Some of my students say 100 pages of reading a week is to much homework.
It depends on the reading. In an English course, that's a trifling amount. In a science course with densely-written prose that may need to be reread multiple times (or have proofs and analyses reviewed and rederived by the the reader) that's a pretty steep demand. Is this stuff that just needs to be skimmed, or is it stuff that needs to be closely read? It is technology news, or technology specifications? Are those 'printed from a website' pages, with a large font and lots of pictures, or are they 'telephone book' pages, with tiny print and no whitespace? Is there significant overlap with the in-class material, or are they in virgin territory? Are they software manuals rich in repetition and full of 'this-page-intentionally-left-blank'?
When I was in school, the normal full course load was five courses, each with three hours per week of lecture time, plus another five or six hours (varying greatly from term to term) of hands-on laboratory courses. Throw in another couple of hours of mandatory 'tutorial' slots on top, and we're at between twenty and twenty-five hours of 'you must be here' per week. If we assume that each of those hours in class has an associated hour of work outside of class, then the students are at a full-time (plus a bit of overtime) level of 40 to 50 hours of weekly work. (And don't forget that some of them will have ten or fifteen or more hours of part-time paid work on top of that, so that they can pay rent and eat.)
So, let's say your three-hour allotment of weekly lectures can legitimately draw an additional three hours' worth of out-of-class work. If the students spend two minutes reading each page (and reviewing, and making notes on the material), then they're at two hundred minutes per week You're already twenty minutes over quota, and they haven't even looked at the final group project, their assignments, or studied for their midterms or exams. At a brisk minute per page, they're left with just eighty minutes in which to do all of their other assigned work for your course.
That's not exactly 'crazy high level'. Matrix Algebra is usually a sophomore level class, and a watered down one at that.
Hm. I got my first exposure to matrices in high school, and my university hit all of its science and math students with it again as freshmen, and then we got vector calculus as sophomores.
But...there wasn't anything there that required a calculator, let alone a computer. The problems we dealt with were in real space, so 3x3 (and occasionally 4x4) matrices covered everything we needed - and we learned everything that was important about matrix manipulation using matrices small enough to manipulate by hand.
I didn't need to dust off Matlab/Octave until at least junior year, when I was doing quantum mechanics problems in matrix form. (And manipulating image datasets, modelling the propagation of polarized light, and analyzing and deconvoluting time series of data. Even then, these last three applications were more hands-on laboratory situations, not lecture courses.)
Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers. So they might as well become used to it.
What kind of ridiculous job do you have, where your boss communicates with his subordinates through a blog, and where presenters at meetings prepare multiple-choice quizzes that staff have to 'click in' on? Are you Regis Philbin, returning to host the next season of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Of the technologies listed in the Slashdot blurb, only teleconferencing is likely to be important in a modern workplace -- and that is apt to have very narrow applications for most university courses.
Far more useful are the non-technology-centered teaching techniques mentioned: hands-on exercises and group activities. Those actually do much better represent how things are learned and done in the real world.
I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.
And I really hate it when others start prattling about errors with statistics when they don't know when to take an adequate sample.
In the linked 'study', we find that the highest risk category is for black cars, with a theft risk of approximately 0.25% during the length of the study. We also learn that the number of pink vehicles included in the study is just 109.
If car thieves had an identical preference for pink cars and black cars (don't ask me why), then in a sample this size, there's still only about a 25% chance that any of the pink cars would be stolen over the study period. The sample is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. It could be that car thieves desperately want to take pink cars, but are having too much trouble finding them.
The data used in this study are insufficient to show that pink cars are less likely to be stolen than the other less-common colors; they aren't even a big enough sample to show that pink cars are safer than the most-stolen colors.
Cheap materials, cheap process, room temperature......way too good to be true.
Two economists are walking down the street. One suddenly stops, staring at the ground.
"How remarkable. There appears to be a hundred dollar bill lying on the pavement!" He bends to pick it up.
The second economist immediately replies,
"Don't waste the effort, you fool! If there were a real hundred dollar bill on the pavement, someone would have already picked it up."
There exists a virtually infinite number of potential industrial processes which are both simple and inexpensive -- but whose output is utter crap. It is impossible to exhaustively screen all of them (ask the alchemists who sought the magic recipe for converting base metals into gold), so unless guided by theory, there are going to be all kinds of simple, cheap, worthwhile materials that go undiscovered.
...units are dollars per contract size so it would be $166 per 37500lbs...
Wow - that's remarkable. I totally misread the wholesale price of coffee; I apologize for the misleading subsequent numbers.
Since your initial assumption was wrong, the rest of your analysis is similarly wrong.
I stand by my $0.04 per pot.
I'm still surprised that your friend is able to get his hands on roasted, ground coffee for less than a buck a pound. (Generally the big markup is in the roasting.) Even at a miserly 30 cents a pound, he's blowing through the entire four cents right there.
And I'd be surprised if he's paying his employees less than minimum wage, so there's another four cents (if brewing a pot is a nineteen-second job).
Washing each mug (or loading and unloading it from the dishwasher) is another ten-second job, so that's two more cents -- or the disposable cup's going to cost a couple pennies. And there's eight of those cups in the pot.
And I wonder where he's getting the free electricity.
And I'm still neglecting what are probably the real big costs; things like the building lease, the heat, the lights. Assuming disturbingly inexpensive, crappy, watery coffee, served in a magic cost-free container, I can see four cents a pot as a marginal cost of beans. But it's far from an accurate reflection of what that pot costs to serve.
I had a friend in the coffee shop business and it cost him about $0.04 per POT for coffee.
I think it's neat how you still keep in touch with your friends who live in 1963.
Green coffee beans trade at wholesale prices of somewhere upward of one dollar per pound on international markets. Specialty, fair trade, organic, or higher-grade beans will cost more.
Let's assume that your friend is using a small, 50-ounce coffeepot. Figure that will take a couple of ounces of ground, roasted coffee. Two ounces at one dollar per pound is a bit more than twelve cents' worth of green beans. That assumes that there is no cost to roast the coffee, package the coffee, store the coffee, or deliver the coffee; it also ignores the fact that coffee is actually trading closer to $1.66, and that it will lose another fifteen percent of its mass when roasted.
Heck, if the barista making the coffee earns $7.25 an hour (the U.S. federal minimum wage), then four cents pays her for a hair less than twenty seconds of work. I hope that you're not expecting anyone to spend time to wash those coffeepots and mugs. If the coffeemaker draws 1200 watts, and electricity is ten cents per kWh, then the ten minutes it took to brew the pot just burned through half our budget: 2 cents.
Why convert to electricity in the first place? If you pump water to a higher place you might as well let the windmills pump it directly (that's why the Dutch invented them after all), you have an immediate buffer in the lake so you can never pump too hard, and the hydroelectric generators can be throttled easily. You have the benefits of a buffer and a higher efficiency, as well as a more simple design (no high-tech generators needed in every windmill). Damn great idea, if I say it myself...
Ah, so instead of placing a small generator at each wind turbine and connecting it to the grid with wire, you now need to build a heavy-duty water pump at each turbine. That probably requires appreciably more maintenance and lubrication and cost(especially once you include the mechanical linkages from the hub of the turbine down to the pump).
And it gets worse. Each wind turbine now needs to be connected to an ample source of water at the bottom, and to a high-level reservoir at the top. Does each turbine get its own supply canal and reservoir lake (constructed at ruinous cost, and carefully and expensively placed so that none of these water works interferes with its own turbine's supply of wind)? Or do we link the pumps together with an extensive piping system, in which internal friction negates the efficiency benefits we accrued through not making the intermediate conversion to electricity in the first place?
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, but almost no guns. The US has less than half their suicide rate, with guns freely available.
And, clearly, the availability of firearms is certainly the only social, political, cultural, or economic difference between those two countries.
People who want to commit suicide will use whatever means handy. The availability of one method, guns, has no impact on that.
Not having a gun handy very likely doesn't affect the number of suicide attempts, but it may reduce the number of successes. Not all methods of suicide are equally effective.
If you want to use the newspaper's soapbox, you have to play by their rules.
If you want to post anonymously and for free (although this is a one-time ninety-nine cent fee, so it doesn't exactly break the bank) then there are lots of venues in which to do so.
Different parts of the internet offer different ways to screen out trolls, with varying degrees of success and with varying costs and benefits. Some newspapers impose lengthy delays (and incur significant costs to themselves) on comment posting to allow for their own moderators to screen comments. Slashdot has a moderation system which is generally good at elevating comments supportive of our constituency's preferred varieties of groupthink, but which may handle less-popular viewpoints less well (even when expressed cogently, politely, and coherently, such views face a toss-up between up- and down-moderation), and which also allows well-written posts that don't appear within an hour or two of the story to disappear from the radar of most readers.
And this isn't exactly a new concept for newspapers. Are there any serious newspapers with appreciable circulation numbers that allow anonymous letters to the editor in their print editions?
See also: The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Penny Arcade. Maybe this is the right solution to the GIFT problem for this particular institution. I look forward to seeing if this is effective in improving signal-to-noise.
It's to instill fear, and reduce the (speculative) lost sales.
Bingo. The parent post has it correct.
The purpose of the lawsuits was never to directly recover money from individuals who have engaged in occasional acts of copyright infringement. Rather, it was to create the perception that online infringement could have dire consequences (dealing with even a groundless lawsuit is a tremendous time sink, and even a "small" settlement can run to four or five figures), and thereby (in theory) encourage people to pay for at least some of the music that they otherwise would have downloaded for free.
While the $16 million appears on the balance sheet as legal fees, it would far more accurately be charged to the marketing budget as an advertising campaign. I doubt that the RIAA members ever expected these lawsuits to directly recoup their own costs. Looked at as a marketing expense, $16 million is a drop in the bucket.
Whatever you might think of the RIAA's economic model or the ethics of using threats of extortionate legal action to frighten consumers, the bloggers and reporters who are framing this story as "OMG the RIAA are SOOO stoopid! They only got $391K from their $16 million lawsuits! Hahahaha Looosers!" have entirely missed the point. Indeed, they're apparently even more foolish than they accuse the RIAA of being.
An intelligent analysis of the situation might look at what the RIAA's members did or did not receive in return for this $16 million campaign. Did they receive value for money? Has there been a change in the amount of private, noncommercial infringement? Have sales numbers been improved? Has public perception of, and attitudes toward, copyright infringement changed? Has this campaign generated a lot of free publicity, and has that publicity been a net positive for the 'message' that the labels wish to push?
You can actually make a radiation shield that lets light pass through it by simply 'impregnating' acrylic with lead?
Yes. Such barrier materials are widely commercially available, for exactly this sort of purpose: here's the first hit I found. The material is usually horrifically expensive, but that's true of virtually any special-purpose material with scientific or medical applications. Leaded glass is also often used in radiology suites.
Doesn't anyone ever use Google before asking questions?
[...] and enjoy the same take-home pay after taxes. What is unfair or discriminatory about that?
I'm single. My taxes are MUCH higher than someone who is married, with multiple dependents. I also rent instead of owning a home, which means I don't get those tax breaks either.
Now, I don't think there should be a tax on being gay, but why wouldn't Google pay ME more to cover my additional tax burden? Why only for sexual preference?
For better or for worse, it has been decided that there is a social benefit to easing the tax burden on individuals who have dependents (generally dependent children). This actually does make sense to some extent, as those children do provide indirect benefits to all of us, and it makes sense to defray some of the costs associated with raising them. (When they grow up and pay taxes of their own, it's everyone's social security they'll be paying for. You're paying a premium now to not have to shell out to raise the kids who will fund your retirement.)
Perhaps more important, the decision to have children (or not) is one that is open to everyone. (Even the infertile can choose to adopt.) The decision to rent accommodation or to buy a home is open to everyone. (Yes, you may have to make other choices, about your education, about places you are willing to live, about careers and salaries you are willing to work for.)
On the other hand, sexual orientation isn't a choice. These people were being penalized for a fundamental part of who they were; for something that they can't change no matter how hard they work or what other decisions they might make in life. That is why Google is paying same-sex partners more.
The best solution is to move to Canada! If you shack up together for one year -- opposite-sex or same-sex, doesn't matter -- then you're common-law spouses as far as the Canada Revenue Agency (their version of the IRS) is concerned.
Can't wait a year to start filing joint tax returns? Go ahead and get married. Gay, straight, somewhere in between, it doesn't matter; it's legal! (Just one spouse per person, however. They're still picky about that.)
Of course, your health insurance is going to be a lot less expensive anyway -- visits to your doctor are covered by the government.
So do you believe it is always OK for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexual preference, or only do so when it favors homosexuals? I strongly suspect that you are a hypocrite and would be protesting any stated policy that advocated paying homosexuals less than straights rather than more.
If that were the case, it would indeed be an ugly hypocrisy.
Of course, your inflammatory strawman argument is irrelevant to the present discussion. What Google is doing here is ensuring that same-sex couples receive the same benefits package for the same price as their heterosexual coworkers. At the end of the day, the straight couples and the gay couples get the same health care and enjoy the same take-home pay after taxes. What is unfair or discriminatory about that?
Surely you're not arguing that same-sex couples should pay higher taxes than heterosexual couples on identical benefits?
Many USicans only have Saturdays free to run errands. Ending services on Saturday is a burden to them.
How does a lack of Saturday delivery interfere with running errands? I find your comment confusing.
For comparison, I offer the Canadian system. While delivery only occurs on Monday through Friday, postal services are often available on an extended schedule. Canada Post maintains a network of service counters (often in drug, convenience, and grocery stores) which provide parcel services, sell money orders, and supply copies of frequently-used government documents (passport applications, tax forms). These local outlets also act as pickup points for parcels which are too large for home delivery (the stuff that didn't fit in your mailbox while you were out).
Many of these counters have extended weeknight hours (beyond typical nine-to-five business hours) and offer Saturday hours; some are even open on Sunday afternoons. (The retailers hosting the counters have probably realized that extended postal hours can attract customers.) In other words, Canadian Saturday-errand-runners have no trouble obtaining postal services, even in the absence of Saturday delivery.
Letters and smaller parcels can, of course, be sent at any time simply by dropping in a post box.
The company was only incorporated in 2008 and only went public in 2004. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are still only in their late thirties.
Suppose Page and Brin started out hiring their peers: fellow college students and recent grads, people that they're comfortable working with, and (perhaps more important) people who are willing to work long hours cheaply for a startup. Immediately, that means that the group of individuals making up senior management today - or at least those with the most seniority - will mostly be in their thirties, no ageism or conspiracy required. For a variety of reasons, people tend to hire subordinates who are younger. (I'm not saying that this is a hard and fast rule, only a tendency.) Younger people are (again) usually less expensive to hire, and they can be groomed for long-term future promotion and as a source of institutional memory and continuity. Younger managers may feel uncomfortable or insecure giving direction to workers who are much older.
In other words, it's going to be another twenty years before the founders and big bosses get close to retirement age -- which means it's probably going to be almost that long before you see a more uniform distribution of ages among their employees.
I was surprised by that figure - losing $60 billion to fraud on $600 billion (roughly) total spending? That's damn scary, and would mean that one dollar out of every ten was being paid out for fraudulent claims.
Fortunately, I read the linked press release. The actual quote is:
Fraud, waste and abuse in our health care system account for three percent of our total health care spending, costing Americans more than $60 billion every year.
First, the $60 billion isn't solely from fraud. It's from the somewhat more nebulous "fraud, waste, and abuse". No breakdown is provided for those three categories. ("Waste" is a particularly difficult one - does that include the unnecessary blood tests or CT scans ordered by a physician who fears malpractice suits?)
Second, the $60 billion figure is linked to the "health care system", and identified as only three percent of "total health care spending". The wording is unclear, but it may be referring to fraud, waste, and abuse in health care in general, rather than simply confined to the Medicare program. What is the scope of programs covered by this claim?
Finally, the same press release also notes that
In 2008, better enforcement measures to fight fraud, waste and abuse in Medicare netted Americans more than $16 billion in savings.
This seems to suggest that there are steps being taken to reduce the size of the problem; in one year this "waste" was reduced by a quarter.
Having a paper in Nature is the gold standard in research and I don't think this stance will do their researchers any good.
Nature isn't the only journal in the top tier. Within any given field, there are slightly more specific journals with equal 'street cred' -- Cell is seen as just as important among biologists; The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet are just as good for clinical researchers; I imagine that other fields have similar 'blockbuster' titles.
And if you're not going for Nature, then Science is their major competitor for the 'general' scientific audience. Similar impact factor, similar value on one's CV. (When the human genome was sequenced, the Human Genome Project published in Nature, while Celera simultaenously published their sequence in Science.)
And then there are the up-and-comers — the new open-access Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are both just a few years old, but already publishing a lot of cutting-edge research -- with impact factors to match. And since they are open acess (Creative Commons licensed), they don't charge any subscription fees. (And open access means that they may be cited more often, because more people can read them.)
What makes this a problem in my mind is that Google Maps doesn't offer a "detour me" feature that allows you to easily avoid specified nodes in the commute graph.
Well, they don't quite have a "please avoid these nodes" feature, they do have a "please include these nodes". When Google Maps displays a route, you can click and drag anywhere along the route to force a different path. You can add multiple nodes if necessary; the path finder will go through all of them in order.
No, it doesn't guarantee that your new route will be the best or fastest detour, but if you tug sideways on a node that's in the detour region, you can watch the suggested route update live until you have a path around the blockage. Piece of cake.
I'm suing Black Berry as well. It told me to take a right and I drove into a lake.
Stop using your Blackberry while you're driving, asshat!
Seriously, I would find it deliciously poetic if, at the time of the accident, the driver in this case was distracted while typing email on his mobile device.
The price of gasoline should go up to eight dollars a gallon, that should keep people from wasting it.
It might do, at that.
The current price for unleaded gasoline in Germany is about 1.40 euros per liter, and it was up to 1.57 euros in the summer of 2008. That makes the current price about $6.60 US per gallon, and the peak just over $9 per gallon.
Because of these horrendous fuel prices, the German people suffer terribly. They are forced to drive tiny, ugly, uncomfortable econoboxes with weak, underpowered, dreadful engines. Germans look with barely-concealed envy at the spacious, high-quality, fuel-spendthrift U.S. automobile.
I cannot doubt that Germany's automakers desperately want to earn the same financial success and worldwide reputation enjoyed by their American counterparts.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of my students say 100 pages of reading a week is to much homework.
It depends on the reading. In an English course, that's a trifling amount. In a science course with densely-written prose that may need to be reread multiple times (or have proofs and analyses reviewed and rederived by the the reader) that's a pretty steep demand. Is this stuff that just needs to be skimmed, or is it stuff that needs to be closely read? It is technology news, or technology specifications? Are those 'printed from a website' pages, with a large font and lots of pictures, or are they 'telephone book' pages, with tiny print and no whitespace? Is there significant overlap with the in-class material, or are they in virgin territory? Are they software manuals rich in repetition and full of 'this-page-intentionally-left-blank'?
When I was in school, the normal full course load was five courses, each with three hours per week of lecture time, plus another five or six hours (varying greatly from term to term) of hands-on laboratory courses. Throw in another couple of hours of mandatory 'tutorial' slots on top, and we're at between twenty and twenty-five hours of 'you must be here' per week. If we assume that each of those hours in class has an associated hour of work outside of class, then the students are at a full-time (plus a bit of overtime) level of 40 to 50 hours of weekly work. (And don't forget that some of them will have ten or fifteen or more hours of part-time paid work on top of that, so that they can pay rent and eat.)
So, let's say your three-hour allotment of weekly lectures can legitimately draw an additional three hours' worth of out-of-class work. If the students spend two minutes reading each page (and reviewing, and making notes on the material), then they're at two hundred minutes per week You're already twenty minutes over quota, and they haven't even looked at the final group project, their assignments, or studied for their midterms or exams. At a brisk minute per page, they're left with just eighty minutes in which to do all of their other assigned work for your course.
That's not exactly 'crazy high level'. Matrix Algebra is usually a sophomore level class, and a watered down one at that.
Hm. I got my first exposure to matrices in high school, and my university hit all of its science and math students with it again as freshmen, and then we got vector calculus as sophomores.
But...there wasn't anything there that required a calculator, let alone a computer. The problems we dealt with were in real space, so 3x3 (and occasionally 4x4) matrices covered everything we needed - and we learned everything that was important about matrix manipulation using matrices small enough to manipulate by hand.
I didn't need to dust off Matlab/Octave until at least junior year, when I was doing quantum mechanics problems in matrix form. (And manipulating image datasets, modelling the propagation of polarized light, and analyzing and deconvoluting time series of data. Even then, these last three applications were more hands-on laboratory situations, not lecture courses.)
Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers. So they might as well become used to it.
What kind of ridiculous job do you have, where your boss communicates with his subordinates through a blog, and where presenters at meetings prepare multiple-choice quizzes that staff have to 'click in' on? Are you Regis Philbin, returning to host the next season of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Of the technologies listed in the Slashdot blurb, only teleconferencing is likely to be important in a modern workplace -- and that is apt to have very narrow applications for most university courses.
Far more useful are the non-technology-centered teaching techniques mentioned: hands-on exercises and group activities. Those actually do much better represent how things are learned and done in the real world.
I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.
And I really hate it when others start prattling about errors with statistics when they don't know when to take an adequate sample.
In the linked 'study', we find that the highest risk category is for black cars, with a theft risk of approximately 0.25% during the length of the study. We also learn that the number of pink vehicles included in the study is just 109.
If car thieves had an identical preference for pink cars and black cars (don't ask me why), then in a sample this size, there's still only about a 25% chance that any of the pink cars would be stolen over the study period. The sample is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. It could be that car thieves desperately want to take pink cars, but are having too much trouble finding them.
The data used in this study are insufficient to show that pink cars are less likely to be stolen than the other less-common colors; they aren't even a big enough sample to show that pink cars are safer than the most-stolen colors.
Cheap materials, cheap process, room temperature......way too good to be true.
Two economists are walking down the street. One suddenly stops, staring at the ground.
"How remarkable. There appears to be a hundred dollar bill lying on the pavement!" He bends to pick it up.
The second economist immediately replies,
"Don't waste the effort, you fool! If there were a real hundred dollar bill on the pavement, someone would have already picked it up."
There exists a virtually infinite number of potential industrial processes which are both simple and inexpensive -- but whose output is utter crap. It is impossible to exhaustively screen all of them (ask the alchemists who sought the magic recipe for converting base metals into gold), so unless guided by theory, there are going to be all kinds of simple, cheap, worthwhile materials that go undiscovered.
"It's real", hAckzor concludes.
Film at eleven. Take that, scientific establishment.
...units are dollars per contract size so it would be $166 per 37500lbs...
Wow - that's remarkable. I totally misread the wholesale price of coffee; I apologize for the misleading subsequent numbers.
Since your initial assumption was wrong, the rest of your analysis is similarly wrong.
I stand by my $0.04 per pot.
I'm still surprised that your friend is able to get his hands on roasted, ground coffee for less than a buck a pound. (Generally the big markup is in the roasting.) Even at a miserly 30 cents a pound, he's blowing through the entire four cents right there.
And I'd be surprised if he's paying his employees less than minimum wage, so there's another four cents (if brewing a pot is a nineteen-second job).
Washing each mug (or loading and unloading it from the dishwasher) is another ten-second job, so that's two more cents -- or the disposable cup's going to cost a couple pennies. And there's eight of those cups in the pot.
And I wonder where he's getting the free electricity.
And I'm still neglecting what are probably the real big costs; things like the building lease, the heat, the lights. Assuming disturbingly inexpensive, crappy, watery coffee, served in a magic cost-free container, I can see four cents a pot as a marginal cost of beans. But it's far from an accurate reflection of what that pot costs to serve.
I had a friend in the coffee shop business and it cost him about $0.04 per POT for coffee.
I think it's neat how you still keep in touch with your friends who live in 1963.
Green coffee beans trade at wholesale prices of somewhere upward of one dollar per pound on international markets. Specialty, fair trade, organic, or higher-grade beans will cost more.
Let's assume that your friend is using a small, 50-ounce coffeepot. Figure that will take a couple of ounces of ground, roasted coffee. Two ounces at one dollar per pound is a bit more than twelve cents' worth of green beans. That assumes that there is no cost to roast the coffee, package the coffee, store the coffee, or deliver the coffee; it also ignores the fact that coffee is actually trading closer to $1.66, and that it will lose another fifteen percent of its mass when roasted.
Heck, if the barista making the coffee earns $7.25 an hour (the U.S. federal minimum wage), then four cents pays her for a hair less than twenty seconds of work. I hope that you're not expecting anyone to spend time to wash those coffeepots and mugs. If the coffeemaker draws 1200 watts, and electricity is ten cents per kWh, then the ten minutes it took to brew the pot just burned through half our budget: 2 cents.
Why convert to electricity in the first place? If you pump water to a higher place you might as well let the windmills pump it directly (that's why the Dutch invented them after all), you have an immediate buffer in the lake so you can never pump too hard, and the hydroelectric generators can be throttled easily. You have the benefits of a buffer and a higher efficiency, as well as a more simple design (no high-tech generators needed in every windmill). Damn great idea, if I say it myself...
Ah, so instead of placing a small generator at each wind turbine and connecting it to the grid with wire, you now need to build a heavy-duty water pump at each turbine. That probably requires appreciably more maintenance and lubrication and cost(especially once you include the mechanical linkages from the hub of the turbine down to the pump).
And it gets worse. Each wind turbine now needs to be connected to an ample source of water at the bottom, and to a high-level reservoir at the top. Does each turbine get its own supply canal and reservoir lake (constructed at ruinous cost, and carefully and expensively placed so that none of these water works interferes with its own turbine's supply of wind)? Or do we link the pumps together with an extensive piping system, in which internal friction negates the efficiency benefits we accrued through not making the intermediate conversion to electricity in the first place?
I had an aunt who would climb a tree to find the worst possible guy when she could have stood on the ground and dated a nice guy.
Truly, one should never date guys who live in trees.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, but almost no guns. The US has less than half their suicide rate, with guns freely available.
And, clearly, the availability of firearms is certainly the only social, political, cultural, or economic difference between those two countries.
People who want to commit suicide will use whatever means handy. The availability of one method, guns, has no impact on that.
Not having a gun handy very likely doesn't affect the number of suicide attempts, but it may reduce the number of successes. Not all methods of suicide are equally effective.
They're going to know the location of a tool that's as interesting to them as a socket wrench or a drill.
I would like to know where you're getting your socket wrenches.
If you want to post anonymously and for free (although this is a one-time ninety-nine cent fee, so it doesn't exactly break the bank) then there are lots of venues in which to do so.
Different parts of the internet offer different ways to screen out trolls, with varying degrees of success and with varying costs and benefits. Some newspapers impose lengthy delays (and incur significant costs to themselves) on comment posting to allow for their own moderators to screen comments. Slashdot has a moderation system which is generally good at elevating comments supportive of our constituency's preferred varieties of groupthink, but which may handle less-popular viewpoints less well (even when expressed cogently, politely, and coherently, such views face a toss-up between up- and down-moderation), and which also allows well-written posts that don't appear within an hour or two of the story to disappear from the radar of most readers.
And this isn't exactly a new concept for newspapers. Are there any serious newspapers with appreciable circulation numbers that allow anonymous letters to the editor in their print editions?
See also: The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Penny Arcade. Maybe this is the right solution to the GIFT problem for this particular institution. I look forward to seeing if this is effective in improving signal-to-noise.
It's to instill fear, and reduce the (speculative) lost sales.
Bingo. The parent post has it correct.
The purpose of the lawsuits was never to directly recover money from individuals who have engaged in occasional acts of copyright infringement. Rather, it was to create the perception that online infringement could have dire consequences (dealing with even a groundless lawsuit is a tremendous time sink, and even a "small" settlement can run to four or five figures), and thereby (in theory) encourage people to pay for at least some of the music that they otherwise would have downloaded for free.
While the $16 million appears on the balance sheet as legal fees, it would far more accurately be charged to the marketing budget as an advertising campaign. I doubt that the RIAA members ever expected these lawsuits to directly recoup their own costs. Looked at as a marketing expense, $16 million is a drop in the bucket.
Whatever you might think of the RIAA's economic model or the ethics of using threats of extortionate legal action to frighten consumers, the bloggers and reporters who are framing this story as "OMG the RIAA are SOOO stoopid! They only got $391K from their $16 million lawsuits! Hahahaha Looosers!" have entirely missed the point. Indeed, they're apparently even more foolish than they accuse the RIAA of being.
An intelligent analysis of the situation might look at what the RIAA's members did or did not receive in return for this $16 million campaign. Did they receive value for money? Has there been a change in the amount of private, noncommercial infringement? Have sales numbers been improved? Has public perception of, and attitudes toward, copyright infringement changed? Has this campaign generated a lot of free publicity, and has that publicity been a net positive for the 'message' that the labels wish to push?
You can actually make a radiation shield that lets light pass through it by simply 'impregnating' acrylic with lead?
Yes. Such barrier materials are widely commercially available, for exactly this sort of purpose: here's the first hit I found. The material is usually horrifically expensive, but that's true of virtually any special-purpose material with scientific or medical applications. Leaded glass is also often used in radiology suites.
Doesn't anyone ever use Google before asking questions?
I'm single. My taxes are MUCH higher than someone who is married, with multiple dependents. I also rent instead of owning a home, which means I don't get those tax breaks either.
Now, I don't think there should be a tax on being gay, but why wouldn't Google pay ME more to cover my additional tax burden? Why only for sexual preference?
For better or for worse, it has been decided that there is a social benefit to easing the tax burden on individuals who have dependents (generally dependent children). This actually does make sense to some extent, as those children do provide indirect benefits to all of us, and it makes sense to defray some of the costs associated with raising them. (When they grow up and pay taxes of their own, it's everyone's social security they'll be paying for. You're paying a premium now to not have to shell out to raise the kids who will fund your retirement.)
Perhaps more important, the decision to have children (or not) is one that is open to everyone. (Even the infertile can choose to adopt.) The decision to rent accommodation or to buy a home is open to everyone. (Yes, you may have to make other choices, about your education, about places you are willing to live, about careers and salaries you are willing to work for.)
On the other hand, sexual orientation isn't a choice. These people were being penalized for a fundamental part of who they were; for something that they can't change no matter how hard they work or what other decisions they might make in life. That is why Google is paying same-sex partners more.
Can't wait a year to start filing joint tax returns? Go ahead and get married. Gay, straight, somewhere in between, it doesn't matter; it's legal! (Just one spouse per person, however. They're still picky about that.)
Of course, your health insurance is going to be a lot less expensive anyway -- visits to your doctor are covered by the government.
So do you believe it is always OK for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexual preference, or only do so when it favors homosexuals? I strongly suspect that you are a hypocrite and would be protesting any stated policy that advocated paying homosexuals less than straights rather than more.
If that were the case, it would indeed be an ugly hypocrisy.
Of course, your inflammatory strawman argument is irrelevant to the present discussion. What Google is doing here is ensuring that same-sex couples receive the same benefits package for the same price as their heterosexual coworkers. At the end of the day, the straight couples and the gay couples get the same health care and enjoy the same take-home pay after taxes. What is unfair or discriminatory about that?
Surely you're not arguing that same-sex couples should pay higher taxes than heterosexual couples on identical benefits?
Many USicans only have Saturdays free to run errands. Ending services on Saturday is a burden to them.
How does a lack of Saturday delivery interfere with running errands? I find your comment confusing.
For comparison, I offer the Canadian system. While delivery only occurs on Monday through Friday, postal services are often available on an extended schedule. Canada Post maintains a network of service counters (often in drug, convenience, and grocery stores) which provide parcel services, sell money orders, and supply copies of frequently-used government documents (passport applications, tax forms). These local outlets also act as pickup points for parcels which are too large for home delivery (the stuff that didn't fit in your mailbox while you were out).
Many of these counters have extended weeknight hours (beyond typical nine-to-five business hours) and offer Saturday hours; some are even open on Sunday afternoons. (The retailers hosting the counters have probably realized that extended postal hours can attract customers.) In other words, Canadian Saturday-errand-runners have no trouble obtaining postal services, even in the absence of Saturday delivery.
Letters and smaller parcels can, of course, be sent at any time simply by dropping in a post box.
Suppose Page and Brin started out hiring their peers: fellow college students and recent grads, people that they're comfortable working with, and (perhaps more important) people who are willing to work long hours cheaply for a startup. Immediately, that means that the group of individuals making up senior management today - or at least those with the most seniority - will mostly be in their thirties, no ageism or conspiracy required. For a variety of reasons, people tend to hire subordinates who are younger. (I'm not saying that this is a hard and fast rule, only a tendency.) Younger people are (again) usually less expensive to hire, and they can be groomed for long-term future promotion and as a source of institutional memory and continuity. Younger managers may feel uncomfortable or insecure giving direction to workers who are much older.
In other words, it's going to be another twenty years before the founders and big bosses get close to retirement age -- which means it's probably going to be almost that long before you see a more uniform distribution of ages among their employees.
wastes $60 billion annually on Medicare fraud.
I was surprised by that figure - losing $60 billion to fraud on $600 billion (roughly) total spending? That's damn scary, and would mean that one dollar out of every ten was being paid out for fraudulent claims.
Fortunately, I read the linked press release. The actual quote is:
First, the $60 billion isn't solely from fraud. It's from the somewhat more nebulous "fraud, waste, and abuse". No breakdown is provided for those three categories. ("Waste" is a particularly difficult one - does that include the unnecessary blood tests or CT scans ordered by a physician who fears malpractice suits?)
Second, the $60 billion figure is linked to the "health care system", and identified as only three percent of "total health care spending". The wording is unclear, but it may be referring to fraud, waste, and abuse in health care in general, rather than simply confined to the Medicare program. What is the scope of programs covered by this claim?
Finally, the same press release also notes that
This seems to suggest that there are steps being taken to reduce the size of the problem; in one year this "waste" was reduced by a quarter.
Having a paper in Nature is the gold standard in research and I don't think this stance will do their researchers any good.
Nature isn't the only journal in the top tier. Within any given field, there are slightly more specific journals with equal 'street cred' -- Cell is seen as just as important among biologists; The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet are just as good for clinical researchers; I imagine that other fields have similar 'blockbuster' titles.
And if you're not going for Nature, then Science is their major competitor for the 'general' scientific audience. Similar impact factor, similar value on one's CV. (When the human genome was sequenced, the Human Genome Project published in Nature, while Celera simultaenously published their sequence in Science.)
And then there are the up-and-comers — the new open-access Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are both just a few years old, but already publishing a lot of cutting-edge research -- with impact factors to match. And since they are open acess (Creative Commons licensed), they don't charge any subscription fees. (And open access means that they may be cited more often, because more people can read them.)
What makes this a problem in my mind is that Google Maps doesn't offer a "detour me" feature that allows you to easily avoid specified nodes in the commute graph.
Well, they don't quite have a "please avoid these nodes" feature, they do have a "please include these nodes". When Google Maps displays a route, you can click and drag anywhere along the route to force a different path. You can add multiple nodes if necessary; the path finder will go through all of them in order.
No, it doesn't guarantee that your new route will be the best or fastest detour, but if you tug sideways on a node that's in the detour region, you can watch the suggested route update live until you have a path around the blockage. Piece of cake.
I'm suing Black Berry as well. It told me to take a right and I drove into a lake.
Stop using your Blackberry while you're driving, asshat!
Seriously, I would find it deliciously poetic if, at the time of the accident, the driver in this case was distracted while typing email on his mobile device.
In the future, of course, all Blackberry users just need to get one of these essential safety devices.
It might do, at that.
The current price for unleaded gasoline in Germany is about 1.40 euros per liter, and it was up to 1.57 euros in the summer of 2008. That makes the current price about $6.60 US per gallon, and the peak just over $9 per gallon.
Because of these horrendous fuel prices, the German people suffer terribly. They are forced to drive tiny, ugly, uncomfortable econoboxes with weak, underpowered, dreadful engines. Germans look with barely-concealed envy at the spacious, high-quality, fuel-spendthrift U.S. automobile.
I cannot doubt that Germany's automakers desperately want to earn the same financial success and worldwide reputation enjoyed by their American counterparts.