An amendment that states that every time someone sponsors or votes for a law that is found to be unconstitutional, they get fined their entire yearly salary, and are barred from ever holding the position of lawmaker.
Well, that solution certainly won't have any unintended consequences. Some of the more serious flaws with your proposal, in no particular order:
Final rulings on constitutionality can take many years to come down, particularly in cases that proceed all the way to the state or federal Supreme Court. By the time a final decision is reached, the lawmaker will have had the opportunity to retire without penalty. The public will likely have had the chance to consider the lawmaker's conduct and vote on it in an election (why would the courts get to overrule a public vote on a lawmaker's fitness?). Hell, the lawmaker may even have had time to reconsider and rethink his ways; this sort of 'political death penalty' offers no opportunity for reform.
There are often genuine disagreements over points of constitutional law. Supreme Court justices seldom reach unanimous verdicts, why would we expect or demand that lawmakers 'guess right' every time?
Lawmakers may be reluctant to introduce legislation that is likely constitutional but which treads close to a constitutional question. Most people (and most courts) agree that there are reasonable limits to the freedom of speech (the canonical issue of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater). Would a lawmaker avoid introducing such laws today if he feared massive penalties for failing to strike exactly the correct balance between competing constitutional interests?
If you punish all lawmakers who even vote for a law, they'll all be too damn scared to vote on anything. On the other hand, if you only punish lawmakers who sponsor legislation, young lawmakers will simply have all their bills introduced by older, ready-to-retire lawmakers.
There will be (further) efforts by ruling parties to stack the land's high courts, both to protect their own legislation and legislators, and to try to force out members of the opposition.
Will lawmakers be penalized if the Supreme Court revisits a previous decision? What happens if a law is deemed constitutional in 1970 but ruled unconstitutional in 1990? How about the other way around--what if a law is ruled unconstitutional in 1970, but revisited in 1990 and found to be a-okay after all? Do you give the legislator his money back twenty years later, and can he sue the Supreme Court for his twenty years out of office? (Compare Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education; or look at the Supreme Court's various reversals on capital punishment.)
While the "Right to Keep and Bear Property" isn't one of the explicitly enumerated ones in the Bill of Rights, the "Right to Keep and Bear Property" is the Right upon which *all* other Rights are founded.
Without that absolute right, the notion of having any Freedom or Liberty is ludicrous.
Yes, there's an obvious contradiction in being told that one is Free and at Liberty, but also told that they cannot own, possess or use property without obtaining prior permission from their Masters.
Bollocks. It's been said that your 'right' to swing your fist ends at my nose. One individual's right to Freedom and Liberty (and Motherhood, and Apple Pie) doesn't trump the right of another to exactly the same thing.
Yep--society expects you to fill out paperwork, do appropriate training, and present some sort of reasonably good reasons before you're permitted to own or handle radioactive materials. Why? Because if you mishandle radioisotopes - unintentionally or deliberately - it's going to damage my property. (Not to mention the risk to my Life and Liberty.) Whose absolute 'Right to Keep and Bear Property' wins? Do I have to give up my absolute right to grow tomatoes in my backyard because you have an absolute right to store nuclear materials in your garden shed?
Your 'absolute right' to make your own rules ended when your ancestors decided to come out of the hills and join civilization. Balances are struck between the rights of different individuals and groups. You are welcome to disagree with the processes by which those balances are established, or where particular lines are drawn. Insisting that a free society must include an absolute 'Right to Keep and Bear Property' is an interesting discussion topic for a freshman philosophy course--but is otherwise a laughably indefensible position.
Now, how do you explain that you've just had radiation treatment to the mindless TSA buffoon who's found you're radioactive?
This isn't really a new problem. Radiotherapy patients were getting picked up by radiation monitors in the New York subway system years ago. See for example this case, which involves a fellow who was searched (strip searched) twice in Manhattan subway stations during a three-week period. This was back in 2002. My understanding is that most (American) clinicians are aware of the potential problem, and know enough to send their patients out the door with explanatory paperwork and pager numbers for medical personnel who can explain to police why certain individuals are radioactive.
Heck, it's been long enough that I suspect most police/Homeland Security officers may actually be familiar with this potential for false positives. Now, I admit that the 'radioactive pets' problem is a new one to me, and there's a large part of my mind that says, "Quit torturing the cat. Let it go. Put the animal to rest peacefully, rather than have it get arrested, detained, and blown up by Homeland Security."
What a wonderful invention allows instanteneous intercontinental communication! Who is it that we have to thank?
Actually, the largest share of intercontinental data traffic is now carried on submarine fiber optic cables. The bandwidth through geosync satellites was getting to be too cramped. For some applications, the speed-of-light delay (it's a long way out to geosync orbit) may cause trouble as well.
Still, your heart's in the right place. Sir Arthur will be missed.
great so now all the "early" (2 years+) adopters got screwed, paying more for a lousy product to begin with. I wonder if they'll give a credit to those early adopters....
My God--you're right. Since I can now buy Wing Commander (the film or the game) for five bucks from the discount bin, I demand a refund of the extra money I paid when the product first came on the market. Wait...what?
In nearly every industry for nearly every product, early adopters pay a premium for the privilege.
Who takes an unknown disc that they find in a newspaper and sticks it into their machine without so much as reading the cover? It says right on the thing, don't use it in a Mac. Then they want to complain?
You're right. Someone saw something that looked like a DVD, and treated it like a DVD. The fools. (The warning on the disc was, apparently, the entirely clear and obvious phrase "NO APPLE SLOT IN DRIVE" in the bottom corner of the label. You did look at the article, right?)
Tomorrow I'm going to leave a platter of poisoned brownies in the lunchroom at work, along with a big sign saying "BROWNIES". It's all on the up-and-up as long as I leave a "NO MOUTH FOOD" label in the bottom corner of the sign, right? I can't wait to see how many suckers I can catch. Ha ha!
Way to go guys ! You saved $42 million but increased the chance of the entire $500 million project failing due to not enough preflight tests! Good choice there ! Nice one !
Leaving aside the serious issue of reduced preflight testing (*cough* Hubble *cough*), we're still paying $550 million (the 2006 budgeted amount) instead of $592 million (the requested total amount), a reduction of 7.1%. In exchange for those savings, we're getting 3.5 years of science instead of 4.0--a reduction of 12.5%. Way to go, guys.
So, the mission is launched in 2008, and 3.5 years after that they come hat in hand back to NASA and Congress, and ask for an extra $50 million to 'extend' the mission. The hardware's already up there, they just want to fund the monitoring and analysis. Why throw away a perfectly good satellite while it can still do science? (Note repeated extension of funding for other projects beyond their expected lifetimes when they continued to generate results; the recent Mars rovers are perhaps the most dramatic recent examples.)
The result? Stern gets to look good now for cracking down on 'waste'. The scientists get to look good for being 'team players' and working with management. Four years from now, NASA gets to look good for having an ongoing successful mission that was 'on budget'. Congress gets to look good for opening its wallet to science to 'save' an already-successful project from the dustbin. (Depending on when the probe actually gets launched, there will be at least two and possibly three Congressional elections between now and when the project runs out of money.) The same money ultimately gets spent.
Assuming the OLPC really does cost the equivalent of 30% per capita income in India that means if they just buy 3 million of them thats the same as 1 million teachers salaries.
Well, no--it doesn't mean that at all. Per capita income is the total income of the country divided by the total population. That population includes children, the elderly, the infirm, the stay-at-home parents, the unemployed. In the 2001 census, India recorded a population of 1029 million (a shade more than a billion). Of those, 402 million were employed at some point during the course of the year, while only 313 million were employed for at least six months of the year. I don't have data on the number of Indians who were employed full-time for the entire year. In other words, the OLPC cost is not more than about 10% of the average full-time salary, and may be appreciably less.
Then, of course, the assumption is made that a teacher's salary is going to be roughly equal to the average full-time salary. I have no idea if that assumption is valid. How does a teacher's salary compare to that of the average agricultural worker or ditch digger? How about to salary of a guy who sits in a cube in Delhi and answers tech support calls from the States or the fellow who rings up purchases in the local grocery store? Do teachers earn a premium salary for their level of education and responsibility as they do in the United States? It's entirely possible that the cost of an OLPC runs to only two or three percent of the average Indian teacher's salary. (In that case, the relative costs would be comparable to a starting U.S. teacher at $30,000 per year and a $1000 Dell laptop.)
Are you crazy, man! Every DNS, NTP, and DHCP server out there needs it's own quad core with 8GB RAM! Our departmental wiki needs a whole load balanced cluster.
Ah, I remember my days in the Internet Pornography Retrieval, Testing And Evaluation Department with great fondness....
The part that I responded to by saying "I have no comment on whether or not they've done their study correctly" and "I agree completely that they present insufficient amounts of their raw data"? That 'rest of your post'?
Meanwhile, the authors describe their work in the article text as "an ongoing double-blind controlled laboratory study". Whether or not they did it correctly is difficult to say, and I agree with you that the information that they present to describe their methods is inadequate--but once again you leap to conclusions based on inadequate reading of the material before you.
Going back to your original post, you describe radio-sensitivity as "a COMPLETE load of horse manure." Well and good, and I'm inclined to agree that that is most likely true. Nevertheless, you've let your own bias against the experimenter's (poorly-supported) conclusion colour your reading of the material, and it's damaged your credibility. Again looking at your first post, you assert their bias based on their use of the word 'sham' (which is absurd, as noted). You criticise their paucity of statistical data (a valid objection). You doubt that they did a double-blind study (wrong; it's in the introduction to the article). You finally draw a conclusion (based on your flawed analysis) and make a bold statement of your own bias.
If you're going to present an analysis that concludes someone else's work is useless crap, you shouldn't be surprised that someone reads your own work with as much attention to detail.
a microwave oven emits less radiation density then the amounts used in this study
Er, I think you lost a decimal place (or three) there, friend.
Figure a 1000 watt microwave oven with 1 kg (about 2 pounds) of ground beef defrosting. The bulk of the microwaves emitted are absorbed by the food, giving a SAR (specific absorption rate) of 1000 watts per kilogram (W/kg). The average mass of a human head, meanwhile, is about 5 kg; that makes an SAR of 200 W/kg.
The SAR used in this study was an average of 1.4 W/kg. This low level results in minimal local heating, particularly in a well-perfused part of the body like the brain (lots of blood flowing through equals lots of capacity to draw off excess heat to the rest of the body.) On the other hand, if you were to stick your head in the microwave (after jimmying the safety interlocks) I guarantee that you would find the level of local heating to be...uncomfortable.
That's what they call the 'non-RF' exposure tests. No, they're not biased from the start.
While I'm seldom one to flame, you're certainly made yourself look like a right fool to anyone who knows anything about designing a properly controlled and blinded study.
'Sham' treatment, 'mock' treatment, 'placebo' treatment are all synonyms widely used in the scientific literature to describe non-functional imitation treatments given in a blinded (or much better, double-blinded) study. It's called a 'sham' treatment because that's what it is--a fake. A knockoff. Looks the same, but doesn't do anything. The term isn't prejudicial or pejorative; it's only descriptive. Fire up PubMed and you'll find nearly forty thousand scientific papers that use the term 'sham' in their title or abstract. (For comparison, about a hundred thousand use the word 'placebo'.)
I have no comment on whether or not they've done their study correctly. A number of other posters here have identified a number of potential flaws and pitfalls in their methodology. I agree completely that they present insufficient amounts of their raw data. Nevertheless, concluding that they are biased based on the fact that they correctly use scientific jargon seems...careless. Idiot.
Actually, that smell is bacteria getting a foothold on the once sterile urine.
No, it isn't. Urine contains some chemical waste products that the body doesn't need, and those waste products don't smell particularly appealing. On the other hand, most bugs don't particularly like living in those waste products, either--only a very small fraction of bacteria are content colonizing the normal urinary tract. Fresh out of the body, urine will smell--even when it is sterile (as it ought to be).
And that makes me wonder what the risk of hijacking would be if carrying guns was allowed (even encouraged?) on airplanes.
Hm. Leaving aside for the moment that a substantial fraction of hijackings don't currently lead to fatalities (an outcome that would practically be guaranteed under your proposal), there are the 'unintended consequences'.
How would airlines or the FAA feel about having highly flammable and/or explosive gunpowders in the passenger cabin? An electrical fault above your luggage bin might start cooking off a clip of ammo rather than just singeing your carry-on. The ammunition would be dangerous to evacuating passengers, rescue personnel, and firefighters in the event of a (nominally) survivable crash that was accompanied by fire.
In a confined space with hundreds of people, is it wise to have frightened, twitchy amateurs handling firearms?
If you thought the Virginia Tech guy got a lot of press, think about the next nutjob who decides he wants a flashy suicide-by-plane. Walking down the aisle with his trusty, TSA-approved semiauto, how many people will he shoot before someone manages to return fire? (Will they return fire accurately?) Will the extra press attention appeal to a certain type of psychotic mind?
What do you do about the hijacker who decides to put some ballistic armor in his carry-on? Kevlar vests don't look like anything special on a baggage x-ray.
For the terrorist who just wants to bring down the plane and doesn't care about killing himself to do it, his gun and clip(s) provide him with a handy place to store his plastic explosive or conceal other nasty things in a difficult-to-xray way.
In other words, a heavily-armed flight might be less likely to be a victim of a successful hijacking--but you'd trade that risk for a whole bunch of more serious ones.
critics is just a shorthand for "Insurance Companies" right?
In principle, we could probably keep you alive longer and in better shape if we had a full medical team follow you around for the rest of your life. The could monitor your blood pressure, sample your urine and stool, perform a full-body MRI every week to check for changes, have thoracic and neurosurgeons standing by....
In practice, we recognize that such an approach is ridiculously costly and provides a very small marginal benefit over telling you to report problems to your phsyician, and encouraging you to get a physical on a regular basis. We have already accepted that we are willing to limit the amount of money and effort we expend to provide a health benefit. (Even if we are unwilling to impose such limits, there is a maximum amount of money available, and a maximum number of medical practitioners who can be trained and hired.)
So where do you draw the line? What treatments do you fund? How do you allocate finite resources to give the greatest benefit to the most people? There are various metrics for looking at treatment (and non-treatment) outcomes. If you start to delve into the field, you might see acronyms like QALYs: Quality-Adjusted Life Years. One year of perfect health is one QALY; death is worth zero; various states of disease and disability are assigned intermediate scores. Difficult - indeed, sometimes rather arbitrary - estimates of quality of life are made.
Treatments are often evaluated based on their expected (or demonstrated, in clinical trials) effectiveness in increasing a patient's anticipated QALYs. A drug that will make you live ten years longer is superior to one that will extend your life only five years; a treatment that gives you ten more years of mountain climbing will score better than one that leaves you bedridden. Public health systems and private insurance companies will tend to seek the biggest increase in QALYs for their buck. Each will also (formally or informally) establish guidelines and thresholds for the maximum that they will pay for a QALY. About five years ago, I saw a survey that suggested that about a hundred thousand U.S. dollars was the approximate cap on an acceptable price per QALY. (Remember that 1 QALY might come from a surgical procedure that adds - on average - a year of perfect health, or it might be a drug that eliminates chronic pain for five or ten years.)
You might disagree on exactly how quality of life ought to be measured. You might disagree on the price-per-QALY cap selected. What you can't get away from is the fact that health resources are finite, and that at some point decisions have to be made about their allocation.
Look at everything we have gotten out of the space race so far. Microwaves (communications and ovens)...
I'm pretty sure that microwave ovens were developed at a military subcontractor who was building radar equipment for use on Earth--nothing to do with the space race. The first commercial microwave oven was sold in 1947. Microwave communications relays, meanwhile, were in wide use for cross-country telephone communcations in the United States starting well before Sputnik was launched.
NASA has produced a lot of cool spinoffs, but microwave technology isn't one of them.
Wind might always blow at very high altitudes - but solar works only during the day. So, you either have storage, you ramp coal power plants up and down from day to night, or black out the customers.
That assumes - incorrectly - that electricity demand is constant all day, and that only one or two technologies must meet all of the demand. In North America demand is highest on hot summer afternoons. Conveniently, those same hot summer afternoons are also the best weather for solar energy. Even in winter, demand is higher during daylight hours and early evening (West Coast solar could still supply some East Coast evening demand; we could also increase winter sun late in the day by staying on daylight saving time year 'round) than overnight. (The daytime demand is something like 30% higher than the overnight usage.)
Base load can then be made up of hydroelectric, nuclear, and high-altitude wind power--all of those can operate 24/7, without emissions. Additional peak load could be met by (more-costly, greenhouse-gas-emitting, but still fairly clean and fast-starting) natural gas turbines.
Say in an "old school voting system" you had a company in charge of transporting ballot boxes from the booths to the counting stations, and one of the trucks took a "minor detour" on the way, maybe for the convenience of the company or the employees (take a leak or buy a drink etc).
I can't speak for other jurisdictions, but I know in the "old school" country of Canada (with its valuable dollar, its gay weddings, its high-quality ganja, its proven oil reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia, its polite people, and its rejection of firearms in favour of elegant weapons from a more civilized age) the ballots aren't taken to a central location prior to counting.
Ballots are hand-counted at the polling station immediately after the polls close. The ballots are only physically handled by two individuals (each nominated by a different political party), but representatives from any candidate or party are permitted to observe the process.
Actually, I meant "sorted according to a gradient".
Graduated has "Arranged in grades or gradations; arranged according to the degree of difficulty or importance" as one of its definitions, so it could be used in the sense that you're looking for. If you prefer, 'gradated' is also a real word with the meaning that you seek. 'Gradiated', however, is not a word.
My guess is that the submarine sensed the flotilla sailing on a collision course and surfaced to identify and save itself. That still doesn't excuse the US Sonar Operators for not sensing it.
Indeed. If only there were some way for a submarine to evade a surface vessel. Perhaps some method could be devised that involves going around a surface vessel by travelling in some direction that the surface ship couldn't.
We'll have to put our engineers to work on this problem.
For cancer scanning, you'd really want a PET (positron emission tomography)
That's a good idea. A home scanning technique that requires intravenously-administered, short-half-life-made-on-site-in-a-cyclotron radioisotopes. Er, what?
PET is something that you would use to confirm a diagnosis (look for metabolic hotspots if cancer is suspected) or detect metastases (tumours distant from the original site). It's never the first tool that a diagnostician reaches for.
Besides, the resolution of PET is crap compared to MR. If a hypothetical hypochondriac really wanted to keep an eye out for tiny changes that might signal malignancy (or some other disorder), he'd want MR's higher resolution and zero ionizing radiation exposure.
I'm very glad to help cancer research, but will this also result in the development of drug patents that (a) bankrupt some patients, and (b) prevent other researchers from improving on those drugs?
It it makes you feel better, the bioinformatics team is being led by a Canadian researcher out of a Candian institution (the Ontario Cancer Institute at Princess Margaret Hospital, jointly with the University of Toronto). In Canada, chemotherapy drugs are provided to patients free of charge, and pricing is controlled by the provincial government.
If you're being screwed by the drug companies in your jurisdiction, you need to talk to your government representatives. In the meantime, the counties with proper socialized medicine appreciate your assistance with the project, and would like to extend our thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that solution certainly won't have any unintended consequences. Some of the more serious flaws with your proposal, in no particular order:
Final rulings on constitutionality can take many years to come down, particularly in cases that proceed all the way to the state or federal Supreme Court. By the time a final decision is reached, the lawmaker will have had the opportunity to retire without penalty. The public will likely have had the chance to consider the lawmaker's conduct and vote on it in an election (why would the courts get to overrule a public vote on a lawmaker's fitness?). Hell, the lawmaker may even have had time to reconsider and rethink his ways; this sort of 'political death penalty' offers no opportunity for reform.
There are often genuine disagreements over points of constitutional law. Supreme Court justices seldom reach unanimous verdicts, why would we expect or demand that lawmakers 'guess right' every time?
Lawmakers may be reluctant to introduce legislation that is likely constitutional but which treads close to a constitutional question. Most people (and most courts) agree that there are reasonable limits to the freedom of speech (the canonical issue of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater). Would a lawmaker avoid introducing such laws today if he feared massive penalties for failing to strike exactly the correct balance between competing constitutional interests?
If you punish all lawmakers who even vote for a law, they'll all be too damn scared to vote on anything. On the other hand, if you only punish lawmakers who sponsor legislation, young lawmakers will simply have all their bills introduced by older, ready-to-retire lawmakers.
There will be (further) efforts by ruling parties to stack the land's high courts, both to protect their own legislation and legislators, and to try to force out members of the opposition.
Will lawmakers be penalized if the Supreme Court revisits a previous decision? What happens if a law is deemed constitutional in 1970 but ruled unconstitutional in 1990? How about the other way around--what if a law is ruled unconstitutional in 1970, but revisited in 1990 and found to be a-okay after all? Do you give the legislator his money back twenty years later, and can he sue the Supreme Court for his twenty years out of office? (Compare Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education; or look at the Supreme Court's various reversals on capital punishment.)
Bollocks. It's been said that your 'right' to swing your fist ends at my nose. One individual's right to Freedom and Liberty (and Motherhood, and Apple Pie) doesn't trump the right of another to exactly the same thing.
Yep--society expects you to fill out paperwork, do appropriate training, and present some sort of reasonably good reasons before you're permitted to own or handle radioactive materials. Why? Because if you mishandle radioisotopes - unintentionally or deliberately - it's going to damage my property. (Not to mention the risk to my Life and Liberty.) Whose absolute 'Right to Keep and Bear Property' wins? Do I have to give up my absolute right to grow tomatoes in my backyard because you have an absolute right to store nuclear materials in your garden shed?
Your 'absolute right' to make your own rules ended when your ancestors decided to come out of the hills and join civilization. Balances are struck between the rights of different individuals and groups. You are welcome to disagree with the processes by which those balances are established, or where particular lines are drawn. Insisting that a free society must include an absolute 'Right to Keep and Bear Property' is an interesting discussion topic for a freshman philosophy course--but is otherwise a laughably indefensible position.
This isn't really a new problem. Radiotherapy patients were getting picked up by radiation monitors in the New York subway system years ago. See for example this case, which involves a fellow who was searched (strip searched) twice in Manhattan subway stations during a three-week period. This was back in 2002. My understanding is that most (American) clinicians are aware of the potential problem, and know enough to send their patients out the door with explanatory paperwork and pager numbers for medical personnel who can explain to police why certain individuals are radioactive.
Heck, it's been long enough that I suspect most police/Homeland Security officers may actually be familiar with this potential for false positives. Now, I admit that the 'radioactive pets' problem is a new one to me, and there's a large part of my mind that says, "Quit torturing the cat. Let it go. Put the animal to rest peacefully, rather than have it get arrested, detained, and blown up by Homeland Security."
Actually, the largest share of intercontinental data traffic is now carried on submarine fiber optic cables. The bandwidth through geosync satellites was getting to be too cramped. For some applications, the speed-of-light delay (it's a long way out to geosync orbit) may cause trouble as well.
Still, your heart's in the right place. Sir Arthur will be missed.
My God--you're right. Since I can now buy Wing Commander (the film or the game) for five bucks from the discount bin, I demand a refund of the extra money I paid when the product first came on the market. Wait...what?
In nearly every industry for nearly every product, early adopters pay a premium for the privilege.
You're right. Someone saw something that looked like a DVD, and treated it like a DVD. The fools. (The warning on the disc was, apparently, the entirely clear and obvious phrase "NO APPLE SLOT IN DRIVE" in the bottom corner of the label. You did look at the article, right?)
Tomorrow I'm going to leave a platter of poisoned brownies in the lunchroom at work, along with a big sign saying "BROWNIES". It's all on the up-and-up as long as I leave a "NO MOUTH FOOD" label in the bottom corner of the sign, right? I can't wait to see how many suckers I can catch. Ha ha!
Leaving aside the serious issue of reduced preflight testing (*cough* Hubble *cough*), we're still paying $550 million (the 2006 budgeted amount) instead of $592 million (the requested total amount), a reduction of 7.1%. In exchange for those savings, we're getting 3.5 years of science instead of 4.0--a reduction of 12.5%. Way to go, guys.
So, the mission is launched in 2008, and 3.5 years after that they come hat in hand back to NASA and Congress, and ask for an extra $50 million to 'extend' the mission. The hardware's already up there, they just want to fund the monitoring and analysis. Why throw away a perfectly good satellite while it can still do science? (Note repeated extension of funding for other projects beyond their expected lifetimes when they continued to generate results; the recent Mars rovers are perhaps the most dramatic recent examples.)
The result? Stern gets to look good now for cracking down on 'waste'. The scientists get to look good for being 'team players' and working with management. Four years from now, NASA gets to look good for having an ongoing successful mission that was 'on budget'. Congress gets to look good for opening its wallet to science to 'save' an already-successful project from the dustbin. (Depending on when the probe actually gets launched, there will be at least two and possibly three Congressional elections between now and when the project runs out of money.) The same money ultimately gets spent.
Well, no--it doesn't mean that at all. Per capita income is the total income of the country divided by the total population. That population includes children, the elderly, the infirm, the stay-at-home parents, the unemployed. In the 2001 census, India recorded a population of 1029 million (a shade more than a billion). Of those, 402 million were employed at some point during the course of the year, while only 313 million were employed for at least six months of the year. I don't have data on the number of Indians who were employed full-time for the entire year. In other words, the OLPC cost is not more than about 10% of the average full-time salary, and may be appreciably less.
Then, of course, the assumption is made that a teacher's salary is going to be roughly equal to the average full-time salary. I have no idea if that assumption is valid. How does a teacher's salary compare to that of the average agricultural worker or ditch digger? How about to salary of a guy who sits in a cube in Delhi and answers tech support calls from the States or the fellow who rings up purchases in the local grocery store? Do teachers earn a premium salary for their level of education and responsibility as they do in the United States? It's entirely possible that the cost of an OLPC runs to only two or three percent of the average Indian teacher's salary. (In that case, the relative costs would be comparable to a starting U.S. teacher at $30,000 per year and a $1000 Dell laptop.)
Ah, I remember my days in the Internet Pornography Retrieval, Testing And Evaluation Department with great fondness....
The part that I responded to by saying "I have no comment on whether or not they've done their study correctly" and "I agree completely that they present insufficient amounts of their raw data"? That 'rest of your post'?
Meanwhile, the authors describe their work in the article text as "an ongoing double-blind controlled laboratory study". Whether or not they did it correctly is difficult to say, and I agree with you that the information that they present to describe their methods is inadequate--but once again you leap to conclusions based on inadequate reading of the material before you.
Going back to your original post, you describe radio-sensitivity as "a COMPLETE load of horse manure." Well and good, and I'm inclined to agree that that is most likely true. Nevertheless, you've let your own bias against the experimenter's (poorly-supported) conclusion colour your reading of the material, and it's damaged your credibility. Again looking at your first post, you assert their bias based on their use of the word 'sham' (which is absurd, as noted). You criticise their paucity of statistical data (a valid objection). You doubt that they did a double-blind study (wrong; it's in the introduction to the article). You finally draw a conclusion (based on your flawed analysis) and make a bold statement of your own bias.
If you're going to present an analysis that concludes someone else's work is useless crap, you shouldn't be surprised that someone reads your own work with as much attention to detail.
Er, I think you lost a decimal place (or three) there, friend.
Figure a 1000 watt microwave oven with 1 kg (about 2 pounds) of ground beef defrosting. The bulk of the microwaves emitted are absorbed by the food, giving a SAR (specific absorption rate) of 1000 watts per kilogram (W/kg). The average mass of a human head, meanwhile, is about 5 kg; that makes an SAR of 200 W/kg.
The SAR used in this study was an average of 1.4 W/kg. This low level results in minimal local heating, particularly in a well-perfused part of the body like the brain (lots of blood flowing through equals lots of capacity to draw off excess heat to the rest of the body.) On the other hand, if you were to stick your head in the microwave (after jimmying the safety interlocks) I guarantee that you would find the level of local heating to be...uncomfortable.
While I'm seldom one to flame, you're certainly made yourself look like a right fool to anyone who knows anything about designing a properly controlled and blinded study.
'Sham' treatment, 'mock' treatment, 'placebo' treatment are all synonyms widely used in the scientific literature to describe non-functional imitation treatments given in a blinded (or much better, double-blinded) study. It's called a 'sham' treatment because that's what it is--a fake. A knockoff. Looks the same, but doesn't do anything. The term isn't prejudicial or pejorative; it's only descriptive. Fire up PubMed and you'll find nearly forty thousand scientific papers that use the term 'sham' in their title or abstract. (For comparison, about a hundred thousand use the word 'placebo'.)
I have no comment on whether or not they've done their study correctly. A number of other posters here have identified a number of potential flaws and pitfalls in their methodology. I agree completely that they present insufficient amounts of their raw data. Nevertheless, concluding that they are biased based on the fact that they correctly use scientific jargon seems...careless. Idiot.
No, it isn't. Urine contains some chemical waste products that the body doesn't need, and those waste products don't smell particularly appealing. On the other hand, most bugs don't particularly like living in those waste products, either--only a very small fraction of bacteria are content colonizing the normal urinary tract. Fresh out of the body, urine will smell--even when it is sterile (as it ought to be).
Hm. Leaving aside for the moment that a substantial fraction of hijackings don't currently lead to fatalities (an outcome that would practically be guaranteed under your proposal), there are the 'unintended consequences'.
How would airlines or the FAA feel about having highly flammable and/or explosive gunpowders in the passenger cabin? An electrical fault above your luggage bin might start cooking off a clip of ammo rather than just singeing your carry-on. The ammunition would be dangerous to evacuating passengers, rescue personnel, and firefighters in the event of a (nominally) survivable crash that was accompanied by fire.
In a confined space with hundreds of people, is it wise to have frightened, twitchy amateurs handling firearms?
If you thought the Virginia Tech guy got a lot of press, think about the next nutjob who decides he wants a flashy suicide-by-plane. Walking down the aisle with his trusty, TSA-approved semiauto, how many people will he shoot before someone manages to return fire? (Will they return fire accurately?) Will the extra press attention appeal to a certain type of psychotic mind?
What do you do about the hijacker who decides to put some ballistic armor in his carry-on? Kevlar vests don't look like anything special on a baggage x-ray.
For the terrorist who just wants to bring down the plane and doesn't care about killing himself to do it, his gun and clip(s) provide him with a handy place to store his plastic explosive or conceal other nasty things in a difficult-to-xray way.
In other words, a heavily-armed flight might be less likely to be a victim of a successful hijacking--but you'd trade that risk for a whole bunch of more serious ones.
In principle, we could probably keep you alive longer and in better shape if we had a full medical team follow you around for the rest of your life. The could monitor your blood pressure, sample your urine and stool, perform a full-body MRI every week to check for changes, have thoracic and neurosurgeons standing by....
In practice, we recognize that such an approach is ridiculously costly and provides a very small marginal benefit over telling you to report problems to your phsyician, and encouraging you to get a physical on a regular basis. We have already accepted that we are willing to limit the amount of money and effort we expend to provide a health benefit. (Even if we are unwilling to impose such limits, there is a maximum amount of money available, and a maximum number of medical practitioners who can be trained and hired.)
So where do you draw the line? What treatments do you fund? How do you allocate finite resources to give the greatest benefit to the most people? There are various metrics for looking at treatment (and non-treatment) outcomes. If you start to delve into the field, you might see acronyms like QALYs: Quality-Adjusted Life Years. One year of perfect health is one QALY; death is worth zero; various states of disease and disability are assigned intermediate scores. Difficult - indeed, sometimes rather arbitrary - estimates of quality of life are made.
Treatments are often evaluated based on their expected (or demonstrated, in clinical trials) effectiveness in increasing a patient's anticipated QALYs. A drug that will make you live ten years longer is superior to one that will extend your life only five years; a treatment that gives you ten more years of mountain climbing will score better than one that leaves you bedridden. Public health systems and private insurance companies will tend to seek the biggest increase in QALYs for their buck. Each will also (formally or informally) establish guidelines and thresholds for the maximum that they will pay for a QALY. About five years ago, I saw a survey that suggested that about a hundred thousand U.S. dollars was the approximate cap on an acceptable price per QALY. (Remember that 1 QALY might come from a surgical procedure that adds - on average - a year of perfect health, or it might be a drug that eliminates chronic pain for five or ten years.)
You might disagree on exactly how quality of life ought to be measured. You might disagree on the price-per-QALY cap selected. What you can't get away from is the fact that health resources are finite, and that at some point decisions have to be made about their allocation.
(-1, Karma whore)
I'm pretty sure that microwave ovens were developed at a military subcontractor who was building radar equipment for use on Earth--nothing to do with the space race. The first commercial microwave oven was sold in 1947. Microwave communications relays, meanwhile, were in wide use for cross-country telephone communcations in the United States starting well before Sputnik was launched.
NASA has produced a lot of cool spinoffs, but microwave technology isn't one of them.
That assumes - incorrectly - that electricity demand is constant all day, and that only one or two technologies must meet all of the demand. In North America demand is highest on hot summer afternoons. Conveniently, those same hot summer afternoons are also the best weather for solar energy. Even in winter, demand is higher during daylight hours and early evening (West Coast solar could still supply some East Coast evening demand; we could also increase winter sun late in the day by staying on daylight saving time year 'round) than overnight. (The daytime demand is something like 30% higher than the overnight usage.)
Base load can then be made up of hydroelectric, nuclear, and high-altitude wind power--all of those can operate 24/7, without emissions. Additional peak load could be met by (more-costly, greenhouse-gas-emitting, but still fairly clean and fast-starting) natural gas turbines.
Wait until you see Phase Two.
I can't speak for other jurisdictions, but I know in the "old school" country of Canada (with its valuable dollar, its gay weddings, its high-quality ganja, its proven oil reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia, its polite people, and its rejection of firearms in favour of elegant weapons from a more civilized age) the ballots aren't taken to a central location prior to counting.
Ballots are hand-counted at the polling station immediately after the polls close. The ballots are only physically handled by two individuals (each nominated by a different political party), but representatives from any candidate or party are permitted to observe the process.
Graduated has "Arranged in grades or gradations; arranged according to the degree of difficulty or importance" as one of its definitions, so it could be used in the sense that you're looking for. If you prefer, 'gradated' is also a real word with the meaning that you seek. 'Gradiated', however, is not a word.
Indeed. If only there were some way for a submarine to evade a surface vessel. Perhaps some method could be devised that involves going around a surface vessel by travelling in some direction that the surface ship couldn't.
We'll have to put our engineers to work on this problem.
Would now be a good time to point out that 'gradiated' isn't a word? (Perhaps you meant 'graduated'....)
That's a good idea. A home scanning technique that requires intravenously-administered, short-half-life-made-on-site-in-a-cyclotron radioisotopes. Er, what?
PET is something that you would use to confirm a diagnosis (look for metabolic hotspots if cancer is suspected) or detect metastases (tumours distant from the original site). It's never the first tool that a diagnostician reaches for.
Besides, the resolution of PET is crap compared to MR. If a hypothetical hypochondriac really wanted to keep an eye out for tiny changes that might signal malignancy (or some other disorder), he'd want MR's higher resolution and zero ionizing radiation exposure.
It it makes you feel better, the bioinformatics team is being led by a Canadian researcher out of a Candian institution (the Ontario Cancer Institute at Princess Margaret Hospital, jointly with the University of Toronto). In Canada, chemotherapy drugs are provided to patients free of charge, and pricing is controlled by the provincial government.
If you're being screwed by the drug companies in your jurisdiction, you need to talk to your government representatives. In the meantime, the counties with proper socialized medicine appreciate your assistance with the project, and would like to extend our thanks.