If a library owns a book, they have a right to scan it (or even to make a photocopy of a rare book for archival purposes). They have a right to use that scan within their building, or campus, to transmit to one other computer terminal at a time.
Google made a deal with the libraries. That's how they scanned the books. The libraries agreed to let Google distribute snippits. You can go into a library and photocopy several pages from a book.
The other issue is that libraries want to scan their collections for use within their own building, so they can send disintegrating books to cold storage or throw them out. It's sort of like making a backup. But the Author's Guild doesn't want to let them do that either.
The libraries want to be able to send images of the pages of their books to their patrons, rather than bringing up the physical book.
That seems reasonable.
Here's a real problem: I was at the New York Public Library's performing arts library in Lincoln Center. The librarian explained that they have collections of folders of clippings about all kinds of theater topics, such as theaters. These clippings contain information that's available noplace else. They don't have a good index, and the only way to find out what's in the folders is to get them from the stacks. The newspaper clippings are printed on newsprint, which is disintegrating.
They want to image the whole collection, so patrons of the library can sit at a terminal and view images of the folders, rather than have to send them up from the stacks in elevators and read through the disintegrating clippings. They're waiting for the resolution of the Google suit before they can go ahead. If the Authors' Guild wins, they won't be able to image their own collection, and they'll have to watch it turn to dust.
A lot of this stuff has the problem of orphan works. It would be almost impossible to digitize it if you needed permission from the copyright holder (which is not necessarily the author).
A folder might contain articles, such as reviews, from a dozen different publications. Some of them might not be in existence any more. If the reviewer was an employee of the publication, the copyright belongs to the publication. If the reviewer was a freelancer, it probably belongs to the freelancer or his estate -- but that depends on long-lost contracts. There are people who track these copyrights down when publishers want to reprint things in textbooks -- it might cost $10 or $100 per article to track down the current owner, and sometimes you can't find them at all. Sometimes it's still in copyright, but they can't figure out, without a lawsuit, exactly who owns the rights (like that Philip K. Dick story, The Adjustment Bureau).
I think it's a social good to have these disintegrating files imaged. I think it's fair use. The Author's Guild doesn't think so, and if they get their way, these folders will turn to dust.
BTW, I also make my living as a published author. But I've spent days searching through paper copies of old books and microfilm, and I've always dreamed of being about to search for it by computer.
I spoke to a couple of copyright lawyers about this and I asked them to define "fair use." How much can you copy? How many pages?
The answer is, nobody knows. There are a few cases that the court decided but outside of those very narrow conditions, no lawyer can tell you for sure.
Incidentally, those same authors who are complaining about their books being copied without their permission usually copy entire reviews of their books to give away in the press kits of their books.
What's obvious to you isn't obvious to somebody else.
I was going through that Wall Street Journal link and sorting it by unemployment rate, popularity, and income.
A lot of it doesn't make sense. Electrical engineers had more unemployment than other specialties.
I suspect they would change from year to year. There is a cycle -- salaries go up in subject A, more students major in A, the employment market is saturated, students hear about that from their older friends, and stop majoring in it.
It seems like the best-paying, lowest-unemployment majors are in engineering, like petroleum engineering. But engineering specialties aren't secure. They're cyclical. The reason they pay you so much is that you might spend half of your career unemployed. If another offshore well has a blowout, there goes petroleum engineering. If another nuclear plant melts down, there goes nuclear engineering. If the military budget gets cut in half, there goes engineering, period.
That's all well and good, until someone has to support them. I am all for letting them clean toilets for the next 40 years. But, no, they are currently infesting, er, "occupying", Wall Street, Oakland, etc. demanding that someone give them money and a living. I suspect that is what the Chinese are trying to avoid.
Cheap, ignorant shot at Occupy Wall Street.
Let me guess -- you've never been to OWS. Everything you know about OWS you got from TV, newspapers, or you just made up, right?
I was there. The facts are, they're not demanding somebody give them money and a living. Some of them make more money than you.
Their *main* complaint is that the richest 1% have too much political power. They're running the government. It's not so much that the top 1% own half the country, but that they own the government too.
They work harder than you. There was a chef who was laid off from a five-star restaurant, who was making 1,000 meals a day in Zucotti Park. If something had to be done, like cleaning up the park and putting all the garbage neatly in garbage bags for the sanitation pickup, more people than they needed would volunteer.
If you had an education, you would have known how to tell the difference between the truth and propaganda.
What was your major in college -- Ayn Rand studies?
The principal ideas behind functional finance can be summarised as:[1]
Governments have to intervene; the economy is not self-regulating.
The principal economic objective of the state should be to ensure a prosperous economy.
Money is a creature of the state; it has to be managed.
Fiscal policy should be directed in the light of its impact on the economy, and the budget should be managed accordingly, that is, 'balance' is not important in itself.
The amount and pace of government spending should be set in the light of the desired level of activity, and taxes should be levied for their economic impact, rather than to raise revenue.
Principles of 'sound finance' apply to individuals. They make sense for households and businesses, but do not apply to the governments of sovereign states, capable of issuing money.
If you read their autobiographies on the Nobel Prize web site, you'll see that many of them say they never could have gone to college if CCNY wasn't free.
This list doesn't even include the list doesn't even include the CCNY graduates who contributed to society in ways that didn't win a Nobel Prize, such as Andrew Grove.
Any one of those guys paid back more to society than it cost to educate his whole CCNY class.
Free education is the best investment we could make. Every tax dollar returns itself to society several times over.
I don't see any clear pattern there. Do these unemployment numbers stay constant from year to year? Or will they be completely different 5 years from now when you graduate?
I don't think this gives much support to the line, "It's your own fault that you took out college loans and still can't get a job. You should have studied something useful."
Maybe you could guess that visual and performing arts might not be a marketable major, but engineering and industrial management?
Maybe composition and speech, but materials engineering and material science?
Maybe fine arts. But genetics? Biochemical sciences?
Maybe philosophy and religious studies. But neuroscience?
CBS MoneyWatch November 16, 2011 9:30 AM 25 college majors with the highest unemployment rates By Lynn O'Shaughnessy
1. Clinical psychology 19.5%
2. Miscellaneous fine arts 16.2%
3. United States history 15.1%
4. Library science 15.0%
5. (tie) Military technologies; educational psychology 10.9%
6. Architecture 10.6%
7. Industrial & organizational psychology 10.4%
8. Miscellaneous psychology 10.3%
9. Linguistics & comparative literature 10.2%
10. (tie) Visual & performing arts; engineering & industrial management 9.2%
11. Engineering & industrial management 9.2%
12. Social psychology 8.8%
13. International business 8.5%
14. Humanities 8.4%
15. General social sciences 8.2%
16. Commercial art & graphic design 8.1%
17. Studio art 8.0%
18. Pre-law & legal studies 7.9%
19. Materials engineering and materials science and composition & speech (tie) 7.7%
20. Liberal arts 7.6%
21. (tie) Fine arts and genetics 7.4%
22. Film video & photography arts and cosmetology services & culinary arts (tie) 7.3%
23. Philosophy & religious studies and neuroscience (tie) 7.2%
24. Biochemical sciences 7.1%
25. (tie) Journalism and sociology 7.0%
Best gift I ever gave was a copy of a patent that this girl's father had filed.
He was an engineer, she knew he had patents, but she had never seen them. I used to go to the patent library so I looked him up. They had to do with high-voltage power line transmission.
When she opened the envelope she thought it was some weird, geeky thing -- until she saw her father's name on it. She made copies and passed it around to the whole family. She was my friend for life.
I only wish her father had still been alive so I could talk to him about transmission lines.
Ask the AccessWorld Experts! Special Online Event November 14-18
Dates: 11/14/2011 - 11/18/2011
AccessWorld iconFamilyConnect and AccessWorld Magazine are excited to announce a special opportunity for families to interact directly with some of the foremost authorities on accessible technology—from cell phones to ebooks, screen readers, classroom adaptations, and more.
Simply visit FamilyConnect's Ask the Experts blog anytime from November 14-18 (Monday-Friday) and leave your questions or concerns in the comments. Our team will be on hand to respond to your inquiries.
AccessWorld's accessibility experts include:
Lee Huffman
Tara Annis
Brad Hodges
Janet Ingber
Deborah Kendrick
J.J. Meddaugh
Ike Presley
John Rempel
This one-of-a-kind opportunity allows families to have their questions and concerns about assistive technology addressed by leading experts. Join us November 14-18 for this exciting online event!
I knew some people at the American Foundation for the Blind. At that time, they had a research department of a couple of engineers creating assistive devices. You might contact the AFB or other blindness organizations and find an engineer to talk to. You might well find somebody who will be enthusiastic about your project.
That's true, but the Kurtzweil and other reading machines are fairly expensive, $3,000 and up, I believe. JAWS is also fairly expensive. I think they mostly sell them to people who are eligible for Medicare and Medicaid.
A lot of that cost is for tech support and development, which they do well, but here the poster is capable of providing his own tech support.
The long-term result of macular degeneration is that he will lose the ability to focus on anything in the center of his vision, and will eventually hit the point where he only has (blurry) peripheral vision. When this occurs, he will not be able to read at all.
That wasn't my impression. I thought they usually preserve peripheral vision. It is true that vascular problems in the retina can cause a lot of damage and even total blindness, but I don't know how common it is.
Review Article Medical Progress Age-Related Macular Degeneration Rama D. Jager, M.D., William F. Mieler, M.D., and Joan W. Miller, M.D. N Engl J Med 2008; 358:2606-2617June 12, 2008
Although most people with advanced age-related macular degeneration do not become completely blind, visual loss often markedly reduces the quality of life and is associated with disability and clinical depression in up to one third of patients, even if only one eye is affected.
Standard tissue culture techniques grow cells on fetal calf serum -- that is, blood serum taken from fetal calves, which are found in slaughterhouses when pregnant cows are slaughtered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_calf_serum
If we stopped slaughtering animals, they couldn't grow this stuff in vitro. So this isn't a vegetarian solution. It isn't even a low-resource solution.
AFAIK, it's not possible to grow animal cells in culture media entirely from plant sources.
Dreeben, in his argument, urged the court to stick to the line it has drawn in the past — no warrant is needed for surveillance of activities conducted on public roads.
Chief Justice John Roberts, however, seemed skeptical about applying that rationale to new technologies, asking if the government could "put a GPS device on our cars and monitor us?"
Dreeben responded that under the government's theory and the court's precedents, "the justices of this court, when driving on the streets, have no greater expectation of privacy" against a GPS device attached to the car "than they would if the FBI followed them around the clock."
Justice Stephen Breyer struck a more ominous tone, asserting that "if you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movements of every citizen in the United States," a scenario that "sounds like 1984." Discussion of Orwell's dystopic novel arose five times during the argument. Related NPR Stories Do Police Need Warrants For GPS Tracking Devices? Nov. 8, 2011
Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Dreeban to explain the difference between the warrantless use of GPS devices and the general search authority that outraged the Founding Fathers and inspired the Fourth Amendment ban on searches without court authorization. Dreeben maintained, however, that putting a GPS device on a car is not a search. And he seemed to suggest that people have different expectations of privacy in an era of technological advances.
That is "too much for me," interjected Justice Elena Kagan, suggesting that people would think their privacy interests are violated by having a robotic device monitoring their movements 24 hours a day.
Seeking to frame the issue differently, Justice Samuel Alito said that the "heart of the problem" is that until the Internet and computer age, it was very difficult to gather private information about an individual. "But with computers, it's now so simple to amass an enormous amount of information about people.... So how do we deal with this?"
But Chief Justice Roberts focused more narrowly on the government's position that no warrant is required. "Your argument is, it doesn't depend how much suspicion you have, it doesn't depend on how urgent it is. Your argument is you can do it, period. It doesn't have to be limited in any way, right?" Replied Dreeben, "That is correct."
So just how difficult is it to get a warrant? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put that question to the government's lawyer. Dreeben conceded it would not have been difficult in this case, but, he noted, a warrant requires a showing that there is probable cause to believe a crime has occurred, and he said police most often use GPS devices at the early stages of an investigation, before there is evidence of a crime.
Sotomayor asked how many GPS devices are used this way. Dreeben said he didn't know about local and state use, but the number used by federal law enforcement was "in the low thousands" each year.
Following Dreeben to the lectern, attorney Leckar contended that because the GPS was placed on Jones' car, it was a trespass on his property and amounted to an unconstitutional seizure, a commandeering of his car to provide data. The justices, however, were looking for how to address a broader question.
Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what the difference is between putting a GPS device on a car and placing 30 deputies along a route to conduct surveillance. "It seems to me what you're saying is that the police have to use the most inefficient me
The studies you quote were all performed within the broken system. It's quite hard to extrapolate their results to fundamentally different circumstances. For instance the RAND study had people paying 95%, which would almost certainly be higher than what they would pay with reduced demand and lack of health insurance overhead. Even the 50% is questionable.
25% is close to the 20% that Medicare charges. This was designed covering the full range.
What do you mean, "broken system"? That's the system we've got, and we're trying to figure out ways to improve it.
Other countries have copayments, and they don't work either. I read a series of articles, pro and con, on the Swiss health care system, in JAMA. Their copayments don't work either. For serious diseases, they quickly exhaust the maximum copayment, and the state has to take over -- at which point they have free health care. In the US, they don't have maximum copayments, and people go bankrupt.
We could break apart the back room collective bargaining and price fixing and actually make health care something that people actually pay for, like car insurance and automotive services. That way, at least, we can see some competition for price and maybe people will even understand the resources they waste every time they go to the doctor about a cold. (Well, at least after they paid $80 to hear the doc say "It's a cold, drink some juice and get some rest" they'll think twice before doing it again.)
This is a common fallacy -- that the costs of going to doctors for minor discretionary ailments are a significant part of health care costs. As the economist Paul Krugman has explained, the major expenses in health care aren't $80 visits to the doctor, but $50,000 and $100,000 cancers, $20,000 a year lifelong treatments for diabetes, $50,000 a year lifelong treatments for multiple sclerosis, $50,000 and $100,000 heart bypass operations.
Actually, there have been many studies over at least 40 years to see whether charging patients more would produce better -- or even cheaper -- care. They all failed. Look up the Rand Health Insurance Experiment in Wikipedia. Patients who had greater copayments put off necessary care, like blood pressure medication (probably the most cost-efficient intervention we have).
U.S. corporations like IBM tried imposing co-payments on their employees, and they ended those policies when they found that they wound up spending *more* money. Patients with asthma put off maintenance care, and wound up going to the hospital more.
Health insurance isn't like car insurance. If your car is damaged, you know what the problem is and you know what's going on. If your doctor tells you that you have a disease you never heard of, and that you have to treat it right away, you don't know what's going on. It will take you more than a day of Google searches to find out.
If a nurse tells you, "You should go to the hospital right away. It could be life-threatening," what are you going to do? Look it up on the Internet?
Making health care decisions is like a graduate-level exam with questions you're unlikely to understand, and if you get one question wrong, you die.
It would also help the problems with cancer screening: once people see a $10,000+ price tag on treating that maybe-dangerous tumor they'll definitely give waiting and seeing a thought.
Ridiculous. The main thing a cancer patient wants to know is whether (or how long) he's going to live. The only concern about treating a tumor is (1) whether it really is a tumor that has to be treated and (2) what the best treatment is.
Cancer chemotherapy causes heart failure and other cancers. Is the risk of death from treatment greater than the risk of death from no treatment? Nobody takes doxorubicin just because they can get it free.
I know people who are doing watchful waiting, because their doctors think it's one of those false positives. I've talked about the decisions with them.
$10,000 doesn't enter into the decision. How much is your life worth?
IANAL but it seems to me that one solution might be to leave the US, become a (dual) citizen of another country, go bankrupt under the other country's laws, and discharge your student loans that way. I don't think the US could collect a debt like that.
Who's to say what's a useable skill? Go to the Nobel Prize web site and look at the biographies of the winners in biology and chemistry. Many of them were liberal arts majors, like Eric Kandel who studied history and literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kandel#Early_years
The scientists and techies who made this country great in post-WWII America were often Europeans who had a strong tradition of a well-rounded education, including English/art/history, and taught it to their students. It basically teaches you how to think. Scientists have to know how to think. You want to prepare yourself for a world in which there is no security and people always have to find new careers? A liberal arts background is what you need to face that brave new world. Of course it also helps to know how to think when you have to decide who you and your fellow citizens should vote for in the next election.
OTOH there are engineers who can't get jobs when the industry of their engineering specialty goes into a down cycle. There are accountants who can't get jobs.
Approximately 4,300 child molesters were released from prisons in 15 States in 1994. An estimated 3.3% of these 4,300 were rearrested for another sex crime against a child within 3 years of release from prison.
That's about what I thought it was. With numbers like that, I don't think it's a good social policy to release "child molesters" into the general population.
If I could release 30 child molesters, and I knew that 29 of them would become law-abiding citizens, and one would molest another child, I'd be reluctant to releases them.
Of course, American prisons are dungeons that create more crime. I think it's an illness and they should be treated like patients, in a humane, least restrictive environment. All I want is for dangerous people to be kept kept where they won't hurt anybody else. If they want to go on supervised trips to the zoo like John Hinkley, let them go.
This is assuming that they really *are* child molesters, and not adults with 16-year-old girlfriends. (The age of consent is 16 in the UK, so why is it a crime here?)
The American Academy of Pediatrics has a different take. They define "sexual abuse," which requires that the abuser be at least 4 years older than the abused, as I recall.
I think the doctors should take the lead in this, not prosecutors. 30-second election spots on TV are not a good way to make social policy.
What about Phillip Craig Garrido, who kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard and kept her in an encampment behind his house for 18 years, while she had 2 children by him?
Garrido had been arrested in 1976 for a kidnap and rape of an adult woman, who might have been killed if he hadn't been caught by a cop who noticed something wrong. He was sentenced to 50 years, but released on parole after 10 years.
I think that someone who commits a stranger rape, or a rape with kidnapping, *should* be put away essentially forever. I don't think a 1% recidivism rate in those cases is acceptable.
What we actually did was define sex crimes with minors and other consentual sex as rape, and fill the jails with people who weren't dangerous (along with non-dangerous drug offenders and other nonviolent crimes).
Every academic criminologist says that you have to separate the dangerous offenders who should be in jail from the non-dangerous offenders who shouldn't be. That's the way to deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
If I have a CD, I have a right to make a backup.
If a library owns a book, they have a right to scan it (or even to make a photocopy of a rare book for archival purposes). They have a right to use that scan within their building, or campus, to transmit to one other computer terminal at a time.
Google made a deal with the libraries. That's how they scanned the books. The libraries agreed to let Google distribute snippits. You can go into a library and photocopy several pages from a book.
The other issue is that libraries want to scan their collections for use within their own building, so they can send disintegrating books to cold storage or throw them out. It's sort of like making a backup. But the Author's Guild doesn't want to let them do that either.
The libraries want to be able to send images of the pages of their books to their patrons, rather than bringing up the physical book.
That seems reasonable.
Here's a real problem: I was at the New York Public Library's performing arts library in Lincoln Center. The librarian explained that they have collections of folders of clippings about all kinds of theater topics, such as theaters. These clippings contain information that's available noplace else. They don't have a good index, and the only way to find out what's in the folders is to get them from the stacks. The newspaper clippings are printed on newsprint, which is disintegrating.
They want to image the whole collection, so patrons of the library can sit at a terminal and view images of the folders, rather than have to send them up from the stacks in elevators and read through the disintegrating clippings. They're waiting for the resolution of the Google suit before they can go ahead. If the Authors' Guild wins, they won't be able to image their own collection, and they'll have to watch it turn to dust.
A lot of this stuff has the problem of orphan works. It would be almost impossible to digitize it if you needed permission from the copyright holder (which is not necessarily the author).
A folder might contain articles, such as reviews, from a dozen different publications. Some of them might not be in existence any more. If the reviewer was an employee of the publication, the copyright belongs to the publication. If the reviewer was a freelancer, it probably belongs to the freelancer or his estate -- but that depends on long-lost contracts. There are people who track these copyrights down when publishers want to reprint things in textbooks -- it might cost $10 or $100 per article to track down the current owner, and sometimes you can't find them at all. Sometimes it's still in copyright, but they can't figure out, without a lawsuit, exactly who owns the rights (like that Philip K. Dick story, The Adjustment Bureau).
I think it's a social good to have these disintegrating files imaged. I think it's fair use. The Author's Guild doesn't think so, and if they get their way, these folders will turn to dust.
BTW, I also make my living as a published author. But I've spent days searching through paper copies of old books and microfilm, and I've always dreamed of being about to search for it by computer.
I spoke to a couple of copyright lawyers about this and I asked them to define "fair use." How much can you copy? How many pages?
The answer is, nobody knows. There are a few cases that the court decided but outside of those very narrow conditions, no lawyer can tell you for sure.
Incidentally, those same authors who are complaining about their books being copied without their permission usually copy entire reviews of their books to give away in the press kits of their books.
What's obvious to you isn't obvious to somebody else.
I was going through that Wall Street Journal link and sorting it by unemployment rate, popularity, and income.
A lot of it doesn't make sense. Electrical engineers had more unemployment than other specialties.
I suspect they would change from year to year. There is a cycle -- salaries go up in subject A, more students major in A, the employment market is saturated, students hear about that from their older friends, and stop majoring in it.
It seems like the best-paying, lowest-unemployment majors are in engineering, like petroleum engineering. But engineering specialties aren't secure. They're cyclical. The reason they pay you so much is that you might spend half of your career unemployed. If another offshore well has a blowout, there goes petroleum engineering. If another nuclear plant melts down, there goes nuclear engineering. If the military budget gets cut in half, there goes engineering, period.
Here's somebody else who studied history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kandel He didn't get a job out of it either.
That's all well and good, until someone has to support them. I am all for letting them clean toilets for the next 40 years. But, no, they are currently infesting, er, "occupying", Wall Street, Oakland, etc. demanding that someone give them money and a living. I suspect that is what the Chinese are trying to avoid.
Cheap, ignorant shot at Occupy Wall Street.
Let me guess -- you've never been to OWS. Everything you know about OWS you got from TV, newspapers, or you just made up, right?
I was there. The facts are, they're not demanding somebody give them money and a living. Some of them make more money than you.
Their *main* complaint is that the richest 1% have too much political power. They're running the government. It's not so much that the top 1% own half the country, but that they own the government too.
They work harder than you. There was a chef who was laid off from a five-star restaurant, who was making 1,000 meals a day in Zucotti Park. If something had to be done, like cleaning up the park and putting all the garbage neatly in garbage bags for the sanitation pickup, more people than they needed would volunteer.
If you had an education, you would have known how to tell the difference between the truth and propaganda.
What was your major in college -- Ayn Rand studies?
Makes sense to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_finance#History_of_use
The principal ideas behind functional finance can be summarised as:[1]
Governments have to intervene; the economy is not self-regulating.
The principal economic objective of the state should be to ensure a prosperous economy.
Money is a creature of the state; it has to be managed.
Fiscal policy should be directed in the light of its impact on the economy, and the budget should be managed accordingly, that is, 'balance' is not important in itself.
The amount and pace of government spending should be set in the light of the desired level of activity, and taxes should be levied for their economic impact, rather than to raise revenue.
Principles of 'sound finance' apply to individuals. They make sense for households and businesses, but do not apply to the governments of sovereign states, capable of issuing money.
People like this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_City_University_of_New_York
If you read their autobiographies on the Nobel Prize web site, you'll see that many of them say they never could have gone to college if CCNY wasn't free.
This list doesn't even include the list doesn't even include the CCNY graduates who contributed to society in ways that didn't win a Nobel Prize, such as Andrew Grove.
Any one of those guys paid back more to society than it cost to educate his whole CCNY class.
Free education is the best investment we could make. Every tax dollar returns itself to society several times over.
I saw that on CBS Moneywatch.
I don't see any clear pattern there. Do these unemployment numbers stay constant from year to year? Or will they be completely different 5 years from now when you graduate?
I don't think this gives much support to the line, "It's your own fault that you took out college loans and still can't get a job. You should have studied something useful."
Maybe you could guess that visual and performing arts might not be a marketable major, but engineering and industrial management?
Maybe composition and speech, but materials engineering and material science?
Maybe fine arts. But genetics? Biochemical sciences?
Maybe philosophy and religious studies. But neuroscience?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57325132/25-college-majors-with-the-highest-unemployment-rates/
CBS MoneyWatch
November 16, 2011 9:30 AM
25 college majors with the highest unemployment rates
By Lynn O'Shaughnessy
1. Clinical psychology 19.5%
2. Miscellaneous fine arts 16.2%
3. United States history 15.1%
4. Library science 15.0%
5. (tie) Military technologies; educational psychology 10.9%
6. Architecture 10.6%
7. Industrial & organizational psychology 10.4%
8. Miscellaneous psychology 10.3%
9. Linguistics & comparative literature 10.2%
10. (tie) Visual & performing arts; engineering & industrial management 9.2%
11. Engineering & industrial management 9.2%
12. Social psychology 8.8%
13. International business 8.5%
14. Humanities 8.4%
15. General social sciences 8.2%
16. Commercial art & graphic design 8.1%
17. Studio art 8.0%
18. Pre-law & legal studies 7.9%
19. Materials engineering and materials science and composition & speech (tie) 7.7%
20. Liberal arts 7.6%
21. (tie) Fine arts and genetics 7.4%
22. Film video & photography arts and cosmetology services & culinary arts (tie) 7.3%
23. Philosophy & religious studies and neuroscience (tie) 7.2%
24. Biochemical sciences 7.1%
25. (tie) Journalism and sociology 7.0%
Best gift I ever gave was a copy of a patent that this girl's father had filed.
He was an engineer, she knew he had patents, but she had never seen them. I used to go to the patent library so I looked him up. They had to do with high-voltage power line transmission.
When she opened the envelope she thought it was some weird, geeky thing -- until she saw her father's name on it. She made copies and passed it around to the whole family. She was my friend for life.
I only wish her father had still been alive so I could talk to him about transmission lines.
How could Christmas be complete without cranky old uncle Anonymous Coward?
Here's a magazine about assistive devices for the visually impaired that's having a special on-line Q&A event this very week:
http://www.familyconnect.org/calendar.asp?EventID=2955
Ask the AccessWorld Experts! Special Online Event November 14-18
Dates: 11/14/2011 - 11/18/2011
AccessWorld iconFamilyConnect and AccessWorld Magazine are excited to announce a special opportunity for families to interact directly with some of the foremost authorities on accessible technology—from cell phones to ebooks, screen readers, classroom adaptations, and more.
Simply visit FamilyConnect's Ask the Experts blog anytime from November 14-18 (Monday-Friday) and leave your questions or concerns in the comments. Our team will be on hand to respond to your inquiries.
AccessWorld's accessibility experts include:
Lee Huffman
Tara Annis
Brad Hodges
Janet Ingber
Deborah Kendrick
J.J. Meddaugh
Ike Presley
John Rempel
This one-of-a-kind opportunity allows families to have their questions and concerns about assistive technology addressed by leading experts. Join us November 14-18 for this exciting online event!
Contact: Lee Huffman
E-Mail: accessworld@afb.net
URL: http://www.familyconnect.org/experts
And here's AccessWorld:
AccessWorld
Technology and People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired
http://www.afb.org/aw/main.asp
I knew some people at the American Foundation for the Blind. At that time, they had a research department of a couple of engineers creating assistive devices. You might contact the AFB or other blindness organizations and find an engineer to talk to. You might well find somebody who will be enthusiastic about your project.
That's true, but the Kurtzweil and other reading machines are fairly expensive, $3,000 and up, I believe. JAWS is also fairly expensive. I think they mostly sell them to people who are eligible for Medicare and Medicaid.
A lot of that cost is for tech support and development, which they do well, but here the poster is capable of providing his own tech support.
The long-term result of macular degeneration is that he will lose the ability to focus on anything in the center of his vision, and will eventually hit the point where he only has (blurry) peripheral vision. When this occurs, he will not be able to read at all.
That wasn't my impression. I thought they usually preserve peripheral vision. It is true that vascular problems in the retina can cause a lot of damage and even total blindness, but I don't know how common it is.
Review Article
Medical Progress
Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Rama D. Jager, M.D., William F. Mieler, M.D., and Joan W. Miller, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2008; 358:2606-2617June 12, 2008
Although most people with advanced age-related macular degeneration do not become completely blind, visual loss often markedly reduces the quality of life and is associated with disability and clinical depression in up to one third of patients, even if only one eye is affected.
Standard tissue culture techniques grow cells on fetal calf serum -- that is, blood serum taken from fetal calves, which are found in slaughterhouses when pregnant cows are slaughtered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_calf_serum
If we stopped slaughtering animals, they couldn't grow this stuff in vitro. So this isn't a vegetarian solution. It isn't even a low-resource solution.
AFAIK, it's not possible to grow animal cells in culture media entirely from plant sources.
Anybody know otherwise?
Here's the NPR story about the Supreme Court argument today. I think the full transcript will be on the Supreme Court web site.
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142143552/justices-weigh-technology-and-privacy-in-gps-case
....
Justices Invoke '1984' During GPS Case Arguments
by Nina Totenberg
Dreeben, in his argument, urged the court to stick to the line it has drawn in the past — no warrant is needed for surveillance of activities conducted on public roads.
Chief Justice John Roberts, however, seemed skeptical about applying that rationale to new technologies, asking if the government could "put a GPS device on our cars and monitor us?"
Dreeben responded that under the government's theory and the court's precedents, "the justices of this court, when driving on the streets, have no greater expectation of privacy" against a GPS device attached to the car "than they would if the FBI followed them around the clock."
Justice Stephen Breyer struck a more ominous tone, asserting that "if you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movements of every citizen in the United States," a scenario that "sounds like 1984." Discussion of Orwell's dystopic novel arose five times during the argument.
Related NPR Stories
Do Police Need Warrants For GPS Tracking Devices? Nov. 8, 2011
Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Dreeban to explain the difference between the warrantless use of GPS devices and the general search authority that outraged the Founding Fathers and inspired the Fourth Amendment ban on searches without court authorization. Dreeben maintained, however, that putting a GPS device on a car is not a search. And he seemed to suggest that people have different expectations of privacy in an era of technological advances.
That is "too much for me," interjected Justice Elena Kagan, suggesting that people would think their privacy interests are violated by having a robotic device monitoring their movements 24 hours a day.
Seeking to frame the issue differently, Justice Samuel Alito said that the "heart of the problem" is that until the Internet and computer age, it was very difficult to gather private information about an individual. "But with computers, it's now so simple to amass an enormous amount of information about people. ... So how do we deal with this?"
But Chief Justice Roberts focused more narrowly on the government's position that no warrant is required. "Your argument is, it doesn't depend how much suspicion you have, it doesn't depend on how urgent it is. Your argument is you can do it, period. It doesn't have to be limited in any way, right?" Replied Dreeben, "That is correct."
So just how difficult is it to get a warrant? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put that question to the government's lawyer. Dreeben conceded it would not have been difficult in this case, but, he noted, a warrant requires a showing that there is probable cause to believe a crime has occurred, and he said police most often use GPS devices at the early stages of an investigation, before there is evidence of a crime.
Sotomayor asked how many GPS devices are used this way. Dreeben said he didn't know about local and state use, but the number used by federal law enforcement was "in the low thousands" each year.
Following Dreeben to the lectern, attorney Leckar contended that because the GPS was placed on Jones' car, it was a trespass on his property and amounted to an unconstitutional seizure, a commandeering of his car to provide data. The justices, however, were looking for how to address a broader question.
Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what the difference is between putting a GPS device on a car and placing 30 deputies along a route to conduct surveillance. "It seems to me what you're saying is that the police have to use the most inefficient me
The studies you quote were all performed within the broken system. It's quite hard to extrapolate their results to fundamentally different circumstances. For instance the RAND study had people paying 95%, which would almost certainly be higher than what they would pay with reduced demand and lack of health insurance overhead. Even the 50% is questionable.
No, it was 0%, 25%, 50% or 95% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experiment
25% is close to the 20% that Medicare charges. This was designed covering the full range.
What do you mean, "broken system"? That's the system we've got, and we're trying to figure out ways to improve it.
Other countries have copayments, and they don't work either. I read a series of articles, pro and con, on the Swiss health care system, in JAMA. Their copayments don't work either. For serious diseases, they quickly exhaust the maximum copayment, and the state has to take over -- at which point they have free health care. In the US, they don't have maximum copayments, and people go bankrupt.
This is well known in the insurance industry. It cost a lot more to have somebody crippled for life than to just kill them off.
You know why railroads have emergency axes? It's to kill of the passengers after a train wreck.
If you run over a pedestrian, back up your car and finish them off.
We could break apart the back room collective bargaining and price fixing and actually make health care something that people actually pay for, like car insurance and automotive services. That way, at least, we can see some competition for price and maybe people will even understand the resources they waste every time they go to the doctor about a cold. (Well, at least after they paid $80 to hear the doc say "It's a cold, drink some juice and get some rest" they'll think twice before doing it again.)
This is a common fallacy -- that the costs of going to doctors for minor discretionary ailments are a significant part of health care costs. As the economist Paul Krugman has explained, the major expenses in health care aren't $80 visits to the doctor, but $50,000 and $100,000 cancers, $20,000 a year lifelong treatments for diabetes, $50,000 a year lifelong treatments for multiple sclerosis, $50,000 and $100,000 heart bypass operations.
Actually, there have been many studies over at least 40 years to see whether charging patients more would produce better -- or even cheaper -- care. They all failed. Look up the Rand Health Insurance Experiment in Wikipedia. Patients who had greater copayments put off necessary care, like blood pressure medication (probably the most cost-efficient intervention we have).
U.S. corporations like IBM tried imposing co-payments on their employees, and they ended those policies when they found that they wound up spending *more* money. Patients with asthma put off maintenance care, and wound up going to the hospital more.
Health insurance isn't like car insurance. If your car is damaged, you know what the problem is and you know what's going on. If your doctor tells you that you have a disease you never heard of, and that you have to treat it right away, you don't know what's going on. It will take you more than a day of Google searches to find out.
If a nurse tells you, "You should go to the hospital right away. It could be life-threatening," what are you going to do? Look it up on the Internet?
Making health care decisions is like a graduate-level exam with questions you're unlikely to understand, and if you get one question wrong, you die.
It would also help the problems with cancer screening: once people see a $10,000+ price tag on treating that maybe-dangerous tumor they'll definitely give waiting and seeing a thought.
Ridiculous. The main thing a cancer patient wants to know is whether (or how long) he's going to live. The only concern about treating a tumor is (1) whether it really is a tumor that has to be treated and (2) what the best treatment is.
Cancer chemotherapy causes heart failure and other cancers. Is the risk of death from treatment greater than the risk of death from no treatment? Nobody takes doxorubicin just because they can get it free.
I know people who are doing watchful waiting, because their doctors think it's one of those false positives. I've talked about the decisions with them.
$10,000 doesn't enter into the decision. How much is your life worth?
Better for us if we were hamsters. Or Paramecium.
I wish I were a zebrafish. You cut a piece out of a zebrafish's heart, it grows right back.
But what about drug tests? Big employers give everybody drug tests.
IANAL but it seems to me that one solution might be to leave the US, become a (dual) citizen of another country, go bankrupt under the other country's laws, and discharge your student loans that way. I don't think the US could collect a debt like that.
Who's to say what's a useable skill? Go to the Nobel Prize web site and look at the biographies of the winners in biology and chemistry. Many of them were liberal arts majors, like Eric Kandel who studied history and literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kandel#Early_years
The scientists and techies who made this country great in post-WWII America were often Europeans who had a strong tradition of a well-rounded education, including English/art/history, and taught it to their students. It basically teaches you how to think. Scientists have to know how to think. You want to prepare yourself for a world in which there is no security and people always have to find new careers? A liberal arts background is what you need to face that brave new world. Of course it also helps to know how to think when you have to decide who you and your fellow citizens should vote for in the next election.
OTOH there are engineers who can't get jobs when the industry of their engineering specialty goes into a down cycle. There are accountants who can't get jobs.
After they're caught, it's very rare for these guys to repeat offend.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sex_offender#Recidivism_rates
Treatment works for these guys.
Thanks for the cite. Here's what they say:
Approximately 4,300 child molesters were released from prisons in 15 States in 1994. An estimated 3.3% of these 4,300 were rearrested for another sex crime against a child within 3 years of release from prison.
That's about what I thought it was. With numbers like that, I don't think it's a good social policy to release "child molesters" into the general population.
If I could release 30 child molesters, and I knew that 29 of them would become law-abiding citizens, and one would molest another child, I'd be reluctant to releases them.
Of course, American prisons are dungeons that create more crime. I think it's an illness and they should be treated like patients, in a humane, least restrictive environment. All I want is for dangerous people to be kept kept where they won't hurt anybody else. If they want to go on supervised trips to the zoo like John Hinkley, let them go.
This is assuming that they really *are* child molesters, and not adults with 16-year-old girlfriends. (The age of consent is 16 in the UK, so why is it a crime here?)
The American Academy of Pediatrics has a different take. They define "sexual abuse," which requires that the abuser be at least 4 years older than the abused, as I recall.
I think the doctors should take the lead in this, not prosecutors. 30-second election spots on TV are not a good way to make social policy.
What about Phillip Craig Garrido, who kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard and kept her in an encampment behind his house for 18 years, while she had 2 children by him?
Garrido had been arrested in 1976 for a kidnap and rape of an adult woman, who might have been killed if he hadn't been caught by a cop who noticed something wrong. He was sentenced to 50 years, but released on parole after 10 years.
I think that someone who commits a stranger rape, or a rape with kidnapping, *should* be put away essentially forever. I don't think a 1% recidivism rate in those cases is acceptable.
What we actually did was define sex crimes with minors and other consentual sex as rape, and fill the jails with people who weren't dangerous (along with non-dangerous drug offenders and other nonviolent crimes).
Every academic criminologist says that you have to separate the dangerous offenders who should be in jail from the non-dangerous offenders who shouldn't be. That's the way to deal with it.
http://lurkertech.com/buzzword-bingo/