the cause?
I find it very interesting that Taser International claims that the 150+ deaths that have occurred immediately after the person is shot with the Taser are not caused by the Taser. At the same time their website has pages (see below) of warnings about all the medical risks associated with being shot by a Taser (such as an increased risk of heart attack).
As other posters have already commented, it is not the Taser itself that is the problem, it is the use of it. If these were being used only in cases where a firearm would normally be used it is one thing. In that situation a small risk of death by Taser is acceptable when compared to the near certainty after being shot multiple times. But that is not what we are seeing. People are dying in situations where without the Taser they would not be seriously harmed....and that is what I have a problem with.
The value of a company is not only in the market value of the products they produce. It is also in the market value of what they could produce and the impact they could have on your company. I suspect that a significant part of the buyout was for this reason.
I fail to see where the victory is in this. The only thing he gained was that the charges were dropped. Considering that the charges were baseless to begin with, that is not much. On the other hand, the city won by making him pay $10k to fight a baseless charge and by getting away with no punishment for the city or the officer involved. Seems to be a weak victory to me...
[quote] Unexplained affluence, failing to report overseas travel, showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, keeping unusual work hours, unreported contacts with foreign nationals, unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, and unexplained absences are all considered potential espionage indicators. [/quote]
Other than the first point, that describes a large portion of the college population (especially at the graduate level).
The problem with a guide like this is that it returns too many false positives. The odds of a single person who fit most of those characteristics out of a group of 20,000 being a terrorist is almost nil. Yes, it will be true in some cases, but not in enough to warrant the massive investment in time. All this does it put people's minds at ease that the government is Doing Something.
The real reason for choosing ethanol is its availability. It's easy to come by and is currently cheaper than gasoline. The US also has a great deal of surplus farming capacity from which to draw greater yields. (Though folks generally argue about how much surplus capacity there is, and how much can be brought online before food production is seriously impacted.) Are we talking about corn-based ethanol here? Because there IS no "surplus" capacity. It is real simple to tell. Check the NASS stats for 2006 production (yes, I know 2007 production is up something like 10-15%, but it is at the expense of other crops such as soybeans which incidentally are used for biodiesel). Then go to the Renewable Fuels Association and total up the capacity of all the refineries (note that their list is a few months out of date). Calculate it out based on 2.5-2.8* gallons per bushel of corn. The numbers are a bit concerning. We are currently using over 20% of the corn harvest for ethanol production. Basic economics demands that we can't increase the production much more without seeing significant increases in prices for other crops (causing other crops to be more profitable and farmers to switch).
Regardless, while we can use a significant percentage of out corn harvest for ethanol production, we can't use all that much more. Even using 45% of the corn harvested each year would not provide enough ethanol to make a significant dent in foreign oil purchases.
*The figures seem to vary. Quite a few reports will say 2.7 or 2.8, but many refinery websites indicate differently (a 50MGY refinery stating that they use 20 million bushels per year). It could be that they are running over capacity. *shrug*
You are missing the point. The idea is to make this one part of an overall strategy. Sure, it is expensive, but it is nowhere near as expensive as say educating a couple billion people. Furthermore, user education has limited effectiveness and takes a long period of time. It is unlikely that we would be able to properly educate the majority of people if we had a decade.
Further comments about the distinction between public and private:
The purpose of a shield law is to allow people to speak privately to journalist ( and BTW, I'll agree that Wolf qualifies as a journalist ). If he has private interviews of the rioters, they should be protected. If he personally knows the rioters - and there are reasonable claims that he does - that information is private and should be protected.
But the riots were a public act. Wolf taped them as anyone - including the cops - could have.
The real question here is: should a journalist should be allowed to take something that is public and make it private, and then claim protection under privacy laws? Why is it that nobody here is bothering to read the background on this story? This case has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE VIDEO FOOTAGE. Good god, when are you going to learn to actually read something before you post.
Wolf offered to release the tape multiple times. The stumbling block has always been that he was ordered to essentially provide a profile to the secret grand jury about all the people he knew of that were at the riot. This part had nothing at all to do with the damaged police car and everything to do with the government wanting to know who the political dissidents are.
I don't think that anyone familiar with the PC market was expecting anything different. Windows Vista is not a revolutionary OS, it is an improvement on what most people already have. Simply put, there is no reason for the vast majority of consumers to purchase a new computer for the sake of Vista.
Typically they fail to put things in context, use too much math too early, and focus on irrelevant equations and derivations rather than the important concepts. And how this is different from your average textbook?
You make the assumption that a full-scale response is needed in this kind of situation. Anyone with half a brain (which apparently does not include the Boston PD) would have immediately known that those objects were not bombs. The problem with it all is that if the government keeps responding in this manner, the common citizen will ignore warnings when the real thing happens.
I ran into a similar problem with Vonage. If you actually read the TOS (at least as of ~a year ago), you do NOT need to call to cancel service, only e-mail them. I contacted them at the e-mail listed and they (of course) responded by saying that it was necessary to call. I replied back with a copy of the relevant portion of the TOS and an hour later I had a reply saying it was canceled.
I seriously doubt that anyone here is surprised. There is simply almost no reason to upgrade to a newer OS.
1) The OS is in its infancy, meaning that there are large numbers of bugs.
2) It is just before a major holiday break, large projects will not be starting until after the break.
3) There is no feature that requires an upgrade.
4) The training of the tech staff is probably just getting started.
Most companies will be looking at switching when their next major desktop purchase goes through (generally once per year). If that is anywhere in the next few months, they will probably just roll out with XP and wait until the next hardware cycle to seriously consider it.
I understand and agree (in a way) with what you are saying. The problem here is that by ordering the game produced, he is in fact saying that a game CAN be a public nuisance. That in itself is a hirrible precedent.
A super-neat wiring rack is great, if you don't need to get to the wires often. If you need to rearrange wiring often (for whatever reason), there is no point in making it look great (though a certain level of neatness is required for optimum efficiency).
That isn't the reason libraries are doing digital. The cost for journals is going up every year. Twenty years ago, a university would subscribe to hundreds (if not thousands) of journals. Now imagine that the price today is between $50 and $900 per year for 500 journals, most of which are looked at once per year. Services which provide access to large numbers of periodicals are the way of the future simply because they are cheaper, not because they are any better.
Slashdot Mirror
The OP mentioned that getting copies of dissertations is difficult. Let me provide some more background on the problem.
First, the copyright is not the issue so much as the language concerning copying and distribution of the dissertation.University libraries almost always have copies of dissertations (theses are different), but the lack of clear language or law regarding copies makes them extremely reluctant to copy them.
Even if they will make arrangements for duplication there are often other hurdles. Most universities use ProQuest (UMI) who microfilms and sells copies for ~$50. Unfortunately, these are extremely low quality black and white reproductions that are often unsuitable for research. Often I end up having to order a copy from ProQuest, then go back to the university and ask them to make better copies of all the images and plates.
Universities that do not use ProQuest have a large range of policies. Some will simply not make copies (Stanford). Others will make copies only after getting permission in writing from the author (University of Michigan). Still others will make copies, but only at a high cost (~$1100 in one case from a certain public university in Colorado).
Finally, there are some cases where the university will neither copy or lend a dissertation, so your only option is to travel there to read it.
Feel free to reply if you have any questions about the process as I have learned far more about it than I ever wanted to.
Five years ago I had the opportunity to experience the military hospital system when I broke several bones. The entirety of the treatment program (about a dozen doctor visits plus about thirty physical therapy visits) resulted in only a dozen pages of scribbles (~10 words to each page) from the doctor visits plus the intake paperwork (~4 pages). There were no records of the physical therapy sessions (PS: The VA has refused to cover the injury citing a lack of documentation!)
Compare this to the civilian care I received a few months later for the same injury which had complete descriptions and detailed records of every visit.
So unless there have been radical changes in staff and their practices, all you will end up with is junk in electronic form instead of on paper.
A major part of my job is tracking down research that has been done on various topics and passing it along to a user. Every time I do a search for one of my users I use about 30 different databases (ScienceDirect, Worldcat, Google Scholar, etc.). What can I use for Chinese journals? Yes, there are a few databases (whose names I can't recall off the top of my head), but they are extremely limited. I don't have the sorting and filtering abilities I do with other databases. Oftentimes the title and abstract are translated to English but the abstract is no more than three sentences. For comparison, most of the journals in my field from say Germany are also fully translated (often side-by-side) into English.
In short, if I can't find it I can't pass it along to my users for their evaluation. For those that do make it to my users, most will be dismissed as useless.
Am I the only one disturbed by comments like this? It has been almost eight years now and many people are acting like it happened yesterday. Clinging to what happened that day to form your identity and world outlook eight years later would seem to point to severe psychological issues to me.
"For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted."
Slashdot is not exactly going to be a sympathetic crowd here. What we have is an intelligent person who ignored every single bit of advice from a multitude of sources in favor of outright greed. So now she wants to warn people, but is it really going to do any good? She clearly would have ignored the advice she is now giving.
You can not compare say chemical pollution in the US during the 70's to Chemical pollution in China today for a number of reasons. Technologies for both production and pollution are drastically different today than they were even a decade ago, much less four. China has the lessons learned and the technology developed by other countries to work with. Them NOT using it is not a case of honest ignorance or lack of alternatives but a CHOICE to have pollution this bad for the sake of economic development.
Good god, if this is corruption then about 95% of the people in middle and upper management should be in jail. When I read the headline I thought he had been caught embezzling a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars. I don't think that there are too many people who are innocent of having their company pay for an expense that was not 100% appropriate.
/.
Get real, this is small time stuff that is not even worth making it to the news much less
I skimmed the full report and it would appear that the writers are making assumptions. There is an assumption that the presence of laptops is what has lead to increased standardized test scores. This ignores the dozens of major changes that have been taking place in education over the last decade.
While I would agree that the small business owner plays a role, the IT staff play a bigger one. Most shops of less than 10-20 people will not have their own IT staff. In these cases, you often have someone come in and create the network and set things up, but nobody is there to do day to day tasks. A side effect is that no employee is likely to even know that they should be keeping detailed records of software purchases and use. You can see this even more in companies that grew from a single person.
Ex: A service business was started eight years ago by a single person. They have the owner and two other employees in an office as well as a dozen field techs. Who manages the software? In all likelihood they contract for someone to do ocassional work. Furthermore, can we really expect a business of this size to have the receipt from when the owner purchased a copy of Photoshop five years ago for his laptop when he was the only employee?
To be reasonable, we have to expect that almost all small businesses will not *technically* be in compliance even if they legally purchased all their software.
IIRC, 275 have died immediately following being shot with a Taser. In at least 30 cases the coroner has stated that the Tasering was the cause. The problem is that there is almost no way to absolutely prove the Taser was the cause. If a person has a heart weakness that has been with them their entire lives and has never caused problems yet kills them after being hit with the Taser, what is the cause?
I find it very interesting that Taser International claims that the 150+ deaths that have occurred immediately after the person is shot with the Taser are not caused by the Taser. At the same time their website has pages (see below) of warnings about all the medical risks associated with being shot by a Taser (such as an increased risk of heart attack).
http://www.taser.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/Controlled%20Documents/Warnings/LG-INST-CTZWARN-001%20REV%20E%20Citizen%20Warnings.pdf
As other posters have already commented, it is not the Taser itself that is the problem, it is the use of it. If these were being used only in cases where a firearm would normally be used it is one thing. In that situation a small risk of death by Taser is acceptable when compared to the near certainty after being shot multiple times. But that is not what we are seeing. People are dying in situations where without the Taser they would not be seriously harmed....and that is what I have a problem with.
re: $860m
The value of a company is not only in the market value of the products they produce. It is also in the market value of what they could produce and the impact they could have on your company. I suspect that a significant part of the buyout was for this reason.
I fail to see where the victory is in this. The only thing he gained was that the charges were dropped. Considering that the charges were baseless to begin with, that is not much. On the other hand, the city won by making him pay $10k to fight a baseless charge and by getting away with no punishment for the city or the officer involved. Seems to be a weak victory to me...
[quote]
Unexplained affluence, failing to report overseas travel, showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, keeping unusual work hours, unreported contacts with foreign nationals, unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, and unexplained absences are all considered potential espionage indicators.
[/quote]
Other than the first point, that describes a large portion of the college population (especially at the graduate level).
The problem with a guide like this is that it returns too many false positives. The odds of a single person who fit most of those characteristics out of a group of 20,000 being a terrorist is almost nil. Yes, it will be true in some cases, but not in enough to warrant the massive investment in time. All this does it put people's minds at ease that the government is Doing Something.
Regardless, while we can use a significant percentage of out corn harvest for ethanol production, we can't use all that much more. Even using 45% of the corn harvested each year would not provide enough ethanol to make a significant dent in foreign oil purchases.
*The figures seem to vary. Quite a few reports will say 2.7 or 2.8, but many refinery websites indicate differently (a 50MGY refinery stating that they use 20 million bushels per year). It could be that they are running over capacity. *shrug*
You are missing the point. The idea is to make this one part of an overall strategy. Sure, it is expensive, but it is nowhere near as expensive as say educating a couple billion people. Furthermore, user education has limited effectiveness and takes a long period of time. It is unlikely that we would be able to properly educate the majority of people if we had a decade.
The purpose of a shield law is to allow people to speak privately to journalist ( and BTW, I'll agree that Wolf qualifies as a journalist ). If he has private interviews of the rioters, they should be protected. If he personally knows the rioters - and there are reasonable claims that he does - that information is private and should be protected.
But the riots were a public act. Wolf taped them as anyone - including the cops - could have.
The real question here is: should a journalist should be allowed to take something that is public and make it private, and then claim protection under privacy laws? Why is it that nobody here is bothering to read the background on this story? This case has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE VIDEO FOOTAGE. Good god, when are you going to learn to actually read something before you post.
Wolf offered to release the tape multiple times. The stumbling block has always been that he was ordered to essentially provide a profile to the secret grand jury about all the people he knew of that were at the riot. This part had nothing at all to do with the damaged police car and everything to do with the government wanting to know who the political dissidents are.
THAT is what the case is about.
I don't think that anyone familiar with the PC market was expecting anything different. Windows Vista is not a revolutionary OS, it is an improvement on what most people already have. Simply put, there is no reason for the vast majority of consumers to purchase a new computer for the sake of Vista.
You make the assumption that a full-scale response is needed in this kind of situation. Anyone with half a brain (which apparently does not include the Boston PD) would have immediately known that those objects were not bombs. The problem with it all is that if the government keeps responding in this manner, the common citizen will ignore warnings when the real thing happens.
I ran into a similar problem with Vonage. If you actually read the TOS (at least as of ~a year ago), you do NOT need to call to cancel service, only e-mail them. I contacted them at the e-mail listed and they (of course) responded by saying that it was necessary to call. I replied back with a copy of the relevant portion of the TOS and an hour later I had a reply saying it was canceled.
The moral of the story is, READ your TOS.
I seriously doubt that anyone here is surprised. There is simply almost no reason to upgrade to a newer OS.
1) The OS is in its infancy, meaning that there are large numbers of bugs.
2) It is just before a major holiday break, large projects will not be starting until after the break.
3) There is no feature that requires an upgrade.
4) The training of the tech staff is probably just getting started.
Most companies will be looking at switching when their next major desktop purchase goes through (generally once per year). If that is anywhere in the next few months, they will probably just roll out with XP and wait until the next hardware cycle to seriously consider it.
I understand and agree (in a way) with what you are saying. The problem here is that by ordering the game produced, he is in fact saying that a game CAN be a public nuisance. That in itself is a hirrible precedent.
A super-neat wiring rack is great, if you don't need to get to the wires often. If you need to rearrange wiring often (for whatever reason), there is no point in making it look great (though a certain level of neatness is required for optimum efficiency).
That isn't the reason libraries are doing digital. The cost for journals is going up every year. Twenty years ago, a university would subscribe to hundreds (if not thousands) of journals. Now imagine that the price today is between $50 and $900 per year for 500 journals, most of which are looked at once per year. Services which provide access to large numbers of periodicals are the way of the future simply because they are cheaper, not because they are any better.