Ad hominem attacks on me aren't stopping you from looking like an ass, especially now that you're pretending not to have written stuff like this:
Criteria? Try "criterion," singular. The only metric they cited about "impact on research" is a really crappy one: "While the number of journal articles produced by American researchers has risen slightly since 1988, the rest of the world has raced ahead (see chart)."
What you characterized as crappy was clearly a completely bogus claim that the article is based on one measure of research productivity. This was accompanied by vague and unsubstantiated attacks on .
Frankly, if you don't think that the number of drugs shortlisted for "priority" testing by the FDA is a good metric for biomedical research you need to take some science courses. Proxy variables rarely get much better. Its stuff like this that makes you a shortlist candidate for President.
Watching you flaggelate from ignorant outrage to ad hominem attacks is starting to be fun. And since you had trouble clicking through to page two (or counting to two judging by your "criteria" comment), you can find the link to that elusive quote below. If paragraph two of eight doesn't count as the "top" of a page, you're a pedant in addition to idiot.
What changed, and what the snippet you posted mentions, relates to the rights conferred by the patent. The federal government used to own those rights, to the exclusion of the university, but the researchers could ask the government to give those rights back.
I do not know anyone who has ever taken out a patent for the federal government.
Why stop with the snippet? Why not read the whole bloody article?
Asserting that we have "great new drugs" is no basis for your ignorant attacks on a piece that does a great job (1) describing and attempting to statistically document a slow-down in biomedical innovation, (2) describing how a small change in federal law has aversely affected biomedical research while driving up the costs of medical care.
Your early criticisms of the piece showed complete ignorance of its argument. Now that you're presented with some actual figures, you're trying to squirrel out of facing them. Of course there are ways to critique the data, which makes it surprising that all of your critiques are responses to data in the snippets of article that I've posted. The fact that you've misinterpreted some of them suggests you still haven't bothered to RTFA.
And in cancer, one remarkable study led by the FDA's cancer czar, Richard Pazdur, seems to say it all: A full three-quarters of the 71 cancer drugs approved by the agency from 1990 through 2002 did not show any survival benefit over the old, standard care.
Although this translates into 1.5 new drugs per year, the author wasn't attacking the slow pace of invention. He was using the quote to illustrate the nature and growing commercialization of biomedical research -- while simultaneously showing much of its futility. 71 drugs a year is not an improvement over 18 drugs a year if the remaining 53 don't do anything.
On the other hand, I *do* remember the article going into great length discussing how some of the most effective new drugs have resulted from collaborative community science, and resulting in enormous commercial and legal battles because they became patented and locked-off from further research in ways which would have previously been impractical or impossible.
If you want to keep making yourself look like an ass by saying things about the article which are obviously dead wrong to anyone who's read it, I'm happy to help:
Or you could forget such squishy "knowledge indicators" and go to the hard stuff: drugs. FDA scientists have an entire vocabulary for describing new compounds that come into its office. When something is considered truly novel and innovative, the FDA calls it a new molecular entity, or NME. Many of the other drugs regulators see are reformulations, old compounds with new indications for use, or "me too" drugs that are similar to several on the shelf. But even the label NME doesn't mean a drug necessarily fills a critical gap in health care.
When regulators see promising clinical data for a drug that really is needed by patients right now--as with the HIV drug Emtriva in 2003--it gives the drug a "priority review." The idea is to get it out to doctors as quickly as possible. So those who want to measure the performance of the world's drug manufacturers should look not only at the total number of FDA-approved compounds and biologics in a current year, but also at how many priority NMEs are making it through. By both measures, the productivity picture is much worse than it was in 1996 (although 2004 seems to have had a bumper crop). From 2000 through the end of 2003, the average number of priority NMEs each year was eight; in the previous four years, it was twice that.
For a number of common diseases, it seems that progress has stalled. Since the advent of genetically engineered human insulin in 1977, there has been relatively little new help for diabetics. Age-adjusted death rates for those with the disease have gotten worse, not better, during the past 25 years. Patients with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and multiple sclerosis have waited anxiously for anything promising to appear in the pipeline. And in cancer, one remarkable study led by the FDA's cancer czar, Richard Pazdur, seems to say it all: A full three-quarters of the 71 cancer drugs approved by the agency from 1990 through 2002 did not show any survival benefit over the old, standard care.
Fortune didn't run a regression analysis, but if you want to claim that their data is wrong and misleading it helps to at least know what that data is.
The Fox label is also laughable -- I'm not the one talking out of my ass in this discussion. Why don't you read the article before reflexively spasming for the "reply" button this time.
I did - last night - and I didn't see any mention of some kind of change in the patent process, whereby researchers used to "automatically" receive patents for anything. Show me where the article mentions that.
Its right at the top of page two. But since you apparently didn't catch it either time you read (surely you went back to check before trolling), here it is:
It was one piece of federal legislation that you've probably never heard of--a 1980 tweak to the U.S. patent and trademark law known as the Bayh-Dole Act. That single law, named for its sponsors, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole, in essence transferred the title of all discoveries made with the help of federal research grants to the universities and small businesses where they were made.
Prior to the law's enactment, inventors could always petition the government for the patent rights to their own work, though the rules were different at each federal agency; some 20 different statutes governed patent policy. The law simplified the "technology transfer" process and, more important, changed the legal presumption about who ought to own and develop new ideas--private enterprise as opposed to Uncle Sam.
Your claim that the number of drugs under testing for public release is a "crappy" metric for drug-focused innovation is specious.
No-one claimed that the patent system changed. The 1980 change allowed private researchers to patent inventioned funded with federal grants. It did this by eliminating the existing bureaucratic approval process for these types of applications.
You can spin theories of how this is supposed to be wonderful for innovation. Anyone can. The point of the article is that there has been a striking DROP in innovative drug creation. This is hard evidence, and its particarly striking if your claim of increased federal funding for drug research is true.
Strong evidence of a slow-down in innovation in drug research exists, and it exists regardless of whether you like it, or bother to read the article before trolling in response to someone who has.
Hear hear! Grandparent post has clearly not read the article, the basic logic of which is as follows:
(1) Inventions are now patented which would not have been patented previously because researchers could not *automatically* get patents for federally-funded research. There was a complex process that wasn't invoked for relatively trivial or cumulative research.
(2) The change in law led to a cash grab, and a research culture in which universities encouraged staff to patent any new developments, even those growing out of collaborative research. This led to commercial barriers being formed (licensing) which inhibited research and industrial application.
(3) As a result of #2, the amount of research flowing back into the academic commons is being sharply reduced. This is also inhibiting research.
(4) As a result of #2 and #3, there is a visible and statistically significant reduction in the amount of innovation in the drug industry since 1980, measured in terms of the amount of significant new drugs being made available to the public, and those which are significant enough to merit fast-tracked approval.
So parent post is correct. You *do* pay twice, because you are paying licenses to use technology which was never previously patented because it grew out of the public domain and so there were greater barriers to patenting it because a bureaucratic approval process was required.
The argument is that the law made it possible to commercialize things which were not commonly commercialized before.
The article talks about differences in intelligence based on GENDER. I take no responsibility for the gaping assumptions we have to make about the methodology used to make it seem remotely like science.
If you really beg to differ, why don't you conduct a small survey of the parents in your community. Seriously. Just ask anyone you know who has had children the age at which their child learned to speak, and *then* ask them the gender of the child. Alternately, ask your parents how old you were when you started speaking. Assuming you're male, statistics suggest that you started speaking at a year old or older. Female children routinely start speaking at 8-9 months. This holds cross culture, and cross language....
I would love to hear how this WELL-ESTABLISHED DEVELOPMENTAL FACT is a result of parents being "utterly biased about their children".
It is not *quite* possible, although it is statistically possible. It is also statistically possible that you will spontaneously combust before finishing this sentence.
Crap science is crap science, and the biggest give-away is when controversial claims are made without supporting information or data on research methods. Invoking tolerance as an excuse for intellectual laziness in research is absurd, as is feeling victimized by "political correctness" when objections are made on grounds of scientific rationality.
This is worth a read if you take genetics-based racial research seriously. Thomas Sowell can also hardly be called political correct.
I don't disagree with any of your points about the validity of the scientific process, I just don't see any of them at work here. If Slashdot provided a link to actual research or a detailed description of it then we could engage in a debate about the validity of the research.
Gender differences in early childhood skills development are not vague assertions. They are well established although explanations for them obviously vary and genetic-based arguments may be controversial. In any event, anyone in doubt of the phenomenon I've described can resolve the matter in a few minutes simply by speaking to a few parents. Alternately, anyone is welcome to google for "gender difference language aquisition" or something similar.
I'm sorry. I wasn't aware that gender doesn't exist at childbirth. I also don't see the author claiming what you are claiming in any of the linked pieces.
I'm attacking Slashdot for confusing sensational press releases with science, *especially* when the ideas that are proposed run against conventional and relatively uncontroversial established knowledge. Calling something science does not make it science.
This is an inflammatory and grossly sexist thing to post without any suporting data, and I'm saying that as a man. Its absurd that a science-oriented site like Slashdot would propagate this sort of "research" without even providing a link to a description of methodology and results. If I write a press release claiming that the world is flat, can that make the front page???
Women seem less intelligent than men??? This is news to me.
Baby girls start speaking on average three or four months before their male counterparts. This pattern holds across cultures, races and languages. If language acquisition is a reasonable test of intelligence, women far outpace men. Female students perform better than their male counterparts in most fields of education through high-school.
I'm embarassed to read this sort of crap on Slashdot. Especially after actually clicking through the link and reading that this same professor "has caused outrage in the past with claims that white people are more intelligent than blacks and that criminal traits are genetically inherited." For a website that purports to take science seriously, this is absurd. What's next, a Slashdot category for social darwinism or intelligent design?
Morrowind got me addicted simply because of the freedom of action it allowed. The plot and background were incidental to the thrill of discovering that one COULD do almost anything that the physics engine allowed.
Psychonauts is an excellent new game that makes articles like the above "nothing new under the sun" look pretty foolish. Cross between one of the old Lucasarts adventure games and a platformer like Mario64.
If you really feel this way, you should check out the new game Psychonauts. Easily the most creative computer game I've played in the last ten years.
Addictive game and utterly bizarre. Various missions involve finding a milkman, destroying a city of fish, playing Risk with Napolean and floating through a pinball disco. Game of the Year easily.
I work with the Adso project, an attempt to create an open source Chinese-English translation and language processing engine. We're quite pleased with the results to date and have set up a language learning blog and online text processing site for people to play with.
I also -- for unrelated reasons -- read some of the late Qing stuff and can testify that the language is basically completely different. Customs of word usage vary dramatically (single characters preferred to bigrams), while most official documents lack punctuation.
Anyway, both experiences make me very skeptical of statistical translation approaches in the Chinese-English space, since any good translation is almost always a non-literal translation, and there needs to be room in any system for ambiguity in how terms are translated contextually. I suspect the statistical approaches will work much better in the better specified romance languages.
Who said the United States should deflate? The country has control over its own monetary and fiscal fate and isn't facing any danger of deflation statistically, even when recent increases in the price of oil are accounted into price indexing systems.
Theoretically, the worst case situation would see the United States somehow increasing its money supply to accomodate deflationary pressures. The result would force the Chinese to choose between higher inflation or appreciation, the first of which pushes the costs of adjustment onto Chinese consumers, and the second of which is the preferred solution of the right wing anyway.
Whatever happens, the entire process is about as good a deal for the US as one gets in international economics. The country gets cheap financing for its deficit and gets to hand off dollars which are guaranteed to be worth less in real terms in the future.
A currency peg has nothing to do with currency manipulation. The two concepts are opposite (the literal meaning of the word manipulate is to move with the hand).
The yuan-dollar exchange rate has held constant at about 8.2 RMB to the dollar since 1994. If the RMB is undervalued it is because demand for goods produced in China is increasing as the country develops, not because the Chinese government is manipulating the peg.
Assuming the Chinese government does not revalue its currency, the value of the RMB will equilibrium through inflation in China and deflation in the United States. The United States can easily avoid deflation with sensible monetary and fiscal policy, so all this fuss about China is basically just a bunch of FUD.
The development community relies on this piece of software because important people in the community know and trust those tools. McVoy was responsive to concerns by core developers about data interoperability, so the issue was not user-driven as with Windows/Samba.
Andrew has laudable goals. But if he was truly offended by the use of proprietary software in the development process he should have started a fork of the kernel on something like Subversion and advocated the adoption of those tools (or better yet -- developed them). Instead, he disrupted a productive development environment by antagonizing relations between contributors who were perfectly happy otherwise.
Development in the Linux kernel will slow down. This is an unfortunate loss when you consider that it has been caused by someone standing on principle for something none of the major players seem to care about.
huh? The dialogue compares the dark side to an art while the screen depicts a ballet filled with symbolism representing the aggressive subconscious. And this is supposed to be accidental?
From the article linked above:
>> Associated with the subconscious since Homer's treatment of Neptune in the Odyssey... water imagery dominates the new film. As a symbol of latent aggression and hubris, it lurks in the background at those pivotal moments in the narrative where characters make terrible lapses in judgement. As a cliff-dwelling diplomat, Amidala is as logically bound to oppose the creation of an Army of the Republic as the amphibious Jar Jar is thematically fated to support it: the deliberate division of ego and id could hardly be clearer. Lucas appropriately places the romance and marriage of Anakin and Amidala at a lakeside retreat, while he situates the Army of the Clones on the watery planet Kamino. Among the most interesting qualities of this film is the way this symbolism reinforces itself on multiple levels. Not only are the Clones an aggressive and irrational race (like the Gungans they are warriors who live in a "hidden city"), but the Jedi are as oblivious to the existence of Kamino as they are to the dangers of the pride and aggression that lurk within themselves.
If you're sure its accidental perhaps you can post an counterexample inconsistent with this explanation. Might be harder than you think....:)
The US-RMB peg has NOT CHANGED since 1994, which basically tells you the whole story.
There is absolutely nothing manipulative about a currency peg (the US dollar was pegged to other currencies at various points in its history). About the worst you can say is that the Chinese central bank has been buying up USD to neutralize inflationary pressures caused by the inflow of foreign currency. This places some deflationary pressure on the US dollar, but the logical thing for the US government to do if this is a real problem is to compensate by printing a few more dollars.
Sure, most language software is next-to-useless, but the market slants heavily towards very basic learners. So even if you have a good program, the material it covers is likely to be so basic as to make it ineffective at actually teaching the language.
That being said, some ways of doing things work. If you're still studying Mandarin, for instance, you might find the following site useful. Great for building up vocab, while the highlighting improves one's ability to rapidly parse Chinese text mentally:
Slashdot Mirror
What you characterized as crappy was clearly a completely bogus claim that the article is based on one measure of research productivity. This was accompanied by vague and unsubstantiated attacks on .
Frankly, if you don't think that the number of drugs shortlisted for "priority" testing by the FDA is a good metric for biomedical research you need to take some science courses. Proxy variables rarely get much better. Its stuff like this that makes you a shortlist candidate for President.
Watching you flaggelate from ignorant outrage to ad hominem attacks is starting to be fun. And since you had trouble clicking through to page two (or counting to two judging by your "criteria" comment), you can find the link to that elusive quote below. If paragraph two of eight doesn't count as the "top" of a page, you're a pedant in addition to idiot.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fortune75/articles
I do not know anyone who has ever taken out a patent for the federal government.
Why stop with the snippet? Why not read the whole bloody article?
Asserting that we have "great new drugs" is no basis for your ignorant attacks on a piece that does a great job (1) describing and attempting to statistically document a slow-down in biomedical innovation, (2) describing how a small change in federal law has aversely affected biomedical research while driving up the costs of medical care.
Your early criticisms of the piece showed complete ignorance of its argument. Now that you're presented with some actual figures, you're trying to squirrel out of facing them. Of course there are ways to critique the data, which makes it surprising that all of your critiques are responses to data in the snippets of article that I've posted. The fact that you've misinterpreted some of them suggests you still haven't bothered to RTFA.
Although this translates into 1.5 new drugs per year, the author wasn't attacking the slow pace of invention. He was using the quote to illustrate the nature and growing commercialization of biomedical research -- while simultaneously showing much of its futility. 71 drugs a year is not an improvement over 18 drugs a year if the remaining 53 don't do anything.
On the other hand, I *do* remember the article going into great length discussing how some of the most effective new drugs have resulted from collaborative community science, and resulting in enormous commercial and legal battles because they became patented and locked-off from further research in ways which would have previously been impractical or impossible.
Fortune didn't run a regression analysis, but if you want to claim that their data is wrong and misleading it helps to at least know what that data is.
The Fox label is also laughable -- I'm not the one talking out of my ass in this discussion. Why don't you read the article before reflexively spasming for the "reply" button this time.
Its right at the top of page two. But since you apparently didn't catch it either time you read (surely you went back to check before trolling), here it is:
Your claim that the number of drugs under testing for public release is a "crappy" metric for drug-focused innovation is specious.
You clearly haven't read the article.
No-one claimed that the patent system changed. The 1980 change allowed private researchers to patent inventioned funded with federal grants. It did this by eliminating the existing bureaucratic approval process for these types of applications.
You can spin theories of how this is supposed to be wonderful for innovation. Anyone can. The point of the article is that there has been a striking DROP in innovative drug creation. This is hard evidence, and its particarly striking if your claim of increased federal funding for drug research is true.
Strong evidence of a slow-down in innovation in drug research exists, and it exists regardless of whether you like it, or bother to read the article before trolling in response to someone who has.
Hear hear! Grandparent post has clearly not read the article, the basic logic of which is as follows:
(1) Inventions are now patented which would not have been patented previously because researchers could not *automatically* get patents for federally-funded research. There was a complex process that wasn't invoked for relatively trivial or cumulative research.
(2) The change in law led to a cash grab, and a research culture in which universities encouraged staff to patent any new developments, even those growing out of collaborative research. This led to commercial barriers being formed (licensing) which inhibited research and industrial application.
(3) As a result of #2, the amount of research flowing back into the academic commons is being sharply reduced. This is also inhibiting research.
(4) As a result of #2 and #3, there is a visible and statistically significant reduction in the amount of innovation in the drug industry since 1980, measured in terms of the amount of significant new drugs being made available to the public, and those which are significant enough to merit fast-tracked approval.
So parent post is correct. You *do* pay twice, because you are paying licenses to use technology which was never previously patented because it grew out of the public domain and so there were greater barriers to patenting it because a bureaucratic approval process was required.
The argument is that the law made it possible to commercialize things which were not commonly commercialized before.
The article talks about differences in intelligence based on GENDER. I take no responsibility for the gaping assumptions we have to make about the methodology used to make it seem remotely like science.
If you really beg to differ, why don't you conduct a small survey of the parents in your community. Seriously. Just ask anyone you know who has had children the age at which their child learned to speak, and *then* ask them the gender of the child. Alternately, ask your parents how old you were when you started speaking. Assuming you're male, statistics suggest that you started speaking at a year old or older. Female children routinely start speaking at 8-9 months. This holds cross culture, and cross language....
I would love to hear how this WELL-ESTABLISHED DEVELOPMENTAL FACT is a result of parents being "utterly biased about their children".
It is not *quite* possible, although it is statistically possible. It is also statistically possible that you will spontaneously combust before finishing this sentence.
c urve/sowell.html
Crap science is crap science, and the biggest give-away is when controversial claims are made without supporting information or data on research methods. Invoking tolerance as an excuse for intellectual laziness in research is absurd, as is feeling victimized by "political correctness" when objections are made on grounds of scientific rationality.
This is worth a read if you take genetics-based racial research seriously. Thomas Sowell can also hardly be called political correct.
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-
I don't disagree with any of your points about the validity of the scientific process, I just don't see any of them at work here. If Slashdot provided a link to actual research or a detailed description of it then we could engage in a debate about the validity of the research.
Gender differences in early childhood skills development are not vague assertions. They are well established although explanations for them obviously vary and genetic-based arguments may be controversial. In any event, anyone in doubt of the phenomenon I've described can resolve the matter in a few minutes simply by speaking to a few parents. Alternately, anyone is welcome to google for "gender difference language aquisition" or something similar.
I'm sorry. I wasn't aware that gender doesn't exist at childbirth. I also don't see the author claiming what you are claiming in any of the linked pieces.
I'm attacking Slashdot for confusing sensational press releases with science, *especially* when the ideas that are proposed run against conventional and relatively uncontroversial established knowledge. Calling something science does not make it science.
This is an inflammatory and grossly sexist thing to post without any suporting data, and I'm saying that as a man. Its absurd that a science-oriented site like Slashdot would propagate this sort of "research" without even providing a link to a description of methodology and results. If I write a press release claiming that the world is flat, can that make the front page???
If this article contained any link to a "citation-filled, disprovable, scientific paper" you might have a point.
Women seem less intelligent than men??? This is news to me.
Baby girls start speaking on average three or four months before their male counterparts. This pattern holds across cultures, races and languages. If language acquisition is a reasonable test of intelligence, women far outpace men. Female students perform better than their male counterparts in most fields of education through high-school.
I'm embarassed to read this sort of crap on Slashdot. Especially after actually clicking through the link and reading that this same professor "has caused outrage in the past with claims that white people are more intelligent than blacks and that criminal traits are genetically inherited." For a website that purports to take science seriously, this is absurd. What's next, a Slashdot category for social darwinism or intelligent design?
Nice post.
Morrowind got me addicted simply because of the freedom of action it allowed. The plot and background were incidental to the thrill of discovering that one COULD do almost anything that the physics engine allowed.
Psychonauts is an excellent new game that makes articles like the above "nothing new under the sun" look pretty foolish. Cross between one of the old Lucasarts adventure games and a platformer like Mario64.
"Because nobody is inventing anything new."
If you really feel this way, you should check out the new game Psychonauts. Easily the most creative computer game I've played in the last ten years.
Addictive game and utterly bizarre. Various missions involve finding a milkman, destroying a city of fish, playing Risk with Napolean and floating through a pinball disco. Game of the Year easily.
I work with the Adso project, an attempt to create an open source Chinese-English translation and language processing engine. We're quite pleased with the results to date and have set up a language learning blog and online text processing site for people to play with.
http://www.adsotrans.com
http://www.newsinchinese.com
I also -- for unrelated reasons -- read some of the late Qing stuff and can testify that the language is basically completely different. Customs of word usage vary dramatically (single characters preferred to bigrams), while most official documents lack punctuation.
Anyway, both experiences make me very skeptical of statistical translation approaches in the Chinese-English space, since any good translation is almost always a non-literal translation, and there needs to be room in any system for ambiguity in how terms are translated contextually. I suspect the statistical approaches will work much better in the better specified romance languages.
Power to them if they can do it.
Who said the United States should deflate? The country has control over its own monetary and fiscal fate and isn't facing any danger of deflation statistically, even when recent increases in the price of oil are accounted into price indexing systems.
Theoretically, the worst case situation would see the United States somehow increasing its money supply to accomodate deflationary pressures. The result would force the Chinese to choose between higher inflation or appreciation, the first of which pushes the costs of adjustment onto Chinese consumers, and the second of which is the preferred solution of the right wing anyway.
Whatever happens, the entire process is about as good a deal for the US as one gets in international economics. The country gets cheap financing for its deficit and gets to hand off dollars which are guaranteed to be worth less in real terms in the future.
A currency peg has nothing to do with currency manipulation. The two concepts are opposite (the literal meaning of the word manipulate is to move with the hand).
The yuan-dollar exchange rate has held constant at about 8.2 RMB to the dollar since 1994. If the RMB is undervalued it is because demand for goods produced in China is increasing as the country develops, not because the Chinese government is manipulating the peg.
Assuming the Chinese government does not revalue its currency, the value of the RMB will equilibrium through inflation in China and deflation in the United States. The United States can easily avoid deflation with sensible monetary and fiscal policy, so all this fuss about China is basically just a bunch of FUD.
He does attack first. That's why he dies.
The development community relies on this piece of software because important people in the community know and trust those tools. McVoy was responsive to concerns by core developers about data interoperability, so the issue was not user-driven as with Windows/Samba.
Andrew has laudable goals. But if he was truly offended by the use of proprietary software in the development process he should have started a fork of the kernel on something like Subversion and advocated the adoption of those tools (or better yet -- developed them). Instead, he disrupted a productive development environment by antagonizing relations between contributors who were perfectly happy otherwise.
Development in the Linux kernel will slow down. This is an unfortunate loss when you consider that it has been caused by someone standing on principle for something none of the major players seem to care about.
huh? The dialogue compares the dark side to an art while the screen depicts a ballet filled with symbolism representing the aggressive subconscious. And this is supposed to be accidental?
:)
From the article linked above:
>> Associated with the subconscious since Homer's treatment of Neptune in the Odyssey... water imagery dominates the new film. As a symbol of latent aggression and hubris, it lurks in the background at those pivotal moments in the narrative where characters make terrible lapses in judgement. As a cliff-dwelling diplomat, Amidala is as logically bound to oppose the creation of an Army of the Republic as the amphibious Jar Jar is thematically fated to support it: the deliberate division of ego and id could hardly be clearer. Lucas appropriately places the romance and marriage of Anakin and Amidala at a lakeside retreat, while he situates the Army of the Clones on the watery planet Kamino. Among the most interesting qualities of this film is the way this symbolism reinforces itself on multiple levels. Not only are the Clones an aggressive and irrational race (like the Gungans they are warriors who live in a "hidden city"), but the Jedi are as oblivious to the existence of Kamino as they are to the dangers of the pride and aggression that lurk within themselves.
If you're sure its accidental perhaps you can post an counterexample inconsistent with this explanation. Might be harder than you think....
Makes thematic sense. Water represents aggression and the subconscious in the symbolic framework Lucas is constructing.
There's a nice article with more details about some of how this was done in the first film here:
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/38/clones1.htm
The US-RMB peg has NOT CHANGED since 1994, which basically tells you the whole story.
There is absolutely nothing manipulative about a currency peg (the US dollar was pegged to other currencies at various points in its history). About the worst you can say is that the Chinese central bank has been buying up USD to neutralize inflationary pressures caused by the inflow of foreign currency. This places some deflationary pressure on the US dollar, but the logical thing for the US government to do if this is a real problem is to compensate by printing a few more dollars.
Someone should mod parent up. This is true.
Very difficult game, incidentally.
Sure, most language software is next-to-useless, but the market slants heavily towards very basic learners. So even if you have a good program, the material it covers is likely to be so basic as to make it ineffective at actually teaching the language.
That being said, some ways of doing things work. If you're still studying Mandarin, for instance, you might find the following site useful. Great for building up vocab, while the highlighting improves one's ability to rapidly parse Chinese text mentally:
http://www.newsinchinese.com