When I first met him, for example, he was big on hydroelectric power. Then someone told him that dams kill fish and suddenly he was preaching against them and had adopted some new cause.
New Scientist had an article comparing the fatalities from different sources of energy recently. As I recall, coal power was the worst, but after that came hydroelectric.
Dams fail. There were dam failures in China several years ago that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Good intentions without understanding science can do more harm than good.
Your friend should have had a good engineering professor to chew him out.
Science magazine had an article about that. Hydrogen leaks through thick tanks, it leaks through thick pipe walls. It's hard to send it through a 100-mile pipe and get anything left at the end. Amazing stuff, hydrogen.
That's why I was so interested in this story. How have they fixed the problems of hydrogen leaking through the pipes? Too bad they didn't say.
The 2009 Indian geek movie 3 Idiots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots had a prototype just like that. It looked like they built it for less than $500.
I don't know where you get your information from, but I get my information from personal experience, we don't have much of a First Amendment left in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg:
(1) I went on a demonstration against the upcoming war in Iraq. The City was letting music performances go on the Great Lawn in Central Park. We requested to have a rally on the Great Lawn, the only place in NYC that was big enough. The City refused, using their traditional BS excuse that it would harm the grass. (Jimmy Breslin, the last great newspaper reporter, called up the groundskeeper at the country's biggest lawn, in Kentucky, and asked him if the lawn would take it. The groundskeeper said no problem, he has crowds like that all the time.) So we couldn't have the rally.
(2) Then we had a demonstration against the Republican Party convention. Bloomberg routed us up Fifth Avenue, past the New York Public Library. At the library, the cops attacked some innocent people, including some bystanders, and charged them with attacking an officer, a felony. They wanted to pull that old stunt about charging them with a felony, and offering them a choice between pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, or going to jail on a felony if they tried to exercise their right to a fair trial and fight the false charges. Then it turned out that the cops had videotaped the arrests, and the videotapes showed that the accused were actually doing nothing wrong, and the cops made an unprovoked attack and swore to false charges. Oops. Charges dismissed, but the cops weren't prosecuted for perjury.
(3)... I could go on, but what's the point? You'll have a bullshit answer for everything. The "Free Speech Zones" in Boston during the Democratic Party convention, where the cops offered the demonstrators a park surrounded by barbed wire, where nobody could see or hear them. Amy Goodman's arrest in Chicago. "Bong hits for Jesus."
Don't try to get me to support your favorite cause, eminent domain. Go complain to the Republicans about that yourself.
You've had your chance to argue once again that global warming is bad science. I'm not convinced. You're using a standard debater's trick, which is to go through an enormous document and find details to disagree with. You're entitled to try, but it doesn't hold up. You're reduced to an ad hominem attack on Phil Jones rather than addressing the merits.
I think it's good science. More important, most of the top scientists in the world think it's good science.
The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, OTOH, don't exist. They were a deliberate lie. Colin Powell stood up in the UN, showed photographs of supposed poison gas generators (actually hydrogen balloon generators) and said that he had "irrefutable" evidence if WMDs. I was ready to believe him. I didn't think anybody would go out on a limb like that if it wasn't true. It turned out to be a lie. The entire Bush Administration lied. More Americans died in Iraq than in the World Trade Center. And yet they elected Bush again. So politicians have no accountability for lies.
The evidence is *much* stronger that burned fuel particles in the atmosphere increase the rate of asthma and bronchitis, causing as I recall 3,000 deaths a year from coal, 3,000 deaths a year from gasoline, and several times as much disability. (Just ask a nuclear power engineer.)
"There are thousands of scientists who question the methodologies and conclusions of the CRU".
Every scientific paper I read has a section on the limitations of the methodologies and conclusions of the study. That's standard thoughtful academic writing. Scientists question *everything*. That doesn't mean their conclusions are wrong. It just means they've carefully considered alternative explanations.
For global warming, the overwhelming consensus makes it unlikely their conclusions are wrong.
It's possible they could be wrong. Anything is possible. But when we're faced with an imminent danger, we have to stop arguing over hypotheticals created by coal and gas industry think tanks and come to a plan of action.
There are dozens of scientists who question the methodologies and conclusions of the CRU.
We have to take them seriously on the merits. That's the way science works. But for policy purposes, we should go along with the overwhelming majority.
Stone had a brilliant mind. In 1957, when he was a graduate student studying space physics at the University of Chicago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. "Just like that, because of the Cold War and our need to match Sputnik," he says, "a whole new realm absolutely opened up." http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0414-ed-stone-20110412,0,2806518,full.story
They also loved in an age where beating the Soviets in science and technology was considered more important than building the next iDink consumer device, or concocting some alchemical algorithm for market traders.
The Soviets were the best rivals we ever had.
None of this bullshit about teachers getting paid too much, we have to break their union, fire them, privatize the education system, make college kids mortgage their future with loans, bring in H-1Bs if we need scientists and engineers, and teach creationism.
We were putting money into science and engineering education like we're putting money today into the war on terrorism.
That is a bullshit argument which the right-wingers keep dragging out in places like the Wall Street Journal.
Of course the cost of education has gone up since the 1970s.
First, they had to educate all the Negroes. Most of us think that's money well spent. In the 1970s, they were still dragging the former Confederacy kicking and screaming to comply with the federal legislation that required them to educate Negroes. Before then, they had black schools with a fraction of the budget of white schools. So a lot of that money went for equal education.
Second, they had to educate handicapped people, after the Handicapped Act of 1974. In the 1970s, a lot of states didn't educate handicapped children. They warehoused them instead. I remember a guy who worked with blind people describing how he went to an institution and saw a blind girl of about 9 tied up in a chair. The people at the institution said they tied her to a chair "so she didn't hurt herself." That's all she did all day, sit tied to a chair. After the Handicapped Act, the states had to educate blind (and other) handicapped children. That costs money. But we as a society decided we want to give handicapped children the best education they can get.
I know what the right-wing argument is: We're spending too much money on education because we're paying union teachers too much. Well, we're not. We pay teachers less than a lot of the countries that are beating us in education.
You find one study that you don't understand, and then you tell *other* people to shut the fuck up. Typical ignorant right-winger.
other countries that are beating the US in student achievement (e.g. Finland) have a union tradition that is just as strong, if not stronger, than in the US.
The reason for ensuring that public sector employees retain their full rights to freedom of speech and association is so that they can keep their jobs when a different political party than the one they personally support comes to power.
McGRAW-HILL RESEARCH FOUNDATION Policy Paper: Lessons from PISA
WHAT THE U.S. CAN LEARN FROM THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL EDUCATION REFORM EFFORTS
3. Ontario, Canada
An interesting fact about high-performing Ontario, Canada is that the teachers there are heavily unionized. In fact, every teacher is required to join the union, which is as strong and as fiercely protective of teachers’ rights as any union in the U.S.
But in Ontario, they have shown that a strong teachers union is not inimical to successful education reform.
That's right, blame it on religion instead of harder targets like teacher's unions that have protected terrible and under-performing teachers. I'm a great example of why they should be broken up. My math education was so bad in "good public schools" that I am now staring down the prospects of having to go to a community college to make sure I have all of the foundations plus engineering calculus down pat before I can apply for a M.S. in any respectable subject.
That's right, blame it on the unions. Most of the school systems that score better than the U.S. in international comparisons are union systems, like Finland.
McGRAW-HILL RESEARCH FOUNDATION Policy Paper: Lessons from PISA
WHAT THE U.S. CAN LEARN FROM THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL EDUCATION REFORM EFFORTS
3. Ontario, Canada
An interesting fact about high-performing Ontario, Canada is that the teachers there are heavily unionized. In fact, every teacher is required to join the union, which is as strong and as fiercely protective of teachers’ rights as any union in the U.S.
But in Ontario, they have shown that a strong teachers union is not inimical to successful education reform.
Here's what unions do:
Alfonse D'Amato, who went up the ranks in the Republican party on Long Island, and finally was a U.S. Senator, got sued after he left Congress. In a lawsuit, both sides have to disclose a lot of documents. One of the documents that came out was a letter from D'Amato to one of his assistants discussing how much of their income civil servants should be required to kick back as campaign contributions to the Republican Party -- should it be 2.5% or 3%, something like that. Because of the statute of limitations, they couldn't be prosecuted for it, but everybody who had a county job knew this was going on. My friend's daughter applied for a job as a lifeguard, and they told her that if her parents weren't members of the Republican Party, she shouldn't bother applying -- they would check.
That's what it's like without unions. You need the approval of the Republican Party bosses to get a job. You have to contribute to the Republican Party to keep your job. And if your boss doesn't like you for some reason, he can claim you were really incompetent all these years and fire you.
In the non-union states, the schools are firing teachers with 20 years experience making $60,000 a year and replacing them with recent college graduates making $25,000 a year. That's the future of conservative America: you work 20 years at a job, get fired, and have to spend the rest of your life in semi-employment.
The unions, and the teachers themselves, have been targets for right-wing wackos, most of whom don't even understand education. Read the Wall Street Journal comments pages sometimes.
It has repeatedly turned out that anti-union school "reformers" who claimed they had to fire incompetent unionized teachers, and replace them with young, inspiring teachers, were getting good test results because their teachers were cheating on the tests.
That happened in George W. Bush's Texas, it happened repeatedly in many places, and it just happened again in Michelle Rhee's DC public school system. If you read the USA Today story http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-28-1Aschooltesting28_CV_N.htm you'll see that the testing company, McGraw-Hill, reported to Rhee that the test results had a large number of wrong answers erased and replaced with correct answers, a sign of cheating, and Rhee covered it up.
Meanwhile, the same people who are attacking teachers' unions -- originally Republicans but now also "moderate" Democrats -- have ended free college, like City College in New
I honestly don't know if you're trolling, ignorant, or being overly pedantic.
There isn't much scientific evidence about what kind of diet is "healthy."
How in the hell did you come to that conclusion.
Reading the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, BMJ, and Science, going to lectures at medical meetings by nutritionists and other doctors, and having them explain it to me to make sure I understood it correctly.
Studies over the last two decades alone very clearly show what is "healthy"; defined as good health and longer life in better health.
Actually, I think there was only one of healthy people, which found out that healthy people who ate a Mediterranean diet had lower death rates than people who ate a more western diet. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp030069 I think that's the only one of a healthy population.
Needless to say, those diets are extremely unpopular.
Mediterranean diets are unpopular? I know a lot of awfully popular Greek restaurants.
Furthermore, studies dating back over the last several hundred years very clearly indicate what is unhealthy.
I'm sure that isn't true. Name one study, besides the NEJM study I cited.
So while we can't authoritatively say, eating x, y, and z will absolutely make you healthy, we absolutely can say, in general, a healthy diet looks like x. But its not like we don't know and acknowledge genetic variance plays a big role here.
But there were many studies (some of them randomized prospective trials) starting in the 1970s, and going on for long stretches of time, that compared *healthy* people eating low-cholesterol and high-cholesterol diet. (One of them was the MRFIT trial, if you want to look it up.) For people without heart disease, there was no difference in the death rates between the two groups.
If anyone knows of a scientific study that shows *healthy* people had better health outcomes long-term on one particular diet compared to a different diet, I'd like to know what it is.
You're conflating several things. Man, I'm using that word a lot today. The conflation is the fact you are specifically pulling out sub-segments of the population to hold against the average.
I don't know what you're talking about. Many of these studies deliberately incorporated a large number of diverse people, like the MRFIT study, the Nurses' study, etc. Even in the community population studies, there was no benefit to healthy people.
Many studies, for decades now, are attempting to better address the issue in more granularity but much of that is only possible with broader genetic studies and understanding of those genetics are it relates to both health and nutrient consumption.
In order for me to tell whether you actually know what you're talking about, could you name any of those studies?
So as I said above, we absolutely, for the broad population, know what an unhealthy diet looks like. Which, that alone is of great benefit. Furthermore, for the broadest of population, we know what a good diet consists of. And really, where this differs is typically about foods which fall outside of what he know is healthy or based on what we know bad foods are.
So yes, being absolutely pedantic, for every specific person, we can not authoritatively say, this is absolutely this most healthy diet for you. Just the same, on average, we can say a healthy diet should look something like this and we can tweak it to better reflect your health needs beyond that. But even more so, we absolutely do know, in general, what a bad diet looks like. That does leave lots of great area and perhaps even some overlap between the extremes, but even with that, t
There isn't much scientific evidence about what kind of diet is "healthy."
We know that people with certain kinds of heart disease will live longer if they eat high-cholesterol diets.
But there were many studies (some of them randomized prospective trials) starting in the 1970s, and going on for long stretches of time, that compared *healthy* people eating low-cholesterol and high-cholesterol diet. (One of them was the MRFIT trial, if you want to look it up.) For people without heart disease, there was no difference in the death rates between the two groups.
If anyone knows of a scientific study that shows *healthy* people had better health outcomes long-term on one particular diet compared to a different diet, I'd like to know what it is.
The Atkins diet is no more or less effective than anything else.
On Slashdot people should understand the significance of a randomized, controlled trial.
If you assign a large number of people to 3 different diets, as the JAMA authors did, and one diet produces significantly more weight loss, then it's a more effective diet.
That may be because people on the Atkins diet are satiated with a lower amount of calories than the other diets, as the Atkins people speculate. It may be for some other reason. But that's the data. And if you believe in science, you have to follow the data.
But seriously, the entire body of scientific knowledge is itself is a model
No, part of the body of scientific knowledge is data. You compare your model to the data, and see if it agrees, as Feynmann said.
If they could come up with an independent source of data that the lifetime costs of smokers was less, I'd believe them. It might be true, if they have heart attacks and die quickly. But suppose they have heart attacks and have to get implantable cardio-defibrillators? They could cost more money.
Slashdot Mirror
When I first met him, for example, he was big on hydroelectric power. Then someone told him that dams kill fish and suddenly he was preaching against them and had adopted some new cause.
New Scientist had an article comparing the fatalities from different sources of energy recently. As I recall, coal power was the worst, but after that came hydroelectric.
Dams fail. There were dam failures in China several years ago that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Good intentions without understanding science can do more harm than good.
Your friend should have had a good engineering professor to chew him out.
That is indeed the problem with hydrogen fuel.
Science magazine had an article about that. Hydrogen leaks through thick tanks, it leaks through thick pipe walls. It's hard to send it through a 100-mile pipe and get anything left at the end. Amazing stuff, hydrogen.
That's why I was so interested in this story. How have they fixed the problems of hydrogen leaking through the pipes? Too bad they didn't say.
Put out that cigarette.
The 2009 Indian geek movie 3 Idiots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots had a prototype just like that. It looked like they built it for less than $500.
There were toy radio-controlled helicopters selling for $1,000. http://www.rctoys.com/rc-products/DF-VTI-EYE.html
Cool! I'll be playing with my plastic helicopter and toy soldiers on this all day.
Here's the Google Maps satellite photo of Abbottabad, Pakistan. I can't find his compound. Can you?
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Abbottabad&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=29.854268,56.513672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Abbottabad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan&ll=34.146769,73.209769&spn=0.0019,0.005493&t=h&z=18
I don't know where you get your information from, but I get my information from personal experience, we don't have much of a First Amendment left in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg:
(1) I went on a demonstration against the upcoming war in Iraq. The City was letting music performances go on the Great Lawn in Central Park. We requested to have a rally on the Great Lawn, the only place in NYC that was big enough. The City refused, using their traditional BS excuse that it would harm the grass. (Jimmy Breslin, the last great newspaper reporter, called up the groundskeeper at the country's biggest lawn, in Kentucky, and asked him if the lawn would take it. The groundskeeper said no problem, he has crowds like that all the time.) So we couldn't have the rally.
(2) Then we had a demonstration against the Republican Party convention. Bloomberg routed us up Fifth Avenue, past the New York Public Library. At the library, the cops attacked some innocent people, including some bystanders, and charged them with attacking an officer, a felony. They wanted to pull that old stunt about charging them with a felony, and offering them a choice between pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, or going to jail on a felony if they tried to exercise their right to a fair trial and fight the false charges. Then it turned out that the cops had videotaped the arrests, and the videotapes showed that the accused were actually doing nothing wrong, and the cops made an unprovoked attack and swore to false charges. Oops. Charges dismissed, but the cops weren't prosecuted for perjury.
(3) ... I could go on, but what's the point? You'll have a bullshit answer for everything. The "Free Speech Zones" in Boston during the Democratic Party convention, where the cops offered the demonstrators a park surrounded by barbed wire, where nobody could see or hear them. Amy Goodman's arrest in Chicago. "Bong hits for Jesus."
Don't try to get me to support your favorite cause, eminent domain. Go complain to the Republicans about that yourself.
You've had your chance to argue once again that global warming is bad science. I'm not convinced. You're using a standard debater's trick, which is to go through an enormous document and find details to disagree with. You're entitled to try, but it doesn't hold up. You're reduced to an ad hominem attack on Phil Jones rather than addressing the merits.
I think it's good science. More important, most of the top scientists in the world think it's good science.
The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, OTOH, don't exist. They were a deliberate lie. Colin Powell stood up in the UN, showed photographs of supposed poison gas generators (actually hydrogen balloon generators) and said that he had "irrefutable" evidence if WMDs. I was ready to believe him. I didn't think anybody would go out on a limb like that if it wasn't true. It turned out to be a lie. The entire Bush Administration lied. More Americans died in Iraq than in the World Trade Center. And yet they elected Bush again. So politicians have no accountability for lies.
Why not?
When a scientist commits fraud and is discovered, he's discredited for life.
When a politician commits fraud and is discovered, he just goes on like nothing happened. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200499,00.html Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq
The evidence is *much* stronger that burned fuel particles in the atmosphere increase the rate of asthma and bronchitis, causing as I recall 3,000 deaths a year from coal, 3,000 deaths a year from gasoline, and several times as much disability. (Just ask a nuclear power engineer.)
Is that also a multi-trillion dollar heist?
"There are thousands of scientists who question the methodologies and conclusions of the CRU".
Every scientific paper I read has a section on the limitations of the methodologies and conclusions of the study. That's standard thoughtful academic writing. Scientists question *everything*. That doesn't mean their conclusions are wrong. It just means they've carefully considered alternative explanations.
For global warming, the overwhelming consensus makes it unlikely their conclusions are wrong.
It's possible they could be wrong. Anything is possible. But when we're faced with an imminent danger, we have to stop arguing over hypotheticals created by coal and gas industry think tanks and come to a plan of action.
There are dozens of scientists who question the methodologies and conclusions of the CRU.
We have to take them seriously on the merits. That's the way science works. But for policy purposes, we should go along with the overwhelming majority.
Country : Sweden
ISP : Bredbandsbolaget
Speed : 100Mbit downlink, 10Mbit uplink. No traffic-limits. No shaping at all.
Price : ~15USD ~120SEK / month
Like I said:
Stone had a brilliant mind. In 1957, when he was a graduate student studying space physics at the University of Chicago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. "Just like that, because of the Cold War and our need to match Sputnik," he says, "a whole new realm absolutely opened up."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0414-ed-stone-20110412,0,2806518,full.story
You know, they weren't club-wielding savages in loincloths back then.
Don't knock it, son. Those club-wielding savages invented fire.
They also loved in an age where beating the Soviets in science and technology was considered more important than building the next iDink consumer device, or concocting some alchemical algorithm for market traders.
The Soviets were the best rivals we ever had.
None of this bullshit about teachers getting paid too much, we have to break their union, fire them, privatize the education system, make college kids mortgage their future with loans, bring in H-1Bs if we need scientists and engineers, and teach creationism.
We were putting money into science and engineering education like we're putting money today into the war on terrorism.
Scientists had respect.
We had to beat the commies into space, after they humiliated us http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_1 twice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin If they hadn't purged Korolev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev they might have put the first man on the moon.
And they were great mathematicians too.
And they made great symphonies and movies.
That is a bullshit argument which the right-wingers keep dragging out in places like the Wall Street Journal.
Of course the cost of education has gone up since the 1970s.
First, they had to educate all the Negroes. Most of us think that's money well spent. In the 1970s, they were still dragging the former Confederacy kicking and screaming to comply with the federal legislation that required them to educate Negroes. Before then, they had black schools with a fraction of the budget of white schools. So a lot of that money went for equal education.
Second, they had to educate handicapped people, after the Handicapped Act of 1974. In the 1970s, a lot of states didn't educate handicapped children. They warehoused them instead. I remember a guy who worked with blind people describing how he went to an institution and saw a blind girl of about 9 tied up in a chair. The people at the institution said they tied her to a chair "so she didn't hurt herself." That's all she did all day, sit tied to a chair. After the Handicapped Act, the states had to educate blind (and other) handicapped children. That costs money. But we as a society decided we want to give handicapped children the best education they can get.
I know what the right-wing argument is: We're spending too much money on education because we're paying union teachers too much. Well, we're not. We pay teachers less than a lot of the countries that are beating us in education.
You find one study that you don't understand, and then you tell *other* people to shut the fuck up. Typical ignorant right-winger.
other countries that are beating the US in student achievement (e.g. Finland) have a union tradition that is just as strong, if not stronger, than in the US.
The reason for ensuring that public sector employees retain their full rights to freedom of speech and association is so that they can keep their jobs when a different political party than the one they personally support comes to power.
Good point (actually 2 good points).
http://www.mcgraw-hillresearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/pisa-intl-competitiveness.pdf
McGRAW-HILL RESEARCH FOUNDATION
Policy Paper: Lessons from PISA
WHAT THE U.S. CAN LEARN FROM THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL EDUCATION REFORM EFFORTS
3. Ontario, Canada
An interesting fact about high-performing Ontario, Canada is that the teachers there are heavily unionized. In fact, every teacher is required to join the union, which is as strong and
as fiercely protective of teachers’ rights as any union in the U.S.
But in Ontario, they have shown that a strong teachers union is not inimical to successful education reform.
That's right, blame it on religion instead of harder targets like teacher's unions that have protected terrible and under-performing teachers. I'm a great example of why they should be broken up. My math education was so bad in "good public schools" that I am now staring down the prospects of having to go to a community college to make sure I have all of the foundations plus engineering calculus down pat before I can apply for a M.S. in any respectable subject.
That's right, blame it on the unions. Most of the school systems that score better than the U.S. in international comparisons are union systems, like Finland.
http://www.mcgraw-hillresearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/pisa-intl-competitiveness.pdf
McGRAW-HILL RESEARCH FOUNDATION
Policy Paper: Lessons from PISA
WHAT THE U.S. CAN LEARN FROM THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL EDUCATION REFORM EFFORTS
3. Ontario, Canada
An interesting fact about high-performing Ontario, Canada is that the teachers there are heavily unionized. In fact, every teacher is required to join the union, which is as strong and
as fiercely protective of teachers’ rights as any union in the U.S.
But in Ontario, they have shown that a strong teachers union is not inimical to successful education reform.
Here's what unions do:
Alfonse D'Amato, who went up the ranks in the Republican party on Long Island, and finally was a U.S. Senator, got sued after he left Congress. In a lawsuit, both sides have to disclose a lot of documents. One of the documents that came out was a letter from D'Amato to one of his assistants discussing how much of their income civil servants should be required to kick back as campaign contributions to the Republican Party -- should it be 2.5% or 3%, something like that. Because of the statute of limitations, they couldn't be prosecuted for it, but everybody who had a county job knew this was going on. My friend's daughter applied for a job as a lifeguard, and they told her that if her parents weren't members of the Republican Party, she shouldn't bother applying -- they would check.
That's what it's like without unions. You need the approval of the Republican Party bosses to get a job. You have to contribute to the Republican Party to keep your job. And if your boss doesn't like you for some reason, he can claim you were really incompetent all these years and fire you.
In the non-union states, the schools are firing teachers with 20 years experience making $60,000 a year and replacing them with recent college graduates making $25,000 a year. That's the future of conservative America: you work 20 years at a job, get fired, and have to spend the rest of your life in semi-employment.
The unions, and the teachers themselves, have been targets for right-wing wackos, most of whom don't even understand education. Read the Wall Street Journal comments pages sometimes.
It has repeatedly turned out that anti-union school "reformers" who claimed they had to fire incompetent unionized teachers, and replace them with young, inspiring teachers, were getting good test results because their teachers were cheating on the tests.
That happened in George W. Bush's Texas, it happened repeatedly in many places, and it just happened again in Michelle Rhee's DC public school system. If you read the USA Today story http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-28-1Aschooltesting28_CV_N.htm you'll see that the testing company, McGraw-Hill, reported to Rhee that the test results had a large number of wrong answers erased and replaced with correct answers, a sign of cheating, and Rhee covered it up.
Meanwhile, the same people who are attacking teachers' unions -- originally Republicans but now also "moderate" Democrats -- have ended free college, like City College in New
I guarantee that you have never seen anything quite in the same league as the videos made by Sapientia University
Without diminishing the creativity of these videos, I recommend that if you enjoyed these you might do a Google search for "Dance Your PhD".
Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/and-the-dance-your-phd-winner-is.html
Nucleic acids never looked so good.
I honestly don't know if you're trolling, ignorant, or being overly pedantic.
There isn't much scientific evidence about what kind of diet is "healthy."
How in the hell did you come to that conclusion.
Reading the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, BMJ, and Science, going to lectures at medical meetings by nutritionists and other doctors, and having them explain it to me to make sure I understood it correctly.
Studies over the last two decades alone very clearly show what is "healthy"; defined as good health and longer life in better health.
Actually, I think there was only one of healthy people, which found out that healthy people who ate a Mediterranean diet had lower death rates than people who ate a more western diet. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp030069 I think that's the only one of a healthy population.
Needless to say, those diets are extremely unpopular.
Mediterranean diets are unpopular? I know a lot of awfully popular Greek restaurants.
Furthermore, studies dating back over the last several hundred years very clearly indicate what is unhealthy.
I'm sure that isn't true. Name one study, besides the NEJM study I cited.
So while we can't authoritatively say, eating x, y, and z will absolutely make you healthy, we absolutely can say, in general, a healthy diet looks like x. But its not like we don't know and acknowledge genetic variance plays a big role here.
But there were many studies (some of them randomized prospective trials) starting in the 1970s, and going on for long stretches of time, that compared *healthy* people eating low-cholesterol and high-cholesterol diet. (One of them was the MRFIT trial, if you want to look it up.) For people without heart disease, there was no difference in the death rates between the two groups.
If anyone knows of a scientific study that shows *healthy* people had better health outcomes long-term on one particular diet compared to a different diet, I'd like to know what it is.
You're conflating several things. Man, I'm using that word a lot today. The conflation is the fact you are specifically pulling out sub-segments of the population to hold against the average.
I don't know what you're talking about. Many of these studies deliberately incorporated a large number of diverse people, like the MRFIT study, the Nurses' study, etc. Even in the community population studies, there was no benefit to healthy people.
Many studies, for decades now, are attempting to better address the issue in more granularity but much of that is only possible with broader genetic studies and understanding of those genetics are it relates to both health and nutrient consumption.
In order for me to tell whether you actually know what you're talking about, could you name any of those studies?
So as I said above, we absolutely, for the broad population, know what an unhealthy diet looks like. Which, that alone is of great benefit. Furthermore, for the broadest of population, we know what a good diet consists of. And really, where this differs is typically about foods which fall outside of what he know is healthy or based on what we know bad foods are.
So yes, being absolutely pedantic, for every specific person, we can not authoritatively say, this is absolutely this most healthy diet for you. Just the same, on average, we can say a healthy diet should look something like this and we can tweak it to better reflect your health needs beyond that. But even more so, we absolutely do know, in general, what a bad diet looks like. That does leave lots of great area and perhaps even some overlap between the extremes, but even with that, t
There isn't much scientific evidence about what kind of diet is "healthy."
We know that people with certain kinds of heart disease will live longer if they eat high-cholesterol diets.
But there were many studies (some of them randomized prospective trials) starting in the 1970s, and going on for long stretches of time, that compared *healthy* people eating low-cholesterol and high-cholesterol diet. (One of them was the MRFIT trial, if you want to look it up.) For people without heart disease, there was no difference in the death rates between the two groups.
If anyone knows of a scientific study that shows *healthy* people had better health outcomes long-term on one particular diet compared to a different diet, I'd like to know what it is.
The Atkins diet is no more or less effective than anything else.
On Slashdot people should understand the significance of a randomized, controlled trial.
If you assign a large number of people to 3 different diets, as the JAMA authors did, and one diet produces significantly more weight loss, then it's a more effective diet.
That may be because people on the Atkins diet are satiated with a lower amount of calories than the other diets, as the Atkins people speculate. It may be for some other reason. But that's the data. And if you believe in science, you have to follow the data.
The Atkins diet isn't a fad diet.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a comparison of the Atkins diet to 2 other diets, and it performed better.
A diet that has successful results published in JAMA isn't a fad diet.
But seriously, the entire body of scientific knowledge is itself is a model
No, part of the body of scientific knowledge is data. You compare your model to the data, and see if it agrees, as Feynmann said.
If they could come up with an independent source of data that the lifetime costs of smokers was less, I'd believe them. It might be true, if they have heart attacks and die quickly. But suppose they have heart attacks and have to get implantable cardio-defibrillators? They could cost more money.