The p-value in this case is the probability of the null hypothesis, which is, "There are no innocent people being held at Guantanamo Bay." This is the perfectly ordinary language of statistics, which I strongly encourage you to learn. Having a basic grasp of probability theory will change your view of the world.
The computation is based on simple Poison statistics. Essentially, what is P(0) for a mean of N, where N is the average number of innocent people you'd expect in a population the size of the prison camp based on well-known error rates in law enforcement activities and given the complete lack of meaningful judicial oversight.
There's your problem. You are reifying a homogenous, intollerant, ethno-racist culture and saying that it will be "corrupted" by external influences, as opposed to "diluted" or "enhanced". You've simply assumed without argument that the homogenous, xenophobic culture of Japan is superior to everything outside it, by some standard. I am left wondering what that standard is.
I have no doubt that local cultures will persist despite homogenization. I come from a nation of mongrels, and we are still quite distinct, even from our neighbours to the south. Don't underestimate the robustness of local cultures, or the weakness of cultures that have to close themselves off from "corrupting" outside influences to maintain themselves.
For price per effect, in comparison with humans... ugh.
Assuming five times parts cost for the price it would be reasonble to have $10k worth of parts for a $50k unit. For something that just cleans hotel rooms I don't think that's unreasonable, assuming a modest level of supervision, say one human in charge of all the robots in the building. Assuming your hotel staff are costing you $10/hr all-in (not unreasonable for near-minimum-wage LEGAL workers) and working 1000 hours a year, if a robot could replace just one of them it would pay for itself within a decade, even including maintenace.
This seems like an extremely do-able project, given a relatively modest development budget. Ideally you'd need a major hotel chain to sponsor it, as the field trials would be exciting, and the liability issues more than anything else will likely be the major impediment to adoption--you'd certainly have to have realtime video capture from these units to avoid spurious claims from guests that they had been run into and so on.
I'm sure if they knew they could pass from jailer to inmate if they got caught it would have a chilling effect on currently rampant smuggling...
It will reduce the number of smugglers. Why do you believe that will reduce the amount of smuggling?
That is, reducing supply without reducing demand cannot have any effect other than increasing the revenues of the remaining suppliers. Demand may drop due to increases in price, but by how much depends on the price elasticity of demand relative to supply. There are circumstances in which reducing the number of suppliers will result eventually in a lower equilibrium market price.
Install jammers (probably with a whitelist of allowed phones) or STFU.
But that would prevent criminal gangs from maximizing their smuggling profits after the casual competition is eliminated! You have to ask who benefits from a proposed legal change, and in this case it is obvious the only beneficiaries are the criminal organizations who will be willing and able to take the risk of continued smuggling.
The volume of smuggling will not change, but the number of smugglers will go down, increasing the profitability of the remaining smugglers by a great deal.
Installing jammers would do nothing like that, and so is obviously pointless!
Note that the summary says "prison guards, staff and vendors are cashing in". These suppliers are the weak link and are somewhat likely to respond to the legislation.
Right, so by increasing the penalties you are decreasing the competition, and therefore increasing the profit margins for those willing and able to continue the practice.
But of course fewer (and richer) smugglers does not in any way imply fewer smuggled cell phones, so it isn't clear why anyone would suggest harsher penalties in this case, other than maybe organized criminals who want to use the law to "persuade" the more casual competition to exit the market.
Only if you for some reason assume that "few smugglers" implies "less smuggling" would this position make any sense, but you'd have to be insane to believe that. It would be like claiming that the number of burgers sold has gone down since the '50's because back then there were zillions of independent burger joints but today the market is dominated by a few well-organized vendors like McDonald's.
Perhaps the legislation is upping the category and/or the penalty.
I wonder why they would do that, given the known lack of correlation between the harshness of penalties and the occurence of crimes.
Texas, for example, has one of the highest murder rates in the US, and also has extremely harsh penalties, including the frequent use of killing convicted murderers.
North Dakota, in contrast, has one of the lowest murder rates in the US, and has never employed the practice of killing convicted murderers.
I don't know what the relevant difference is between Texas and North Dakota, but given the murder rates are anti-correlated with the harshness of the penalties it seems unlikely that the two are related at all. There is quite a bit of research to back this notion up, that after a certain point the marginal decline in a criminal behaviour for a marginal increase in penalty decreases, a fact that should come as no suprise to anyone who has been paying attention to ecnomics for, say, the past 200 years. The law of diminishing returns is a pretty fundamental result of human preference functions.
Now it may be that in the present case there are data to suggest that the point of diminishing returns has not been met with regard to cell phone smuggling in prisons, but the very first question that should be asked of people proposing legal changes of this kind is, "Where are the data to show that this new and harsher law will result in a reduction in the penalized behaviour sufficient to justify the change?"
But editorial effort isn't the staple of daily news, and never has been.
Nor have subscriber fees ever been the majority revenue stream for newspapers and magazines. The decrease in production and delivery cost for online media ought to more-or-less balance out the loss of subscription revenue, as both used to be roughly half the budget.
The real problem is that advertising revenue has dropped like a stone because the Web has more-or-less infinite capacity to deliver ads. There is no longer a scarcity of ad space, so the amount that can be charged for ads online is trivial compared to what print media could charge.
Thus, what Murdoch is trying here is almost completely new: a subscriber-funded daily newspaper.
The only similar thing I'm aware of are hobby-group newsletters, like "Undercurrent" was for SCUBA diving: periodicals run by people who felt advertisers had too much pull with the major publications, and deliberately went with a subscriber-funded model so they would have the editorial freedom to say what they liked.
Advertisers have always put a slight check on the editorial excesses of mass media. If Murdoch can pull this off, he'll have a self-selected audience paying him to lie to them according to the party line.
I'm doubtful he'll succeed, though. Low quality content is available for free, and the kind of people who want a monotonic diet of ideologically laden idiocy aren't going to be too picky about quality, since they are buying it for the party line, not the quality.
The other problem is even the map updates are frequently best guesses.
It would seem that another problem is that these units have a city-dweller's notion of what consitutes a "road" and a "car". Outside of cities the concept of "road" is a lot vaguer, and vehicle type is a lot more relevant. I've been down "roads" in a Willies Jeep that you wouldn't want to take in anything else, and used "roads" that are only seasonably passable. Some "roads" are only drivable in late summer and mid-winter (too muddy at other times); some are impassable in winter due to snow or spring due to flooding; some are passable only in winter due to to freezing (and only then if they've been plowed); and so on.
There is no reason why most of this knowledge could not be respresented in a GPS navigation unit, but the people who write software for them apparently don't ever actually use them go out of the city.
The first guy I knew who had a GPS told me, "This thing can make you absolutely fearless."
Back when sonar depth sounders were becoming cheap and common there was a story about a sinking near where I lived. The skipper of a fishing boat was crusing along watching his newly-installed depth sounder, and stove in the bow of his boat against a cliff that dropped shear into the water. The boat sank, and local legend has it that it's still there, a few hundred feet down.
I have no idea if the story is true, but it's plausible, given the local geography. In either case, it was one of those socially valuable tales that reminded everyone to keep an eye on where they were going, not just how much water was under the keel.
When we told the operator that he was well outside the marked channels and that he had struck a rock that's clearly marked on all navigation charts, he simply replied, "Well my GPS told me to turn left here."
I grew up living on a rocky point with reefs offshore in an area with 16 foot tides, and every couple of years my father and brother and I would rescue boaters who'd run aground. This was back when LORAN was still pretty new and GPS undreamed of, but the universal feature of people who hit the rocks was that the only navigation aid on board was--at best--a road map.
A big part of the problem is that people are simply ignorant. If you didn't grow up in an area or haven't lived there for a long time it can be hard to appreciate the risks. And most people grow up in urban or suburban areas that effectively have no (natural) risks at all. People like that simply don't know enough to appreciate that the landscape and climate can kill them if they don't take the appropriate precautions. GPS is just an enabling device that helps that ignorance get them killed: it creates an illusion of safety and certainty that they might otherwise not have, although according to the article people were plenty able to get into trouble without it.
Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment.
The sciences are the results of the persistent application of the discipline of science to specific subject matter.
When people say, "Science doesn't explain everything" they are declaring their basic ignorance of what science is. Science doesn't explain anything. The sciences do explain a few things, but none of the sciences is intended by anyone sane to be a comprehensive explanation of all things.
Astrology will never be a science, any more than medicine will ever be a science. Doctors are not scientists, but technologists. They use the results of science to treat disease. Astrologers would be the same, if there were any systematic tests or controlled experiments that demonstrated a causal influence of the heavens on human life. Such systematic tests and controlled experiments would be science.
If one wanted to approach astrology as a scientist, one would use a standard personality inventory from the science of psychology and give it to a large number of people. One would also record the date of birth of those people. One would then test the idea "there is an association between date of birth and personality" by first doing unsupervised learning to cluster the personality results, and then looking for non-random features in the birth-dates in each cluster. Or one could simply apply a distance metric between personalities and compare that distribution to birth-date (or birth-day-of-year, or whatever) using a Kruskal-Wallis test or similar.
Any time anything remotely like this has been done, no significant degree of association has been found. Yet for astrological practice to be useful, the degree of association must be very high--this is also quantifiable.
It is relatively trivial to prove a negative via controlled experiment and systematic observation. Physicists do this all the time, particularly with regard to various phenomen "beyond the standard model". In practical terms, the public testing of astrological ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation has been done, and the ideas have failed.
The differences you are talking about are a) barely measureable; b) subject to hemispheric and cultural effects; and c) unrelated to the astrologically-relevant characteristics that most people are concerned with.
Yet you seem to think this is somehow relevant to the discussion of astrology as a social and cultural phenomenon, when there is no evidence that the tiny differences you are bringing up are in any way related to the claims astrologists make.
The Iraq Vet Stress Project [stressproject.org] uses very precise & minute magnetic fields - those generated with fingertips - to help soldiers with PTSD. The procedure involves tapping on specific locations on the skin while thinking about a specific distressing thought or emotion. They don't know exactly why it works, just that it does.
Here may be part of the problem. You start with a completely unjustified claim about "precise and minute magnetic fields" that is probably false, and end with a completely contradictory claim "they don't know exactly why it works". So on the one hand you are claiming a detailed knowledge of one aspect of the process, and on the other claiming a deep ignorance of it. That kind of thing sets off the bullshit detector in most people's minds pretty loudly. Tapping the skin is not precise, and while there are electromagentic fields involved in any nerve stimulation they are hardly the way one would ordinarily describe this sort of thing.
Furthermore, a quick glance at the studies that purport to show outcome effects suggests they are severely lacking. They aren't double-blind, and the control arm in the largest study involves putting people with PTSD on a waiting list, not giving them a placebo treatment of any kind. I wonder if being on a waiting list ever increases stress?
The obvious placebo for the effectiveness of this kind of tapping treatment is to run the people through exactly the same course of hour-long sessions, but with something else replacing the tapping, like playing a musical tone, say. That would focus on the core phenomenological claim: that tapping the skin is the relevant causal agent in this kind of intervention.
I can think of lots of reasons why the APA might be against this kind of thing, but I see no evidence that the studies done so far actually constitute science, which is the public testing of an idea by controlled experiment and systematic observation. The experiments that have been done and the observations that have been made simply do not test the idea "tapping is the necessary and sufficient cause of improvement in PTSD seen in the poorly designed studies done to date."
The Bible names several tools which scholars cannot identify.
Not just the Bible. Various ancient stories include mentions of things that are uninterpretable. The one that comes most easily to mind is the "stone things" that moved Gilgamesh's boat across the waters in his search for Utnapishtim (who was the basis for the Noah figure in the Biblical flood story, as near as any unbiased scholar can tell, although people with a prior bias regarding the Bible not being a collection of derivative fairy-tales sometimes argue differently, although unconvincingly.)
Nature doesn't care how it looks, it cares what it's footprint is
Yeah, but "it's ugly" is the last gasp of the NIMBYs. They don't have anything substantive to say against a technology, so they make some lame aesthetic case, like the Kennedy's did over windmills offshore their New England estate.
what advantage does this technology hold over trains?
Capital cost, higher terrain tolerance, lower environmental impact, lower operating costs and higher efficiency due to fixed power-plant.
The first three advantages come from only needing to place towers at intervals of 100 m or more as opposed to laying rails. The latter advantages come from not having to to drag your power-plant around with you, so you can load it up with (heavy, large) extras to make it more efficient and lower emissions.
It may be difficult to cover comparable distances to railroads with these things, although given they were covering ~10 km decades ago one would expect that modern materials would allow individual cable ways of at least several times that, and there is bound to be a point at which engine and switching stations would be far enough apart that building N cableways of X kilometers apiece would be more optimal than building one railway of X*N kilometers, particularly over difficult terrain.
So I walk away to, oh, I don't know take a piss or something, and when I come back wherever I bumped my mouse getting up is the most relevant thing in my search? Riiight.
Wow, you've sure demostrated with that anecdote that statistical analysis is a bunch of nonsense! Incredibly insightful!
So if I'm reading correctly, EVERY TIME you do a search you get up and take a piss, bumping the cursor in the process?
Or you think--for some undisclosed reason--that everyone does this kind of thing often enough to overwhelm any statistical power in these results?
Why is that, exactly? Where are the data on how often people get up, bump their mouse, etc? Why do you believe that accidental mouse motions are the dominant phenomenon, rather than deliberate ones? Where is your data?
I mean, obviously, they've got some kind of research to back it up... But it seems like this would be pretty useless to me.
This is modded "insightful", which it is. But the insight is entirely into the contents of your own head. If you bother to actually look at the data you might have something to say about the world outside yourself, which might get modded not just "insightful", but "interesting".
Why do people in the 21st century continue to repeat the failed behaviour of the past and report what "it seems like" to them as if it was remotely interesting or relevant to any given problem? We can look back at the past several thousand years and see that what "just seemed like" the truth to generations past was the uttermost nonsense. It "just seemed like" the moons of Jupiter were "useless" and therefore did not exist. It "just seemed like" the impetus theory of motion was correct. It "just seemed like" the brain cooled the blood. It "just seemed like" the continents were stable. It "just seemed like" the human psyche was divided into the id, the ego and the superego, and so on.
Introspection and casual observation of commonplaces--the method of philosophy--is known to overwhelmingly produce results that are false at best, meaningless at worst. So why does anyone anywhere reach for the contents of their own introspective experience as the first and often only datum when considering any question?
Are they unaware of the past three hundred years of intellectual history?
And to compound the problem, the individuals at those companies knew that they were never going to be personally liable for any of it.
Which is what distinguishes the United States from a free market. In a free market, individuals are liable for their actions. Government interference in the free market in the form of legislation that shields individuals from the consequences of their actions in the form of the various Companies Acts that have been passed in the past 150 years, allows such people to hide behind the skirts of the Nanny State.
Given the absence of a free market in the US, there are only two consistent alternatives: to regulate the existing market further so that we get the benefits of the corporate form of social organization without so much of the downside, or to unregulate the market by abolishing the Companies Act and its successors, and return corporate property to its individual owners (the shareholders) while giving each owner and officer personal liability. Since the latter leads to a mess--this is simply a matter of historical fact--I personally favour further regulating the non-free market in which corporations exist.
Anyone who attempts to oppose the regulation of corporations on the basis of claims about "the free market" is guilty of a fundamental logical inconsistency, as no corporations would exist in a genuinely free market.
If any African slaves were still around, they would tell you so...
Even so, modern day communists still seek to avoid the failings of someone like Stalin while building upon his successes. Liberal democracy makes no such attempts; it's just business as usual for centuries.
So few words, so many errors, and not even the pretext of self-consistency.
Liberal democracy has made no attempt to improve itself, but for some reason there aren't any slaves in liberal democracies any more?
And have you talked to any political prisoners in Cuba lately? Or bothered to look at what's going on in Venezuala?
"Pro-business dictators" is a contradiction in terms. The only way you can make it coherent is "pro-businesses run by the friends of the dictator" or something similar. No dictatorship is "pro-business" in the sense of making it easy for individuals to establish and run business--they are if anything in favour of giving special treatment to some businesses run by their friends, but that is "pro-friend" rather than "pro-bussiness". Communism avoids this by outlawing private busiensses, so stupid people don't notice that communist dictators engage in exactly the same "pro-friend" behaviour that non-communist dictators do.
Arguing that one form of dictatorship is better than another is like arguing whether you'd rather be shot or drowned: either way you wind up dead. Me, I'd rather oppose both, and live.
Anarchism implies a egalitarian society where workers collectively manage the means of production without bosses or owners.
So, descent into poverty followed by either perpetual small wars, like every pre-rule-of-law human society everywhere, or the rise of a "big man" (lugal, wanax, warlord... every human language has a word for it, for a reason) that results in consolidation and empire.
Or do you have something original and interesting that addresses the unfortunate reality that humans tend toward hierachy and non-egalitarian forms of social organization due to our most fundamental evolutionary nature? I'm not saying these tendencies can't be overcome--modern social democracies don't do a bad job of it--but I am saying that the rule of law, coercive though it may be, has yet to be bested as a means of doing so.
The traditional anarchist view of humans as "natural" egalitarians who have been led astray by the EEEvil capitalists/statists/etc-ists simply will not hold water against two fundamental facts: humans are very significantly sexually dimorphic, implying mate competition and a moderate degree of polygamy; and the archaic male breeding population of humans was about half the size of the archaic female population, although the physical populations were the same size.
Mate competition (amongst males) and mate choice (amongst females) are intense and active impetuses in human behaviour, and unless they are managed (NOT repressed) somehow they will inevitably destroy any form of egalitarian anarchism.
Again: I'm not saying egalitarian anarchism isn't possible. I'm not even saying it isn't desirable. I'm asking if the modern egalitarian anarchist movement has done any work to address these facts about human beings, or are they still engaged in wishful thinking that will lead to more failed social experiments and vast quantities of human misery?
being in a position where your actions have an immediate and massive effect on the bottom line
Translation: "I am a short-sighted imbecile with some weirdly irrational time-preference function that massively over-values immediately obvious effects relative to long-term causes."
Slashdot Mirror
The p-value in this case is the probability of the null hypothesis, which is, "There are no innocent people being held at Guantanamo Bay." This is the perfectly ordinary language of statistics, which I strongly encourage you to learn. Having a basic grasp of probability theory will change your view of the world.
The computation is based on simple Poison statistics. Essentially, what is P(0) for a mean of N, where N is the average number of innocent people you'd expect in a population the size of the prison camp based on well-known error rates in law enforcement activities and given the complete lack of meaningful judicial oversight.
outside corruption
There's your problem. You are reifying a homogenous, intollerant, ethno-racist culture and saying that it will be "corrupted" by external influences, as opposed to "diluted" or "enhanced". You've simply assumed without argument that the homogenous, xenophobic culture of Japan is superior to everything outside it, by some standard. I am left wondering what that standard is.
I have no doubt that local cultures will persist despite homogenization. I come from a nation of mongrels, and we are still quite distinct, even from our neighbours to the south. Don't underestimate the robustness of local cultures, or the weakness of cultures that have to close themselves off from "corrupting" outside influences to maintain themselves.
For price per effect, in comparison with humans... ugh.
Assuming five times parts cost for the price it would be reasonble to have $10k worth of parts for a $50k unit. For something that just cleans hotel rooms I don't think that's unreasonable, assuming a modest level of supervision, say one human in charge of all the robots in the building. Assuming your hotel staff are costing you $10/hr all-in (not unreasonable for near-minimum-wage LEGAL workers) and working 1000 hours a year, if a robot could replace just one of them it would pay for itself within a decade, even including maintenace.
This seems like an extremely do-able project, given a relatively modest development budget. Ideally you'd need a major hotel chain to sponsor it, as the field trials would be exciting, and the liability issues more than anything else will likely be the major impediment to adoption--you'd certainly have to have realtime video capture from these units to avoid spurious claims from guests that they had been run into and so on.
I'm sure if they knew they could pass from jailer to inmate if they got caught it would have a chilling effect on currently rampant smuggling...
It will reduce the number of smugglers. Why do you believe that will reduce the amount of smuggling?
That is, reducing supply without reducing demand cannot have any effect other than increasing the revenues of the remaining suppliers. Demand may drop due to increases in price, but by how much depends on the price elasticity of demand relative to supply. There are circumstances in which reducing the number of suppliers will result eventually in a lower equilibrium market price.
Install jammers (probably with a whitelist of allowed phones) or STFU.
But that would prevent criminal gangs from maximizing their smuggling profits after the casual competition is eliminated! You have to ask who benefits from a proposed legal change, and in this case it is obvious the only beneficiaries are the criminal organizations who will be willing and able to take the risk of continued smuggling.
The volume of smuggling will not change, but the number of smugglers will go down, increasing the profitability of the remaining smugglers by a great deal.
Installing jammers would do nothing like that, and so is obviously pointless!
Note that the summary says "prison guards, staff and vendors are cashing in". These suppliers are the weak link and are somewhat likely to respond to the legislation.
Right, so by increasing the penalties you are decreasing the competition, and therefore increasing the profit margins for those willing and able to continue the practice.
But of course fewer (and richer) smugglers does not in any way imply fewer smuggled cell phones, so it isn't clear why anyone would suggest harsher penalties in this case, other than maybe organized criminals who want to use the law to "persuade" the more casual competition to exit the market.
Only if you for some reason assume that "few smugglers" implies "less smuggling" would this position make any sense, but you'd have to be insane to believe that. It would be like claiming that the number of burgers sold has gone down since the '50's because back then there were zillions of independent burger joints but today the market is dominated by a few well-organized vendors like McDonald's.
Perhaps the legislation is upping the category and/or the penalty.
I wonder why they would do that, given the known lack of correlation between the harshness of penalties and the occurence of crimes.
Texas, for example, has one of the highest murder rates in the US, and also has extremely harsh penalties, including the frequent use of killing convicted murderers.
North Dakota, in contrast, has one of the lowest murder rates in the US, and has never employed the practice of killing convicted murderers.
I don't know what the relevant difference is between Texas and North Dakota, but given the murder rates are anti-correlated with the harshness of the penalties it seems unlikely that the two are related at all. There is quite a bit of research to back this notion up, that after a certain point the marginal decline in a criminal behaviour for a marginal increase in penalty decreases, a fact that should come as no suprise to anyone who has been paying attention to ecnomics for, say, the past 200 years. The law of diminishing returns is a pretty fundamental result of human preference functions.
Now it may be that in the present case there are data to suggest that the point of diminishing returns has not been met with regard to cell phone smuggling in prisons, but the very first question that should be asked of people proposing legal changes of this kind is, "Where are the data to show that this new and harsher law will result in a reduction in the penalized behaviour sufficient to justify the change?"
Editorial effort will do that for you.
But editorial effort isn't the staple of daily news, and never has been.
Nor have subscriber fees ever been the majority revenue stream for newspapers and magazines. The decrease in production and delivery cost for online media ought to more-or-less balance out the loss of subscription revenue, as both used to be roughly half the budget.
The real problem is that advertising revenue has dropped like a stone because the Web has more-or-less infinite capacity to deliver ads. There is no longer a scarcity of ad space, so the amount that can be charged for ads online is trivial compared to what print media could charge.
Thus, what Murdoch is trying here is almost completely new: a subscriber-funded daily newspaper.
The only similar thing I'm aware of are hobby-group newsletters, like "Undercurrent" was for SCUBA diving: periodicals run by people who felt advertisers had too much pull with the major publications, and deliberately went with a subscriber-funded model so they would have the editorial freedom to say what they liked.
Advertisers have always put a slight check on the editorial excesses of mass media. If Murdoch can pull this off, he'll have a self-selected audience paying him to lie to them according to the party line.
I'm doubtful he'll succeed, though. Low quality content is available for free, and the kind of people who want a monotonic diet of ideologically laden idiocy aren't going to be too picky about quality, since they are buying it for the party line, not the quality.
The other problem is even the map updates are frequently best guesses.
It would seem that another problem is that these units have a city-dweller's notion of what consitutes a "road" and a "car". Outside of cities the concept of "road" is a lot vaguer, and vehicle type is a lot more relevant. I've been down "roads" in a Willies Jeep that you wouldn't want to take in anything else, and used "roads" that are only seasonably passable. Some "roads" are only drivable in late summer and mid-winter (too muddy at other times); some are impassable in winter due to snow or spring due to flooding; some are passable only in winter due to to freezing (and only then if they've been plowed); and so on.
There is no reason why most of this knowledge could not be respresented in a GPS navigation unit, but the people who write software for them apparently don't ever actually use them go out of the city.
The first guy I knew who had a GPS told me, "This thing can make you absolutely fearless."
Back when sonar depth sounders were becoming cheap and common there was a story about a sinking near where I lived. The skipper of a fishing boat was crusing along watching his newly-installed depth sounder, and stove in the bow of his boat against a cliff that dropped shear into the water. The boat sank, and local legend has it that it's still there, a few hundred feet down.
I have no idea if the story is true, but it's plausible, given the local geography. In either case, it was one of those socially valuable tales that reminded everyone to keep an eye on where they were going, not just how much water was under the keel.
When we told the operator that he was well outside the marked channels and that he had struck a rock that's clearly marked on all navigation charts, he simply replied, "Well my GPS told me to turn left here."
I grew up living on a rocky point with reefs offshore in an area with 16 foot tides, and every couple of years my father and brother and I would rescue boaters who'd run aground. This was back when LORAN was still pretty new and GPS undreamed of, but the universal feature of people who hit the rocks was that the only navigation aid on board was--at best--a road map.
A big part of the problem is that people are simply ignorant. If you didn't grow up in an area or haven't lived there for a long time it can be hard to appreciate the risks. And most people grow up in urban or suburban areas that effectively have no (natural) risks at all. People like that simply don't know enough to appreciate that the landscape and climate can kill them if they don't take the appropriate precautions. GPS is just an enabling device that helps that ignorance get them killed: it creates an illusion of safety and certainty that they might otherwise not have, although according to the article people were plenty able to get into trouble without it.
Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment.
The sciences are the results of the persistent application of the discipline of science to specific subject matter.
When people say, "Science doesn't explain everything" they are declaring their basic ignorance of what science is. Science doesn't explain anything. The sciences do explain a few things, but none of the sciences is intended by anyone sane to be a comprehensive explanation of all things.
Astrology will never be a science, any more than medicine will ever be a science. Doctors are not scientists, but technologists. They use the results of science to treat disease. Astrologers would be the same, if there were any systematic tests or controlled experiments that demonstrated a causal influence of the heavens on human life. Such systematic tests and controlled experiments would be science.
If one wanted to approach astrology as a scientist, one would use a standard personality inventory from the science of psychology and give it to a large number of people. One would also record the date of birth of those people. One would then test the idea "there is an association between date of birth and personality" by first doing unsupervised learning to cluster the personality results, and then looking for non-random features in the birth-dates in each cluster. Or one could simply apply a distance metric between personalities and compare that distribution to birth-date (or birth-day-of-year, or whatever) using a Kruskal-Wallis test or similar.
Any time anything remotely like this has been done, no significant degree of association has been found. Yet for astrological practice to be useful, the degree of association must be very high--this is also quantifiable.
It is relatively trivial to prove a negative via controlled experiment and systematic observation. Physicists do this all the time, particularly with regard to various phenomen "beyond the standard model". In practical terms, the public testing of astrological ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation has been done, and the ideas have failed.
That is how astrology differs from science.
There are some measurable differences
The differences you are talking about are a) barely measureable; b) subject to hemispheric and cultural effects; and c) unrelated to the astrologically-relevant characteristics that most people are concerned with.
Yet you seem to think this is somehow relevant to the discussion of astrology as a social and cultural phenomenon, when there is no evidence that the tiny differences you are bringing up are in any way related to the claims astrologists make.
The Iraq Vet Stress Project [stressproject.org] uses very precise & minute magnetic fields - those generated with fingertips - to help soldiers with PTSD. The procedure involves tapping on specific locations on the skin while thinking about a specific distressing thought or emotion. They don't know exactly why it works, just that it does.
Here may be part of the problem. You start with a completely unjustified claim about "precise and minute magnetic fields" that is probably false, and end with a completely contradictory claim "they don't know exactly why it works". So on the one hand you are claiming a detailed knowledge of one aspect of the process, and on the other claiming a deep ignorance of it. That kind of thing sets off the bullshit detector in most people's minds pretty loudly. Tapping the skin is not precise, and while there are electromagentic fields involved in any nerve stimulation they are hardly the way one would ordinarily describe this sort of thing.
Furthermore, a quick glance at the studies that purport to show outcome effects suggests they are severely lacking. They aren't double-blind, and the control arm in the largest study involves putting people with PTSD on a waiting list, not giving them a placebo treatment of any kind. I wonder if being on a waiting list ever increases stress?
The obvious placebo for the effectiveness of this kind of tapping treatment is to run the people through exactly the same course of hour-long sessions, but with something else replacing the tapping, like playing a musical tone, say. That would focus on the core phenomenological claim: that tapping the skin is the relevant causal agent in this kind of intervention.
I can think of lots of reasons why the APA might be against this kind of thing, but I see no evidence that the studies done so far actually constitute science, which is the public testing of an idea by controlled experiment and systematic observation. The experiments that have been done and the observations that have been made simply do not test the idea "tapping is the necessary and sufficient cause of improvement in PTSD seen in the poorly designed studies done to date."
The Bible names several tools which scholars cannot identify.
Not just the Bible. Various ancient stories include mentions of things that are uninterpretable. The one that comes most easily to mind is the "stone things" that moved Gilgamesh's boat across the waters in his search for Utnapishtim (who was the basis for the Noah figure in the Biblical flood story, as near as any unbiased scholar can tell, although people with a prior bias regarding the Bible not being a collection of derivative fairy-tales sometimes argue differently, although unconvincingly.)
Thanks to all the other commenters here I now know that it is blocked "only in Canada". Pity.
The message I get is that the content is available in Canada via "The Comedy Network", but they never have the recent stuff.
You can check out a fairly entertaining interview of Brian Greene by Stephen Colbert from last Thursday on Colbert's web site [colbertnation.com].
No I can't. Neither can anyone else outside the United States.
Nature doesn't care how it looks, it cares what it's footprint is
Yeah, but "it's ugly" is the last gasp of the NIMBYs. They don't have anything substantive to say against a technology, so they make some lame aesthetic case, like the Kennedy's did over windmills offshore their New England estate.
what advantage does this technology hold over trains?
Capital cost, higher terrain tolerance, lower environmental impact, lower operating costs and higher efficiency due to fixed power-plant.
The first three advantages come from only needing to place towers at intervals of 100 m or more as opposed to laying rails. The latter advantages come from not having to to drag your power-plant around with you, so you can load it up with (heavy, large) extras to make it more efficient and lower emissions.
It may be difficult to cover comparable distances to railroads with these things, although given they were covering ~10 km decades ago one would expect that modern materials would allow individual cable ways of at least several times that, and there is bound to be a point at which engine and switching stations would be far enough apart that building N cableways of X kilometers apiece would be more optimal than building one railway of X*N kilometers, particularly over difficult terrain.
So I walk away to, oh, I don't know take a piss or something, and when I come back wherever I bumped my mouse getting up is the most relevant thing in my search? Riiight.
Wow, you've sure demostrated with that anecdote that statistical analysis is a bunch of nonsense! Incredibly insightful!
So if I'm reading correctly, EVERY TIME you do a search you get up and take a piss, bumping the cursor in the process?
Or you think--for some undisclosed reason--that everyone does this kind of thing often enough to overwhelm any statistical power in these results?
Why is that, exactly? Where are the data on how often people get up, bump their mouse, etc? Why do you believe that accidental mouse motions are the dominant phenomenon, rather than deliberate ones? Where is your data?
I mean, obviously, they've got some kind of research to back it up... But it seems like this would be pretty useless to me.
This is modded "insightful", which it is. But the insight is entirely into the contents of your own head. If you bother to actually look at the data you might have something to say about the world outside yourself, which might get modded not just "insightful", but "interesting".
Why do people in the 21st century continue to repeat the failed behaviour of the past and report what "it seems like" to them as if it was remotely interesting or relevant to any given problem? We can look back at the past several thousand years and see that what "just seemed like" the truth to generations past was the uttermost nonsense. It "just seemed like" the moons of Jupiter were "useless" and therefore did not exist. It "just seemed like" the impetus theory of motion was correct. It "just seemed like" the brain cooled the blood. It "just seemed like" the continents were stable. It "just seemed like" the human psyche was divided into the id, the ego and the superego, and so on.
Introspection and casual observation of commonplaces--the method of philosophy--is known to overwhelmingly produce results that are false at best, meaningless at worst. So why does anyone anywhere reach for the contents of their own introspective experience as the first and often only datum when considering any question?
Are they unaware of the past three hundred years of intellectual history?
And to compound the problem, the individuals at those companies knew that they were never going to be personally liable for any of it.
Which is what distinguishes the United States from a free market. In a free market, individuals are liable for their actions. Government interference in the free market in the form of legislation that shields individuals from the consequences of their actions in the form of the various Companies Acts that have been passed in the past 150 years, allows such people to hide behind the skirts of the Nanny State.
Given the absence of a free market in the US, there are only two consistent alternatives: to regulate the existing market further so that we get the benefits of the corporate form of social organization without so much of the downside, or to unregulate the market by abolishing the Companies Act and its successors, and return corporate property to its individual owners (the shareholders) while giving each owner and officer personal liability. Since the latter leads to a mess--this is simply a matter of historical fact--I personally favour further regulating the non-free market in which corporations exist.
Anyone who attempts to oppose the regulation of corporations on the basis of claims about "the free market" is guilty of a fundamental logical inconsistency, as no corporations would exist in a genuinely free market.
If any African slaves were still around, they would tell you so...
Even so, modern day communists still seek to avoid the failings of someone like Stalin while building upon his successes. Liberal democracy makes no such attempts; it's just business as usual for centuries.
So few words, so many errors, and not even the pretext of self-consistency.
Liberal democracy has made no attempt to improve itself, but for some reason there aren't any slaves in liberal democracies any more?
And have you talked to any political prisoners in Cuba lately? Or bothered to look at what's going on in Venezuala?
"Pro-business dictators" is a contradiction in terms. The only way you can make it coherent is "pro-businesses run by the friends of the dictator" or something similar. No dictatorship is "pro-business" in the sense of making it easy for individuals to establish and run business--they are if anything in favour of giving special treatment to some businesses run by their friends, but that is "pro-friend" rather than "pro-bussiness". Communism avoids this by outlawing private busiensses, so stupid people don't notice that communist dictators engage in exactly the same "pro-friend" behaviour that non-communist dictators do.
Arguing that one form of dictatorship is better than another is like arguing whether you'd rather be shot or drowned: either way you wind up dead. Me, I'd rather oppose both, and live.
Anarchism implies a egalitarian society where workers collectively manage the means of production without bosses or owners.
So, descent into poverty followed by either perpetual small wars, like every pre-rule-of-law human society everywhere, or the rise of a "big man" (lugal, wanax, warlord... every human language has a word for it, for a reason) that results in consolidation and empire.
Or do you have something original and interesting that addresses the unfortunate reality that humans tend toward hierachy and non-egalitarian forms of social organization due to our most fundamental evolutionary nature? I'm not saying these tendencies can't be overcome--modern social democracies don't do a bad job of it--but I am saying that the rule of law, coercive though it may be, has yet to be bested as a means of doing so.
The traditional anarchist view of humans as "natural" egalitarians who have been led astray by the EEEvil capitalists/statists/etc-ists simply will not hold water against two fundamental facts: humans are very significantly sexually dimorphic, implying mate competition and a moderate degree of polygamy; and the archaic male breeding population of humans was about half the size of the archaic female population, although the physical populations were the same size.
Mate competition (amongst males) and mate choice (amongst females) are intense and active impetuses in human behaviour, and unless they are managed (NOT repressed) somehow they will inevitably destroy any form of egalitarian anarchism.
Again: I'm not saying egalitarian anarchism isn't possible. I'm not even saying it isn't desirable. I'm asking if the modern egalitarian anarchist movement has done any work to address these facts about human beings, or are they still engaged in wishful thinking that will lead to more failed social experiments and vast quantities of human misery?
being in a position where your actions have an immediate and massive effect on the bottom line
Translation: "I am a short-sighted imbecile with some weirdly irrational time-preference function that massively over-values immediately obvious effects relative to long-term causes."