Weeeell...not minimal hiking. Just no overnight trips over mountains; we like our warm beds and cold beer fridge. The length of day hikes we choose will probably be based on how hard it's raining.:)
We will definitely make it as far east as Skaftafell to see Svartifoss and do some of the hiking in the area. I'd like to get out to Jökulsárlón, but we just may not have time on this trip. (And perhaps we should come back in August for it, if there are going to be fireworks--that's definitely news to me!) We're staying near Skógar, so it's a long drive out and back for a single day.
Oooh, someone who knows their Icelandic geography and actually types their accents, umlauts, and eths;)
I admit that I cheated -- I copied and pasted from the Wikipedia articles.:D
Over the last couple of years, I've learnt that Iceland is an absolutely brilliant place to stop for a few days to decompress in the middle of a transatlantic flight. My partner and I will be back again for a week this fall, mostly exploring the south and southeast. We'll probably do a day hike up the Skógá river, but we won't cross over Fimmvörðuháls this year--she's recovering from knee surgery, so spending the evenings in a warm hot pot has more appeal than freezing on a mountain pass.
Grímsvötn has been erupting semi-regularly for decades; in the last twenty years there have been eruptions in 1996, 1998, 2004, and now 2011. While long-term volcano prediction is more of an art than a science, there's no particular reason to believe that this eruption is related to either the Eyjafjallajökull eruption or to the still-apparently-quiescent (keep your fingers crossed) Katla. Grímsvötn is actually quite a distance from Katla: roughly 150 km. Eyjafjallajökull is much closer to Katla (just 30 km) and the initial smaller eruption last year (on Fimmvörðuháls) was nearer still.
The entire country pretty much runs on geothermal and hydroelectric power.
There are bathable hot springs.
The word geyser comes from Icelandic.
The whole country is snuggled up against the Arctic circle, but the jet stream keeps it from getting unpleasantly cold. In summer it can get quite toasty, actually. (And from June through August the sun dips below the horizon, but it never gets really dark.) In winter, you can see northern lights in the afternoon.
... and yet as a medium, books came last after everything else.
Unlike music and video, which have always required costly, electricity-intensive, cumbersome equipment, books have always been available in an easily-portable, electricity-free, transferable, can-be-read-in-sunlight, still-functional-albeit-grotesquely-swollen-after-falling-in-the-tub format.
Reading an LCD screen outdoors or under other awkward lighting conditions is an uncomfortable nuisance, and widespread ownership of laptops is really something that's only happened in the last decade, anyway. People don't want to be tethered to AC outlets or limited to one battery's charge when reading novel. Being chained to a desktop computer is not the way most people want to enjoy their books, either. Printing downloaded novels is a tremendous inconvenience, and hardly less costly than just buying the damn paperback in the first place.
E-ink and ebook readers are a technology that's barely five years old. They're the first tools which incorporate all the functionality of paper books. Before ebook readers, there was no way that books were ever going to come to computers for any but the smallest niche markets.
There are no houses less than 3x my annual income around here. Houses start at 4x, and decent ones start at 5-6x. I might be able to find a condo at 3x.
Damn, that's in intractable dilemma. It would seem that the rule of thumb offered by the original poster violates your God-given right as an American to own (a small fraction of, shared with the bank) a home with a lawn and a driveway where you can park your SUV, so that you can make long trips to Wal-Mart. Since you're a good person, you deserve to have your front lawn and backyard barbecue; it's a moral issue, not a financial one. I mean, only sub-humans live in condos.
Seriously, we're talking about rules of thumb here. They can be bent or broken providing one has sound justification; a rule of thumb is heuristic guidance, not Mosaic law.
On the other hand, the U.S. housing market is ample evidence that large numbers of people are very poor judges of their financial limits. Even among the substantial majority of Americans who didn't lose their homes or their solvency during the subprime fallout, many still live right on the edge. Fewer than half of Americans have any sort of 'emergency fund' to cover them in the event of surprise expenses or unexpected job loss. Any family carrying any credit card debt month to month is living beyond their means, but there is an appalling culture of "I want $NICE_THING, therefore I should have it, whether or not I can afford it--and anyone who says otherwise can go soak his head."
That's true, the costs of the least honest and most unpleasant people are spread across everyone. Tragedy of the commons.
I'd hate to have to share an office with you; since I make $75k a year, you'd no doubt assume that you were justified in stealing the pens from my desk and my lunch from the fridge, since I can afford to replace them.
Society only works when the proportion of assholes is kept low. Otherwise, you're why we can't have nice things. Oh, and please don't waste your time on the lecture you were about to give about how faceless corporations deserve to get ripped off because you've occasionally been unsatisfied with the customer service you've received, or how I'm hopelessly naive because I actually assume that most people aren't sociopaths like you.
This is the Age of the Internet. Overspecialization isn't the problem
it used to be. With instant communication and email, a PhD student can
be in regular contact with all the 10 people around the world who work
in his particular sub-specialty if he wants to. So it doesn't matter very much if
the local faculty don't know his specialty, although in practice at least the advisor
ought to be qualified enough to supervise the work.
Arguably, it's superior because it may lead to more inter-university collaborations.
The concern with overspecialization is not so much one of limited collaboration opportunities. (Right now just the 'front-burner' projects in my lab involve collaboration with colleagues in at least five countries on two continents, and there are at least a couple more countries and one more continent kicking around in recent publications.) Encouraging students to participate in projects that involve researchers at other institutions is very worthwhile, and will serve them in good stead regardless of what they choose to do after graduate school.
The concern -- my concern, at least -- is the danger that these hyperspecialized students are losing the ability to generalize what they're learning and doing, and the chance to ever be able to work in other areas--even closely related ones. A student who spends five (or six, or eight) years working in a very narrow area with a small set of techniques, solving the same problems over and over runs the risk of becoming a highly-degreed technician. A PhD isn't supposed to be an intensive five-year training program for learning to operate one particular instrument or perform one particular task. There are large structural biology laboratories where Alice does all the protein expression in E. coli, Bob does the HPLC purification, Carol sets up the crystal trays, Dave shoots the crystals at the synchrotron, and so forth. It's a great CV builder, because everyone's name goes on every paper--but no one actually learns more than one step of the process. Not one of those students will be ready to run their own research program. Sure, Bob will be a great HPLC tech, but a real-world employer can hire a fresh-from-university biochem or chemistry B.Sc. for twenty grand less, and get them up to speed with a week of training and a couple of months of practice.
One potential buyer got a static shock from the carpet as is common in the dry vegas air. She actuually thought the solar power array caused it! How am I supposed to reason with that kind of stupidity?
No matter where you go or what you do, you're going to encounter people who don't understand that a) correlation is not causation; and b) the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Some brands of stupidity you just can't reason with. Back when I was in high school (quite a while ago), I worked in a grocery store that did a fair bit of trade in the organic granola and magic sugar pill line. One of our customers insisted that we not use the bar code scanners on her groceries, because the laser light was a special form of dangerous "radiation". I refrained from suggesting that she tightly wrap her package in tin foil to protect it from the deadly sunlight outside the shop; I also avoided asking if she only ate in complete darkness.
With your solar panels, you introduce something that is going to desirable and interesting to one segment of your buying audience, and frightening to another. We can slowly shift that balance over time, but new things will always be exciting to some people and scary to others. As an aside, consider that the solar panels might have helped you to avoid a crazy homebuyer. If you hadn't had the panels on the roof, you wouldn't have known she was nuts until she started to make unreasonable demands during negotiations, or absurd damage claims after she bought. You might have narrowly escaped years of legal nuisances.
I understand you either didn't read anything beyond the first two lines of my reply as I doubt you're trying to be a troll, so please go back and read and interpret the comment in it's entirety.
I understand that you don't try to be an unpleasant person, and that you just didn't understand either the point that I was making or the concept of satire.
Your first post implied that the measure of a game's value and quality (and hence price) should be solely judged by the length of time that you would want to spend playing it.
Your most recent post actually makes essentially the same point that mine does, whether you realize it or not. While the marginal improvement in "quality" - however one chooses to define it - generally decreases with each increment in price (there's a diminishing returns principle at work here), there are still people who will pay $60,000 for an automobile that does little more than a $10,000 automobile. The qualitative improvement in user experience is, to them, worth the price premium.
There are certain types of games that just won't be made for $1. Consider high-complexity games like Civilization, where extensive pre-release testing (and, potentially, post-release patching...) is required to create an acceptable AI and balance the units. Or think about games like SimCity, where the artwork is an essential part of the value and a lack of interface polish would be crippling. Some people like games that share the look, feel, and sound of their favorite television shows or movies; it's not my cup of tea, but I can understand those people being willing to pay a premium for that experience. Should we just load up a basket at the bookstore and pay by the pound at the checkout? Or are some hours spent reading better - dare I say worth more - than others?
If a $1 game provides me with about 1 week of entertainment, a $60 game should provide me with 60 weeks of entertainment.
If I can buy a $15,000 car that drives 100 mph, why can't the $60,000 car hit 400 mph?
If I don't mind a five-minute commute in my $1,000 used clunker, I should be just as happy with a five-hour drive to work in the $60,000 Lexus, right?
A $200 bottle of wine probably isn't twice as "good" as a $100 bottle of wine (though a $10 bottle probably is twice as good as a $5 bottle).
My $1000 camera doesn't do five times as much as a $200 point and shoot, and it definitely doesn't do twice as much as a $500 camera. I've got it for the small but perceptible improvement in image quality, plus the ten percent (or so) of photographs that would be impossible with the cheaper cameras.
The price of luxury, leisure, and entertainment goods does not necessarily correlate linearly with simple measures.
I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted.
You're right. Google should hire an army of individuals to manually rate the content on every web page that they crawl. Human beings could index and categorize web sites to make the good stuff easier to find. This directory approach provided easy access to thousands of sites for clients of Yahoo! in the 1990s, and it's why dozens of internet users still rely on Yahoo! today.
Yes sir, there's nothing like the feel of good old-fashioned hand-crafted search results. Sure, they cost a little more and take a little longer, and it's getting harder to find new young search artisans willing to pick up the trade, but it's surely worth it in the end. Please take a number, and a search technician will be glad to add your site to the index as soon as he gets around to you--probably in late 2023.
Nothing at all, except a motherboard failure now means you lost all your data.
You might as well say that we shouldn't use hard drives, because after all, "a hard drive failure now means you lost all your data".
Why does security-conscious storage prevent you from keeping backups? Whether you're dealing with system administration or handguns, idiots with powerful tools will always be able to shoot themselves in the foot.
This isn't some second-rate system like Chernobyl, it is close-to-state-of-the-art.
Actually, construction of the first unit at Fukushima I began in 1967, with the six units entering commercial service between 1971 and 1979. Construction at Chernobyl began in 1970 and included building a city to house plant employees and their families; the first reactor didn't enter service until 1977, and unit 4 (site of the accident) wasn't completed until 1983.
The reactors at Fukushima I are among the very oldest in Japan, contemporary with (if not older than) the units at Chernobyl. While the Japanese reactors are still inherently much safer than the RBMK designs used at Chernobyl, calling them 'state-of-the-art' -- or even close to it -- is rather a stretch.
Why is one instance of a legal request for open records considered bullying and intimidation and the other one not?
Your signature line -- I like your black & white world; mine has too many shades of gray -- seems oddly out of step with your question; have you considered changing it? Surely you're not naive enough to believe that there exists any bureaucratic or legal process, however well-intended, which cannot be misapplied to result in counterproductive ends or unintended consequences?
Consider the civil court system; while it is generally accepted to be a worthwhile thing, it can also be abused. Parties with deep pockets can threaten lawsuits or drag out cases in order to chill criticism or bankrupt opponents: so-called strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP suits. Many jurisdictions have recognized this failure mode of the civil court system and have enacted anti-SLAPP statutes to discourage this particular way of abusing the system, though I note that Wisconsin isn't among them.
I trust that the parallels to the extant case are obvious.
If you read the paper or click on the maps you will actually see that they DO NOT CORRECT for local population density. So, the metric in question is absolute rather than "per capita" productivity. This doesn't entirely invalidate it, but it calls into question how you would verbalize or interpret the results.
Local population density is pretty irrelevant here, too, unless your question is "what is the probability that I will meet the author of a journal article while walking down the street?" (To be fair, that is something one might be interested in when choosing where to live, but even in large cities there are often university enclaves near campus.) If you put a university with ten thousand students in a city of a million people, all other things being equal there's no reason why its scientific output ought to differ from a ten-thousand-student university in a 'college town' with just fifty thousand residents. The size of the circle in Los Angeles has nothing to do with the city itself, and everything to do with the output of UCLA.
More interesting would be something like number and quality of publications normalized according to the number of graduate students and postdocs (since they're the ones who are most likely doing the actual hands-on research) in the city.
The Sievert is a measure of ACCUMULATED dose. Time is a factor. Therefore being exposed to 1 Sievert for a second (the real unit behind the sievert is the J/s, which is equivalent to Watts)....
A point of clarification -- the gray (Gy) is technically the SI unit for absorbed dose, measured in joules per kilogram. The sievert (Sv) is a measure of dose equivalent, which takes the absorbed dose in Gy and multiplies it by a factor that accounts for the relative biological effect of the radiation. Whole-body doses of gamma radiation get a factor of 1; neutrons and alpha particles can have a factor of up to 20. Exposures to only part of the body have weighting factors less than 1; skin, which is particularly tolerant, gets a factor of just 0.01. (There is a similar relationship between the rad and the rem: 1 rad = 1 cGy, and 1 rem = 1 cSv.)
So 1 gray per second (Gy/s) is equivalent to an absorbed ionizing radiation dose of 1 watt per kilogram (W/kg). If we assume gamma radiation and whole-body exposure, that's also equivalent to 1 sievert per second (Sv/s).
The speed of the Earth's rotation changes every time I ride an elevator, too. (Please resist the temptation to make a fat joke here; it's too obvious to be worth the trouble.) On a more impressive scale, there's a significant and variable amount of angular momentum stored in the atmosphere. Changes in major air currents year over year (things like El Nino, for instance) can change the length of the day by close to a millisecond: hundreds of times more than this little earthquake.
This can't be 2010, because in 2010 you would have the technology to throttle a set of sites that were less important to give important network traffic a guaranteed level of throughput--without having to block the sites completely.
And that would be an entirely appropriate and worthwhile solution if one were an ISP dealing with too many torrents, instead of the military trying to save lives.
Implementing and testing a dynamic throttling system is - or should be - a very low priority when one is in the middle of major disaster recovery. (The loss of eBay or ESPN doesn't count as a 'major disaster'.) Just cutting off these domains is the simplest, most effective, least failure-prone way to free up bandwidth.
It might be libel, but unless the school actually has jurisdiction this suspension and expulsion is a load of crap.
In many jurisdictions, school officials are constrained by zero-tolerance, zero-discretion policies when faced with these sorts of accusations; they are compelled to investigate whenever these sorts of claims - however spurious or implausible - arise.
Consider the alternative-history headline to this story: "Students identify teacher as pedophile, rapist; School declines to take action--says cannot investigate reports made after hours".
Your ability to exercise free speech does not absolve you of responsibility for the content and consequences of that speech.
Calling an innocent teacher a "pedophile" and a "rapist" - which is what these kids did - is the educational world's equivalent of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater. Spuriously accusing someone else of any crime is bad enough; falsely accusing someone of being a child molester is beyond the pale; leveling such an accusation at a teacher - who would tend to face immediate suspension during any investigation, followed by dismissal and blacklisting, not to mention torches and pitchforks - is appalling behavior. Many jurisdictions have zero-tolerance, zero-discretion policies for responding to these types of claims, and school board officials have no choice about whether or not to investigate and take immediate action.
It might frighten you to discover a similar anti-defamation policy buried deep on page 174 of your employee manual that you never knew about, or perhaps it will be an amendment to said manual next month because of this.
For the reasons I mention above, there's no need to mention these things in the school's rules for these actions to be punishable. If anything, I suspect it's in there to try to protect the students and manage expectations -- if they get an explicit reminder that this type of defamation has serious consequences, they might be less likely to go ahead and do it without thinking.
By the same token, if your coworker falsely accused a manager of raping one or more of his subordinates, how well do you think that would go over? Would your HR department shrug it off as a bit of harmless fun if it was just because "I was mad that day because of what he [did]" (in the words of one of our students). To take a less emotionally-charged crime, if someone accused the company accountant of embezzling funds, would that be okay? Really? Is there so little maturity and sense of personal responsibility that every company now needs to add "You shouldn't baselessly accuse your coworkers of serious criminal acts" to their handbooks?
Parents need to remind their children that the Internet isn't some special place unattached to reality. That glowing box connects you to real computers operated by real, physical people in real, ordinary places on the physical planet Earth. Actions taken on the internet have repercussions offline, and vice versa. Defamatory statements are not magically protected just because they appear on 'teh internets'. Disappointingly, it seems that certain Slashdot posters are also unaware of this reality.
Its a story about how no judge is going to establish a precedent wherein evidence not under the court's or police department's control will be admitted....
It's a (non-)story about how no judge is going to establish a precedent wherein evidence derived from a device not tested or examined by the court or by expert witnesses is implicitly assumed reliable. The court wasn't willing to accept radar gun evidence where the operator couldn't prove he had been appropriately trained or that the device had been properly calibrated; why would the court accept the (putative) output of an untested smartphone app?
How about just keeping actual books in libraries instead? No tech support, no licensing needed.
Right, just physical space (heated, air-conditioned, humidity-controlled, access-controlled space) and staff to store, shelve, check out, check in, reshelve, index, and repair every single print volume.
And the print books are only available during the limited hours the library is open. (This can be a serious issue for individuals with long work/commuting hours coupled to family commitments, especially in communities where library hours are very limited.)
For individuals with mobility concerns getting to the library can be costly or time-consuming, if not impossible. For individuals with limited vision an ebook offers adjustable font size.
In rural areas, it may be impossible for individuals to get to the library by public transit; even library patrons who own cars may need to commit significant time and generate appreciable emissions driving to their nearest library.
Larger cities with multiple library branches can share a small number of ebooks across a large number of branches.
You don't need a GPS to find the potholes, you just get in your car and drive, they'll find you. Just watch out when they do!
On the other hand, if you don't want to have to rely on city workers driving every mile of road in the city looking for potholes -- and have to wait until spring 2013 before they're finished their survey -- then I can see the benefits of a distributed system.
This app potentially provides information that would be difficult and time-consuming to acquire in any other way. It tells you how many drivers are actually going over a given pothole, which is a more direct measure of the harmfulness of a given hole than a simple look at the average traffic on a given street. (Some holes are easier to avoid than others; there's a reasonable argument that the holes causing the most discomfort should be fixed sooner.) It also may be able to provide information about the 'severity' of each hole; the ones producing the most acute acceleration are probably going to be subjectively 'worse' than the others.
Given finite and insufficient road repair resources, it makes sense to develop methods to allocate those limited resources in a way which maximizes the improvement in comfort for the most drivers. I will note at least one caveat, however -- the 'fairness' of the system could be distorted by a non-uniform distribution of accelerometer-equipped smartphones running this app. Lower-income residential neighborhoods, for instance, might be penalized by such a scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
South and east, eh? And minimal hiking?
Weeeell...not minimal hiking. Just no overnight trips over mountains; we like our warm beds and cold beer fridge. The length of day hikes we choose will probably be based on how hard it's raining. :)
We will definitely make it as far east as Skaftafell to see Svartifoss and do some of the hiking in the area. I'd like to get out to Jökulsárlón, but we just may not have time on this trip. (And perhaps we should come back in August for it, if there are going to be fireworks--that's definitely news to me!) We're staying near Skógar, so it's a long drive out and back for a single day.
Oooh, someone who knows their Icelandic geography and actually types their accents, umlauts, and eths ;)
I admit that I cheated -- I copied and pasted from the Wikipedia articles. :D
Over the last couple of years, I've learnt that Iceland is an absolutely brilliant place to stop for a few days to decompress in the middle of a transatlantic flight. My partner and I will be back again for a week this fall, mostly exploring the south and southeast. We'll probably do a day hike up the Skógá river, but we won't cross over Fimmvörðuháls this year--she's recovering from knee surgery, so spending the evenings in a warm hot pot has more appeal than freezing on a mountain pass.
Grímsvötn has been erupting semi-regularly for decades; in the last twenty years there have been eruptions in 1996, 1998, 2004, and now 2011. While long-term volcano prediction is more of an art than a science, there's no particular reason to believe that this eruption is related to either the Eyjafjallajökull eruption or to the still-apparently-quiescent (keep your fingers crossed) Katla. Grímsvötn is actually quite a distance from Katla: roughly 150 km. Eyjafjallajökull is much closer to Katla (just 30 km) and the initial smaller eruption last year (on Fimmvörðuháls) was nearer still.
How can it really get any better?
The entire country pretty much runs on geothermal and hydroelectric power.
There are bathable hot springs.
The word geyser comes from Icelandic.
The whole country is snuggled up against the Arctic circle, but the jet stream keeps it from getting unpleasantly cold. In summer it can get quite toasty, actually. (And from June through August the sun dips below the horizon, but it never gets really dark.) In winter, you can see northern lights in the afternoon.
They have Europe's largest waterfall.
And millions of puffins.
And, for better or worse, Björk.
... and yet as a medium, books came last after everything else.
Unlike music and video, which have always required costly, electricity-intensive, cumbersome equipment, books have always been available in an easily-portable, electricity-free, transferable, can-be-read-in-sunlight, still-functional-albeit-grotesquely-swollen-after-falling-in-the-tub format.
Reading an LCD screen outdoors or under other awkward lighting conditions is an uncomfortable nuisance, and widespread ownership of laptops is really something that's only happened in the last decade, anyway. People don't want to be tethered to AC outlets or limited to one battery's charge when reading novel. Being chained to a desktop computer is not the way most people want to enjoy their books, either. Printing downloaded novels is a tremendous inconvenience, and hardly less costly than just buying the damn paperback in the first place.
E-ink and ebook readers are a technology that's barely five years old. They're the first tools which incorporate all the functionality of paper books. Before ebook readers, there was no way that books were ever going to come to computers for any but the smallest niche markets.
There are no houses less than 3x my annual income around here. Houses start at 4x, and decent ones start at 5-6x. I might be able to find a condo at 3x.
Damn, that's in intractable dilemma. It would seem that the rule of thumb offered by the original poster violates your God-given right as an American to own (a small fraction of, shared with the bank) a home with a lawn and a driveway where you can park your SUV, so that you can make long trips to Wal-Mart. Since you're a good person, you deserve to have your front lawn and backyard barbecue; it's a moral issue, not a financial one. I mean, only sub-humans live in condos.
Seriously, we're talking about rules of thumb here. They can be bent or broken providing one has sound justification; a rule of thumb is heuristic guidance, not Mosaic law.
On the other hand, the U.S. housing market is ample evidence that large numbers of people are very poor judges of their financial limits. Even among the substantial majority of Americans who didn't lose their homes or their solvency during the subprime fallout, many still live right on the edge. Fewer than half of Americans have any sort of 'emergency fund' to cover them in the event of surprise expenses or unexpected job loss. Any family carrying any credit card debt month to month is living beyond their means, but there is an appalling culture of "I want $NICE_THING, therefore I should have it, whether or not I can afford it--and anyone who says otherwise can go soak his head."
I'd hate to have to share an office with you; since I make $75k a year, you'd no doubt assume that you were justified in stealing the pens from my desk and my lunch from the fridge, since I can afford to replace them.
Society only works when the proportion of assholes is kept low. Otherwise, you're why we can't have nice things. Oh, and please don't waste your time on the lecture you were about to give about how faceless corporations deserve to get ripped off because you've occasionally been unsatisfied with the customer service you've received, or how I'm hopelessly naive because I actually assume that most people aren't sociopaths like you.
This is the Age of the Internet. Overspecialization isn't the problem it used to be. With instant communication and email, a PhD student can be in regular contact with all the 10 people around the world who work in his particular sub-specialty if he wants to. So it doesn't matter very much if the local faculty don't know his specialty, although in practice at least the advisor ought to be qualified enough to supervise the work. Arguably, it's superior because it may lead to more inter-university collaborations.
The concern with overspecialization is not so much one of limited collaboration opportunities. (Right now just the 'front-burner' projects in my lab involve collaboration with colleagues in at least five countries on two continents, and there are at least a couple more countries and one more continent kicking around in recent publications.) Encouraging students to participate in projects that involve researchers at other institutions is very worthwhile, and will serve them in good stead regardless of what they choose to do after graduate school.
The concern -- my concern, at least -- is the danger that these hyperspecialized students are losing the ability to generalize what they're learning and doing, and the chance to ever be able to work in other areas--even closely related ones. A student who spends five (or six, or eight) years working in a very narrow area with a small set of techniques, solving the same problems over and over runs the risk of becoming a highly-degreed technician. A PhD isn't supposed to be an intensive five-year training program for learning to operate one particular instrument or perform one particular task. There are large structural biology laboratories where Alice does all the protein expression in E. coli, Bob does the HPLC purification, Carol sets up the crystal trays, Dave shoots the crystals at the synchrotron, and so forth. It's a great CV builder, because everyone's name goes on every paper--but no one actually learns more than one step of the process. Not one of those students will be ready to run their own research program. Sure, Bob will be a great HPLC tech, but a real-world employer can hire a fresh-from-university biochem or chemistry B.Sc. for twenty grand less, and get them up to speed with a week of training and a couple of months of practice.
One potential buyer got a static shock from the carpet as is common in the dry vegas air. She actuually thought the solar power array caused it! How am I supposed to reason with that kind of stupidity?
No matter where you go or what you do, you're going to encounter people who don't understand that a) correlation is not causation; and b) the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Some brands of stupidity you just can't reason with. Back when I was in high school (quite a while ago), I worked in a grocery store that did a fair bit of trade in the organic granola and magic sugar pill line. One of our customers insisted that we not use the bar code scanners on her groceries, because the laser light was a special form of dangerous "radiation". I refrained from suggesting that she tightly wrap her package in tin foil to protect it from the deadly sunlight outside the shop; I also avoided asking if she only ate in complete darkness.
With your solar panels, you introduce something that is going to desirable and interesting to one segment of your buying audience, and frightening to another. We can slowly shift that balance over time, but new things will always be exciting to some people and scary to others. As an aside, consider that the solar panels might have helped you to avoid a crazy homebuyer. If you hadn't had the panels on the roof, you wouldn't have known she was nuts until she started to make unreasonable demands during negotiations, or absurd damage claims after she bought. You might have narrowly escaped years of legal nuisances.
I understand you either didn't read anything beyond the first two lines of my reply as I doubt you're trying to be a troll, so please go back and read and interpret the comment in it's entirety.
I understand that you don't try to be an unpleasant person, and that you just didn't understand either the point that I was making or the concept of satire.
Your first post implied that the measure of a game's value and quality (and hence price) should be solely judged by the length of time that you would want to spend playing it.
Your most recent post actually makes essentially the same point that mine does, whether you realize it or not. While the marginal improvement in "quality" - however one chooses to define it - generally decreases with each increment in price (there's a diminishing returns principle at work here), there are still people who will pay $60,000 for an automobile that does little more than a $10,000 automobile. The qualitative improvement in user experience is, to them, worth the price premium.
There are certain types of games that just won't be made for $1. Consider high-complexity games like Civilization, where extensive pre-release testing (and, potentially, post-release patching...) is required to create an acceptable AI and balance the units. Or think about games like SimCity, where the artwork is an essential part of the value and a lack of interface polish would be crippling. Some people like games that share the look, feel, and sound of their favorite television shows or movies; it's not my cup of tea, but I can understand those people being willing to pay a premium for that experience. Should we just load up a basket at the bookstore and pay by the pound at the checkout? Or are some hours spent reading better - dare I say worth more - than others?
If a $1 game provides me with about 1 week of entertainment, a $60 game should provide me with 60 weeks of entertainment.
If I can buy a $15,000 car that drives 100 mph, why can't the $60,000 car hit 400 mph?
If I don't mind a five-minute commute in my $1,000 used clunker, I should be just as happy with a five-hour drive to work in the $60,000 Lexus, right?
A $200 bottle of wine probably isn't twice as "good" as a $100 bottle of wine (though a $10 bottle probably is twice as good as a $5 bottle).
My $1000 camera doesn't do five times as much as a $200 point and shoot, and it definitely doesn't do twice as much as a $500 camera. I've got it for the small but perceptible improvement in image quality, plus the ten percent (or so) of photographs that would be impossible with the cheaper cameras.
The price of luxury, leisure, and entertainment goods does not necessarily correlate linearly with simple measures.
I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted.
You're right. Google should hire an army of individuals to manually rate the content on every web page that they crawl. Human beings could index and categorize web sites to make the good stuff easier to find. This directory approach provided easy access to thousands of sites for clients of Yahoo! in the 1990s, and it's why dozens of internet users still rely on Yahoo! today.
Yes sir, there's nothing like the feel of good old-fashioned hand-crafted search results. Sure, they cost a little more and take a little longer, and it's getting harder to find new young search artisans willing to pick up the trade, but it's surely worth it in the end. Please take a number, and a search technician will be glad to add your site to the index as soon as he gets around to you--probably in late 2023.
Nothing at all, except a motherboard failure now means you lost all your data.
You might as well say that we shouldn't use hard drives, because after all, "a hard drive failure now means you lost all your data".
Why does security-conscious storage prevent you from keeping backups? Whether you're dealing with system administration or handguns, idiots with powerful tools will always be able to shoot themselves in the foot.
This isn't some second-rate system like Chernobyl, it is close-to-state-of-the-art.
Actually, construction of the first unit at Fukushima I began in 1967, with the six units entering commercial service between 1971 and 1979. Construction at Chernobyl began in 1970 and included building a city to house plant employees and their families; the first reactor didn't enter service until 1977, and unit 4 (site of the accident) wasn't completed until 1983.
The reactors at Fukushima I are among the very oldest in Japan, contemporary with (if not older than) the units at Chernobyl. While the Japanese reactors are still inherently much safer than the RBMK designs used at Chernobyl, calling them 'state-of-the-art' -- or even close to it -- is rather a stretch.
Why is one instance of a legal request for open records considered bullying and intimidation and the other one not?
Your signature line -- I like your black & white world; mine has too many shades of gray -- seems oddly out of step with your question; have you considered changing it? Surely you're not naive enough to believe that there exists any bureaucratic or legal process, however well-intended, which cannot be misapplied to result in counterproductive ends or unintended consequences?
Consider the civil court system; while it is generally accepted to be a worthwhile thing, it can also be abused. Parties with deep pockets can threaten lawsuits or drag out cases in order to chill criticism or bankrupt opponents: so-called strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP suits. Many jurisdictions have recognized this failure mode of the civil court system and have enacted anti-SLAPP statutes to discourage this particular way of abusing the system, though I note that Wisconsin isn't among them.
I trust that the parallels to the extant case are obvious.
If you read the paper or click on the maps you will actually see that they DO NOT CORRECT for local population density. So, the metric in question is absolute rather than "per capita" productivity. This doesn't entirely invalidate it, but it calls into question how you would verbalize or interpret the results.
Local population density is pretty irrelevant here, too, unless your question is "what is the probability that I will meet the author of a journal article while walking down the street?" (To be fair, that is something one might be interested in when choosing where to live, but even in large cities there are often university enclaves near campus.) If you put a university with ten thousand students in a city of a million people, all other things being equal there's no reason why its scientific output ought to differ from a ten-thousand-student university in a 'college town' with just fifty thousand residents. The size of the circle in Los Angeles has nothing to do with the city itself, and everything to do with the output of UCLA.
More interesting would be something like number and quality of publications normalized according to the number of graduate students and postdocs (since they're the ones who are most likely doing the actual hands-on research) in the city.
The Sievert is a measure of ACCUMULATED dose. Time is a factor. Therefore being exposed to 1 Sievert for a second (the real unit behind the sievert is the J/s, which is equivalent to Watts)....
A point of clarification -- the gray (Gy) is technically the SI unit for absorbed dose, measured in joules per kilogram. The sievert (Sv) is a measure of dose equivalent, which takes the absorbed dose in Gy and multiplies it by a factor that accounts for the relative biological effect of the radiation. Whole-body doses of gamma radiation get a factor of 1; neutrons and alpha particles can have a factor of up to 20. Exposures to only part of the body have weighting factors less than 1; skin, which is particularly tolerant, gets a factor of just 0.01. (There is a similar relationship between the rad and the rem: 1 rad = 1 cGy, and 1 rem = 1 cSv.)
So 1 gray per second (Gy/s) is equivalent to an absorbed ionizing radiation dose of 1 watt per kilogram (W/kg). If we assume gamma radiation and whole-body exposure, that's also equivalent to 1 sievert per second (Sv/s).
Newton still right!
Basic principles of mechanics remain sound!
Film at eleven.
The speed of the Earth's rotation changes every time I ride an elevator, too. (Please resist the temptation to make a fat joke here; it's too obvious to be worth the trouble.) On a more impressive scale, there's a significant and variable amount of angular momentum stored in the atmosphere. Changes in major air currents year over year (things like El Nino, for instance) can change the length of the day by close to a millisecond: hundreds of times more than this little earthquake.
This can't be 2010, because in 2010 you would have the technology to throttle a set of sites that were less important to give important network traffic a guaranteed level of throughput--without having to block the sites completely.
And that would be an entirely appropriate and worthwhile solution if one were an ISP dealing with too many torrents, instead of the military trying to save lives.
Implementing and testing a dynamic throttling system is - or should be - a very low priority when one is in the middle of major disaster recovery. (The loss of eBay or ESPN doesn't count as a 'major disaster'.) Just cutting off these domains is the simplest, most effective, least failure-prone way to free up bandwidth.
It might be libel, but unless the school actually has jurisdiction this suspension and expulsion is a load of crap.
In many jurisdictions, school officials are constrained by zero-tolerance, zero-discretion policies when faced with these sorts of accusations; they are compelled to investigate whenever these sorts of claims - however spurious or implausible - arise.
Consider the alternative-history headline to this story: "Students identify teacher as pedophile, rapist; School declines to take action--says cannot investigate reports made after hours".
...our ability to exercise free speech.
Your ability to exercise free speech does not absolve you of responsibility for the content and consequences of that speech.
Calling an innocent teacher a "pedophile" and a "rapist" - which is what these kids did - is the educational world's equivalent of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater. Spuriously accusing someone else of any crime is bad enough; falsely accusing someone of being a child molester is beyond the pale; leveling such an accusation at a teacher - who would tend to face immediate suspension during any investigation, followed by dismissal and blacklisting, not to mention torches and pitchforks - is appalling behavior. Many jurisdictions have zero-tolerance, zero-discretion policies for responding to these types of claims, and school board officials have no choice about whether or not to investigate and take immediate action.
It might frighten you to discover a similar anti-defamation policy buried deep on page 174 of your employee manual that you never knew about, or perhaps it will be an amendment to said manual next month because of this.
For the reasons I mention above, there's no need to mention these things in the school's rules for these actions to be punishable. If anything, I suspect it's in there to try to protect the students and manage expectations -- if they get an explicit reminder that this type of defamation has serious consequences, they might be less likely to go ahead and do it without thinking.
By the same token, if your coworker falsely accused a manager of raping one or more of his subordinates, how well do you think that would go over? Would your HR department shrug it off as a bit of harmless fun if it was just because "I was mad that day because of what he [did]" (in the words of one of our students). To take a less emotionally-charged crime, if someone accused the company accountant of embezzling funds, would that be okay? Really? Is there so little maturity and sense of personal responsibility that every company now needs to add "You shouldn't baselessly accuse your coworkers of serious criminal acts" to their handbooks?
Parents need to remind their children that the Internet isn't some special place unattached to reality. That glowing box connects you to real computers operated by real, physical people in real, ordinary places on the physical planet Earth. Actions taken on the internet have repercussions offline, and vice versa. Defamatory statements are not magically protected just because they appear on 'teh internets'. Disappointingly, it seems that certain Slashdot posters are also unaware of this reality.
Its a story about how no judge is going to establish a precedent wherein evidence not under the court's or police department's control will be admitted....
It's a (non-)story about how no judge is going to establish a precedent wherein evidence derived from a device not tested or examined by the court or by expert witnesses is implicitly assumed reliable. The court wasn't willing to accept radar gun evidence where the operator couldn't prove he had been appropriately trained or that the device had been properly calibrated; why would the court accept the (putative) output of an untested smartphone app?
How about just keeping actual books in libraries instead? No tech support, no licensing needed.
Right, just physical space (heated, air-conditioned, humidity-controlled, access-controlled space) and staff to store, shelve, check out, check in, reshelve, index, and repair every single print volume.
And the print books are only available during the limited hours the library is open. (This can be a serious issue for individuals with long work/commuting hours coupled to family commitments, especially in communities where library hours are very limited.)
For individuals with mobility concerns getting to the library can be costly or time-consuming, if not impossible. For individuals with limited vision an ebook offers adjustable font size.
In rural areas, it may be impossible for individuals to get to the library by public transit; even library patrons who own cars may need to commit significant time and generate appreciable emissions driving to their nearest library.
Larger cities with multiple library branches can share a small number of ebooks across a large number of branches.
That's why.
You don't need a GPS to find the potholes, you just get in your car and drive, they'll find you. Just watch out when they do!
On the other hand, if you don't want to have to rely on city workers driving every mile of road in the city looking for potholes -- and have to wait until spring 2013 before they're finished their survey -- then I can see the benefits of a distributed system.
This app potentially provides information that would be difficult and time-consuming to acquire in any other way. It tells you how many drivers are actually going over a given pothole, which is a more direct measure of the harmfulness of a given hole than a simple look at the average traffic on a given street. (Some holes are easier to avoid than others; there's a reasonable argument that the holes causing the most discomfort should be fixed sooner.) It also may be able to provide information about the 'severity' of each hole; the ones producing the most acute acceleration are probably going to be subjectively 'worse' than the others.
Given finite and insufficient road repair resources, it makes sense to develop methods to allocate those limited resources in a way which maximizes the improvement in comfort for the most drivers. I will note at least one caveat, however -- the 'fairness' of the system could be distorted by a non-uniform distribution of accelerometer-equipped smartphones running this app. Lower-income residential neighborhoods, for instance, might be penalized by such a scheme.
Just sayin'.