That's not a premisse, that's the conclusion. We are to accept it because of the study.
What study? There is no actual evidence in this particular article that suggests mindfulness is not achievable, and a great deal of evidence dating back thousands of years that it is (Buddhist psychology is a monument to pre-scientific people getting a remarkable amount of stuff right simply by paying close attention, despite their bizarre metaphysics.)
That the primary investigator says his work has failed to influence his own behaviour simply means it sucks to be him. He says he's still bad at doing things like estimating the amount of time tasks take, whereas that is a highly learnable skill for people with the mental discipline to actually behave as if the results of their formal analysis are true. I've worked with a lot of people who say estimation is hard, and in every case they simply lack the discipline to believe the fairly easily generated results of formal analysis (keeping records of past tasks, re-estimating based on partial completion, etc.)
So in fact this article is bundling two completely unrelated claims: that naive smart people are more prone to certain types of cognitive error, and that naive people will remain naive forever. But the authors have done no serious work to demonstrate the latter claim and ignored a vast body of work, ancient and modern, that disproves it.
I realize there is still ongoing debate about this because Chomsky has always fiercely defended his theory-of-the-moment, but whole notion of a "language instinct" is pretty tenuous on purely evolutionary grounds. All features of organisms are genetic tendencies that elaborate themselves in a particular developmental context. The insistence that there is a single, genetically determined "deep grammar" would make language completely unlike every other aspect of all organisms everywhere.
the labels that we do use for race can be backed up by genetic testing (by looking for clusters of genes associated with a race), and so tests like this *are* scientifically valid, even though ethically suspicious.
Not so much, because hybridization is the norm, not the exception. That is, it is perfectly possible for a "white" person in the US to have many "black" genetic markers. My family has been in North American for over 300 years, and it would be astonishing if I didn't have some African, Jewish and Native American ancestors.
So while it is correct to say that "certain genetic markers have higher rates of association with certain socially constructed cultural groups" the association is sufficiently weak to be diagnostically useless. So it is clearly false to claim that genetic tests for "race" are "scientifically valid" (whatever that means... certainly they are anti-Bayesian, which is the only meaning "scientifically valid" should have.)
Furthermore, the very notion of "racial fragility" (which for some reason gets called "racial purity") is enormously stupid. Racial fragilists claim that if they have just one ancestor who happens to belong to a particular socially constructed cultural group then their own racial identity is completely destroyed (ie is fragile). Since racial identity is purely a social construct that happens to be weakly associated with minor genetic variations, this is clearly idiotic.
As an example of the lack of genetic distinction between "races": both Irish and Eastern European immigrants to Canada were once considered racially distinct from Anglo-Scottish immigrants. They were literally considered "not white" (which you allude to.) Likewise, Korean and Japanese people are genetically identical, but belong to socially distinct and often mutually antagonistic "racial" groups.
Genetic differences between cultural groups may (but do not necessarily) exist. This does not validate genetic tests for "race" because "race" is a genetically meaningless concept due to the weakness of the association between cultural groups and genetics.
Considering Obama carried 95%+ of the black vote, I wonder why nobody's bothered to do a study to see how many votes racial intolerance cost McCain.
You're about the 10th person to repeat this idiotic canard in this thread and the answer is still the same as it was when the first person posted it far, far, above: 95% of black voters supported Bill Clinton. 85 - 95% of black voters have supported Democratic presidential candidates for decades.
Are you will wondering? Are your racist fellow travelers who will no-doubt go on to repeat your silly question another dozen times on this story still wondering?
It is profoundly sad that so many Americans are so ignorant of a common voting pattern in their society that has persisted for decades, and so proud of their ignorance that they repeatedly trumpet it on popular websites like/.
Sorry, but as a matter of principle I automatically reject any claim that has as its central tenant a theory that has already been falsified.
Furthermore, our understanding of epigenetics makes rubbish of the claim that our DNA is "the core of our biological being." Biology does not have a "core" in the relevant reductionist sense. It has a number of important sub-systems that operate together. DNA is not a blueprint, the cell is not a factory. Claims that we can safely ignore everything except our coding regions are just nonsense, based on decades-old ignorance.
We observe a few examples and assume it will always work that way (or at least under whatever constraints the theory was set up with).
Nope. We observe a few examples and create definitions such that it will always work that way, so long as the (often implicit) assumptions that the very possibility of our definitions depend on hold true.
Example: Newton's 2nd law defines force and mass in a way such that it is always true, so long as force and mass can be defined at all. It turns out they can't always be (thus relativity and quantum mechanics) but so long as they can be, Newton's second law will hold true.
Science is a vastly more creative endeavour than most people--including scientists--realize, and the tautologies ('laws") at its core carry a huge weight of ontological commitment, as all tautologies do ("A bachelor is a never-married man", for example, assumes all kinds of things about the nature of marriage, and men, many of which are simply not true in various societies, making the "tautology" not just false but meaningless!)
Or maybe an undercover private cop trying to cause trouble.
There is no "maybe" about it.
Theorem: IF a person engages in violence while claiming to support a given cause, they are by definition an enemy of that cause who is actively working against it.
Proof: It is an empirical fact that the use of violence in the name of a cause has one overwhelming, inevitable and 99.9% predictable effect, which is to harden public sentiment against the cause. This fact is used routinely by agents provocateur to manipulate public sentiment. Now, since this is known by everyone, is well-documented and is as ordinary and uncontroversial a fact as "the sky is blue", it follows that the only reason anyone would ever use violence in the name of a cause is if they wished to discredit the cause. Since there is no other significant effect, there can be no other significant motivation.
Why people think that "people who genuinely believe in the cause" can be distinguished from "people who are manipulating public opinion" is not clear. They take exactly the same actions which have--unsurprisingly--exactly the same effect. Their purported motivations simply don't come into the equation anywhere. They are ALL agents provocateur, and are ALL opposed to the cause. Period. There is simply no other rational interpretation of any use of violence that is nominally done in the name of a cause.
As a military veteran with friends and family who also served in the military...
That's extremely sad. Like anyone who understands the nature and cause of war, I view soldiers as what they are: the first victims of a hormonally driven, completely irrational and pointlessly destructive behavioural legacy of human evolution.
You and your friends and family have my deepest pity, and I sincerely hope we will one day live in a world where being a deadweight loss to the economy is not considered a matter of pride but sadness, and we all recognize that all soldiers are victims of our human failings.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximise profits, so of course they will do that by reducing privacy
They do not have anything of the kind. This is a widely believed, widely promoted, lie that doesn't withstand the most trivial examination.
"Maximize profits over what timescale?" is one of the obvious questions that can be raised to challenge this false view. Without a specification of timescale--which is completely arbitrary, and "profit maximizing" on one timescale may be disastrous on another--the claim of fiduciary duty amounts to, "They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do something." Because ANYTHING can be argued to "maximize profit" over some timescale: idiotic behaviour like laying off senior workers and replacing them with less competent cheaper ones, or a strategy of becoming an uber-conservative financial company that will last forever, and therefore maximize profits over millenia. And so on.
The only utility that the claim "they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximise profits" has is to clearly identify people who know nothing about law or business, and so have nothing useful to contribute to the discussion.
During most of my career in pure physics I got negative results, which were always hell to publish. One of the things you'd hear a lot was, "Don't worry, a negative result is just as good as a positive result!"
At some point I started telling friends and colleagues who got positive results, "Don't worry, a positive result is just as good as a negative result!" Which is false, as proven by the fact that no one but me ever said it.
Negative results are hard to get published, but far more common than positive results. Furthermore, on the road to any positive result there are going to be lots of negatives: even today, working in an area where true positives are much more common, I try to put a section in every paper entitled something like "Things That Did Not Work So Well", because any experiment or computation or theory is likely to involve some dead ends that seemed like a good idea at the time, and if scientists don't report on them they will continue to seem like good ideas to people who haven't tried them, who will then waste effort on trying them, and fail to publish them when they don't work...
The important fact is at the end: "That is, 'Preparing a photon in the same quantum state will sometimes result in photons in different physical states' does not imply 'Preparing a photon in different quantum states will sometimes result in photons that are in the same physical state'. The former proposition is the statistical interpretation. The latter is the assumption that the authorâ(TM)s argument depends on."
Since the author's assumption has nothing to do with the statistical interpretation, their argument says nothing about the statistical interpretation.
Or in other words: "Oxygen causes seizures. More oxygen causes more seizures. There is no "safe dose", though there is a certain unavoidable dose. So we're all at risk of seizures if we live long enough."
Makes perfect sense to me. After all, all biological systems respond to all environmental effects not just monotonically, but linearly! For example, if you put a person in a pneumatic press you will crush them to death. It follows from this that you should never, ever give a person a hug. After all, there is no safe pressure!
The BAS is a purely political anti-nuclear lobbying organization that has nothing to say on the science of radiation safety.
By using research from publicly-available sources he was able to eventually come up with a working design for a nuclear weapon.
Where did they detonate it? If they didn't detonate it, how did they know it was a working design?
The BAS is a purely political organization pursuing a purely political goal. There are virtually no nuclear physicists involved in it because they don't do science: they are a lobbying organization.
That they can mislead someone who doesn't know anything about nuclear engineering into thinking that they do have some non-political agenda is unsurprising. Those of us who have PhDs in the subject and have worked in environments where radiation safety matters know that the BAS is a political organization, not a scientific one.
There is no threshold below which unreasoning fear is 'safe'.
FTFY.
Seriously, the inflated risk estimates of the no-threshold model are a far greater threat to public safety than even those inflated risks themselves. There is any amount of evidence, as well as theoretical backing from our understanding of biology, that the biological effects of radiation are non-linear.
To take a trivial example: if it were otherwise, Q would always be 1. Since it isn't, radiation effects are non-linear. That's at the high end, but once you admit that it's possible the mantra "there is no safe level" looks like what it is: stupid.
We also know a a lot about the mechanics of DNA repair these days, and denying the existence of threshold effects in radiation response is getting perilously close to denying evolution: you would have to be comparably wrong in your understanding of the chemistry of DNA in both cases.
After the Fukushima disaster mothers in Tokyo were at risk of dehydrated babies because the the no-thresholders were claiming far greater risks than supported by the data.
Finally, why does the summary identify the source as "the Bulletin" rather than spelling out the full name, and why is anyone reading what purports to be a scientific report from a purely political anti-nuclear lobbying organization? It's like getting your information on birth control from "Conservative Catholic Christians for Reproductive Oppression."
Yeah, and a bunch of songs is not the same thing as an album, so I guess there are no indie bands anywhere making any money on anything.
Stoss' argument is laughable: he assumes that authors are incapable of hiring proof-readers, editors and marketers at better rates (because they have lower overheads) than publishers. He assumes that publishers have zero overhead.
Every claim he makes applies identically to indie music, and if any of them were true no indie music scene would exist. And yet it does, because musicians can hire in studio time and producers and all of that, more cheaply and more efficiently than big labels can. Do they get rich? Not generally, no. But then, neither do authors with big publishing houses.
But it's interesting to see what some of the authors have to say about it. Here's a comment from Jim Butcher
Curiously, I was looking at the latest Dresden Files book in Amazon.com last night: it's a buck more expensive than the hardback version.
I wonder if this feeling of rip-off pricing could have anything to do with rate of piracy?
I won't pirate stuff, but I sure as hell won't pay more for DRM-crippled bits than I will for dead trees between hardcovers, even when the DRM is easily stripped: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=639
Uh, the science of AGW is so simple that it has been known since the 19th century. It's way simpler than the effect of CFC's on the ozone layer.
Completely false.
The effect of CFCs on the ozone layer was a relatively straightforward problem of catalytic chemistry occurring, if memory serves, on the surfaces of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. The effect (ozone depletion) could be measured as a single meaningful number, and the causality was one-way and easily tied to CFCs by way of isotope ratios of chlorine in the affected layers of the atmosphere. There was no computational physics involved in any of the major steps from premise to conclusion.
The science of AGW is in contrast incredibly complicated. CO2 is a climate forcing agent: that is simple and has been known since the 19th century. But you would have to be a liar or an idiot to claim that "CO2 is a climate forcing agent" is "the science of AGW" when the response of the climate to CO2 is complex to the point where we can plausibly have an argument over the sign of the response on various time-scales.
All conclusions about AGW are filtered through climate models that have been written by people who are not computational physicists, and which contain a variety of unphysical approximations and parameters, any one of which could turn their predictions into gibberish. While the current hiatus in the observed rise of global atmospheric heat content (which unlike "global average temperature" is at least a physically meaningful value) may be due to increase particulates (inadvertent geoengineering, which is otherwise held to be completely impossible when proposed as a deliberate response to AGW) it is also possible that we are now on a timescale where the response to CO2 forcing is negative rather than positive. Or it may be the nujobs are right and everything in the past 100 years has been random variations.
Nothing about this is simple, and people who claim it is are adding nothing but noise to the rational debate.
One side effect of the interpretation - it makes conscious life inevitable in any universe theoretically capable of supporting it: the entire universe will be in a state of near-infinite superposition, with all possible "timelines" coexisting until one of them gives rise to a conscious mind, at which point the entire system collapses to only those states consistent with that mind's existence.
This isn't even self-consistent. Darwinian evolution is a classical process. Without a mind, in this view, there are no classical processes. Without Darwinian evolution there are no minds.
Victor should decide not to entangle the photons whenever Alice and Bob's polarizations are correlated. That'll rip physics a new one...
Alice and Bob's polarizations can only be seen to be correlated when they know the results of Victor's measurements--both what kind of measurement he performed, and what the outcome of that measurement was.
This is the crucial fact that gets lost in all the popular discussion of this stuff: Alice and Bob always see exactly the same statistics, which are always completely uncorrelated. But knowing Victor's results they can generate sub-sets of their uncorrelated data that show different correlations depending both on the kind of measurement Victor made and the outcome of that measurement. So Alice and Bob see 11, 10, 11, 00, 01... but when they get the results of the kind of Victor's measurements they can break that stream of uncorrelated data down into two quite different ones: [11, 00, 00, 00, 11...] and [10, 01, 01, 10...]. This is why no communication is possible using this kind of effect.
Although this kind of experiment is quite fun, it really doesn't add anything to our understanding of quantum ontology. It just confirms that Bohr et al were right all along. Worth doing, and good science, but not shockingly new (and really worth doing just in case it does produce an unexpected result.)
No, our biggest problem is that we now have a culture - courtesy of people like FDR - that is entirely defined by a sense of unlimited entitlement to what someone else produces.
Absolutely: this is why it's so important for strong regulation, particularly on the banking industry. Otherwise those entitled bastards, whose daily bread is 100% dependent on statutory legal protections from the operation of the free market, without which corporations, much less banks, would not exist, would eat everything rather than just 99% of everything.
Although Trudeau was charismatic he was hardly a paragon of good policy or principled government. He lied repeatedly and was forgiven by an electorate in the East who didn't care how much he alienated the West, the legacy of which alienation is still present today in the form of a Reform Party government in everything but name.
If you really want a Canadian politician who "had policies that he stuck to" you need look no further than the one who simplified the income tax system, negotiated a game-changing free trade agreement with our major trading partner, implemented a cap-and-trade system that dramatically reduced acid rain, and replaced the antiquated MST with a visible and simple value-added tax. Those policies have all been very good for Canada, particularly when administered by a psychopath like Jean Chretien. They are being eroded by the current bunch of Reformers, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone this side of the lunatic fringe willing to claim they were bad for the country, however much you may loathe the individual ultimately responsible for them.
The problem is the schism between Businesses and Government.
No, the problem is that everyone thinks they can solve the problem with some simplistic ideological prescription.
Weinberg's suggestion--raise taxes--is pragmatic and sensible, which is why it will never be done: American politics is about ideology, not reality. It doesn't matter if policies have the effect their ideological promoters say they ought. It matters only that they conform to the dictates of their ideology. Thus, Obama bailing out home-owners or Bush invading Iraq aren't judged on their actual outcomes, but on how the measure up to the input condition of ideological conformance.
FLL, VEX and FRC have different advantages, but all of them are great.
I've been a mentor with a FIRST FRC team for the past three years, and if anyone had told me four years ago how much fun it would be to work with a bunch of high-school students I'd've told them they were nuts. As it turns out, they're one of the best groups of people I've ever worked with: eager to learn, flexible in their thinking, creative and capable. It's like Scouts or Guides for the 21st century. Kids come out of it able to debug complex systems, diagnose mechanical, electrical and software issues, work as a team, argue for their own ideas and reach principled agreement with others.
VEX is great because it puts all the work in the hands of the kids themselves. It's more economically feasible, too. VEX is a Mechano-like system that can be put together with simple tools but is incredibly flexible in the freedom of design it gives. One of my kids has been on a VEX team and last year they were getting a mysterious clicking sound from the robot when it lifted one arm... turned out they'd under-speced the shaft, which had twisted inside the bushing to the point that it looked more like a drill-bit. That's the kind of lesson that will make these kids better engineers, come the day.
FLL is awesome because it's so universally accessible, and there's no better way to teach kids things like the meaning of an infinite loop than for them to see their FLL bot repeating the same endless pattern when trapped by field objects.
The great thing about all these programs is they aren't battle-bots: they are solving far more interesting problems than "smash the other guy", which is really a kind of sad and silly pre-modern use of robots, which are giving us new and fundamental capabilities to create prosperity so we don't have any urge to smash the other guy (not that that urge ever made much sense.)
This is a world-wide phenomenon: I'm in Canada, which routinely produces world-championship FRC teams (the team I help mentor isn't one of them... yet) and there are teams in Europe and elsewhere.
If you've got kids and are interested in technology, you can't do better than to get involved in a local robotics organization. The future is happening right now, in your local schools, and you can be part of it.
Did you have a point? Or are you just showing off your knowledge of the toxicity of gasses in concentrations that no one not working in a very specialized environment is ever at risk of encountering?
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a premisse, that's the conclusion. We are to accept it because of the study.
What study? There is no actual evidence in this particular article that suggests mindfulness is not achievable, and a great deal of evidence dating back thousands of years that it is (Buddhist psychology is a monument to pre-scientific people getting a remarkable amount of stuff right simply by paying close attention, despite their bizarre metaphysics.)
That the primary investigator says his work has failed to influence his own behaviour simply means it sucks to be him. He says he's still bad at doing things like estimating the amount of time tasks take, whereas that is a highly learnable skill for people with the mental discipline to actually behave as if the results of their formal analysis are true. I've worked with a lot of people who say estimation is hard, and in every case they simply lack the discipline to believe the fairly easily generated results of formal analysis (keeping records of past tasks, re-estimating based on partial completion, etc.)
So in fact this article is bundling two completely unrelated claims: that naive smart people are more prone to certain types of cognitive error, and that naive people will remain naive forever. But the authors have done no serious work to demonstrate the latter claim and ignored a vast body of work, ancient and modern, that disproves it.
None of this should be taken to diminish Chomsky's work in linguistics which was altogether very impressive.
I think you misspelled "mostly wrong". Interesting, sure. But mostly wrong: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/10/daniel-everett-amazon
I realize there is still ongoing debate about this because Chomsky has always fiercely defended his theory-of-the-moment, but whole notion of a "language instinct" is pretty tenuous on purely evolutionary grounds. All features of organisms are genetic tendencies that elaborate themselves in a particular developmental context. The insistence that there is a single, genetically determined "deep grammar" would make language completely unlike every other aspect of all organisms everywhere.
the labels that we do use for race can be backed up by genetic testing (by looking for clusters of genes associated with a race), and so tests like this *are* scientifically valid, even though ethically suspicious.
Not so much, because hybridization is the norm, not the exception. That is, it is perfectly possible for a "white" person in the US to have many "black" genetic markers. My family has been in North American for over 300 years, and it would be astonishing if I didn't have some African, Jewish and Native American ancestors.
So while it is correct to say that "certain genetic markers have higher rates of association with certain socially constructed cultural groups" the association is sufficiently weak to be diagnostically useless. So it is clearly false to claim that genetic tests for "race" are "scientifically valid" (whatever that means... certainly they are anti-Bayesian, which is the only meaning "scientifically valid" should have.)
Furthermore, the very notion of "racial fragility" (which for some reason gets called "racial purity") is enormously stupid. Racial fragilists claim that if they have just one ancestor who happens to belong to a particular socially constructed cultural group then their own racial identity is completely destroyed (ie is fragile). Since racial identity is purely a social construct that happens to be weakly associated with minor genetic variations, this is clearly idiotic.
As an example of the lack of genetic distinction between "races": both Irish and Eastern European immigrants to Canada were once considered racially distinct from Anglo-Scottish immigrants. They were literally considered "not white" (which you allude to.) Likewise, Korean and Japanese people are genetically identical, but belong to socially distinct and often mutually antagonistic "racial" groups.
Genetic differences between cultural groups may (but do not necessarily) exist. This does not validate genetic tests for "race" because "race" is a genetically meaningless concept due to the weakness of the association between cultural groups and genetics.
Considering Obama carried 95%+ of the black vote, I wonder why nobody's bothered to do a study to see how many votes racial intolerance cost McCain.
You're about the 10th person to repeat this idiotic canard in this thread and the answer is still the same as it was when the first person posted it far, far, above: 95% of black voters supported Bill Clinton. 85 - 95% of black voters have supported Democratic presidential candidates for decades.
Are you will wondering? Are your racist fellow travelers who will no-doubt go on to repeat your silly question another dozen times on this story still wondering?
It is profoundly sad that so many Americans are so ignorant of a common voting pattern in their society that has persisted for decades, and so proud of their ignorance that they repeatedly trumpet it on popular websites like /.
Sorry, but as a matter of principle I automatically reject any claim that has as its central tenant a theory that has already been falsified.
Furthermore, our understanding of epigenetics makes rubbish of the claim that our DNA is "the core of our biological being." Biology does not have a "core" in the relevant reductionist sense. It has a number of important sub-systems that operate together. DNA is not a blueprint, the cell is not a factory. Claims that we can safely ignore everything except our coding regions are just nonsense, based on decades-old ignorance.
We observe a few examples and assume it will always work that way (or at least under whatever constraints the theory was set up with).
Nope. We observe a few examples and create definitions such that it will always work that way, so long as the (often implicit) assumptions that the very possibility of our definitions depend on hold true.
Example: Newton's 2nd law defines force and mass in a way such that it is always true, so long as force and mass can be defined at all. It turns out they can't always be (thus relativity and quantum mechanics) but so long as they can be, Newton's second law will hold true.
Science is a vastly more creative endeavour than most people--including scientists--realize, and the tautologies ('laws") at its core carry a huge weight of ontological commitment, as all tautologies do ("A bachelor is a never-married man", for example, assumes all kinds of things about the nature of marriage, and men, many of which are simply not true in various societies, making the "tautology" not just false but meaningless!)
Or maybe an undercover private cop trying to cause trouble.
There is no "maybe" about it.
Theorem: IF a person engages in violence while claiming to support a given cause, they are by definition an enemy of that cause who is actively working against it.
Proof: It is an empirical fact that the use of violence in the name of a cause has one overwhelming, inevitable and 99.9% predictable effect, which is to harden public sentiment against the cause. This fact is used routinely by agents provocateur to manipulate public sentiment. Now, since this is known by everyone, is well-documented and is as ordinary and uncontroversial a fact as "the sky is blue", it follows that the only reason anyone would ever use violence in the name of a cause is if they wished to discredit the cause. Since there is no other significant effect, there can be no other significant motivation.
Why people think that "people who genuinely believe in the cause" can be distinguished from "people who are manipulating public opinion" is not clear. They take exactly the same actions which have--unsurprisingly--exactly the same effect. Their purported motivations simply don't come into the equation anywhere. They are ALL agents provocateur, and are ALL opposed to the cause. Period. There is simply no other rational interpretation of any use of violence that is nominally done in the name of a cause.
As a military veteran with friends and family who also served in the military...
That's extremely sad. Like anyone who understands the nature and cause of war, I view soldiers as what they are: the first victims of a hormonally driven, completely irrational and pointlessly destructive behavioural legacy of human evolution.
You and your friends and family have my deepest pity, and I sincerely hope we will one day live in a world where being a deadweight loss to the economy is not considered a matter of pride but sadness, and we all recognize that all soldiers are victims of our human failings.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximise profits, so of course they will do that by reducing privacy
They do not have anything of the kind. This is a widely believed, widely promoted, lie that doesn't withstand the most trivial examination.
"Maximize profits over what timescale?" is one of the obvious questions that can be raised to challenge this false view. Without a specification of timescale--which is completely arbitrary, and "profit maximizing" on one timescale may be disastrous on another--the claim of fiduciary duty amounts to, "They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do something." Because ANYTHING can be argued to "maximize profit" over some timescale: idiotic behaviour like laying off senior workers and replacing them with less competent cheaper ones, or a strategy of becoming an uber-conservative financial company that will last forever, and therefore maximize profits over millenia. And so on.
The only utility that the claim "they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximise profits" has is to clearly identify people who know nothing about law or business, and so have nothing useful to contribute to the discussion.
During most of my career in pure physics I got negative results, which were always hell to publish. One of the things you'd hear a lot was, "Don't worry, a negative result is just as good as a positive result!"
At some point I started telling friends and colleagues who got positive results, "Don't worry, a positive result is just as good as a negative result!" Which is false, as proven by the fact that no one but me ever said it.
Negative results are hard to get published, but far more common than positive results. Furthermore, on the road to any positive result there are going to be lots of negatives: even today, working in an area where true positives are much more common, I try to put a section in every paper entitled something like "Things That Did Not Work So Well", because any experiment or computation or theory is likely to involve some dead ends that seemed like a good idea at the time, and if scientists don't report on them they will continue to seem like good ideas to people who haven't tried them, who will then waste effort on trying them, and fail to publish them when they don't work...
My own take as a physicist who knows a bit about this stuff can be found here: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=621
The important fact is at the end: "That is, 'Preparing a photon in the same quantum state will sometimes result in photons in different physical states' does not imply 'Preparing a photon in different quantum states will sometimes result in photons that are in the same physical state'. The former proposition is the statistical interpretation. The latter is the assumption that the authorâ(TM)s argument depends on."
Since the author's assumption has nothing to do with the statistical interpretation, their argument says nothing about the statistical interpretation.
Or in other words: "Oxygen causes seizures. More oxygen causes more seizures. There is no "safe dose", though there is a certain unavoidable dose. So we're all at risk of seizures if we live long enough."
Makes perfect sense to me. After all, all biological systems respond to all environmental effects not just monotonically, but linearly! For example, if you put a person in a pneumatic press you will crush them to death. It follows from this that you should never, ever give a person a hug. After all, there is no safe pressure!
The BAS is a purely political anti-nuclear lobbying organization that has nothing to say on the science of radiation safety.
By using research from publicly-available sources he was able to eventually come up with a working design for a nuclear weapon.
Where did they detonate it? If they didn't detonate it, how did they know it was a working design?
The BAS is a purely political organization pursuing a purely political goal. There are virtually no nuclear physicists involved in it because they don't do science: they are a lobbying organization.
That they can mislead someone who doesn't know anything about nuclear engineering into thinking that they do have some non-political agenda is unsurprising. Those of us who have PhDs in the subject and have worked in environments where radiation safety matters know that the BAS is a political organization, not a scientific one.
There is no threshold below which unreasoning fear is 'safe'.
FTFY.
Seriously, the inflated risk estimates of the no-threshold model are a far greater threat to public safety than even those inflated risks themselves. There is any amount of evidence, as well as theoretical backing from our understanding of biology, that the biological effects of radiation are non-linear.
To take a trivial example: if it were otherwise, Q would always be 1. Since it isn't, radiation effects are non-linear. That's at the high end, but once you admit that it's possible the mantra "there is no safe level" looks like what it is: stupid.
We also know a a lot about the mechanics of DNA repair these days, and denying the existence of threshold effects in radiation response is getting perilously close to denying evolution: you would have to be comparably wrong in your understanding of the chemistry of DNA in both cases.
After the Fukushima disaster mothers in Tokyo were at risk of dehydrated babies because the the no-thresholders were claiming far greater risks than supported by the data.
Finally, why does the summary identify the source as "the Bulletin" rather than spelling out the full name, and why is anyone reading what purports to be a scientific report from a purely political anti-nuclear lobbying organization? It's like getting your information on birth control from "Conservative Catholic Christians for Reproductive Oppression."
Yeah, and a bunch of songs is not the same thing as an album, so I guess there are no indie bands anywhere making any money on anything.
Stoss' argument is laughable: he assumes that authors are incapable of hiring proof-readers, editors and marketers at better rates (because they have lower overheads) than publishers. He assumes that publishers have zero overhead.
Every claim he makes applies identically to indie music, and if any of them were true no indie music scene would exist. And yet it does, because musicians can hire in studio time and producers and all of that, more cheaply and more efficiently than big labels can. Do they get rich? Not generally, no. But then, neither do authors with big publishing houses.
But it's interesting to see what some of the authors have to say about it. Here's a comment from Jim Butcher
Curiously, I was looking at the latest Dresden Files book in Amazon.com last night: it's a buck more expensive than the hardback version.
I wonder if this feeling of rip-off pricing could have anything to do with rate of piracy?
I won't pirate stuff, but I sure as hell won't pay more for DRM-crippled bits than I will for dead trees between hardcovers, even when the DRM is easily stripped: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=639
Uh, the science of AGW is so simple that it has been known since the 19th century. It's way simpler than the effect of CFC's on the ozone layer.
Completely false.
The effect of CFCs on the ozone layer was a relatively straightforward problem of catalytic chemistry occurring, if memory serves, on the surfaces of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. The effect (ozone depletion) could be measured as a single meaningful number, and the causality was one-way and easily tied to CFCs by way of isotope ratios of chlorine in the affected layers of the atmosphere. There was no computational physics involved in any of the major steps from premise to conclusion.
The science of AGW is in contrast incredibly complicated. CO2 is a climate forcing agent: that is simple and has been known since the 19th century. But you would have to be a liar or an idiot to claim that "CO2 is a climate forcing agent" is "the science of AGW" when the response of the climate to CO2 is complex to the point where we can plausibly have an argument over the sign of the response on various time-scales.
All conclusions about AGW are filtered through climate models that have been written by people who are not computational physicists, and which contain a variety of unphysical approximations and parameters, any one of which could turn their predictions into gibberish. While the current hiatus in the observed rise of global atmospheric heat content (which unlike "global average temperature" is at least a physically meaningful value) may be due to increase particulates (inadvertent geoengineering, which is otherwise held to be completely impossible when proposed as a deliberate response to AGW) it is also possible that we are now on a timescale where the response to CO2 forcing is negative rather than positive. Or it may be the nujobs are right and everything in the past 100 years has been random variations.
Nothing about this is simple, and people who claim it is are adding nothing but noise to the rational debate.
One side effect of the interpretation - it makes conscious life inevitable in any universe theoretically capable of supporting it: the entire universe will be in a state of near-infinite superposition, with all possible "timelines" coexisting until one of them gives rise to a conscious mind, at which point the entire system collapses to only those states consistent with that mind's existence.
This isn't even self-consistent. Darwinian evolution is a classical process. Without a mind, in this view, there are no classical processes. Without Darwinian evolution there are no minds.
If you choose to assume determinism...
FTFY.
Victor should decide not to entangle the photons whenever Alice and Bob's polarizations are correlated. That'll rip physics a new one...
Alice and Bob's polarizations can only be seen to be correlated when they know the results of Victor's measurements--both what kind of measurement he performed, and what the outcome of that measurement was.
This is the crucial fact that gets lost in all the popular discussion of this stuff: Alice and Bob always see exactly the same statistics, which are always completely uncorrelated. But knowing Victor's results they can generate sub-sets of their uncorrelated data that show different correlations depending both on the kind of measurement Victor made and the outcome of that measurement. So Alice and Bob see 11, 10, 11, 00, 01... but when they get the results of the kind of Victor's measurements they can break that stream of uncorrelated data down into two quite different ones: [11, 00, 00, 00, 11...] and [10, 01, 01, 10...]. This is why no communication is possible using this kind of effect.
Although this kind of experiment is quite fun, it really doesn't add anything to our understanding of quantum ontology. It just confirms that Bohr et al were right all along. Worth doing, and good science, but not shockingly new (and really worth doing just in case it does produce an unexpected result.)
No, our biggest problem is that we now have a culture - courtesy of people like FDR - that is entirely defined by a sense of unlimited entitlement to what someone else produces.
Absolutely: this is why it's so important for strong regulation, particularly on the banking industry. Otherwise those entitled bastards, whose daily bread is 100% dependent on statutory legal protections from the operation of the free market, without which corporations, much less banks, would not exist, would eat everything rather than just 99% of everything.
Although Trudeau was charismatic he was hardly a paragon of good policy or principled government. He lied repeatedly and was forgiven by an electorate in the East who didn't care how much he alienated the West, the legacy of which alienation is still present today in the form of a Reform Party government in everything but name.
If you really want a Canadian politician who "had policies that he stuck to" you need look no further than the one who simplified the income tax system, negotiated a game-changing free trade agreement with our major trading partner, implemented a cap-and-trade system that dramatically reduced acid rain, and replaced the antiquated MST with a visible and simple value-added tax. Those policies have all been very good for Canada, particularly when administered by a psychopath like Jean Chretien. They are being eroded by the current bunch of Reformers, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone this side of the lunatic fringe willing to claim they were bad for the country, however much you may loathe the individual ultimately responsible for them.
The problem is the schism between Businesses and Government.
No, the problem is that everyone thinks they can solve the problem with some simplistic ideological prescription.
Weinberg's suggestion--raise taxes--is pragmatic and sensible, which is why it will never be done: American politics is about ideology, not reality. It doesn't matter if policies have the effect their ideological promoters say they ought. It matters only that they conform to the dictates of their ideology. Thus, Obama bailing out home-owners or Bush invading Iraq aren't judged on their actual outcomes, but on how the measure up to the input condition of ideological conformance.
There's also VEX: http://www.vexrobotics.com/
FLL, VEX and FRC have different advantages, but all of them are great.
I've been a mentor with a FIRST FRC team for the past three years, and if anyone had told me four years ago how much fun it would be to work with a bunch of high-school students I'd've told them they were nuts. As it turns out, they're one of the best groups of people I've ever worked with: eager to learn, flexible in their thinking, creative and capable. It's like Scouts or Guides for the 21st century. Kids come out of it able to debug complex systems, diagnose mechanical, electrical and software issues, work as a team, argue for their own ideas and reach principled agreement with others.
VEX is great because it puts all the work in the hands of the kids themselves. It's more economically feasible, too. VEX is a Mechano-like system that can be put together with simple tools but is incredibly flexible in the freedom of design it gives. One of my kids has been on a VEX team and last year they were getting a mysterious clicking sound from the robot when it lifted one arm... turned out they'd under-speced the shaft, which had twisted inside the bushing to the point that it looked more like a drill-bit. That's the kind of lesson that will make these kids better engineers, come the day.
FLL is awesome because it's so universally accessible, and there's no better way to teach kids things like the meaning of an infinite loop than for them to see their FLL bot repeating the same endless pattern when trapped by field objects.
The great thing about all these programs is they aren't battle-bots: they are solving far more interesting problems than "smash the other guy", which is really a kind of sad and silly pre-modern use of robots, which are giving us new and fundamental capabilities to create prosperity so we don't have any urge to smash the other guy (not that that urge ever made much sense.)
This is a world-wide phenomenon: I'm in Canada, which routinely produces world-championship FRC teams (the team I help mentor isn't one of them... yet) and there are teams in Europe and elsewhere.
If you've got kids and are interested in technology, you can't do better than to get involved in a local robotics organization. The future is happening right now, in your local schools, and you can be part of it.
just so you know, CO2 is a poison.
So is oxygen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
Did you have a point? Or are you just showing off your knowledge of the toxicity of gasses in concentrations that no one not working in a very specialized environment is ever at risk of encountering?