That's not the case in places in Oregon. They shorten the yellow lights when they install the red light cameras so that there's practically no time to react. Even if you're going just the speed limit, you'll end up stopped in the intersection or running the red.
Because of that, I've actually stayed in the intersection after screeching to a halt. I'll also stop on a green that's been green for a while. Both choices fuck up traffic a lot, but I'm not going to pay a $250 fine just to make someone else's drive a bit faster. They can go to city hall if they don't like it.
The lights are timed so that you don't have time to stop safely or go through the intersection without eventually turning red. They do this to get more ticket revenues. It's disgusting that they'll put profits of the city over the safety of drivers.
I seem to remember in Bavaria that the green lights would flash a couple times before going to yellow. I thought that was a great way to help figure out how long you had until the light turned yellow.
Of course, that would reduce the probability that people would get caught by redlight cameras and would reduce revenues. So, I'm sure we'll never do that here.
Lights are generally timed in such a way that, once they turn yellow, you have _more than enough_ time to stop safely, even if you're going above the speed limit.
Not in Beaverton, Oregon. In a key intersection, the yellow light used to last 4 seconds. After they installed the red-light cameras the yellows were reduced to 2.4 seconds. Taking into account human reaction time, there is NOT enough time to see the yellow and come to a stop before you're in the middle of the intersection. I say fuck'em, and often stop at a green light in case it's close to turning yellow. I'm not the only one either and it really fucks up traffic. People behind me don't like it, but I'm not paying a $250 ticket because of a crooked city hall.
Good point. Of course, having the photo as evidence would help you when you go to court to contest the ticket.
That is, if you survive the crash and are still able to walk and appear in court.
In the academic work I've done with traffic, it appears that in most places, the red-light cameras tend to cause more accidents and make intersections less safe. Several municipalities and states have removed the systems because of the adverse effects on safety and overall traffic.
Photo-radar, on the other hand, appears to not have this problem.
If you MUST have automated traffic enforcement, at least use the types that don't cause more injuries and deaths. To do otherwise is to profit off the deaths, injuries, and suffering of citizens.
This creditor is most likely a credit card company and I hardly doubt they want to discourage people from using the phone system.
Rather, they know that the people most likely to need the phone service are poor people without computers who have few other options. These people are more likely to be living hand-to-mouth and not have the money to make a payment until close to when their bill is due. These are the easiest people to screw over while they're down... either pay $15 to post an on-time payment, or send it by mail and pay a $30 late fee (oh yeah, and your new 39.9% interest rate).
They don't charge $15 to recoup fees. They do it because it will extract the most money possible from people who have the fewest options.
Yes, and the greatest number of drowning fatalities occur on the same days of the year as the greatest sales of ice cream -- so by that logic, eating ice cream obviously increases your chances of dying by drowning.
That's pretty simplistic on your part.
You're right the a correlation does not mean causation. But it is logical to look for connections and feedback loops. In your scenario, it doesn't take much to ask how the two are connected and if there are other factors involved. Maybe both of those things tend to increase on hot days. Maybe people who tend to go to the beach/pool to swim are also more likely to buy ice scream from the concession stand. Maybe swimmers are naturally drawn to snacks with high sugar and fat content.
Thinking in terms of simple cause and effect is so linear and leads people away from seeing how things are connected and influence each other.
Art and science are both ways of thinking. Is it really so outrageous to consider how changes in one kind of thinking might have an effect on another kind of thinking? Is it difficult for you to understand how A can be affected by B while B is simultaneously affected by A? You can't say one causes the other, but to say there is no connection is equally illogical.
Oh freakin' please... it's that kind of "we're the only important ones" verbal masturbation, followed by nothing more than fallacies and handwaving as "proof", that gets some of us disgusted at a lot of humanities students.
Who do you mean? The author? That he is some kind of self important artist saying art is responsible for science? He's not an artist but is actually a neurosurgeon who likes to research and write.
You wrote a whole lot to scream at this book recommendation. Did you even read anything about the book?
to assume that just because two things happened in a sequence, surely the first _must_ be the cause for the second.
I never asserted that changes in art CAUSED changes in science. But it's an interesting to consider how art and science can influence each other... that changes in thinking in one can influence changes in the other.
Simple "cause and effect" is a very one-dimensional way of looking at the world. Often there are complex feedback loops that prevent arriving at a simple cause and effect. It's quite possible that A is influenced by B while B is simultaneously influenced by A. It's impossible to reduce it down to A caused B or B caused A. But it's also fallacious to say that they're not connected at all.
And for those of you who don't see the point of such a study, consider that Einstein, Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (who founded the Dada movement) all lived within spitting distance of one another at one point in time.
Leonard Shlain wrote an interesting book called Art & Physics. In it, he relates some of the great breakthroughs in science to similar breakthroughs in art. That somehow, the new way of seeing the world in a growing art movement helped inspire scientific thinking.
Leonard Shlain proposes that the visionary artist is the first member of a culture to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to think about the world. Escorting the reader through the classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern eras, Shlain shows how the artists' images when superimposed on the physicists' concepts create a compelling fit.
His other books, Alphabet vs. The Goddess and Sex, Time, and Power were very fascinating too.
In one class I had that had a large term paper, the teacher required that we turn in 2 drafts throughout the term before we turned in the final version. The drafts were reviewed by her, as well as read and marked up by a fellow student.
When we turned in our final, we also had to submit the drafts with the markups. This was ostensibly to see our progress in editing and revising our papers, but I imagine it also served as a good foil against plagiarism.
No, I don't think people generally love the WTO - however, they can see the irony when the very same institution which was used by the US to force others to do what the US wants is then ignored by the US, when the US is doing something contrary to the rules of the same organization it was using to browbeat others.
I agree with you, but instead of the word, "irony", I would use "hypocrisy".
Right, but how can you have an enlightenment if there was no preceding endarkenment?
More seriously, my understanding of the term "Dark Ages" is that there simply was much less written in Europe during those times so there is not as much known through the writings. This is in contrast to periods before and after.
Most MBA programs only allow people have been in the workforce for the same reason. You need the work experience to provide context for the class. Without that context, you'll never be able to connect the theory to practice.
I would disagree with that. Most of the MBA programs I looked at did not have any kind of work requirement. They wanted people with high GMAT scores and GPAs because that raises the average GMAT and GPA of their enrollees.
The goal of most schools is to increase enrollment and increase the "quality" of the applicants. More students = more money.
I just started going back to school at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
The current bulletin only mentions "ownership" in class descriptions and on the page about residency.
"copyright" is mentioned on the doctoral thesis page: 7. Microfilming of the dissertation is mandatory for doctoral candidates. An abstract, which may not exceed 350 words, must be submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies with the University Microfilms International agreement form. The charge for this service is $55, payable at the Cashier's Office, after picking up the necessary forms in the Office of Graduate Studies. Copyrighting of the dissertation is optional, at an additional charge of $45, payable at the Cashier's Office.
And there are a couple more mentions of copyright for the dissertation (no explanation about what the $45 really gets you, as I thought once you put your creative work in tangible form it was automatically copyright-protected). There are also a couple class listings covering copyright.
"intellectual property" only shows up in a class listings.
"property" mentions buildings - submitted transcripts become the property of PSU, along with all other registration/application records - and appears in course listings
Nothing about transferring ownership of assignments is in the application either.
So, if the application (the document I signed) and the catalog are the binding legal documents for my work at the university, then at least at PSU, there is no indication that I'm required to hand over all of my work to the university in order to actually pass my classes.
There is a verifiable history of people working for or on behalf of the government infiltrating protests in the guise of anarchists and committing and inciting vandalism and violence in order to discredit the entire group of protesters in the eyes of the general public.
As far as I know, there is no known history of NYPD eating people. Killing them without cause? Yes. Eating them afterwards? No.
So, basically, what you are tell me, is that you've no idea what 1984 was about and you're simply refering to "big brother" instead of "the surveillance boogeyman" cause you want to sound educated when you are clearly not.
That's somewhat pompous. Just like any non-trivial creative work, there is no single meaning or single message in the book.
To some it could be a tragic romance where two unlikely lovers meet and then betray each other. Others see a warning about a totalitarian government and its total information awareness. For yet others, it's a warning against the dehumanization of the "enemy" in the form of Muslims/Eurasians. And yet again for others, it's a tale of how regimes will hold up a scapegoat like BinLaden/Goldstein as the source of all evil and woes.
Or maybe it's a touching story about a middle-aged man as he just tries to get along through life, learning to find contentment in blind allegiance to his party.
A reference to Nineteen Eighty Four can mean a lot of different things - depending on who is citing it.
I mean, if you want to throw stones at cops, do it when they are beating up on civilians, or taking bribes, or driving through red lights without the siren on. Don't go fuck up a peaceful protest.
Who is to say that some of these "anarchists" are not people working for the cops themselves? It's not like this is unheard of. What the NYPD did here is a lot like the activities of COINTELPRO, which included people working on the behalf of the government to cause violence and mayhem at peace protests - in an effort to discredit the peace movement.
This also happened in Operation Ajax - where the CIA overthrew the government of Iran. They hired gangs to fight each other (and attack "civilians") in the streets of Tehran in order to establish in the minds of the people that the recently ELECTED Mosadegh did not have control over the situation.
If they'll spy and infiltrate a year before a convention, why assume that they would stop at inciting violence and illegal activity?
I just want to thank the old-timers like you who mentioned The Prisoner several months ago.
I got the whole series on Netflix and loved it! I then started getting the Danger Man series and I love it too (except for that crappy theme music they had to add for us dull Americans). I love it so much I just bought the whole set on Amazon...
I just recommended it in another post. I think it's sci-fi in that he was doing work with a weird computer and trying to discover a mathematical foundation to everything. And it touched on the idea of knowledge that is so great that it would drive you insane, which mirrors some religious beliefs that seeing the face of god would also cause madness.
It's hard to draw solid lines and say anything is just sci-fi, or just drama, or just thriller. It had elements of all three, and overall, I thought it was a good movie.
Having one or two staff members devoted primarily to consideration of the rights of the people would not be a bad idea right now.
Congressmen should hold themselves to a higher standard when the issues being dealt with are the rights of the people.
That's a fine guideline for a "good" congressperson. But it only takes one with a bad staffer to slip in an extra page into a thousand page bill to make a change to the law, and the next thing you know, the president has more powers than before and nobody had any idea.
It could be that every such scenario does not have to be programmed... but rather, a complex decision like that is programmed through some kind of decision logic that uses other smaller logic modules to handle the sub-parts of the decision.
But if you give these cars the ability to communicate with each other and "smart roads", you might be able to end up with behaviors that are just not possible with current cars.
Given your scenario, it maybe possible the car can slam to a complete stop - while communicating with all the cars behind it that it's doing that - thus, all cars in the lane stop almost immediately and don't pile up.
Or maybe it can communicate with the oncoming car so that it slows enough that it can zip across the lane in front of the oncoming car and into the shoulder on the other side. Or maybe it can get the oncoming cars to hug the right side of the road, making room down the middle to avoid the accident.
Or maybe the road itself has sensors that can detect pedestrians that the car couldn't see directly, helping to stop the situation before it even gets started.
There are all kinds of interesting possibilities when you combine the ideas of smart roads and smart cars that work together - and they're likely to be far superior in terms of both safety and ability to get around than the capabilities of human drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the case in places in Oregon. They shorten the yellow lights when they install the red light cameras so that there's practically no time to react. Even if you're going just the speed limit, you'll end up stopped in the intersection or running the red.
Because of that, I've actually stayed in the intersection after screeching to a halt. I'll also stop on a green that's been green for a while. Both choices fuck up traffic a lot, but I'm not going to pay a $250 fine just to make someone else's drive a bit faster. They can go to city hall if they don't like it.
The lights are timed so that you don't have time to stop safely or go through the intersection without eventually turning red. They do this to get more ticket revenues. It's disgusting that they'll put profits of the city over the safety of drivers.
I seem to remember in Bavaria that the green lights would flash a couple times before going to yellow. I thought that was a great way to help figure out how long you had until the light turned yellow.
Of course, that would reduce the probability that people would get caught by redlight cameras and would reduce revenues. So, I'm sure we'll never do that here.
Lights are generally timed in such a way that, once they turn yellow, you have _more than enough_ time to stop safely, even if you're going above the speed limit.
Not in Beaverton, Oregon. In a key intersection, the yellow light used to last 4 seconds. After they installed the red-light cameras the yellows were reduced to 2.4 seconds. Taking into account human reaction time, there is NOT enough time to see the yellow and come to a stop before you're in the middle of the intersection. I say fuck'em, and often stop at a green light in case it's close to turning yellow. I'm not the only one either and it really fucks up traffic. People behind me don't like it, but I'm not paying a $250 ticket because of a crooked city hall.
Good point. Of course, having the photo as evidence would help you when you go to court to contest the ticket.
That is, if you survive the crash and are still able to walk and appear in court.
In the academic work I've done with traffic, it appears that in most places, the red-light cameras tend to cause more accidents and make intersections less safe. Several municipalities and states have removed the systems because of the adverse effects on safety and overall traffic.
Photo-radar, on the other hand, appears to not have this problem.
If you MUST have automated traffic enforcement, at least use the types that don't cause more injuries and deaths. To do otherwise is to profit off the deaths, injuries, and suffering of citizens.
This creditor is most likely a credit card company and I hardly doubt they want to discourage people from using the phone system.
Rather, they know that the people most likely to need the phone service are poor people without computers who have few other options. These people are more likely to be living hand-to-mouth and not have the money to make a payment until close to when their bill is due. These are the easiest people to screw over while they're down... either pay $15 to post an on-time payment, or send it by mail and pay a $30 late fee (oh yeah, and your new 39.9% interest rate).
They don't charge $15 to recoup fees. They do it because it will extract the most money possible from people who have the fewest options.
Yes, and the greatest number of drowning fatalities occur on the same days of the year as the greatest sales of ice cream -- so by that logic, eating ice cream obviously increases your chances of dying by drowning.
That's pretty simplistic on your part.
You're right the a correlation does not mean causation. But it is logical to look for connections and feedback loops. In your scenario, it doesn't take much to ask how the two are connected and if there are other factors involved. Maybe both of those things tend to increase on hot days. Maybe people who tend to go to the beach/pool to swim are also more likely to buy ice scream from the concession stand. Maybe swimmers are naturally drawn to snacks with high sugar and fat content.
Thinking in terms of simple cause and effect is so linear and leads people away from seeing how things are connected and influence each other.
Art and science are both ways of thinking. Is it really so outrageous to consider how changes in one kind of thinking might have an effect on another kind of thinking? Is it difficult for you to understand how A can be affected by B while B is simultaneously affected by A? You can't say one causes the other, but to say there is no connection is equally illogical.
Oh freakin' please... it's that kind of "we're the only important ones" verbal masturbation, followed by nothing more than fallacies and handwaving as "proof", that gets some of us disgusted at a lot of humanities students.
Who do you mean? The author? That he is some kind of self important artist saying art is responsible for science? He's not an artist but is actually a neurosurgeon who likes to research and write.
You wrote a whole lot to scream at this book recommendation. Did you even read anything about the book?
to assume that just because two things happened in a sequence, surely the first _must_ be the cause for the second.
I never asserted that changes in art CAUSED changes in science. But it's an interesting to consider how art and science can influence each other... that changes in thinking in one can influence changes in the other.
Simple "cause and effect" is a very one-dimensional way of looking at the world. Often there are complex feedback loops that prevent arriving at a simple cause and effect. It's quite possible that A is influenced by B while B is simultaneously influenced by A. It's impossible to reduce it down to A caused B or B caused A. But it's also fallacious to say that they're not connected at all.
And for those of you who don't see the point of such a study, consider that Einstein, Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (who founded the Dada movement) all lived within spitting distance of one another at one point in time.
Leonard Shlain wrote an interesting book called Art & Physics. In it, he relates some of the great breakthroughs in science to similar breakthroughs in art. That somehow, the new way of seeing the world in a growing art movement helped inspire scientific thinking.
From the websites: http://www.artandphysics.com/
Leonard Shlain proposes that the visionary artist is the first member of a culture to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to think about the world. Escorting the reader through the classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern eras, Shlain shows how the artists' images when superimposed on the physicists' concepts create a compelling fit.
His other books, Alphabet vs. The Goddess and Sex, Time, and Power were very fascinating too.
In one class I had that had a large term paper, the teacher required that we turn in 2 drafts throughout the term before we turned in the final version. The drafts were reviewed by her, as well as read and marked up by a fellow student.
When we turned in our final, we also had to submit the drafts with the markups. This was ostensibly to see our progress in editing and revising our papers, but I imagine it also served as a good foil against plagiarism.
No, I don't think people generally love the WTO - however, they can see the irony when the very same institution which was used by the US to force others to do what the US wants is then ignored by the US, when the US is doing something contrary to the rules of the same organization it was using to browbeat others.
I agree with you, but instead of the word, "irony", I would use "hypocrisy".
Right, but how can you have an enlightenment if there was no preceding endarkenment?
More seriously, my understanding of the term "Dark Ages" is that there simply was much less written in Europe during those times so there is not as much known through the writings. This is in contrast to periods before and after.
Thanks! As someone who aspires to get a PhD and someday become a professor, this set of guidelines is great.
I can't help but think they can't be generalized to apply to more courses of curricula. I'll have to work on that...
Thanks for the pretty version!
Most MBA programs only allow people have been in the workforce for the same reason. You need the work experience to provide context for the class. Without that context, you'll never be able to connect the theory to practice.
I would disagree with that. Most of the MBA programs I looked at did not have any kind of work requirement. They wanted people with high GMAT scores and GPAs because that raises the average GMAT and GPA of their enrollees.
The goal of most schools is to increase enrollment and increase the "quality" of the applicants. More students = more money.
I just started going back to school at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
The current bulletin only mentions "ownership" in class descriptions and on the page about residency.
"copyright" is mentioned on the doctoral thesis page:
7. Microfilming of the dissertation is mandatory
for doctoral candidates. An abstract, which may not
exceed 350 words, must be submitted to the Office
of Graduate Studies with the University Microfilms
International agreement form. The charge for this
service is $55, payable at the Cashier's Office, after
picking up the necessary forms in the Office of
Graduate Studies. Copyrighting of the dissertation
is optional, at an additional charge of $45, payable
at the Cashier's Office.
And there are a couple more mentions of copyright for the dissertation (no explanation about what the $45 really gets you, as I thought once you put your creative work in tangible form it was automatically copyright-protected). There are also a couple class listings covering copyright.
"intellectual property" only shows up in a class listings.
"property" mentions buildings
- submitted transcripts become the property of PSU, along with all other registration/application records
- and appears in course listings
Nothing about transferring ownership of assignments is in the application either.
So, if the application (the document I signed) and the catalog are the binding legal documents for my work at the university, then at least at PSU, there is no indication that I'm required to hand over all of my work to the university in order to actually pass my classes.
There are FOUR lights!
There is a verifiable history of people working for or on behalf of the government infiltrating protests in the guise of anarchists and committing and inciting vandalism and violence in order to discredit the entire group of protesters in the eyes of the general public.
As far as I know, there is no known history of NYPD eating people. Killing them without cause? Yes. Eating them afterwards? No.
So, basically, what you are tell me, is that you've no idea what 1984 was about and you're simply refering to "big brother" instead of "the surveillance boogeyman" cause you want to sound educated when you are clearly not.
That's somewhat pompous. Just like any non-trivial creative work, there is no single meaning or single message in the book.
To some it could be a tragic romance where two unlikely lovers meet and then betray each other. Others see a warning about a totalitarian government and its total information awareness. For yet others, it's a warning against the dehumanization of the "enemy" in the form of Muslims/Eurasians. And yet again for others, it's a tale of how regimes will hold up a scapegoat like BinLaden/Goldstein as the source of all evil and woes.
Or maybe it's a touching story about a middle-aged man as he just tries to get along through life, learning to find contentment in blind allegiance to his party.
A reference to Nineteen Eighty Four can mean a lot of different things - depending on who is citing it.
I mean, if you want to throw stones at cops, do it when they are beating up on civilians, or taking bribes, or driving through red lights without the siren on. Don't go fuck up a peaceful protest.
Who is to say that some of these "anarchists" are not people working for the cops themselves? It's not like this is unheard of. What the NYPD did here is a lot like the activities of COINTELPRO, which included people working on the behalf of the government to cause violence and mayhem at peace protests - in an effort to discredit the peace movement.
This also happened in Operation Ajax - where the CIA overthrew the government of Iran. They hired gangs to fight each other (and attack "civilians") in the streets of Tehran in order to establish in the minds of the people that the recently ELECTED Mosadegh did not have control over the situation.
If they'll spy and infiltrate a year before a convention, why assume that they would stop at inciting violence and illegal activity?
Zardoz!
You forgot Zardoz!
I keep trying, but someone keeps brining it up on slashdot!
I just want to thank the old-timers like you who mentioned The Prisoner several months ago.
I got the whole series on Netflix and loved it! I then started getting the Danger Man series and I love it too (except for that crappy theme music they had to add for us dull Americans). I love it so much I just bought the whole set on Amazon...
I just recommended it in another post. I think it's sci-fi in that he was doing work with a weird computer and trying to discover a mathematical foundation to everything. And it touched on the idea of knowledge that is so great that it would drive you insane, which mirrors some religious beliefs that seeing the face of god would also cause madness.
It's hard to draw solid lines and say anything is just sci-fi, or just drama, or just thriller. It had elements of all three, and overall, I thought it was a good movie.
I would add Pi http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/ to your list. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
When do they broadcast the 2 minutes of hate again? I must have missed it this morning.
This is 2007, not 1984. We've upgraded. Instead of just 2 minutes, there's 24 hours of it on Fox News.
Having one or two staff members devoted primarily to consideration of the rights of the people would not be a bad idea right now.
Congressmen should hold themselves to a higher standard when the issues being dealt with are the rights of the people.
That's a fine guideline for a "good" congressperson. But it only takes one with a bad staffer to slip in an extra page into a thousand page bill to make a change to the law, and the next thing you know, the president has more powers than before and nobody had any idea.
It could be that every such scenario does not have to be programmed... but rather, a complex decision like that is programmed through some kind of decision logic that uses other smaller logic modules to handle the sub-parts of the decision.
But if you give these cars the ability to communicate with each other and "smart roads", you might be able to end up with behaviors that are just not possible with current cars.
Given your scenario, it maybe possible the car can slam to a complete stop - while communicating with all the cars behind it that it's doing that - thus, all cars in the lane stop almost immediately and don't pile up.
Or maybe it can communicate with the oncoming car so that it slows enough that it can zip across the lane in front of the oncoming car and into the shoulder on the other side. Or maybe it can get the oncoming cars to hug the right side of the road, making room down the middle to avoid the accident.
Or maybe the road itself has sensors that can detect pedestrians that the car couldn't see directly, helping to stop the situation before it even gets started.
There are all kinds of interesting possibilities when you combine the ideas of smart roads and smart cars that work together - and they're likely to be far superior in terms of both safety and ability to get around than the capabilities of human drivers.