Hmm. So a 4-year degree is superior to my 30 years of experience.
I don't want to work for, with, or anywhere near anybody who thinks that book learning trumps experience. Sorry. The good news is, you wouldn't want to hire me anyway, I don't have a piece of paper.
That's taking what I said heavily out of context.
I emphasized that the correlation was not perfect and no where did I imply that a 4 year degree trumps 30 years experience.
I will say that you learn more in a 4 year degree than in 4 years experience (after all the objective of the degree is learning). And that I have a better idea what a 4 year degree consisted of than I do 4 years experience.
And calling University "book learning" is highly misleading. I implemented many systems in University, and I implemented many systems in industry. There are things you cannot learn in school, and there are things that are very hard to learn on your own. But in general I learned more implementing things in University as those were projects designed to push the limits of my knowledge.
"Sounds like you're confusing education with schooling."
We all know dumb people with degree's, my point is just because someone went through school does not guarantee they are any good at what they do or that they learned much of anything while they were there.
The degree is about handing out marks of status, in my experience with people someone with a masters is not really better then someone with a bachelors. One simply had more persistance, endurance/ability to cheat amd money to pursue a mark of higher status.
Yes, and in my experience the quality of the degree is correlated to the quality of the programmer. It's not a perfect correlation, but I've found that people with 4 year degrees tend to be a lot stronger than the 2 year diplomas, and I don't think it's all from the school selection process (I don't have enough experience with graduate degrees to judge there).
As for your claim of it being nothing but an avenue for social status. I can't imagine someone going through a real CS program and not coming out not only with a better skill set, but with a better process of thinking.
As for your bizarre insistence that lots of people are cheating, yes I'm sure that a substantial proportion of the students engage in at least some unethical behaviour, but you cannot get through a CS program just by cheating.
It indicates no such thing. The only thing it shows is that they understand public relations. It's a marketing effort.
It's not a great indicator but it is an indicator.
There are a zillion things you can do to improve security, a hacking contest is one of them.
Now this is relying on the fact that the contest was done fairly, which I don't know. That's one of the reasons I questioned if they had access to all the available info before hand.
And voting machines aren't a typical software security situation. For software you can make the software available to anyone who wants a crack at it (har har!). But for voting machines the hardware is a critical component. It's expensive and hard to update remotely so it may not be available to all researchers. As well there are legitimate reasons to restrict the availability of machines to make it more difficult to set up fake voting stations.
For voting machines hacking contests may be the only way to give outside researchers a fair chance to break the machines.
Of course this doesn't really guarantee it's secure (nothing does) but it indicates they're taking security seriously. I am curious if they had full access to machines for a while before the competition, 3 days is a lot of time to try out a bunch of exploits you've worked out, but it's not a lot of time to try to find those exploits if it's the first time you've seen the system.
Whatever conclusions they come to will be completely non-falsifiable and compatible with whatever sort of alien life that we could potentially encounter!
They are either there for doing research and thus don't care about learning or they aren't sure what they are doing there and just needed a job.
You're confusing "All University Professors" with the elusive and endangered "Tenure Track Faculty". Most professors nowadays are employed as sessional instructors. That means that they are working part time on a contract which only lasts for a single semester, have no job security, no benefits of any kind, limited access to resources such as office space or the library, and are typically paid next to nothing.
Any illusions they may have had about doing actual research in their field should have disappeared after their first semester of being exploited, and if they really "just needed a job" they would have been better off serving drinks or flipping burgers. The hours and pay are a lot better and at least there would be some possibility of career advancement that way.
This is nothing new, but it's getting worse every year. Consider Allison Dube, at the University of Calgary. Despite teaching at the same school since before many of his students were born, working full time hours and winning numerous awards for excellence in teaching, he can barely afford to continue working.
Honestly that has more to do with overproduction of Ph.Ds from some departments, notice that most of the people talked about in the article are from arts. The telling part of the article isn't that they're getting paid so little by the Uni, it's that the only time a second job was mentioned it was for a call centre.
I don't think the situation is as bad for the sciences, where Universities have to compete with high paying industry to attract people. These people can then demand things like professorships. In the arts there's just not as much industry demand for the graduate degrees so the Universities can pay them a lot less.
Really, I think the solution is to reduce the number of graduate positions available, this will free up funding to pay faculty better although it will probably reduce the amount of research done (I honestly don't know anything about the quality or value of research from the arts).
The summary said that they didn't change their diets but the abstract makes no mention of that.
I suspect the poster just inferred that because they didn't mention diet in the abstract, but not mentioning diet does not mean the diet didn't change. In my experience when you exercise you tend to eat more. I'm not particularly large (BMI 24.9) but I've never lost any weight by increasing my exercise, it takes changing my diet to affect my weight.
I know for myself, and other relatively fit people I know, when we exercise more we simply eat the extra calories we burned. Of course this isn't the case for all people and I suspect that once you start getting larger you might start to see benefits more often, but note that diet is still the biggest single factor.
I'm actually surprised this study showed as big a difference as it did (-3.3 kg in 12 weeks is pretty good) although 31.8 BMI is starting to trend towards the chubbier side.
Black people are different on the outside, why can't they be different on the inside, too?
Because what makes them different on the outside is such a mind-bogglingly infinitesimal fraction of the entire genetic code. It's simply not likely that there are any broad measures of mental capacity linked to it. About the only things closely linked are discrete details like larger gaps between the condyles in the knee, angle of the upper mandibular ridge, etc. Something as broadly affected as mental capacity is unlikely to have much correlation.
While I think that the argument that black people are intrinsically dumber than the rest of us is silly, I should point out that your counter-argument is just as silly.
There was an article recently describing the development of a "smart(er) rat" by the change of a single gene. Which pretty much refutes the notion that it requires much larger genetic changes to "think different" than to "look different".
After thinking a while about the whole Watson thing I came to the following conclusion.
Yes black people do, on average, score lower on SAT scores, IQ tests, etc. But also remember the null hypothesis is that there is no genetic basis for that gap, you need evidence to overturn the null hypothesis. There are multiple socioeconomic factors that are known to be contributing to that gap than there the mere existence of a gap is not sufficient evidence to overturn the null hypothesis.
To put it another way, the ground is wet, it's raining, and there is a hose lying on the lawn. Yes the hose might have been on and could be responsible for some of the wetness. But the wetness is not evidence of the hose being on because we know the rain could have caused the wetness.
We need other evidence of the hose being on before we can say it helped to make the lawn wet.
When I was living in NY, I worked with a fellow who had his well pointed out by a local Dowser. It cost him $300 in 1990.
And for $300, he would tell you exactly where you should dig, precisely how far you should dig, how much water you were going to get (GPM), how long it would last, whether it was subject to drought or could be relied upon during dry spells. He could also eliminate sources with salt, sulfur, iron, calcium and anything else you don't want in your water. He'd take a wire flag and write the instructions for the driller on the flag, then stick it precisely where they were supposed to drill.
The catch?
The Dowser gave his guarantee in writing, with a quadruple your money back if anything was less than what he promised. Goes dry? Not enough flow? Muddy, salty, iron, sulfur? He'll pay you $1200.
When I heard the story from my co-worker, the old fellow hadn't needed to pay anyone back in the 20 years he'd been doing it. Dunno if he's still alive now, though.
And I'm not sure he'd want to try this out with explosives if he still is.
Why bother with $300 a shot?
All he had to do was call up Randi and he'd get a cool million!
It's possible the author is taking more advanced math than I did (although I would be able to handle the equation in question), and/or is a slower typist, but I was able to handle equations like that along with matrices when taking notes. It was tough at first but after a few weeks I was moving along pretty quick and was only a hair slower than the analog folks.
There were only 2 real problems I found.
1) When a new topic came up I'd have to do a quick google to find how to make the relevant terms.
2) I never found a good solution to draw and integrate diagrams quickly enough.
For 2 maybe there's a fancy latex editor or maybe just practice (I didn't have much latex image experience at that point). But overall I found that the value of having nice notes outweighed the two negatives.
So it is highly course dependent whether LaTeX is viable. But depending how many LaTeX notes the poster has taken there is a possibility they simply haven't had quite enough practice and will be fine if they stick with it.
How many times have you been able to do a 'yum update' or 'preupgrade' without having to worry about whether the system will be able to boot correctly?
How many times has anaconda crashed mid-install, or failed to detect your RAID and decided instead to wipe individual drives without really telling you, or any number of other nagging problems?
'Bleeding-edge' isn't an excuse by any measure; I never run into any problems when upgrading FreeBSD regularly and its ports tree stays far more current than Fedora's yum packages ever will manage.
0, though I don't use much RAID.
There are areas like sound which do seem to cause problems for a lot of people (though I think that's typical for most PulseAudio distros). And pushing KDE 4.0 does seem to have caused some real issues for a while. But when people claim stability problems like the ones you've described I think it's important to remember the plural of anecdote is not data.
they were also exposed to a new nutrient (citrate?) that they learned to metabolize
They didn't "learn" to metabolize it, the ones that could metabolize it lived and reproduced and the ones that couldn't, didn't.
Well yes, they did "learn" in that they evolved to metabolize it. I can accept that when dealing with people without a solid understanding of evolution a more precise term is necessary, and especially when dealing with creationists. However, I think the mechanics are generally known enough that I don't think there's a big problem with using the relaxed language with someone like the original poster (though I certainly could have used a more formal description).
I am curious to know that why would mutate those germs in a short period of time, in a potentially unchanged lab environment? What are they adapting to by evolutionary mutation?
There's two reasons.
First it is a somewhat different environment than they evolved in. Particularly if this was the same bacteria as the previous article I think they were also exposed to a new nutrient (citrate?) that they learned to metabolize. This trait evolving could be the reason that their mutation rate jumped up as they adapted to their new condition.
Second, even if there wasn't any adaptive pressure there's still evolutionary drift as unimportant changes show up and propagate through sheer chance.
Battle for Wesnoth (open source: wesnoth.org) is a game that I started playing over 4 years ago. I looked far and wide for strategy games that could hold my interest with serious replay value. Once I found Wesnoth I got sucked in and I all but quit playing other games for quite some time, and I always keep coming back to Wesnoth, in a trend that players jokingly refer to as a "Wesbreak" - you just have to come back after a few months or a year to see what is new!
It is simple yet, rich with both strategic and tactical depth. Lots (lots!) of user made content and it's own markup language with which to write your own. I started off thinking that I'd never play it multiplayer, but that is about all I do these days. There are some co-op multiplayer campaigns (a relatively recently introduced feature) that are tons of fun. And the 2v2 and 3v3 games can be epic and utterly gripping - provided you find serious folks to play with. Like any multiplayer experience you will find people you'd like to avoid...
It's certainly not a game for everyone, but if you are into wargames, fantasy battle games, hex based games, rpg battle games or like to see thriving open source games you should take a look.
Disclaimer: I am a (very minor!) contributor, so I am all kinds of biased.;)
I have to say Wesnoth is one of the more impressive games I've seen. No fancy graphics, no glitzy features, just awesome fun gameplay.
I think it really is a great example of "less is more".
It's fairly well made in some ways, they just really need some sort of quality control on the maps they put in to it. Most are fairly bad, but there's quite a lot of them and I'm sure they could trim it down to some good ones.
I tried a half dozen and the play in general just reminded me of the stereotypical jumping level that you used to find in a lot of games, time the button pushing perfectly or you lose and restart the level. Obviously some people like those since they were in a lot of games but I can't stand them.
You sound convincing, but you didn't tell us the fatality rate for flu among young healthy people. I would bet it's less than 1 in a million, but I don't actually have any data - just like you. In fact, I do bet every year I don't get the shot. To repeat what the other guy said, we should vaccinate the people at higher risk. If you want an all-out public vaccination, let's aim for eradication rather than play games letting it evolve while making annual payments for that service.
That's a valid point about the personal risk, however you're counting on your health remaining good. If you get encounter some other health issue, cancer, a second illness, or a traffic accident. Suddenly you're a whole lot less healthy.
Also being young and healthy doesn't stop you from being a carrier who can infect vulnerable populations or simply knock out a significant portion of your co-workers.
Flu shots are for people with weak immune systems and old people that are at higher risk to "die" from it.
Where do those people with weak immune systems get the flu from? Could it be from us healthier people don't get shots because we can handle the flu?
Never get one done if you don't _need it_. I've see more people almost die due to allergic reactions to shots than i have due to a bad case of the flu.
I think K-12 should all exist on the same campus. I think older kids should be involved in teaching younger kids and also take part in supporting after school programs.
That might not be a bad idea, older kids generally act a lot more responsible when young children are around, I wonder if that effect could be sustained through the school year by mixing the populations on a regular basis, it could be a pretty effective countermeasure to the herd mentality that occurs in high school.
Of course the difference jumps out. The chart was deliberately designed to make the change jump out by not using 0 as the origin of the Y axis.
This is a very common technique for making a difference look a lot larger than it actually is.
Or it could just be that using 0 as the axis would make a very unreadable graph that wasted a lot of space and didn't show the interesting portion very well.
Clearly reducing the range has the unfortunate side effect of falsely increasing the perceived significance of the results. However, given that the graphs also very clearly print the mins and maxs I'm strongly drawn to believe that the researchers where actually trying to communicate the data accurately as opposed to tricking unwary readers.
Oh, and the differences here are a 2.3% decrease in the percentage of married mothers and 1.2% increase in the number of teen mothers. Considering the topic they're analysing the effect is a lot larger than I would have anticipated.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, because Google's idiotic toolbar being bundled with everything from the end user Java VM to Adobe PDF Reader is so different a tactic.
It is a different tactic.
Google's toolbar is everywhere because people decide they like it and want to include it in their products.
Microsoft's search is because MS is including it in their own products, not because people like it.
No worries, I've done the same many times.
That's what the Internet is for!
Hmm. So a 4-year degree is superior to my 30 years of experience.
I don't want to work for, with, or anywhere near anybody who thinks that book learning trumps experience. Sorry. The good news is, you wouldn't want to hire me anyway, I don't have a piece of paper.
That's taking what I said heavily out of context.
I emphasized that the correlation was not perfect and no where did I imply that a 4 year degree trumps 30 years experience.
I will say that you learn more in a 4 year degree than in 4 years experience (after all the objective of the degree is learning). And that I have a better idea what a 4 year degree consisted of than I do 4 years experience.
And calling University "book learning" is highly misleading. I implemented many systems in University, and I implemented many systems in industry. There are things you cannot learn in school, and there are things that are very hard to learn on your own. But in general I learned more implementing things in University as those were projects designed to push the limits of my knowledge.
On that topic I recall hearing they replicated those results with monkeys, Chimpanzee's specifically.
The male chimps preferred the boy toys while female chimps preferred the girl toys. Afraid I can't find the link right now.
"Sounds like you're confusing education with schooling."
We all know dumb people with degree's, my point is just because someone went through school does not guarantee they are any good at what they do or that they learned much of anything while they were there.
The degree is about handing out marks of status, in my experience with people someone with a masters is not really better then someone with a bachelors. One simply had more persistance, endurance/ability to cheat amd money to pursue a mark of higher status.
Yes, and in my experience the quality of the degree is correlated to the quality of the programmer. It's not a perfect correlation, but I've found that people with 4 year degrees tend to be a lot stronger than the 2 year diplomas, and I don't think it's all from the school selection process (I don't have enough experience with graduate degrees to judge there).
As for your claim of it being nothing but an avenue for social status. I can't imagine someone going through a real CS program and not coming out not only with a better skill set, but with a better process of thinking.
As for your bizarre insistence that lots of people are cheating, yes I'm sure that a substantial proportion of the students engage in at least some unethical behaviour, but you cannot get through a CS program just by cheating.
It indicates no such thing. The only thing it shows is that they understand public relations. It's a marketing effort.
It's not a great indicator but it is an indicator.
There are a zillion things you can do to improve security, a hacking contest is one of them.
Now this is relying on the fact that the contest was done fairly, which I don't know. That's one of the reasons I questioned if they had access to all the available info before hand.
And voting machines aren't a typical software security situation. For software you can make the software available to anyone who wants a crack at it (har har!). But for voting machines the hardware is a critical component. It's expensive and hard to update remotely so it may not be available to all researchers. As well there are legitimate reasons to restrict the availability of machines to make it more difficult to set up fake voting stations.
For voting machines hacking contests may be the only way to give outside researchers a fair chance to break the machines.
Of course this doesn't really guarantee it's secure (nothing does) but it indicates they're taking security seriously. I am curious if they had full access to machines for a while before the competition, 3 days is a lot of time to try out a bunch of exploits you've worked out, but it's not a lot of time to try to find those exploits if it's the first time you've seen the system.
Whatever conclusions they come to will be completely non-falsifiable and compatible with whatever sort of alien life that we could potentially encounter!
You're confusing "All University Professors" with the elusive and endangered "Tenure Track Faculty". Most professors nowadays are employed as sessional instructors. That means that they are working part time on a contract which only lasts for a single semester, have no job security, no benefits of any kind, limited access to resources such as office space or the library, and are typically paid next to nothing.
Any illusions they may have had about doing actual research in their field should have disappeared after their first semester of being exploited, and if they really "just needed a job" they would have been better off serving drinks or flipping burgers. The hours and pay are a lot better and at least there would be some possibility of career advancement that way.
This is nothing new, but it's getting worse every year. Consider Allison Dube, at the University of Calgary. Despite teaching at the same school since before many of his students were born, working full time hours and winning numerous awards for excellence in teaching, he can barely afford to continue working.
Honestly that has more to do with overproduction of Ph.Ds from some departments, notice that most of the people talked about in the article are from arts. The telling part of the article isn't that they're getting paid so little by the Uni, it's that the only time a second job was mentioned it was for a call centre.
I don't think the situation is as bad for the sciences, where Universities have to compete with high paying industry to attract people. These people can then demand things like professorships. In the arts there's just not as much industry demand for the graduate degrees so the Universities can pay them a lot less.
Really, I think the solution is to reduce the number of graduate positions available, this will free up funding to pay faculty better although it will probably reduce the amount of research done (I honestly don't know anything about the quality or value of research from the arts).
Show me a overweight Olympic level marathon runner, and I might believe it.
Me thinks you have cause and effect mixed up here. People are Olympic runners because they have a body that's optimal for it, not vice versa.
Wait a minute...
Let me get this straight. You're saying that doing lots of high jumps won't make me 7 feet tall?
The summary said that they didn't change their diets but the abstract makes no mention of that.
I suspect the poster just inferred that because they didn't mention diet in the abstract, but not mentioning diet does not mean the diet didn't change. In my experience when you exercise you tend to eat more. I'm not particularly large (BMI 24.9) but I've never lost any weight by increasing my exercise, it takes changing my diet to affect my weight.
I know for myself, and other relatively fit people I know, when we exercise more we simply eat the extra calories we burned. Of course this isn't the case for all people and I suspect that once you start getting larger you might start to see benefits more often, but note that diet is still the biggest single factor.
I'm actually surprised this study showed as big a difference as it did (-3.3 kg in 12 weeks is pretty good) although 31.8 BMI is starting to trend towards the chubbier side.
While I think that the argument that black people are intrinsically dumber than the rest of us is silly, I should point out that your counter-argument is just as silly.
There was an article recently describing the development of a "smart(er) rat" by the change of a single gene. Which pretty much refutes the notion that it requires much larger genetic changes to "think different" than to "look different".
After thinking a while about the whole Watson thing I came to the following conclusion.
Yes black people do, on average, score lower on SAT scores, IQ tests, etc. But also remember the null hypothesis is that there is no genetic basis for that gap, you need evidence to overturn the null hypothesis. There are multiple socioeconomic factors that are known to be contributing to that gap than there the mere existence of a gap is not sufficient evidence to overturn the null hypothesis.
To put it another way, the ground is wet, it's raining, and there is a hose lying on the lawn. Yes the hose might have been on and could be responsible for some of the wetness. But the wetness is not evidence of the hose being on because we know the rain could have caused the wetness.
We need other evidence of the hose being on before we can say it helped to make the lawn wet.
This company from the UK is defrauding consumers.
And in doing so is potentially responsible for hundreds of deaths.
And people wonder why skeptics have to take things so seriously...
When I was living in NY, I worked with a fellow who had his well pointed out by a local Dowser. It cost him $300 in 1990.
And for $300, he would tell you exactly where you should dig, precisely how far you should dig, how much water you were going to get (GPM), how long it would last, whether it was subject to drought or could be relied upon during dry spells. He could also eliminate sources with salt, sulfur, iron, calcium and anything else you don't want in your water. He'd take a wire flag and write the instructions for the driller on the flag, then stick it precisely where they were supposed to drill.
The catch?
The Dowser gave his guarantee in writing, with a quadruple your money back if anything was less than what he promised. Goes dry? Not enough flow? Muddy, salty, iron, sulfur? He'll pay you $1200.
When I heard the story from my co-worker, the old fellow hadn't needed to pay anyone back in the 20 years he'd been doing it. Dunno if he's still alive now, though.
And I'm not sure he'd want to try this out with explosives if he still is.
Why bother with $300 a shot?
All he had to do was call up Randi and he'd get a cool million!
I wonder why he didn't...
It's possible the author is taking more advanced math than I did (although I would be able to handle the equation in question), and/or is a slower typist, but I was able to handle equations like that along with matrices when taking notes. It was tough at first but after a few weeks I was moving along pretty quick and was only a hair slower than the analog folks.
There were only 2 real problems I found.
1) When a new topic came up I'd have to do a quick google to find how to make the relevant terms.
2) I never found a good solution to draw and integrate diagrams quickly enough.
For 2 maybe there's a fancy latex editor or maybe just practice (I didn't have much latex image experience at that point). But overall I found that the value of having nice notes outweighed the two negatives.
So it is highly course dependent whether LaTeX is viable. But depending how many LaTeX notes the poster has taken there is a possibility they simply haven't had quite enough practice and will be fine if they stick with it.
How many times have you been able to do a 'yum update' or 'preupgrade' without having to worry about whether the system will be able to boot correctly?
0, though I did read see warnings about some scenarios in the readmes. I don't know what the problem would have been as I didn't try.
How many times has anaconda crashed mid-install, or failed to detect your RAID and decided instead to wipe individual drives without really telling you, or any number of other nagging problems?
'Bleeding-edge' isn't an excuse by any measure; I never run into any problems when upgrading FreeBSD regularly and its ports tree stays far more current than Fedora's yum packages ever will manage.
0, though I don't use much RAID.
There are areas like sound which do seem to cause problems for a lot of people (though I think that's typical for most PulseAudio distros). And pushing KDE 4.0 does seem to have caused some real issues for a while. But when people claim stability problems like the ones you've described I think it's important to remember the plural of anecdote is not data.
they were also exposed to a new nutrient (citrate?) that they learned to metabolize
They didn't "learn" to metabolize it, the ones that could metabolize it lived and reproduced and the ones that couldn't, didn't.
Well yes, they did "learn" in that they evolved to metabolize it. I can accept that when dealing with people without a solid understanding of evolution a more precise term is necessary, and especially when dealing with creationists. However, I think the mechanics are generally known enough that I don't think there's a big problem with using the relaxed language with someone like the original poster (though I certainly could have used a more formal description).
I am curious to know that why would mutate those germs in a short period of time, in a potentially unchanged lab environment? What are they adapting to by evolutionary mutation?
There's two reasons.
First it is a somewhat different environment than they evolved in. Particularly if this was the same bacteria as the previous article I think they were also exposed to a new nutrient (citrate?) that they learned to metabolize. This trait evolving could be the reason that their mutation rate jumped up as they adapted to their new condition.
Second, even if there wasn't any adaptive pressure there's still evolutionary drift as unimportant changes show up and propagate through sheer chance.
Battle for Wesnoth (open source: wesnoth.org) is a game that I started playing over 4 years ago. I looked far and wide for strategy games that could hold my interest with serious replay value. Once I found Wesnoth I got sucked in and I all but quit playing other games for quite some time, and I always keep coming back to Wesnoth, in a trend that players jokingly refer to as a "Wesbreak" - you just have to come back after a few months or a year to see what is new!
It is simple yet, rich with both strategic and tactical depth. Lots (lots!) of user made content and it's own markup language with which to write your own. I started off thinking that I'd never play it multiplayer, but that is about all I do these days. There are some co-op multiplayer campaigns (a relatively recently introduced feature) that are tons of fun. And the 2v2 and 3v3 games can be epic and utterly gripping - provided you find serious folks to play with. Like any multiplayer experience you will find people you'd like to avoid...
It's certainly not a game for everyone, but if you are into wargames, fantasy battle games, hex based games, rpg battle games or like to see thriving open source games you should take a look.
Disclaimer: I am a (very minor!) contributor, so I am all kinds of biased. ;)
I have to say Wesnoth is one of the more impressive games I've seen. No fancy graphics, no glitzy features, just awesome fun gameplay.
I think it really is a great example of "less is more".
It's fairly well made in some ways, they just really need some sort of quality control on the maps they put in to it. Most are fairly bad, but there's quite a lot of them and I'm sure they could trim it down to some good ones.
I tried a half dozen and the play in general just reminded me of the stereotypical jumping level that you used to find in a lot of games, time the button pushing perfectly or you lose and restart the level. Obviously some people like those since they were in a lot of games but I can't stand them.
I find xmoto is an excellent time waster ..
http://xmoto.tuxfamily.org/
I just tried it.
It's like someone made a game of jumping levels! I'd rather have a recreational root canal!!
You sound convincing, but you didn't tell us the fatality rate for flu among young healthy people. I would bet it's less than 1 in a million, but I don't actually have any data - just like you. In fact, I do bet every year I don't get the shot. To repeat what the other guy said, we should vaccinate the people at higher risk. If you want an all-out public vaccination, let's aim for eradication rather than play games letting it evolve while making annual payments for that service.
That's a valid point about the personal risk, however you're counting on your health remaining good. If you get encounter some other health issue, cancer, a second illness, or a traffic accident. Suddenly you're a whole lot less healthy.
Also being young and healthy doesn't stop you from being a carrier who can infect vulnerable populations or simply knock out a significant portion of your co-workers.
Flu shots are for people with weak immune systems and old people that are at higher risk to "die" from it.
Where do those people with weak immune systems get the flu from? Could it be from us healthier people don't get shots because we can handle the flu?
Never get one done if you don't _need it_. I've see more people almost die due to allergic reactions to shots than i have due to a bad case of the flu.
Well the only real serious allergic reaction I'm aware of is Guillain-Barré syndrome, which literally affects 1 in a million people who get the shot and has a mortality rate of 2-3% and 5-10% of recovery with a severe disability.
The flu however kills about 36,000 people in the states each year, so a little more than 1 in 10,000.
So the numbers seems to indicate that the flu shot is still a LOT less likely to kill you than the flu.
I think K-12 should all exist on the same campus. I think older kids should be involved in teaching younger kids and also take part in supporting after school programs.
That might not be a bad idea, older kids generally act a lot more responsible when young children are around, I wonder if that effect could be sustained through the school year by mixing the populations on a regular basis, it could be a pretty effective countermeasure to the herd mentality that occurs in high school.
Of course the difference jumps out. The chart was deliberately designed to make the change jump out by not using 0 as the origin of the Y axis.
This is a very common technique for making a difference look a lot larger than it actually is.
Or it could just be that using 0 as the axis would make a very unreadable graph that wasted a lot of space and didn't show the interesting portion very well.
Clearly reducing the range has the unfortunate side effect of falsely increasing the perceived significance of the results. However, given that the graphs also very clearly print the mins and maxs I'm strongly drawn to believe that the researchers where actually trying to communicate the data accurately as opposed to tricking unwary readers.
Oh, and the differences here are a 2.3% decrease in the percentage of married mothers and 1.2% increase in the number of teen mothers. Considering the topic they're analysing the effect is a lot larger than I would have anticipated.