The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality.
Which would be a serious problem indeed for the science fiction genre, had there been no new ideas in the field since the 1950s.
While I think that your post almost entirely misses the point of science fiction in that you're focusing on the technology rather than on the story, even on that level you're looking in the wrong place. Decades ago we had the dawn of the nuclear age, the space race, the Cold War--and the science fiction of that era reflected the associated hopes, fears, and gadgets.
When more recent works touch on 'new' or 'edgy' technology, we get telepresence, virtual worlds, emergent artificial intelligences, pervasive surveillance. The invisible-but-deadly bogeyman isn't radiation anymore; now we have bioweapons and nanotechnology. There are always going to be technical or scientific frontiers that will prompt worldbuilding.
Private cloud storage has always been around, but it used to be called a "fileserver", or maybe a "SAN", so just because they are calling storage consolidation a "private cloud" doesn't mean it's something new.
Indeed, "cloud" has become the must-have buzzword for everything and everyone. I was amused to see that Western Digital is selling a home network storage appliance as a Personal Cloud.
Yes, it's amazing how many authors like to write a good piece of human chauvinism. We may not be the most powerful or intelligent species in the galaxy, but damn it we're plucky and inventive!
Turtledove himself has gone back to that well at least once, with his Worldwar and Colonization series. (Aliens visit Earth in the twelfth century, see humans with swords and horses, assume human technology and society will advance as slowly as their alien technology did. Aliens return to take over the Earth in 1941, find it a much tougher nut to crack than expected. Ingenious humans eventually show them our superior flexibility and intelligence. Rah rah rah.)
David Weber did it in The Excalibur Alternative.
Arthur C. Clarke did it in the short story Rescue Party.
You could almost argue that Isaac Asimov did it with The Caves of Steel and the subsequent Elijah Bailey novels, if you're willing to consider the Spacers as an 'alien' race.
I hope they have their own cleanup and recovery team following them at all times. Since the pictures show a truck with no placards, any normal Emergency Services team must be deemed expendable.
Or, you know, there are chase cars with agents who can communicate with emergency personnel. (Did you even bother to look at the linked articles?) Or the stuff inside the trailer is clearly placarded, and any accident that doesn't open the outer walls of the trailer wouldn't be severe enough to affect the integrity of its contents.
You would, of course, be saying the exact same damn thing if the government were spending millions of dollars on elegant-sounding but ultimately impractical or unworkable solutions offered by academic geniuses with no experience in government or project management.
This would be GRRM who didn't write a book in over five years, then admitted he'd screwed up the plotting and had been trying to rescue the story?
Oh, probably. But with book in hand it's not apparent to the reader that GRRM may or may not have lost the plot, and we aren't getting bored waiting for more interesting threads to return. (And at least we know that the author won't be afraid to kill off a character who isn't going anywhere.)
And don't make fun of GRRM for how long it's taking to finish the series--every time someone does that, he kills another Stark!
Instead, the middle books were juggling something like seven or eight characters. It's impossible to make significant advances in a story with so many lines...
While it could certainly be argued that sometimes Jordan did this...less well than might have been desirable, it's not impossible. The most familiar counterexample from the world of epic fantasy is probably George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. A Game of Thrones) has eight viewpoint characters, and GRRM is up to sixteen viewpoint characters in the series' most recent instalment (not counting two additional minor characters in the prologue and epilogue). The difficulty is in making all of the independent storylines sufficiently engaging and relevant (and interlinked) that the reader doesn't get bored or annoyed waiting for the most 'interesting' plot threads to return. GRRM generally has (so far) done quite well at this; Jordan had some issues.
In my opinion, Jordan was handicapped by his weaknesses in developing and presenting realistic and compelling female characters. (The problem was particularly crippling because Jordan didn't take the usual fantasy-genre out of having a male-dominated world.) There has been ample parody of his sniffing, braid-tugging, dress-smoothing women that I need not further belabor the point. Jordan also had issues with writing believable romance, which was problematic given that all of his main characters end up coupled (or in larger multiples). His interactions between men and women shaded too far towards the relationship caricatures espoused by stand-up comics (If he doesn't know why I'm upset, I'm not going to tell him! sniff!); while occasionally he played it for a successful laugh, the result usually fell flat.
The only protection that the public has to protect itself is to be able to observe in a meaningful manner the actions of the police.
The problem with your argument is that it assumes the only way to meaningfully observe the actions of the police is to have constant, unfiltered access to all of their radio communications.
Aside from improperly excluding from consideration any other possible mechanism of police oversight, your argument fails to account for the existence of myriad communication channels that are already entirely unmonitored. Those run the gamut from the cellular phone conversation (yes, even the lowliest beat cops now own such devices) to the locker room chat. The interesting stuff isn't going out on the radio now, and it won't be even after the radio is encrypted.
There's nothing worse than an incompetent paranoid.
Libraries clearly DO have age restrictions, only they don't follow them to the letter as it is not say... a swimming pool but a library.
Well, no. The library in question doesn't have age restrictions for stack access, just for borrowing. (And the restrictions on borrowing don't apply to anyone over the age of 11.) You can't criticise their failure to follow a policy that only exists in your imagination.
I'm guessing that there MUST be some mechanism at play which ensures that kids don't go home with "erotic materials" one day, coming back with an angry loud parent in tow the next day.
Those would be the parents who didn't bother to supervise their children, and who were misusing the library as a daycare center. I'd be quite gratified to see librarians not knuckle under to that particular brand of bad, responsibility-abdicating parent.
That said, taking the first major U.S. library system that came to mind (the New York Public Library), it appears that their policy is that anyone from age 12 up can get their own library card as long as they have suitable identification. Under-12 kids need the in-person approval of a parent or guardian to obtain a card, and the parent can choose whether their borrowing is open to the full collection or restricted to the 'juvenile' stacks.
Even considering that type of restriction, however, I've never been to a public library that checked identification or age before allowing access to the stacks; even a kid with borrowing restrictions - or no card at all - could still pull books off the shelf and read them in the library.
Don't most libraries already enforce age restriction and segregation...
The presence of a "children's books" section doesn't mean that the library is enforcing segregation by age. It means that the library is making it easier for interested readers to locate books at a certain reading level. Many public libraries similarly shelve speculative fiction (sci fi and fantasy), mysteries, and romance novels separately from the rest of their fiction holdings, for the benefit of the readers of those genres.
Granted, there's a certain amount of guesswork and judgement involved in sub-categorizing these works, and I certainly won't say that questionable calls and outright mistakes don't occur. (My local library had trouble with the works of Harry Turtledove, for instance, putting books 1 and 4 of his alternate history Settling Accounts tetralogy in general fiction, and sorting books 2 and 3 into science fiction. It took me a couple of trips back to the catalog before I figured out why I couldn't find the sequels on the shelf.)
From a philosophical standpoint, it's easier to engage younger readers with their library if the books they want to read aren't spread far and wide (and oh-so-thinly) among the thick and dull 'adult' tomes. From a practical standpoint, it's easier to equip one area with shelves, tables, chairs, and computers that are sized for child-sized library patrons. From a cynical standpoint, children in libraries - even good children, trying their best - tend to be a bit louder than adults, and it's more comfortable for everyone to encourage them to stay in one area.
In my experience, I've never been in a library that has barred 'children' of whatever age from entering and using the resources in the 'adult' section, as long as their behavior doesn't interfere with the library's other users. (And this isn't a child-specific restriction; an adult holding a shouted conversation should also expect to get shushed.)
You know... that section of the library that holds the Marquis de Sade books.
Which section is that? The libraries I've used have always had their 'erotic' materials shelved in the regular stacks, wherever the catalog would normally sort them.
Sure, you could detect fairly readily that your hammer was missing, but you're unlikely to catch a half-ounce drill bit or socket head when weighing a fifty-pound toolbox. For that matter, the box itself could change weight by that much if you don't notice a blob of grease or a few pieces of packing tape stuck on the bottom.
And how accurate would a high-precision scale be after a few weeks of aircraft mechanics dropping heavy toolboxes on it at the beginning and end of every shift?
Only while under oath. You are not required to tell the truth during a police investigation, but any lie that you tell them can impeach your credibility later in court.
You'll want to be careful with that sort of statement. While perjury charges can apply to lies told under oath, obstruction of justice charges can crop up if you lie during an investigation. Obstruction of justice charges tend to show up when the prosecutor wants to apply extra pressure to a defendant, accomplice, or reluctant witness, or when there isn't sufficient evidence to secure a conviction on the principal crime. (It tends to only come up with high-profile crimes or defendants, but I wouldn't recommend relying on that trend.)
That said, your core point stands--it's never a bad idea to shut up and wait for your lawyer.
The FCC didn't in response to the Windsor incident, thus failing to prevent the, at the time, worst ever airliner crash.
I'm going to assume that you meant the FAA, there...
The article you linked indicates that the construction records for the aircraft involved in the later Turkish Airlines crash contained errors. The FAA had ordered changes to the cargo hatch latching mechanism that failed in the Windsor incident. For some reason (either error or fraud) records for the Turkish Airlines DC-10 claimed that the latch had been upgraded; in reality the upgrades had not been performed. In addition, there were serious training lapses that prevented ground crew from recognizing problems with the cargo door latch.
Moreover, I'm not entirely sure that an FAA airworthiness directive would have had an effect on a Turkish Airlines aircraft flying routes in Europe.
Granted, the NTSB made one additional recommendation not included in the FAA directive: installation of vents between the passenger cabin and the rear cargo area, to reduce the likelihood of floor failure in the event of catastrophic decompression of the cargo hold. It's not clear why we would expect that directive -- had it been issued -- to have been followed, when the directive regarding the cargo hold latch was not.
Is it part of the arrogance of those electing themselves to write and editing articles on wiki that they refuse to use a spell checker, or
is it that the words are simply unknown to the normal spell-check dictionaries?
You might know the answer to this if you had read the linked article instead of immediately jumping in to editorialize (and no, I'm not new here).
While there are a number of serious methodological concerns I've discussed in another post, the author's Table 4 ought to raise a screaming red flag. The algorithm the author used flagged about 5% of articles as having more than 25% of their words misspelled--and the author didn't discuss any sort of manual follow-up on those articles to determine where the problem lay. I'm sorry, but misspelling one word in four just isn't a plausible result.
I suspect that the parser is failing to properly handle tables of data, scientific terminology, some unusual formatting and template markup, and foreign words. All of these categories will have been expanded greatly since Wikipedia's early days, and their presence is a sign that the encyclopedia is increasing in quality and coverage, not being degraded.
Just looking at the raw result presented, I see a claim that more than 6% of Wikipedia is supposedly "misspelled content". This doesn't make sense--even though Wikipedia articles aren't perfect, it's not plausible that 1 in 16 words are misspelled. That's pretty much one spelling error in every sentence.
Part of the problem is the article selection methodology. By pulling random articles, the study author is going to be getting mostly articles that have received little attention, and mostly short articles. (Table 2 and Graph 2 show this very clearly--of the 2400 articles examined, only 14 existed in 2001. Half of them didn't exist until 2007. A quarter were created between 2009 and the present.) It's possible that what has been demonstrated is simply that relatively new articles on relatively unimportant topics tend to be less-well maintained.
The major issue is the corpus used for the study. While a half-million-word dictionary sounds impressive, it's still going to fall down in a couple of key areas. For one, foreign-language terms are likely to be nearly completely unrepresented. For another, a lot of proper nouns are going to be missing. If I write an article about Japanese manga or a Norwegian village, I'm going to be including all kinds of things that an English-language dictionary just isn't going to contain. (Worse, I'll get two misspellings for each Japanese term, since I'll have it in the article with both the original Japanese word plus the romanized transliteration). Another problem area will almost certainly be articles on highly technical topics (molecular biology is full of new and unusual abbreviations).
While certain classes of 'obvious' non-words aren't counted, many will be missed. For example, the article preprocessor filters out percentages, but will pass through numbers followed by the degree symbol (which will show up in scientific and geographic articles).
What is noticeably lacking from the report is any mention of manual checking performed by the author to evaluate the accuracy of the results generated by the spell checker. Table 4 reports that about five percent of articles contain more than 25% misspelled words(!); honestly, even people on Twitter don't (generally) show that level of illiteracy. Are there certain types of articles which are responsible for these grossly inflated counts?
In summary -- sloppy methods give useless results. No news.
But here's my problem: Fully aside from this guy being a genuine quack, why not just test his therapy fully and completely? Follow his specs and advice to the proverbial "T". Prove him wrong beyond a reasonable doubt and put an end to it.
I can see at least four reasons.
First, it's painfully unethical. Since these novel therapies are unlikely to work, encouraging patients to try them in lieu of real, evidence-based medicine is going to kill a lot of people. You cannot get institutional approval to do a trial unless you can demonstrate that your trial therapy is likely to perform as well or better than the existing gold-standard approach. Randomized trials these days don't divide patients into experimental therapy versus placebo; they're divided into experimental therapy versus current therapy.
Second, there isn't enough of anything to do trials of all the ridiculous therapies; we have enough trouble organizing trials of real, evidence-based therapies that are likely to work. The dollar cost would be exorbitant, but that's actually not the steepest cost or most irreplaceable resource. There are only so many clinicians available - doctors and nurses and radiation therapists and pharmacists - with training relevant to oncology, and they can only do so many hours of work in a day. Wasting their time on futile clinical trials means treating fewer patients with real therapies. Similarly, there are limited numbers of skilled laboratory workers, statisticians, and other scientists. Last, but by no means least, there's a limited number of patients with cancer. Recruiting large numbers of patients into useless trials means a shortage of patients for worthwhile trials.
Third, the quacks won't be satisfied anyway. One of the important parameters used in modern clinical trials is the establishment of 'futility' criteria. Essentially, they're intermediate checkpoints in the trial where it might be halted early if the therapy's results aren't looking promising. This is done in an effort to reduce wasting time and money on ineffective interventions; for serious illnesses the futility criteria help to limit the number of dead bodies. If one cuts off a futile trial of a quack therapy early in order to save lives, the quack is going to say that The Man shut down his trial.
Finally, if our response to quackery is to throw funding at it, we encourage more quackery. The persuasive charlatan will always be able to recruit more followers. If this iteration of the therapy is demonstrated useless in a full-blown clinical trial, after this round's money runs out he can just come up with a new variant on the theme, and demand fresh funding for another few years. Lather, rinse, repeat--we create an entire pathological, publicly-funded quack welfare program.
Right. Nothing wrong with a crowd of people hanging around outside his office waiting to speak with him directly, rather than just send an email that he can read when he wants. And at the same time there's a few dozen people trying to call him on the phone. Sounds like a wonderful idea. I'm sure this will work out great.
Spot on, though I wonder if the problem is a little more subtle. Breton is the CEO, so if he wants to have an instant messaging chat, telephone conversation, or video conference with anyone in the company, then of course that person is going to be available and giving whatever the CEO wants to talk about a top priority. Of course it's faster and more effective for him than email, because when the CEO calls, the employees drop everything else.
For everyone else in the company, calls will get screened to voicemail, IM clients will display "AFK", and coworkers whose desks are more than twenty feet apart will spend days trying to find mutually agreeable times in which to schedule their video chats. People who didn't know how to manage their email before won't be any more effective at managing their work or their time after; they'll just spend all day on the phone instead.
To have a productive and efficient conversation, I'll have to prepare and edit a list of points I'd like to raise, read it out to the other person, and have them copy down each item. To avoid errors and omissions, they'll have to read back everything they copied down. If we omit either step, then both parties will get tied up in repeated callbacks to clarify and add omitted agenda items.
Better yet, I can hold my list up to the webcam, and they can capture a screenshot of my list!
it's the sifting through the photos that is the learning experience. Even with film (which I exclusively shoot still after having bought and abandoned a 400D a few years back) I still throw away at least 90% of my pictures. Learn to keep only the best.
Not only that, but learn from the photos that you didn't keep. Do you have problems with camera shake? Are you not using your autofocus correctly? Are you composing your shots carefully, or do you often have trees and flagpoles growing out of people's heads? Do you think about where shadows, highlights, and reflections appear?
Learn which shots failed because of the photographer's limits, and which shots were beyond the reach of your equipment. Learn how to improve the former and work around the latter. Learn when you're inside or outside your camera's envelope--and learn that when you're on the edge, you should keep shooting because sometimes you get lucky. Learn about acceptable compromises between image noise, depth of focus, and exposure time. Learn that when you're shooting at an eighth of a second, you need to brace yourself--and probably take two or three attempts--and that exposure lengths you can get away with using a wide-angle lens won't wash with a telephoto.
All knowledge required to build nuclear weapons is already freely available, e.g. in physics textbooks. If they can't use it then no scientist would be able to help them. It's strictly an engineering challenge nowadays.
Ah, well, pfft--engineering. At least it's nothing difficult.
Going from the physics textbook to the final application is...non-trivial. If you have a person who has never set foot in a kitchen before, you wouldn't expect them to be able to turn out a twelve-course tasting menu just because "all knowledge required to make a gourmet dinner is already freely available, e.g. in cookbooks". At least, you wouldn't expect them to be able to do the job right the first time, and without weeks or months of trial and error.
Any major project (particularly, but by no means exclusively, in the field of engineering) will benefit greatly from having expert individuals on tap who have done similar work before. I know what a uranium hexafluoride gas centrifuge does, but the nitty-gritty details of actually building one are going to take some experimentation. Having scientists and engineers with previous nuclear (weapons) experience means avoiding blind alleys and not reinventing a whole bunch of wheels.
Is it possible to complete a nuclear weapons project without any outside, pre-existing expertise? Sure. (The Americans certainly did it in WWII.) Will it be faster and much cheaper to complete the project given the assistance of experienced experts? Hell yes. With the lone exception of the United States, who didn't have anyone to crib from, no present-day nuclear power has created their arsenal without information given to them by allies, stolen from enemies, or bought from middlemen.
No, it's the "war on sin". Because some people think they are morally superior because they endorse the putting in cages of other people who like to relax with the help of pharmacology.
A potentially valid point, but the witty tagline has less impact because it doesn't respond to the grandparent's point. I don't care if you "relax with the help of pharmacology" in your own living room. I care very much if you "relax with the help of pharmacology" while driving. Using technology to interfere with the former is a questionable use of resources driven by questionable motives within a questionable moral framework. Using technology to interfere with the latter is a legitimate public interest.
As Zechariah Chefee famously said, "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins."
What kind of dystopian hell-hole do you live in where you can be jailed for having traces of drug metabolites in your system?
Nine U.S. states actually explicitly ban 'internal possession' of alcohol - alcohol detectable by blood, breath, or urine test - by individuals under 21.
Several of those states, oddly enough, make it legal for under-21s to consume alcohol in specific settings (often in their home, or under the supervision of adults or guardians.) Missouri has no restrictions on consumption by under-21s, but does bar internal possession.
Slashdot Mirror
The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality.
Which would be a serious problem indeed for the science fiction genre, had there been no new ideas in the field since the 1950s.
While I think that your post almost entirely misses the point of science fiction in that you're focusing on the technology rather than on the story, even on that level you're looking in the wrong place. Decades ago we had the dawn of the nuclear age, the space race, the Cold War--and the science fiction of that era reflected the associated hopes, fears, and gadgets.
When more recent works touch on 'new' or 'edgy' technology, we get telepresence, virtual worlds, emergent artificial intelligences, pervasive surveillance. The invisible-but-deadly bogeyman isn't radiation anymore; now we have bioweapons and nanotechnology. There are always going to be technical or scientific frontiers that will prompt worldbuilding.
Private cloud storage has always been around, but it used to be called a "fileserver", or maybe a "SAN", so just because they are calling storage consolidation a "private cloud" doesn't mean it's something new.
Indeed, "cloud" has become the must-have buzzword for everything and everyone. I was amused to see that Western Digital is selling a home network storage appliance as a Personal Cloud.
Turtledove himself has gone back to that well at least once, with his Worldwar and Colonization series. (Aliens visit Earth in the twelfth century, see humans with swords and horses, assume human technology and society will advance as slowly as their alien technology did. Aliens return to take over the Earth in 1941, find it a much tougher nut to crack than expected. Ingenious humans eventually show them our superior flexibility and intelligence. Rah rah rah.)
David Weber did it in The Excalibur Alternative.
Arthur C. Clarke did it in the short story Rescue Party.
You could almost argue that Isaac Asimov did it with The Caves of Steel and the subsequent Elijah Bailey novels, if you're willing to consider the Spacers as an 'alien' race.
Heck, TVtropes has an entry specifically for Humans Advance Swiftly.
I hope they have their own cleanup and recovery team following them at all times. Since the pictures show a truck with no placards, any normal Emergency Services team must be deemed expendable.
Or, you know, there are chase cars with agents who can communicate with emergency personnel. (Did you even bother to look at the linked articles?) Or the stuff inside the trailer is clearly placarded, and any accident that doesn't open the outer walls of the trailer wouldn't be severe enough to affect the integrity of its contents.
I suspect the cases are in the thousands.
Ah, well. As long as you have hard numbers, then.
Thanks for being so cavalier with MY money.
You would, of course, be saying the exact same damn thing if the government were spending millions of dollars on elegant-sounding but ultimately impractical or unworkable solutions offered by academic geniuses with no experience in government or project management.
Before writing each book, GRRM flips a coin. Heads, he kills a character you like. Tails, he makes a character you hate likable.
I can't help but feel he does that every few chapters, actually...
This would be GRRM who didn't write a book in over five years, then admitted he'd screwed up the plotting and had been trying to rescue the story?
Oh, probably. But with book in hand it's not apparent to the reader that GRRM may or may not have lost the plot, and we aren't getting bored waiting for more interesting threads to return. (And at least we know that the author won't be afraid to kill off a character who isn't going anywhere.)
And don't make fun of GRRM for how long it's taking to finish the series--every time someone does that, he kills another Stark!
Instead, the middle books were juggling something like seven or eight characters. It's impossible to make significant advances in a story with so many lines...
While it could certainly be argued that sometimes Jordan did this...less well than might have been desirable, it's not impossible. The most familiar counterexample from the world of epic fantasy is probably George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. A Game of Thrones) has eight viewpoint characters, and GRRM is up to sixteen viewpoint characters in the series' most recent instalment (not counting two additional minor characters in the prologue and epilogue). The difficulty is in making all of the independent storylines sufficiently engaging and relevant (and interlinked) that the reader doesn't get bored or annoyed waiting for the most 'interesting' plot threads to return. GRRM generally has (so far) done quite well at this; Jordan had some issues.
In my opinion, Jordan was handicapped by his weaknesses in developing and presenting realistic and compelling female characters. (The problem was particularly crippling because Jordan didn't take the usual fantasy-genre out of having a male-dominated world.) There has been ample parody of his sniffing, braid-tugging, dress-smoothing women that I need not further belabor the point. Jordan also had issues with writing believable romance, which was problematic given that all of his main characters end up coupled (or in larger multiples). His interactions between men and women shaded too far towards the relationship caricatures espoused by stand-up comics (If he doesn't know why I'm upset, I'm not going to tell him! sniff!); while occasionally he played it for a successful laugh, the result usually fell flat.
The only protection that the public has to protect itself is to be able to observe in a meaningful manner the actions of the police.
The problem with your argument is that it assumes the only way to meaningfully observe the actions of the police is to have constant, unfiltered access to all of their radio communications.
Aside from improperly excluding from consideration any other possible mechanism of police oversight, your argument fails to account for the existence of myriad communication channels that are already entirely unmonitored. Those run the gamut from the cellular phone conversation (yes, even the lowliest beat cops now own such devices) to the locker room chat. The interesting stuff isn't going out on the radio now, and it won't be even after the radio is encrypted.
There's nothing worse than an incompetent paranoid.
Libraries clearly DO have age restrictions, only they don't follow them to the letter as it is not say... a swimming pool but a library.
Well, no. The library in question doesn't have age restrictions for stack access, just for borrowing. (And the restrictions on borrowing don't apply to anyone over the age of 11.) You can't criticise their failure to follow a policy that only exists in your imagination.
I'm guessing that there MUST be some mechanism at play which ensures that kids don't go home with "erotic materials" one day, coming back with an angry loud parent in tow the next day.
Those would be the parents who didn't bother to supervise their children, and who were misusing the library as a daycare center. I'd be quite gratified to see librarians not knuckle under to that particular brand of bad, responsibility-abdicating parent.
That said, taking the first major U.S. library system that came to mind (the New York Public Library), it appears that their policy is that anyone from age 12 up can get their own library card as long as they have suitable identification. Under-12 kids need the in-person approval of a parent or guardian to obtain a card, and the parent can choose whether their borrowing is open to the full collection or restricted to the 'juvenile' stacks.
Even considering that type of restriction, however, I've never been to a public library that checked identification or age before allowing access to the stacks; even a kid with borrowing restrictions - or no card at all - could still pull books off the shelf and read them in the library.
Don't most libraries already enforce age restriction and segregation...
The presence of a "children's books" section doesn't mean that the library is enforcing segregation by age. It means that the library is making it easier for interested readers to locate books at a certain reading level. Many public libraries similarly shelve speculative fiction (sci fi and fantasy), mysteries, and romance novels separately from the rest of their fiction holdings, for the benefit of the readers of those genres.
Granted, there's a certain amount of guesswork and judgement involved in sub-categorizing these works, and I certainly won't say that questionable calls and outright mistakes don't occur. (My local library had trouble with the works of Harry Turtledove, for instance, putting books 1 and 4 of his alternate history Settling Accounts tetralogy in general fiction, and sorting books 2 and 3 into science fiction. It took me a couple of trips back to the catalog before I figured out why I couldn't find the sequels on the shelf.)
From a philosophical standpoint, it's easier to engage younger readers with their library if the books they want to read aren't spread far and wide (and oh-so-thinly) among the thick and dull 'adult' tomes. From a practical standpoint, it's easier to equip one area with shelves, tables, chairs, and computers that are sized for child-sized library patrons. From a cynical standpoint, children in libraries - even good children, trying their best - tend to be a bit louder than adults, and it's more comfortable for everyone to encourage them to stay in one area.
In my experience, I've never been in a library that has barred 'children' of whatever age from entering and using the resources in the 'adult' section, as long as their behavior doesn't interfere with the library's other users. (And this isn't a child-specific restriction; an adult holding a shouted conversation should also expect to get shushed.)
You know... that section of the library that holds the Marquis de Sade books.
Which section is that? The libraries I've used have always had their 'erotic' materials shelved in the regular stacks, wherever the catalog would normally sort them.
Simply weight the toolbox...
Not simple at all.
Sure, you could detect fairly readily that your hammer was missing, but you're unlikely to catch a half-ounce drill bit or socket head when weighing a fifty-pound toolbox. For that matter, the box itself could change weight by that much if you don't notice a blob of grease or a few pieces of packing tape stuck on the bottom.
And how accurate would a high-precision scale be after a few weeks of aircraft mechanics dropping heavy toolboxes on it at the beginning and end of every shift?
Only while under oath. You are not required to tell the truth during a police investigation, but any lie that you tell them can impeach your credibility later in court.
You'll want to be careful with that sort of statement. While perjury charges can apply to lies told under oath, obstruction of justice charges can crop up if you lie during an investigation. Obstruction of justice charges tend to show up when the prosecutor wants to apply extra pressure to a defendant, accomplice, or reluctant witness, or when there isn't sufficient evidence to secure a conviction on the principal crime. (It tends to only come up with high-profile crimes or defendants, but I wouldn't recommend relying on that trend.)
That said, your core point stands--it's never a bad idea to shut up and wait for your lawyer.
The FCC didn't in response to the Windsor incident, thus failing to prevent the, at the time, worst ever airliner crash.
I'm going to assume that you meant the FAA, there...
The article you linked indicates that the construction records for the aircraft involved in the later Turkish Airlines crash contained errors. The FAA had ordered changes to the cargo hatch latching mechanism that failed in the Windsor incident. For some reason (either error or fraud) records for the Turkish Airlines DC-10 claimed that the latch had been upgraded; in reality the upgrades had not been performed. In addition, there were serious training lapses that prevented ground crew from recognizing problems with the cargo door latch.
Moreover, I'm not entirely sure that an FAA airworthiness directive would have had an effect on a Turkish Airlines aircraft flying routes in Europe.
Granted, the NTSB made one additional recommendation not included in the FAA directive: installation of vents between the passenger cabin and the rear cargo area, to reduce the likelihood of floor failure in the event of catastrophic decompression of the cargo hold. It's not clear why we would expect that directive -- had it been issued -- to have been followed, when the directive regarding the cargo hold latch was not.
Is it part of the arrogance of those electing themselves to write and editing articles on wiki that they refuse to use a spell checker, or is it that the words are simply unknown to the normal spell-check dictionaries?
You might know the answer to this if you had read the linked article instead of immediately jumping in to editorialize (and no, I'm not new here).
While there are a number of serious methodological concerns I've discussed in another post, the author's Table 4 ought to raise a screaming red flag. The algorithm the author used flagged about 5% of articles as having more than 25% of their words misspelled--and the author didn't discuss any sort of manual follow-up on those articles to determine where the problem lay. I'm sorry, but misspelling one word in four just isn't a plausible result.
I suspect that the parser is failing to properly handle tables of data, scientific terminology, some unusual formatting and template markup, and foreign words. All of these categories will have been expanded greatly since Wikipedia's early days, and their presence is a sign that the encyclopedia is increasing in quality and coverage, not being degraded.
Part of the problem is the article selection methodology. By pulling random articles, the study author is going to be getting mostly articles that have received little attention, and mostly short articles. (Table 2 and Graph 2 show this very clearly--of the 2400 articles examined, only 14 existed in 2001. Half of them didn't exist until 2007. A quarter were created between 2009 and the present.) It's possible that what has been demonstrated is simply that relatively new articles on relatively unimportant topics tend to be less-well maintained.
The major issue is the corpus used for the study. While a half-million-word dictionary sounds impressive, it's still going to fall down in a couple of key areas. For one, foreign-language terms are likely to be nearly completely unrepresented. For another, a lot of proper nouns are going to be missing. If I write an article about Japanese manga or a Norwegian village, I'm going to be including all kinds of things that an English-language dictionary just isn't going to contain. (Worse, I'll get two misspellings for each Japanese term, since I'll have it in the article with both the original Japanese word plus the romanized transliteration). Another problem area will almost certainly be articles on highly technical topics (molecular biology is full of new and unusual abbreviations).
While certain classes of 'obvious' non-words aren't counted, many will be missed. For example, the article preprocessor filters out percentages, but will pass through numbers followed by the degree symbol (which will show up in scientific and geographic articles).
What is noticeably lacking from the report is any mention of manual checking performed by the author to evaluate the accuracy of the results generated by the spell checker. Table 4 reports that about five percent of articles contain more than 25% misspelled words(!); honestly, even people on Twitter don't (generally) show that level of illiteracy. Are there certain types of articles which are responsible for these grossly inflated counts?
In summary -- sloppy methods give useless results. No news.
But here's my problem: Fully aside from this guy being a genuine quack, why not just test his therapy fully and completely? Follow his specs and advice to the proverbial "T". Prove him wrong beyond a reasonable doubt and put an end to it.
I can see at least four reasons.
First, it's painfully unethical. Since these novel therapies are unlikely to work, encouraging patients to try them in lieu of real, evidence-based medicine is going to kill a lot of people. You cannot get institutional approval to do a trial unless you can demonstrate that your trial therapy is likely to perform as well or better than the existing gold-standard approach. Randomized trials these days don't divide patients into experimental therapy versus placebo; they're divided into experimental therapy versus current therapy.
Second, there isn't enough of anything to do trials of all the ridiculous therapies; we have enough trouble organizing trials of real, evidence-based therapies that are likely to work. The dollar cost would be exorbitant, but that's actually not the steepest cost or most irreplaceable resource. There are only so many clinicians available - doctors and nurses and radiation therapists and pharmacists - with training relevant to oncology, and they can only do so many hours of work in a day. Wasting their time on futile clinical trials means treating fewer patients with real therapies. Similarly, there are limited numbers of skilled laboratory workers, statisticians, and other scientists. Last, but by no means least, there's a limited number of patients with cancer. Recruiting large numbers of patients into useless trials means a shortage of patients for worthwhile trials.
Third, the quacks won't be satisfied anyway. One of the important parameters used in modern clinical trials is the establishment of 'futility' criteria. Essentially, they're intermediate checkpoints in the trial where it might be halted early if the therapy's results aren't looking promising. This is done in an effort to reduce wasting time and money on ineffective interventions; for serious illnesses the futility criteria help to limit the number of dead bodies. If one cuts off a futile trial of a quack therapy early in order to save lives, the quack is going to say that The Man shut down his trial.
Finally, if our response to quackery is to throw funding at it, we encourage more quackery. The persuasive charlatan will always be able to recruit more followers. If this iteration of the therapy is demonstrated useless in a full-blown clinical trial, after this round's money runs out he can just come up with a new variant on the theme, and demand fresh funding for another few years. Lather, rinse, repeat--we create an entire pathological, publicly-funded quack welfare program.
Right. Nothing wrong with a crowd of people hanging around outside his office waiting to speak with him directly, rather than just send an email that he can read when he wants. And at the same time there's a few dozen people trying to call him on the phone. Sounds like a wonderful idea. I'm sure this will work out great.
Spot on, though I wonder if the problem is a little more subtle. Breton is the CEO, so if he wants to have an instant messaging chat, telephone conversation, or video conference with anyone in the company, then of course that person is going to be available and giving whatever the CEO wants to talk about a top priority. Of course it's faster and more effective for him than email, because when the CEO calls, the employees drop everything else.
For everyone else in the company, calls will get screened to voicemail, IM clients will display "AFK", and coworkers whose desks are more than twenty feet apart will spend days trying to find mutually agreeable times in which to schedule their video chats. People who didn't know how to manage their email before won't be any more effective at managing their work or their time after; they'll just spend all day on the phone instead.
To have a productive and efficient conversation, I'll have to prepare and edit a list of points I'd like to raise, read it out to the other person, and have them copy down each item. To avoid errors and omissions, they'll have to read back everything they copied down. If we omit either step, then both parties will get tied up in repeated callbacks to clarify and add omitted agenda items.
Better yet, I can hold my list up to the webcam, and they can capture a screenshot of my list!
Yes, that is so much better than email.
it's the sifting through the photos that is the learning experience. Even with film (which I exclusively shoot still after having bought and abandoned a 400D a few years back) I still throw away at least 90% of my pictures. Learn to keep only the best.
Not only that, but learn from the photos that you didn't keep. Do you have problems with camera shake? Are you not using your autofocus correctly? Are you composing your shots carefully, or do you often have trees and flagpoles growing out of people's heads? Do you think about where shadows, highlights, and reflections appear?
Learn which shots failed because of the photographer's limits, and which shots were beyond the reach of your equipment. Learn how to improve the former and work around the latter. Learn when you're inside or outside your camera's envelope--and learn that when you're on the edge, you should keep shooting because sometimes you get lucky. Learn about acceptable compromises between image noise, depth of focus, and exposure time. Learn that when you're shooting at an eighth of a second, you need to brace yourself--and probably take two or three attempts--and that exposure lengths you can get away with using a wide-angle lens won't wash with a telephoto.
Failure is always more educational than success!
All knowledge required to build nuclear weapons is already freely available, e.g. in physics textbooks. If they can't use it then no scientist would be able to help them. It's strictly an engineering challenge nowadays.
Ah, well, pfft--engineering. At least it's nothing difficult.
Going from the physics textbook to the final application is...non-trivial. If you have a person who has never set foot in a kitchen before, you wouldn't expect them to be able to turn out a twelve-course tasting menu just because "all knowledge required to make a gourmet dinner is already freely available, e.g. in cookbooks". At least, you wouldn't expect them to be able to do the job right the first time, and without weeks or months of trial and error.
Any major project (particularly, but by no means exclusively, in the field of engineering) will benefit greatly from having expert individuals on tap who have done similar work before. I know what a uranium hexafluoride gas centrifuge does, but the nitty-gritty details of actually building one are going to take some experimentation. Having scientists and engineers with previous nuclear (weapons) experience means avoiding blind alleys and not reinventing a whole bunch of wheels.
Is it possible to complete a nuclear weapons project without any outside, pre-existing expertise? Sure. (The Americans certainly did it in WWII.) Will it be faster and much cheaper to complete the project given the assistance of experienced experts? Hell yes. With the lone exception of the United States, who didn't have anyone to crib from, no present-day nuclear power has created their arsenal without information given to them by allies, stolen from enemies, or bought from middlemen.
I'm sure Android users never get drunk or do stupid things.
To be fair, I don't know of any Android developers who have lost their expensive, super-secret prototype phones after a night at the bar. Twice.
No, it's the "war on sin". Because some people think they are morally superior because they endorse the putting in cages of other people who like to relax with the help of pharmacology.
A potentially valid point, but the witty tagline has less impact because it doesn't respond to the grandparent's point. I don't care if you "relax with the help of pharmacology" in your own living room. I care very much if you "relax with the help of pharmacology" while driving. Using technology to interfere with the former is a questionable use of resources driven by questionable motives within a questionable moral framework. Using technology to interfere with the latter is a legitimate public interest.
As Zechariah Chefee famously said, "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins."
What kind of dystopian hell-hole do you live in where you can be jailed for having traces of drug metabolites in your system?
Nine U.S. states actually explicitly ban 'internal possession' of alcohol - alcohol detectable by blood, breath, or urine test - by individuals under 21.
Several of those states, oddly enough, make it legal for under-21s to consume alcohol in specific settings (often in their home, or under the supervision of adults or guardians.) Missouri has no restrictions on consumption by under-21s, but does bar internal possession.