Re:The multi million dollar question...
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In Google We Trust
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google to me is a nice example of free market competition, even if the profit end of things has yet to be proven. i was joking to someone, imagine if the government had decided to do google, what it would have been like. instead a sharp concept and i think a desire for excellence won out by -- gasp -- being the best product.
google returns much higher quality hits than blind keyword searching could, google bombing notwithstanding. they could do a better job, also. i notice they've finally introduced word stemming (sort of), now how about specifying whether words occur within a certain proximity, such as the same sentence or paragraph, and other criteria (yes, i'm thinking of westlaw).
as for yahoo -- well, "yahooing" just sounds silly.:)
i agree with you -- for now. the manpower and cost issue overwhelm the "big brother" specter. however, i am sure the government forsees a day where packets can be analyzed in an automatic way, much as i recall they have voiceprint information to identify suspects using cellphones by their voices. encryption would seem to be the death knell to all of this.
as for who's talking to whom, public terminals such as at libraries -- the 9-11 folk used these -- will still be a problem. however, you're right, this is very valuable information, and also the sort of thing they should not be collecting without legitimate individual suspicion.
the single biggest barrier to effective intelligence will continue to be human intelligence, of the lack of it. it takes a lot to be a thoughtful investigator and there aren't that many of them. there are plenty of mccarthyist idiots, however. we must watch these developments with care, armed with the assumption that the spy tools will fall into the hands of someone with ethics no more developed that those of a script kiddie.
why not? because that's the same as paying for it myself. to do so would make me less competitive in a market where such clauses are routine. i would effectively have to lower the rent, or forego raising it, to remain competitive. if i offer $2000 plus contract and the neighboring landlord offers $2000 plus maintenance clause, who will they sign with? so i offer $2000 and eat the rest. (now, we have had tenants who did the work....)
people sign the lease thinking, oh yeah, i'll take care of that, i'm not going to HIRE someone to do it! i want the lower rent! besides the work is easy, takes five minutes, i can't imagine why some thief would change $75 for it! (ha! three hours later that price looks good)
hey, i'm not naive but overly optimistic. that's changing.
btw, i am the maintenance firm; finally cleaned the gutters (which had trees in them!) and billed them -- they hit the roof! for the next tenants, i will indeed take over the gutters, i do better work, get a chance to look over the building, and am less likely to fall anyway.
honest, if you look at the numbers you'll see what you're saying is more the rallying cry of the "tort reform" crows and not based in fact. a great example is the infamous mcdonalds hot coffee case, which has been completely misreported to serve their cause. i was surprised, anyway, when i looked into it. (the woman suffered 3rd degree burns in her crotch and needed skin grafts, the coffee was well above normal serving temperatures of 150 at 190 -- where scalding occurs in seconds, mcdonalds was aware of other burning -- frequently of children bystanders -- and didn't respond, mcdonalds refused to settle with the woman for just medical costs in the tens of thousands, mcdonalds was generally indifferent to customer safety, the plainly insane jury award was immediately cut ny 2/3 by the trial judge -- the system working, and so on -- all facts that may not change one's mind but make the case more complex than portrayed).
there may well be a victim culture, but the numbers are persuasive. remember, the people suing tend to have actual injuries and bringing a lawsuit is daunting. think of all the people with valikd claims who simply can't afford to pursue them. so rather than make it harder to sue across the board, why not level the field.
they're not victims *because* they're men -- singled out on gender ("oh, there a guy, i don't like men, let's kill him")); they're not historic victims of majority-minority prejudice; they not politically disabled or victimized by differential enforcement (true of blacks in the south in the past, e.g., lynchings); they dish it our as much as they take it; and...
they are plenty of laws to protect men, called "laws"!
more seriously, civil rights law is about righting systemic social inequalities. they are imho transitional and ideally they will all someday be unnneeded. (as will laws in general, ha!)
little of what i say is free of debate, but you get the idea of one (i hope informative) viewpoint.
to be honest the experience is teaching me a lot about communicating with "regular" people. i am (until now) a lifelong renter and am appalled to realize now some of the basic communication and perspective problems between the two sides. i've had some good landlords and most who were laissez-faire. i was a bit of the latter and got screwed by the current tenants to the tune of a few thousand in dead landcaping, but it is partly my fault for not writing a better lease and using clearer guidelines. better luck i hope with the next tenants (i'm simply not offering renewal to the current ones, which seems gentle but firm; i can't go on with nonsense like reminding them to clean the gutters like the lease says; and wasn't i naive to think that writing in the lease meant everyone would understand).
lawyers, esp. inexperienced or socially-challenged ones, can be a real pain. school may teach the law, but not how to get along with people. a good one who is also a decent human being (i'm working on both) can be a good thing!
and i know some wonderful people who happened also to be lawyers. a bad one sure makes an impression, however.
the cited story is amusing because "the developer would not sell to lawyers as they were afraid of the higher rate of lawsuits that this class of professionals were prone to filing" and the buyer proved him right! but he got nailed for trying to avoid doing business altogether.
as an attorney and a contractor (!) i do wonder about these things, but still feel it is best to decide who to do business with on a case-by-case basis. you never know who will turn out to be the problem.
your question on discrimination law is a good one. how do we choose who is in a "protected class"? after there were a couple of prominent killings maybe 8 years ago the president of the calif. bar did proposed attorneys ought to be protected, which is generally considered nutty. protected classes are generally those that have long histories of fairly brutal discrimination based on an immutable characteristic (race, gender, sexual orientation -- the last one in imho) or certain choices we consider sacrosanct, like religion.
these choices should be a very big deal. as you know, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against gay/lesbian most places, and it has been recently proposed to write an element on that into the constitution itself to remove the subject from democratic debate.
the occasional butthead lawyer who comes up against a butthead developer can fend for him/herself just fine.
logically, doctors should be willing to let these clients die. if it's ethical to refuse such clients, shouldn't every doctor? cervical cancer, sorry i won't help you?
it often doesn't appear to matter whether the prior malpractice action(s) had any merit! if the person brings frivolous lawsuits then maybe she (OB/GYN) isn't a good patient if the situation is less than dire (the hippocratic oath kicks in at some point, yes?), but if you've figured out the person is unethical you've already taken a harder look at them than just going, "oh, a lawyer? forget it." that you've sued may only prove you've pursued your rights against another doctor unfit for a license. in which case, good riddance.
many people hate lawyers up until they need one. the real hobgoblin here is the health care system, which is currently a mess for everyone. the stakes are too high for this, and god forbid skilled doctors be discouraged from critical work like ob/gyn to go be dermatologists (a worthy profession but i hope you get the point). let's skip the name-calling and figure out the important puzzle of universal affordable health care.
an irony is that until recently the DOCTORS were the object of the abusive jokes. ever come across all the dusty wisecracks about golf days on wednesday, take two aspirin and call me in the morning, and so on? they were not founded in love! i am curious why the crosshairs drifted away, are we more eager to believe in our doctors now?
speaking of troublemakers, i have yet to see a situation where mentioning i am a lawyer has been the least bit helpful, except maybe in chatting with other lawyers (i.e., i know the language). this is pretty much bigotry, judging people before you know them, but many lawyers have done nothing to help the situation. the few impugn the many.
on the other hand i would not want a doctor who made such foolish judgments. none of the ones i've dealt with has let on anything like it. before i went to law school i worked at a hospital and the doctors uniformily expressed disappointment i was going (they of course figure they're the best profession), but none concluded that i was dishonest let alone a troublemaker. besides, they should worry about sleazy clients in general -- all one needs is to hook up with a sleazy lawyer and off they go!
just be careful who you pick on, to join in validates the whole system and YOUR group may be next up! needless to say, i don't mention my profession, although i'm happy to talk about who i am.... (a nice guy, i like to think, occasional slashdot contributor, and so on; the profession says little)
most all of us (er, not me) violate the "use tax" rules in our state with out-of-state purchases, except those in states without sales/use tax (lucky). but before you had to fill out a separate form and anyone would feel like a chump volunteering to pay a tax the state would have a heck of a time enforcing and none of their neighbors is paying.
putting it on the main form will at least get money from more people, not such bad thing, and if you're dishonest you should still appreeciate it because it will lower your taxes otherwise due. heck if it's in on the main form maybe i'll pay it just as, er, i've been paying it all along of the separate one.
if you have a problem with the collection of the tax, bear in mind your problem is with ALL sales taxes, not the "internet" flavor of some of those purchases. (hey i don't like them, i think they may inhibit commerce.) one way to ease the recordkeeping burden is to provide, say, a $1000 exemption so many people don'thave to think about it. and from a recordkeeping standpoint, it may actually be a favor for out-of-state merchants to collect the tax for you. i think asking consumers to keep the records is nutty, we have better things to do. (btw, sales tax could be made deductible for federal purposes, it once was, as state income tax is now.)
personally i'd nationalize sales tax if we're going to have one at all, the present system only works because it is unenforced. way too inefficient, both for recordkeeping and enforcement. of course getting all 50 states to agree on tax policy is... fanciful.
i live a few miles from national airport (and the pentagon), and our airport was closed for WEEKS, nearly closed forever had some in the white house had their druthers. some things you don't realize are there until they're gone, and you'd find yourself kind of waiting for the next jet. all we did hear was the flights of military jets, which normally pass over here at less than a thousand as they cut through over national from andrews, but now of course they sounded ten times as loud.
just after the jet hit, i just remember hearing all the sirens, headed in the same direction. our fire department (arlington) was the first there, reportedly the engine was out on another call and saw what happened. (yeah, i wondered what happened to the other call,, too.)
strange time here. then came the anthrax. then the snipers. yes, it did occur to me to wonder whether we should be here, but this is our home.
i notice that most of the biker's pictures (including the one of her in a kawasaki jacket, the brand she mentions repeatedly? did they pay her for promo?) of how the chernobyl area has gone to hell focus on decrepit buildings. well, of course manmade stuff would fall apart; how's nature doing? and to be honest i find it humbling and a tad reassuring that man's creations will go away once man has left, let the earth move on.
our port was handled overnight (verizon --> t-mobile) but that may be plain old luck. interesting about the region-to-region defect.
here's a permanent fix -- how about a permanent number assigned to you for life, like a SSN. dial it, get your friend. yeah, i don't like that idea either, but it certainly is *portable*.
this is a nice example of the parallel existence of privacy and legitimate law enforcement. note that i say parallel, not tradeoff, the latter being the superficial way the alleged "tension" between the two is described. we can have both, and stronger than they are now.
i'd like to think i'm a decent pro-privacy civil libertarian, but i also admit getting a kick out of the law and order episodes when they so often trace someone's movements thanks to bridge tolls or telephone calls or ATM cameras or whatever. cool, hey presto and the bad guy is tagged. here, it's those bin laden cretins, no tears shed; and so it happens in real life). (the israelis once assassinated a man by detonating an explosive in his cellphone -- they waited to hear his voice and... our methods seem gentle in comparison.)
now we have trackable cellphones (which are becoming ubiquitous), rfid chips, red-light cameras with OCR, etc. pretty easy and non-paranoid to imagine the automated abiity to track anyone anywhere.
there are so far as i know few constitutional problems if the data collected is publicly observable information, i.e., no expectation of privacy even if the sophistication of the technology to collect, process, and digest that information would astonish most of us (this does at least rule out Big Brother in your home). the old model was that evidence could be collected only with periodic intrusive methods like breaking down doors or inserting wiretaps, moderated by warrant and the exclusionary rule and so on. what no one expected, though, is the situation now where *unintrusive* methods continuously collect everything one might need. the fourth becomes an anachronism, and the patriot act seems quaint.
the only answer i see, or rather the inevitable path ahead, is to intelligently moderate access to and use of the data. the constitution is only the floor, congress went much farther with the anti-wiretap law. draw the "border" between leigt investigation and fishing expeditions. frankly i don't think we can do a good job of it, but it's the only route i see ahead. all these "public eyes" can not be shut, because we *like* too many of them and even a few innocuous steps may prove to open the door wide.
on both economic and environmental grounds, i applaude filching someone else's paper. how often have i done that at work, in a coffee shop, or even (ahem) liberating one from the "trash." especially the Times.:)
now, we can all read these things for free at the library -- is there not a place here for the library to offer its patrons pooled access to these newspapers? you then eliminate wealth discrimination and a host of other problems; the publications can assure themselves of steady revenue. there are ways to fiddle with the equations, such as limiting concurrent access to a given paper or offer bells and whistles for subscribers, that might iron out some details.
i mention this because our library offers free access to various e-books, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, normally a pricey annual subscription) and a host of other databases including even some ($$$) WSJ articles. these resources are poorly publicized but wonderful. i only know about our OED access because of a helpful/.'er (thanks).
I used to work with MRI, and with a 1.5 Tesla magnet the effect of distance was quite important (people have been killed by objects pulled into the magneet).
anyway, we were told the force varied with the CUBE root of distance. according to this source, the drop-off depends on the nature of the source:
http://www.emfs.info/source_distance.asp
as for a deleterious effect on humans, i won't believe it until i see solid proof, preferably with some mechanism explained. distance is a good place to start -- if someone tells you a microwave oven is dangerous, ask them if they are threatened by their neighbor's? how about someone down the street? how about someone else using an electric razor? etc., etc. -- there is a lot to explore.
This is an oversimplification, but murder is killing with intent, manslaughter is killing due to reckless conduct, criminally negligent homicide is death resulting from negligence -- normally more than ordinary negligent sloppiness, but no real intent to harm. there is also something called involuntary manslaughter that i think in most places means vehicular homicide. if you're curious, the various "degrees" of murder mean all sorts of different things besides what we see on Law & Order. iirc these distinctions within conduct that is all murder were introduced to soften the application of the death penalty many years ago.
the laws vary from state to state, and the feds have there own rules. thus it is hard to say what *the* law is here. regardless nothing i've seen rises to the level of criminally negligent homicide. a well-known criminal case was brought against Ford corporation for the Pinto fuel system design -- the jury acquitted.
NASA itself should be held liable and punished in civil court. singling out a few "rogue" managers as responsible is exactly what NASA wants, and a peculiar way to deal with a defective management structure. however significant punitive damages would make a statement about the agency's culpability. however, it may be legally difficult to pursue such claims -- another problem that needs fixing.
unsurprisingly it is pretty much impossible for astronauts to get excess life insurance from private companies -- especially now. thus it may be worth giving the standard federal and/or military benefits a second look rather than opening a trust fund seeking private donations after each disaster. NASA should look after its own.
this all assumes NASA is truly culpable, a judgment best withheld until all the evidence has been collected and digested, not splashed piecemeal across the headlines (much though i love NYT).
Yes, the foam needs to be fixed, but it wasn't like the O-Ring problem in the Challenger accident when the weather conditions caused a catastrophic failure of the seal. Rather this was a catastrophe that unfolded over many years and culminated when a NASA spokesman told reporters that the falling foam was not a problem.
Just a quibble -- so far it looks like this accident has very much in common with Challenger. Not only was the Challenger SRB design off the mark, but there were complaints from engineering after O-rings were partially damaged in earlier flights, most notably Boisjoly of Morton Thiokol, the SRB contractor. Worst of all, NASA basically strongarmed a waiver of existing temperature restrictions, launching at about 20ÂF below the design spec.
Thus the catastrophic failure of the seal was ultimately caused by defective NASA decisionmaking (the foundation having being laid by the seal design). I'm sure whether this was a dumb error or a "smart" error, but do think management will be the ultimate party responsible.
So we see possible common elements of defective design and failure to react to early problems.
Yes, the calculation is straightforward. I wouldn't attach the word "only" to a probability of 30%.
I also don't think the data is enough for a firm probability assessment. To stop at the second accident and say "this is the probability" overlooks that you would have had a totally different number the day before -- because the sample size is so small. Which is the right number? I don't think there is a sufficient confidence interval although we are getting the idea it is probably somewhere between 1-in-50 and say 1-in-100. That gives a considerably worse hundred-flight failure probability.
Last, however complex the machine and however demanding the environment, this orbiter was destroyed by a piece of flying *foam*. Keeping foam in one piece, appreciating the consequences of failing to do so, and learning from previous instances of damage are not the frontier of materials science.
This accident -- as currently hypothesized -- was foreseeable and cheaply preventable. At this point it appears Columbia was lost to an institutional failure like that which brought down Challenger, but I'll wait for the ultimate findings.
You have the correct number for the pre-Columbia failure probability, though I found slightly different numbers in different sources.
Oddly enough, a little over the month before Columbia was destroyed I emailed an engineer friend re long-term probabilities, specifically not the per-mission risk but the likelihood of an unbroken string of successes. An excerpt is below -- comments welcomed.
My thinking was that regardless of the risk of individual mission failure, people are actually interested in the length of the winning streak and absolute number of failures. Humans, especially this one, do have trouble intuitively assessing probabilities.
I believe NASA was considering revising the 1-in-300 to 1-in-500 figure before the accident; unfortunately it now appears to be accurate or optimistic (we need a larger sample to have confidence).
I've heard a predicted failure rate for the Shuttle of 1-in-300 to 1-in-500... what I'm curious about though, is what is the probability of going, say, 100 missions without a failure?
I explained to someone that you can't just multiply the probability of a single event by the number of events... eventually the overall probability would pass 100%. So... for 100 flights, it's the 299-in-300 chance of success on each flight multiplied out to... what's the quick way of solving this? BTW, STS-113 is mission #112.
Or is the answer simply (299/300)^100 = 71.6%? I can't remember, sigh. Sorry, I know this is a dumb question, but the math hasn't come up much since we did probability in the eighth grade.:)
You're right on the falling penny issue, at least according to this empirical report. Isn't it nice when someone actually tries the experiment rather than accepting the conventional wisdom?
It's intuitively correct, but I should warn that the physics of sleeker objects like cellphones are quite different, judging from the one dropped on me while descending a staircase last Memorial Day. Fortunately for me it was a glancing blow -- the phone shattered after deflecting from my head. Apparently a cellphone in freefall is not accompanied by an apology, but I took satisfaction enough in the destruction of the phone.:)
There are 2 escapes from 1st A. protection considered here. If it is obscene it is not speech (per the SC, not me); if it is not obscene, then it can be restricted only for the most compelling reasons and necessity. Obscene is legally defined as material lacking literary, artistic, political or social value. Here the 8th Circuit apparently has an earlier ruling saying across the board is NEVER obscene, so the obscenity argument is out the window; then they ruled that the paternalistic argument is not enough.
As for Debbie, well she may be obscene (for depicting erect penis, insertionn, or other random criteria) but tolerated in many communities, and enforcement on porno is spotty. Adding an interactive component certainly will not make it less obscene. Indeed what carried the day here was that it was violence and not sex, which if you at the movies is far more tolerated in our culture, and i'll be the first to concede *that* is the real sickness. I vote for more sex, less violence.:) I wouldn't ban any of this stuff, but would consider limiting access to minors in a way that at least allow parents to parent as they see fit.
I never worked with PET, though some researchers there were correlating MRI's fabulous depiction of structure with PET's spatially blurry depiction of metabolism (someone was doing SPECT, too). I speculate metal would not be a big problem with PET, depending on its quantity, though it would of course tend to absorb radiation (PET actually detects the radiation resulting from the annihilation of the positron). MRI has expanded since i did it to fMRI, or functional MRI, which does show metabolism and doesn't involve PET's (trivial) radiation dose).
Here is a comparison that I can't vouch for, but appears to be accurate. Keep your eye on fMRI.
Point taken! I guess the difference is psychological. As someone who had to talk all those *psychaitric* patients through a claustrophobic 40-minute exam that required no motion, their confidence was crucial, so I sure would pick rare over numerous to depict risk. If I were looking at scanner or equipment design or training the latter -- well, no, maybe "significant." Actually a 0.0001% rate would be pretty damn good.
This idea, to try to make scans available for more people, certainly benefits that subgroup. It is a remarkable technology.
Thanks for the cites. However as a veteran of administering many thousands of scans and having talked with our Boston regional service techs about other magnets, I'm skeptical of "numerous" burns -- these incidents are thankfully rare and usually involve the poorly thought-out introduction of foreign objects, not medical implants and the like addressed by this invention. Our EKG monitoring cables were of ordinary design but constructed to be compatible with the scanner. With third-party devices or improper usage.....
There was one magnet that had a problem with its gradient magnets I think, burning the patient in contact with the walls of tube. The tech said they were privately calling it the "scan'n'tan" --;-)
Believe me, anyone who works with MRI is aware of the risk! We wouldn't even keep things in our pockets, including easily erased bank cards!
But accidents happen. Perhaps you have someone unfamiliar visiting like that cop (I bet he just walked into the room before they had a chance to demetal him.. I once scanned a prisoner in full shackles because the two rather large police escorts said he was too dangerous to remove them... but they were attached, hence not a problem). Perhaps a piece of equipment is inadvertantly presumed safe, as by my very diligent coworker who took in an IV pole that looked just like ours (there are expensive aluminum equivalents to these items) -- the pole was aluminum, but not the base. Perhaps a walk-in patient doesn't tell when interviewed about the Zippo lighter in her pocket which then almost smacks into the tech's (my) head.
The room seems no different from anywhere else, and the magnetic field increase exponentially as you approach, easily ripping something away before you can react.
A prudent solution is an airport-style metal detector. There are practical problems with using them that i don't recall; some places do use them. The wands work, but leave you vulnerable to the vacant-brain syndromes above.
As for the Westchester oxygen bottle, I believe what happened was that a magnetic-safe gurney was used but the ordinary oxygen bottle was concealed n the tray beneath by the sheet. This does not justify the tragedy, but demystifies it some. We always followed accidents with great interest.
Slashdot Mirror
google to me is a nice example of free market competition, even if the profit end of things has yet to be proven. i was joking to someone, imagine if the government had decided to do google, what it would have been like. instead a sharp concept and i think a desire for excellence won out by -- gasp -- being the best product.
:)
google returns much higher quality hits than blind keyword searching could, google bombing notwithstanding. they could do a better job, also. i notice they've finally introduced word stemming (sort of), now how about specifying whether words occur within a certain proximity, such as the same sentence or paragraph, and other criteria (yes, i'm thinking of westlaw).
as for yahoo -- well, "yahooing" just sounds silly.
i agree with you -- for now. the manpower and cost issue overwhelm the "big brother" specter. however, i am sure the government forsees a day where packets can be analyzed in an automatic way, much as i recall they have voiceprint information to identify suspects using cellphones by their voices. encryption would seem to be the death knell to all of this.
as for who's talking to whom, public terminals such as at libraries -- the 9-11 folk used these -- will still be a problem. however, you're right, this is very valuable information, and also the sort of thing they should not be collecting without legitimate individual suspicion.
the single biggest barrier to effective intelligence will continue to be human intelligence, of the lack of it. it takes a lot to be a thoughtful investigator and there aren't that many of them. there are plenty of mccarthyist idiots, however. we must watch these developments with care, armed with the assumption that the spy tools will fall into the hands of someone with ethics no more developed that those of a script kiddie.
wow, a naive /.'r ;-)
why not? because that's the same as paying for it myself. to do so would make me less competitive in a market where such clauses are routine. i would effectively have to lower the rent, or forego raising it, to remain competitive. if i offer $2000 plus contract and the neighboring landlord offers $2000 plus maintenance clause, who will they sign with? so i offer $2000 and eat the rest. (now, we have had tenants who did the work....)
people sign the lease thinking, oh yeah, i'll take care of that, i'm not going to HIRE someone to do it! i want the lower rent! besides the work is easy, takes five minutes, i can't imagine why some thief would change $75 for it! (ha! three hours later that price looks good)
hey, i'm not naive but overly optimistic. that's changing.
btw, i am the maintenance firm; finally cleaned the gutters (which had trees in them!) and billed them -- they hit the roof! for the next tenants, i will indeed take over the gutters, i do better work, get a chance to look over the building, and am less likely to fall anyway.
yep, more than you wanted to know!
honest, if you look at the numbers you'll see what you're saying is more the rallying cry of the "tort reform" crows and not based in fact. a great example is the infamous mcdonalds hot coffee case, which has been completely misreported to serve their cause. i was surprised, anyway, when i looked into it. (the woman suffered 3rd degree burns in her crotch and needed skin grafts, the coffee was well above normal serving temperatures of 150 at 190 -- where scalding occurs in seconds, mcdonalds was aware of other burning -- frequently of children bystanders -- and didn't respond, mcdonalds refused to settle with the woman for just medical costs in the tens of thousands, mcdonalds was generally indifferent to customer safety, the plainly insane jury award was immediately cut ny 2/3 by the trial judge -- the system working, and so on -- all facts that may not change one's mind but make the case more complex than portrayed).
there may well be a victim culture, but the numbers are persuasive. remember, the people suing tend to have actual injuries and bringing a lawsuit is daunting. think of all the people with valikd claims who simply can't afford to pursue them. so rather than make it harder to sue across the board, why not level the field.
they're not victims *because* they're men -- singled out on gender ("oh, there a guy, i don't like men, let's kill him")); they're not historic victims of majority-minority prejudice; they not politically disabled or victimized by differential enforcement (true of blacks in the south in the past, e.g., lynchings); they dish it our as much as they take it; and ...
they are plenty of laws to protect men, called "laws"!
more seriously, civil rights law is about righting systemic social inequalities. they are imho transitional and ideally they will all someday be unnneeded. (as will laws in general, ha!)
little of what i say is free of debate, but you get the idea of one (i hope informative) viewpoint.
lol, and i'm a landlord-lawyer.
to be honest the experience is teaching me a lot about communicating with "regular" people. i am (until now) a lifelong renter and am appalled to realize now some of the basic communication and perspective problems between the two sides. i've had some good landlords and most who were laissez-faire. i was a bit of the latter and got screwed by the current tenants to the tune of a few thousand in dead landcaping, but it is partly my fault for not writing a better lease and using clearer guidelines. better luck i hope with the next tenants (i'm simply not offering renewal to the current ones, which seems gentle but firm; i can't go on with nonsense like reminding them to clean the gutters like the lease says; and wasn't i naive to think that writing in the lease meant everyone would understand).
lawyers, esp. inexperienced or socially-challenged ones, can be a real pain. school may teach the law, but not how to get along with people. a good one who is also a decent human being (i'm working on both) can be a good thing!
and i know some wonderful people who happened also to be lawyers. a bad one sure makes an impression, however.
the cited story is amusing because "the developer would not sell to lawyers as they were afraid of the higher rate of lawsuits that this class of professionals were prone to filing" and the buyer proved him right! but he got nailed for trying to avoid doing business altogether.
as an attorney and a contractor (!) i do wonder about these things, but still feel it is best to decide who to do business with on a case-by-case basis. you never know who will turn out to be the problem.
your question on discrimination law is a good one. how do we choose who is in a "protected class"? after there were a couple of prominent killings maybe 8 years ago the president of the calif. bar did proposed attorneys ought to be protected, which is generally considered nutty. protected classes are generally those that have long histories of fairly brutal discrimination based on an immutable characteristic (race, gender, sexual orientation -- the last one in imho) or certain choices we consider sacrosanct, like religion.
these choices should be a very big deal. as you know, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against gay/lesbian most places, and it has been recently proposed to write an element on that into the constitution itself to remove the subject from democratic debate.
the occasional butthead lawyer who comes up against a butthead developer can fend for him/herself just fine.
logically, doctors should be willing to let these clients die. if it's ethical to refuse such clients, shouldn't every doctor? cervical cancer, sorry i won't help you?
it often doesn't appear to matter whether the prior malpractice action(s) had any merit! if the person brings frivolous lawsuits then maybe she (OB/GYN) isn't a good patient if the situation is less than dire (the hippocratic oath kicks in at some point, yes?), but if you've figured out the person is unethical you've already taken a harder look at them than just going, "oh, a lawyer? forget it." that you've sued may only prove you've pursued your rights against another doctor unfit for a license. in which case, good riddance.
many people hate lawyers up until they need one. the real hobgoblin here is the health care system, which is currently a mess for everyone. the stakes are too high for this, and god forbid skilled doctors be discouraged from critical work like ob/gyn to go be dermatologists (a worthy profession but i hope you get the point). let's skip the name-calling and figure out the important puzzle of universal affordable health care.
an irony is that until recently the DOCTORS were the object of the abusive jokes. ever come across all the dusty wisecracks about golf days on wednesday, take two aspirin and call me in the morning, and so on? they were not founded in love! i am curious why the crosshairs drifted away, are we more eager to believe in our doctors now?
speaking of troublemakers, i have yet to see a situation where mentioning i am a lawyer has been the least bit helpful, except maybe in chatting with other lawyers (i.e., i know the language). this is pretty much bigotry, judging people before you know them, but many lawyers have done nothing to help the situation. the few impugn the many.
on the other hand i would not want a doctor who made such foolish judgments. none of the ones i've dealt with has let on anything like it. before i went to law school i worked at a hospital and the doctors uniformily expressed disappointment i was going (they of course figure they're the best profession), but none concluded that i was dishonest let alone a troublemaker. besides, they should worry about sleazy clients in general -- all one needs is to hook up with a sleazy lawyer and off they go!
just be careful who you pick on, to join in validates the whole system and YOUR group may be next up! needless to say, i don't mention my profession, although i'm happy to talk about who i am.... (a nice guy, i like to think, occasional slashdot contributor, and so on; the profession says little)
most all of us (er, not me) violate the "use tax" rules in our state with out-of-state purchases, except those in states without sales/use tax (lucky). but before you had to fill out a separate form and anyone would feel like a chump volunteering to pay a tax the state would have a heck of a time enforcing and none of their neighbors is paying.
... fanciful.
putting it on the main form will at least get money from more people, not such bad thing, and if you're dishonest you should still appreeciate it because it will lower your taxes otherwise due. heck if it's in on the main form maybe i'll pay it just as, er, i've been paying it all along of the separate one.
if you have a problem with the collection of the tax, bear in mind your problem is with ALL sales taxes, not the "internet" flavor of some of those purchases. (hey i don't like them, i think they may inhibit commerce.) one way to ease the recordkeeping burden is to provide, say, a $1000 exemption so many people don'thave to think about it. and from a recordkeeping standpoint, it may actually be a favor for out-of-state merchants to collect the tax for you. i think asking consumers to keep the records is nutty, we have better things to do. (btw, sales tax could be made deductible for federal purposes, it once was, as state income tax is now.)
personally i'd nationalize sales tax if we're going to have one at all, the present system only works because it is unenforced. way too inefficient, both for recordkeeping and enforcement. of course getting all 50 states to agree on tax policy is
i live a few miles from national airport (and the pentagon), and our airport was closed for WEEKS, nearly closed forever had some in the white house had their druthers. some things you don't realize are there until they're gone, and you'd find yourself kind of waiting for the next jet. all we did hear was the flights of military jets, which normally pass over here at less than a thousand as they cut through over national from andrews, but now of course they sounded ten times as loud.
just after the jet hit, i just remember hearing all the sirens, headed in the same direction. our fire department (arlington) was the first there, reportedly the engine was out on another call and saw what happened. (yeah, i wondered what happened to the other call,, too.)
strange time here. then came the anthrax. then the snipers. yes, it did occur to me to wonder whether we should be here, but this is our home.
i notice that most of the biker's pictures (including the one of her in a kawasaki jacket, the brand she mentions repeatedly? did they pay her for promo?) of how the chernobyl area has gone to hell focus on decrepit buildings. well, of course manmade stuff would fall apart; how's nature doing? and to be honest i find it humbling and a tad reassuring that man's creations will go away once man has left, let the earth move on.
our port was handled overnight (verizon --> t-mobile) but that may be plain old luck. interesting about the region-to-region defect.
here's a permanent fix -- how about a permanent number assigned to you for life, like a SSN. dial it, get your friend. yeah, i don't like that idea either, but it certainly is *portable*.
this is a nice example of the parallel existence of privacy and legitimate law enforcement. note that i say parallel, not tradeoff, the latter being the superficial way the alleged "tension" between the two is described. we can have both, and stronger than they are now.
... our methods seem gentle in comparison.)
i'd like to think i'm a decent pro-privacy civil libertarian, but i also admit getting a kick out of the law and order episodes when they so often trace someone's movements thanks to bridge tolls or telephone calls or ATM cameras or whatever. cool, hey presto and the bad guy is tagged. here, it's those bin laden cretins, no tears shed; and so it happens in real life). (the israelis once assassinated a man by detonating an explosive in his cellphone -- they waited to hear his voice and
now we have trackable cellphones (which are becoming ubiquitous), rfid chips, red-light cameras with OCR, etc. pretty easy and non-paranoid to imagine the automated abiity to track anyone anywhere.
there are so far as i know few constitutional problems if the data collected is publicly observable information, i.e., no expectation of privacy even if the sophistication of the technology to collect, process, and digest that information would astonish most of us (this does at least rule out Big Brother in your home). the old model was that evidence could be collected only with periodic intrusive methods like breaking down doors or inserting wiretaps, moderated by warrant and the exclusionary rule and so on. what no one expected, though, is the situation now where *unintrusive* methods continuously collect everything one might need. the fourth becomes an anachronism, and the patriot act seems quaint.
the only answer i see, or rather the inevitable path ahead, is to intelligently moderate access to and use of the data. the constitution is only the floor, congress went much farther with the anti-wiretap law. draw the "border" between leigt investigation and fishing expeditions. frankly i don't think we can do a good job of it, but it's the only route i see ahead. all these "public eyes" can not be shut, because we *like* too many of them and even a few innocuous steps may prove to open the door wide.
on both economic and environmental grounds, i applaude filching someone else's paper. how often have i done that at work, in a coffee shop, or even (ahem) liberating one from the "trash." especially the Times. :)
/.'er (thanks).
now, we can all read these things for free at the library -- is there not a place here for the library to offer its patrons pooled access to these newspapers? you then eliminate wealth discrimination and a host of other problems; the publications can assure themselves of steady revenue. there are ways to fiddle with the equations, such as limiting concurrent access to a given paper or offer bells and whistles for subscribers, that might iron out some details.
i mention this because our library offers free access to various e-books, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, normally a pricey annual subscription) and a host of other databases including even some ($$$) WSJ articles. these resources are poorly publicized but wonderful. i only know about our OED access because of a helpful
I used to work with MRI, and with a 1.5 Tesla magnet the effect of distance was quite important (people have been killed by objects pulled into the magneet).
anyway, we were told the force varied with the CUBE root of distance. according to this source, the drop-off depends on the nature of the source:
http://www.emfs.info/source_distance.asp
as for a deleterious effect on humans, i won't believe it until i see solid proof, preferably with some mechanism explained. distance is a good place to start -- if someone tells you a microwave oven is dangerous, ask them if they are threatened by their neighbor's? how about someone down the street? how about someone else using an electric razor? etc., etc. -- there is a lot to explore.
This is an oversimplification, but murder is killing with intent, manslaughter is killing due to reckless conduct, criminally negligent homicide is death resulting from negligence -- normally more than ordinary negligent sloppiness, but no real intent to harm. there is also something called involuntary manslaughter that i think in most places means vehicular homicide. if you're curious, the various "degrees" of murder mean all sorts of different things besides what we see on Law & Order. iirc these distinctions within conduct that is all murder were introduced to soften the application of the death penalty many years ago.
the laws vary from state to state, and the feds have there own rules. thus it is hard to say what *the* law is here. regardless nothing i've seen rises to the level of criminally negligent homicide. a well-known criminal case was brought against Ford corporation for the Pinto fuel system design -- the jury acquitted.
NASA itself should be held liable and punished in civil court. singling out a few "rogue" managers as responsible is exactly what NASA wants, and a peculiar way to deal with a defective management structure. however significant punitive damages would make a statement about the agency's culpability. however, it may be legally difficult to pursue such claims -- another problem that needs fixing.
unsurprisingly it is pretty much impossible for astronauts to get excess life insurance from private companies -- especially now. thus it may be worth giving the standard federal and/or military benefits a second look rather than opening a trust fund seeking private donations after each disaster. NASA should look after its own.
this all assumes NASA is truly culpable, a judgment best withheld until all the evidence has been collected and digested, not splashed piecemeal across the headlines (much though i love NYT).
Yes, the foam needs to be fixed, but it wasn't like the O-Ring problem in the Challenger accident when the weather conditions caused a catastrophic failure of the seal. Rather this was a catastrophe that unfolded over many years and culminated when a NASA spokesman told reporters that the falling foam was not a problem.
Just a quibble -- so far it looks like this accident has very much in common with Challenger. Not only was the Challenger SRB design off the mark, but there were complaints from engineering after O-rings were partially damaged in earlier flights, most notably Boisjoly of Morton Thiokol, the SRB contractor. Worst of all, NASA basically strongarmed a waiver of existing temperature restrictions, launching at about 20ÂF below the design spec.
Thus the catastrophic failure of the seal was ultimately caused by defective NASA decisionmaking (the foundation having being laid by the seal design). I'm sure whether this was a dumb error or a "smart" error, but do think management will be the ultimate party responsible.
So we see possible common elements of defective design and failure to react to early problems.
Yes, the calculation is straightforward. I wouldn't attach the word "only" to a probability of 30%.
I also don't think the data is enough for a firm probability assessment. To stop at the second accident and say "this is the probability" overlooks that you would have had a totally different number the day before -- because the sample size is so small. Which is the right number? I don't think there is a sufficient confidence interval although we are getting the idea it is probably somewhere between 1-in-50 and say 1-in-100. That gives a considerably worse hundred-flight failure probability.
Last, however complex the machine and however demanding the environment, this orbiter was destroyed by a piece of flying *foam*. Keeping foam in one piece, appreciating the consequences of failing to do so, and learning from previous instances of damage are not the frontier of materials science.
This accident -- as currently hypothesized -- was foreseeable and cheaply preventable. At this point it appears Columbia was lost to an institutional failure like that which brought down Challenger, but I'll wait for the ultimate findings.
Oddly enough, a little over the month before Columbia was destroyed I emailed an engineer friend re long-term probabilities, specifically not the per-mission risk but the likelihood of an unbroken string of successes. An excerpt is below -- comments welcomed.
My thinking was that regardless of the risk of individual mission failure, people are actually interested in the length of the winning streak and absolute number of failures. Humans, especially this one, do have trouble intuitively assessing probabilities.
I believe NASA was considering revising the 1-in-300 to 1-in-500 figure before the accident; unfortunately it now appears to be accurate or optimistic (we need a larger sample to have confidence).
You're right on the falling penny issue, at least according to this empirical report. Isn't it nice when someone actually tries the experiment rather than accepting the conventional wisdom?
:)
It's intuitively correct, but I should warn that the physics of sleeker objects like cellphones are quite different, judging from the one dropped on me while descending a staircase last Memorial Day. Fortunately for me it was a glancing blow -- the phone shattered after deflecting from my head. Apparently a cellphone in freefall is not accompanied by an apology, but I took satisfaction enough in the destruction of the phone.
There are 2 escapes from 1st A. protection considered here. If it is obscene it is not speech (per the SC, not me); if it is not obscene, then it can be restricted only for the most compelling reasons and necessity. Obscene is legally defined as material lacking literary, artistic, political or social value. Here the 8th Circuit apparently has an earlier ruling saying across the board is NEVER obscene, so the obscenity argument is out the window; then they ruled that the paternalistic argument is not enough.
:) I wouldn't ban any of this stuff, but would consider limiting access to minors in a way that at least allow parents to parent as they see fit.
As for Debbie, well she may be obscene (for depicting erect penis, insertionn, or other random criteria) but tolerated in many communities, and enforcement on porno is spotty. Adding an interactive component certainly will not make it less obscene. Indeed what carried the day here was that it was violence and not sex, which if you at the movies is far more tolerated in our culture, and i'll be the first to concede *that* is the real sickness. I vote for more sex, less violence.
I never worked with PET, though some researchers there were correlating MRI's fabulous depiction of structure with PET's spatially blurry depiction of metabolism (someone was doing SPECT, too). I speculate metal would not be a big problem with PET, depending on its quantity, though it would of course tend to absorb radiation (PET actually detects the radiation resulting from the annihilation of the positron). MRI has expanded since i did it to fMRI, or functional MRI, which does show metabolism and doesn't involve PET's (trivial) radiation dose).
Here is a comparison that I can't vouch for, but appears to be accurate. Keep your eye on fMRI.
Point taken! I guess the difference is psychological. As someone who had to talk all those *psychaitric* patients through a claustrophobic 40-minute exam that required no motion, their confidence was crucial, so I sure would pick rare over numerous to depict risk. If I were looking at scanner or equipment design or training the latter -- well, no, maybe "significant." Actually a 0.0001% rate would be pretty damn good.
This idea, to try to make scans available for more people, certainly benefits that subgroup. It is a remarkable technology.
Thanks for the cites. However as a veteran of administering many thousands of scans and having talked with our Boston regional service techs about other magnets, I'm skeptical of "numerous" burns -- these incidents are thankfully rare and usually involve the poorly thought-out introduction of foreign objects, not medical implants and the like addressed by this invention. Our EKG monitoring cables were of ordinary design but constructed to be compatible with the scanner. With third-party devices or improper usage.....
;-)
There was one magnet that had a problem with its gradient magnets I think, burning the patient in contact with the walls of tube. The tech said they were privately calling it the "scan'n'tan" --
Believe me, anyone who works with MRI is aware of the risk! We wouldn't even keep things in our pockets, including easily erased bank cards!
.. I once scanned a prisoner in full shackles because the two rather large police escorts said he was too dangerous to remove them ... but they were attached, hence not a problem). Perhaps a piece of equipment is inadvertantly presumed safe, as by my very diligent coworker who took in an IV pole that looked just like ours (there are expensive aluminum equivalents to these items) -- the pole was aluminum, but not the base. Perhaps a walk-in patient doesn't tell when interviewed about the Zippo lighter in her pocket which then almost smacks into the tech's (my) head.
But accidents happen. Perhaps you have someone unfamiliar visiting like that cop (I bet he just walked into the room before they had a chance to demetal him
The room seems no different from anywhere else, and the magnetic field increase exponentially as you approach, easily ripping something away before you can react.
A prudent solution is an airport-style metal detector. There are practical problems with using them that i don't recall; some places do use them. The wands work, but leave you vulnerable to the vacant-brain syndromes above.
As for the Westchester oxygen bottle, I believe what happened was that a magnetic-safe gurney was used but the ordinary oxygen bottle was concealed n the tray beneath by the sheet. This does not justify the tragedy, but demystifies it some. We always followed accidents with great interest.