The good thing about installing CCTVs in every pub is that, if I'm a cop, and I get videos of some politician going into a gay bar, my career is secure.
Or suppose I'm a legitimate investment advisor and broker and some politician http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=eliot+spitzer&btnG=Google+Search is getting after me because my investment strategies don't meet his old-style accounting standards. If I get a video of him going into a bar with an escort, I can go on with my business unmolested.
I agree: the police should not have been involved. But that means all those lawsuits against school personnel "assaulting" pupils are going to have to disappear.
What are those lawsuits against school personnel "assaulting" pupils?
Anybody can sue anybody for anything, but the only cases that come to court are the ones that involve a teacher injuring a student, which makes it a real assault (no quotes around it).
Every US state plus DC mandates collection of newborn's DNA to screen for genetic diseases. The exact list varies from state to state, but it always includes phenylketoneuria, galactosemia, and hypothyroidism. Some states permit parents to refuse consent on religious grounds, and two more allow objecting on any grounds. Most states specifically exempt collection of these samples from any consent requirements.
Who needs footprints? The states already have the DNA of almost every kid born in the last decade.
Hold on. These laws save infants from death and mental retardation. These DNA tests are useless for police or identification purposes. The same information will go into their medical records (or their death certificate) anyway. I think they're a good policy.
If an infant has one of those diseases, and it isn't treated, the infant will die, and if it isn't treated quickly, the infant will wind up with mental retardation and other serious damage.
These tests don't identify the same DNA sequences that are used in criminal databases, and they can't be used to identify people. If an infant does have one of those diseases, that fact eventually goes into their medical record when the parents bring their (dying) child to the pediatrician or emergency room.
It's politically expedient to give parental exceptions to the laws, because anti-testing and anti-vaccination lobbys have enough political power to be obstructive, and only a few children die as a result. But why would a new parent want to risk having their child die of a preventable disease?
A visitor to the USSR brought home a Soviet clone of the Apple II, which they called IIRC a "Blaht," which means apple in Russian. He wrote an article about it for Byte.
It was a pretty clunky, unreliable device. It was kind of disappointing that the Soviets couldn't clone a western computer cheaply, something that gave the Taiwanese and Koreans no trouble.
One theory was that the Soviets could equal western technology when they made it a top military priority, but not otherwise.
Loren Graham, the MIT professor who probably knows more about Soviet science than any American, said that the Russians had the "blackboard theory": anything you could do with a blackboard and chalk, they could do. But when they actually had to build something, they had trouble. This was ironic for an ideology built on materialism.
But give them credit -- they did have the first satellite in space, the first man in space, and the first woman in space. The Moscow Institute of Cardiology developed the precursor of what would turn out to be tissue plasminogen activator, which is used today to treat people with heart attacks and strokes. Graham said that one thing they did well was their education system. They educated more chemists than anybody else in the world.
Newspapers used to publish information like that routinely, decades ago, but they no longer do so to protect privacy.
The thinking now among newspaper editors is that personal information like that from police blotters and other sources shouldn't be made public. So that news story is unusual. It sounds like a small paper.
The law depends on the state. Under Florida law, as I understand it, most information in government documents is public record, unless there is a specific exception. For example, Governor Jeb Bush's Social Security number was public record, and a privacy activist posted it on a web site.
In New York, the police won't give public access to that kind of information any more. One day I walked down the hall and saw that the door of one of my elderly neighbors had a police seal on it. There was a rumor that she died. I called the local police station to find out if it was true. They wouldn't tell me.
The issue in the animal rights activist cases is that some of these organizations have actually set off bombs, burned down buildings, and intimidated scientists into stopping research out of fear of harm to their families.
Legally, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in the recent al-Manar case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Manar#Banning_of_broadcasts that it's constitutional for the government to outlaw media outlets that directly incite and direct violent action. Some of the animal activist organizations are doing that.
Furthermore, posting the address of a judge in the case, in order to try to influence or harass that judge, would be illegal.
The purpose of their activities is significant. They're publishing these addresses for purposes of harassment. I've read these animal activist web sites. They disingenuously claim they're posting addresses so you can peacefully protest to these people, and don't endorse illegal activities (wink wink). Then after a firebombing, they post anonymized messages from the people who did it justifying their actions. So their claim not to be advocating violence is a sham. These posts are part of a violent campaign to intimidate scientists, and the police are trying to track it down.
Science magazine and New Scientist have run stories about scientists who have stopped doing certain kinds of research, such as brain research in animals, because they were frankly intimidated by firebombings at their homes.
So if you or your parents get a stroke or Parkinson's, they won't be able to help you. One of their firebomb targets was Chiron Corporation, which makes drugs like betaseron, which is a moderately effective treatment for multiple sclerosis.
Your right to protest animal testing ends (1) with nonviolent methods and (2) where my need to use animal testing in medical research begins.
There's a tradeoff. There's a right to free speech and a right to privacy. Newspapers used to say that they should have all the rights. Now they usually acknowledge that there is a right to privacy. There are also laws protecting privacy. I don't know whether you could print addresses like that in every state.
Personally, I would prefer to err on the side of free speech, but like the NYCLU I do acknowledge that limits on publishing personal information for purposes of harassment are constitutional and appropriate.
If I had to choose between the problems of too much free speech, and the problems of too little, I would choose too much. If the price of free speech in China is to make it more difficult to track down violent animal activists, I'll take free speech. If someone can set up a message board in which it's technically possible to defy local laws and post messages without being traced back, that would be better for society than the alternative.
But it doesn't matter what I think. They don't need my permission. It's either technically possible or it's not, and with Tor and international jurisdictions, it seems to be possible.
That's an interesting development in a well-known genetic heart defect. Myosin binding protein C is well known, and mutations in MYPBC3 are one of the most common causes of heart defects in humans (and cats).
If parents are comfortable with prenatal testing and abortion, this genetic defect could be effectively eliminated, in the same way that Down's syndrome has declined dramatically. In principle, the MYPBC3 defect would eventually be eliminated from the population.
MYPBC3 is a pretty cool protein, BTW. It connects the light chains and the heavy chains that make up muscle fibers. Obviously if the proteins that make up muscle fibers come apart you're going to have problems.
Here's a beautiful illustration http://pawpeds.com/pawacademy/health/mybpc3/figure1.jpg which shows how MYPBC3 comes out of the thick filament and holds onto the thin filament, sort of like this: ____________ ====/==/====
(That illustration comes from an article here http://pawpeds.com/pawacademy/health/mybpc3/ about how Dr. Kittleson, in a stroke of nominative determinism, studied the defect in kittens.)
Another common cause of heart defects is protein called beta-myosin heavy chain (MYH7). MYH7 also comes out of the heavy chain. It's the one that looks like a bean pod. It looks a little like this: ____________ ====P==P====
Here's a kewl animation of how it works http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/movies/actin_myosin.html with myosin walking along actin filaments. If you don't think this animation is funny, then molecular biology is not one of your aptitudes.
The main mistake Circuit City made IMHO was that their prices were always higher than their primary competitors
I'm willing to pay as much as 10% more for an expensive product to buy it from a reliable vendor rather than an unreliable vendor.
I used to buy from J&R. First time I bought a computer there, I pulled out an ad from the NYT, and asked the salesman, "Why should I buy from you when X store is selling the same thing for $100 less?"
He said, "Because X store was censured by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs and the Better Business Bureau for selling used products, for swapping components..." and a long list of sleazy stunts, that I didn't believe until he showed me the BBB reports that said so. I bought my computer at J&R, and I still buy expensive stuff at J&R. They're a member of the BBB, BTW.
I studied game theory. I'm better off paying $1,100 and get a working computer, than paying $1,000 and get nothing.
X store, BTW, went out of business a few months later.
CompUSA
Did you ever hear of the curse of the lowest bidder?
The real problem in the United States is that investigative reporting, digging around, doing follow-up, attributing sources, getting people to go on record - is hard work and nobody wants to do it.
There are lots of people who want to do it. The problem is that they can't earn enough to live on while they do it.
Sheep dogs are descended from the natural predators of sheep, which is why they are behaviorally suited to get sheep to do what they want.
When sheep don't want to move, sheep dogs will "eye" them, or stare at them the way a canine predator does before he attacks a prey. That usually gets the sheep to move.
Don't ever stare at a strange dog. He might get the wrong idea.
No. I'm not lying. No this isn't an urban legend. No I didn't hear this from a friend of a friend, I heard this directly from the mouths of the people who can point out names and faces of the people who have said stuff like this--Just so we're clear.
Yeah, that's what the urban legends always say.
If somebody actually did say that to you, they're putting you on.
Are you still going to believe them when they tell you about having sex with corpses?
The services are free, what else would you expect?
Not quite. There's a principle in law called reasonable reliance. (Wikipedia doesn't have an entry, and I can't find a good definition on the web.)
If you reasonably rely on someone else's assurances, and you get screwed, that person can be liable for your damages.
If somebody offers me free software, and I use the software to set up my business data, and the software becomes unusable (say, their copy protection goes psycho), I could argue that I relied on their assurances about their software and now I'm screwed. I might get damages. I don't know for sure because IANAL.
I remember one famous case in which a chemical company gave a science teacher a free case full of bottles labeled with different kinds of petroleum products. The teacher needed some kerosine to store sodium, so he used their bottle labeled kerosine, but it wasn't actually kerosine -- they used water. The sodium blew up, he was injured, sued the chemical company, and won, even though he got it free.
One of the elements of a contract is "consideration" -- if you use AOL's service, they have to get some "consideration" back in order to have an obligation through contract. But delivering your eyeballs to their advertisers might be consideration.
In New York City, the tenants' rights are pretty strong. It's almost impossible for a landlord to evict a tenant who pays the rent, and it takes 6 months to evict a tenant who doesn't pay the rent. My landlord has to renew my yearly lease, at an increase regulated by law. After living here several years, I'm paying about half as much as the people who are now moving in paying what we call "market rent."
That's because (1) There are more tenants in New York City than landlords (2) We had a long tradition of socialist movements in New York City that taught people how to organize into tenants' organizations and demand that our City Council pass strong laws protecting tenants. The strongest, most aggressive organization was the Metropolitan Council on Housing, whose leader, Esther Rand, openly supported the Communist Party (Lenin never liked landlords). For all their faults, those Communists knew how to organize people.
Surprisingly (for those of you who believe in the free market) it works pretty well. The landlords are still getting rich (some of them very rich). There's lots of new housing being built. And a lot of people are able to live in New York City who could never have afforded to live here otherwise. There were some houses abandoned during the economic downturn of the 80s, but that seemed to affect both rent-controlled and uncontrolled housing equally, and it happened in cities without rent control too.
In contrast, Boston had a rent control law, but a few years ago they voted it out. The last I heard, the rents have gone up, it was much harder to get an apartment in Boston, there's no building boom in affordable housing, and from a tenant's POV they're worse off than they used to be. But I'd be interested in first-hand information.
I personally don't think rent control is the ideal solution. I think people who can't afford market-rate rents should be able to live in public housing projects (which also work better than you'd think), and landlords should be allowed to get as rich they want (provided they don't do it at my expense). But rent control was part of a grand bargain that the landlords in New York City struck with the tenants' organizations.
I think the lesson is that tenants can get a much better housing market, with more affordable rents, if they organize and pass laws that benefit them, than they would if they leave it to the free market. If you want to learn how to organize, do a Google search for an MP3 of Pete Seeger's song, "Talking Union." Or search for "Howard Zinn".
As a rather extreme example, a far left wing reporter might put out a story that President Bush has been communicating with members of the armed forces without going through the DoD, and make it sound like he's planning a coup to stay in office.
Schools and libraries subject to CIPA are required to adopt and implement a policy addressing: (a) access by minors to inappropriate matter on the Internet; (b) the safety and security of minors when using electronic mail, chat rooms, and other forms of direct electronic communications; (c) unauthorized access, including so-called "hacking," and other unlawful activities by minors online; (d) unauthorized disclosure, use, and dissemination of personal information regarding minors; and (e) restricting minors' access to materials harmful to them.
If the President of the United States can, with a signing statement, ignore laws that he thinks are unconstitutional, why can't a K-12 student do the same?
A student could reasonably argue that those rules violate the Bill of Rights, despite what any court may say.
Many of those provisions are merely attempts by conservative religious groups to impose their own religious doctrines upon people who follow another religion (or no religion at all). For example, they define nudity per se as "harmful to minors," even though there's no evidence that nudity (or even obscenity) is harmful to anyone by any rational definition.
The real lesson for students is: (a) You have rights to explore ideas (b) You don't get those rights at the sufferance of your school or the government; the Constitution says that those are inalienable rights (c) If anybody tries to take your rights away from you, you have to fight them, and fight for your rights.
No, I said young doctors and medical students. Those statistics include people who started to practice medicine over the last 30 years or more, and they specifically exclude medical students.
One reason people can't (or at least shouldn't) "just accept" that "they don't think the same and have different interests" is that it is for the most part demonstrably untrue. For evidence, please see Janet S. Hyde's meta-analyses of thousands of sex/gender difference studies. Sometimes you can find mean differences that meet statistical significance, but when you look at the effect sizes, it becomes clear that the differences are too small to have practical significance.
I read Hyde's article in Science and I was very disappointed. She made broad, sweeping claims of equal abilities, but in the article she admitted that she didn't have any data on high-level mathematical abilities.
Science 25 July 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5888, pp. 494 - 495 DOI: 10.1126/science.1160364
Education Forum DIVERSITY: Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance Janet S. Hyde,1* Sara M. Lindberg,1 Marcia C. Linn,2 Amy B. Ellis,3 Caroline C. Williams3...
Today, with the gender gap erased in taking advanced math courses, does the gender gap remain in complex problem-solving? To answer this question, we coded test items from all states where tests were available, using a four-level depth of knowledge framework (15). Level 1 (recall) includes recall of facts and performing simple algorithms. Level 2 (skill/concept) items require students to make decisions about how to approach a problem and typically ask students to estimate or compare information. Level 3 (strategic thinking) includes complex cognitive demands that require students to reason, plan, and use evidence. Level 4 (extended thinking) items require complex reasoning over an extended period of time and require students to connect ideas within or across content areas as they develop one among alternate approaches. We computed the percentage of items at levels 3 or 4 for each state for each grade, as an index of the extent to which the test tapped complex problem-solving. The results were disappointing. For most states and most grade levels, none of the items were at levels 3 or 4. Therefore, it was impossible to determine whether there was a gender difference in performance at levels 3 and 4.
I would like to see women engaged in every kind of work without discrimination, and I would like to believe that women are equally capable in CS, engineering and everything else. But the evidence I've seen goes against it.
What convinced me was a study of boys who had been operated on at birth for exstrophy. That's a birth defect in which the bladder is not contained within the abdomen but is exposed on the surface. It was difficult to repair it and preserve male genitals, so male infants used to be "converted" to female and raised as girls. This was the ultimate natural experiment. Even though their male origins was kept a secret from them, they overwhelmingly assumed male interests, attitudes and behavior. This proves with as much evidence as we're likely to get that there is a strong genetic component to many male preferences. Engineering and computer science may be one of those preferences.
NEJM, 22 Jan 2004, 350(4):333-41. Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males With Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth, W.G. Reiner and J.P. Gearhart. 16 genetically male (XY) children had severe cloacal exstrophy including microphallus or phallic inadequacy (incidence 1/400,000). Following medical recommendation, 14 were surgically converted, including orchiectomy, and raised as female. "Parents were instructed to avoid revealing information on their child's sex to anyone at any time, especially to the subject, and were instructed that disclosure of such information might harm the subject's psychosexual development." Parents of 2 children refused surgery and raised children as male. All 16 were reassessed at ages 5-19. Subjects sorted themselves into 3 categories. (1) 5 were living as female (2) 3 had "unclear" sexual id
Slashdot Mirror
The good thing about installing CCTVs in every pub is that, if I'm a cop, and I get videos of some politician going into a gay bar, my career is secure.
Or suppose I'm a legitimate investment advisor and broker and some politician http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=eliot+spitzer&btnG=Google+Search is getting after me because my investment strategies don't meet his old-style accounting standards. If I get a video of him going into a bar with an escort, I can go on with my business unmolested.
I agree: the police should not have been involved. But that means all those lawsuits against school personnel "assaulting" pupils are going to have to disappear.
What are those lawsuits against school personnel "assaulting" pupils?
Anybody can sue anybody for anything, but the only cases that come to court are the ones that involve a teacher injuring a student, which makes it a real assault (no quotes around it).
Can you cite a case?
Actually it's more complicated.
Conyers is pretty good on other issues. He's one of the few Congressmen who supports single-payer health care.
Even the best-intentioned politicians have to make tough decisions about which issues they're going to sell out the public interest on.
Even if you could drive him out of office, you would get a replacement who is just as indebted to interest groups -- maybe worse interest groups.
I'm not saying, "Nobody's perfect," because in reference to politicians, that's an understatement.
Not that this excuses Conyers for selling out on copyright.
Every US state plus DC mandates collection of newborn's DNA to screen for genetic diseases. The exact list varies from state to state, but it always includes phenylketoneuria, galactosemia, and hypothyroidism. Some states permit parents to refuse consent on religious grounds, and two more allow objecting on any grounds. Most states specifically exempt collection of these samples from any consent requirements.
See http://www.ncsl.org/programs/health/screeningprivacy.htm [ncsl.org]
Who needs footprints? The states already have the DNA of almost every kid born in the last decade.
Hold on. These laws save infants from death and mental retardation. These DNA tests are useless for police or identification purposes. The same information will go into their medical records (or their death certificate) anyway. I think they're a good policy.
If an infant has one of those diseases, and it isn't treated, the infant will die, and if it isn't treated quickly, the infant will wind up with mental retardation and other serious damage.
These tests don't identify the same DNA sequences that are used in criminal databases, and they can't be used to identify people. If an infant does have one of those diseases, that fact eventually goes into their medical record when the parents bring their (dying) child to the pediatrician or emergency room.
It's politically expedient to give parental exceptions to the laws, because anti-testing and anti-vaccination lobbys have enough political power to be obstructive, and only a few children die as a result. But why would a new parent want to risk having their child die of a preventable disease?
What's wrong with the tests?
A visitor to the USSR brought home a Soviet clone of the Apple II, which they called IIRC a "Blaht," which means apple in Russian. He wrote an article about it for Byte.
It was a pretty clunky, unreliable device. It was kind of disappointing that the Soviets couldn't clone a western computer cheaply, something that gave the Taiwanese and Koreans no trouble.
One theory was that the Soviets could equal western technology when they made it a top military priority, but not otherwise.
Loren Graham, the MIT professor who probably knows more about Soviet science than any American, said that the Russians had the "blackboard theory": anything you could do with a blackboard and chalk, they could do. But when they actually had to build something, they had trouble. This was ironic for an ideology built on materialism.
But give them credit -- they did have the first satellite in space, the first man in space, and the first woman in space. The Moscow Institute of Cardiology developed the precursor of what would turn out to be tissue plasminogen activator, which is used today to treat people with heart attacks and strokes. Graham said that one thing they did well was their education system. They educated more chemists than anybody else in the world.
Many /. readers never took biology, or if they did they were drunk or stoned when they came to class.
Newspapers used to publish information like that routinely, decades ago, but they no longer do so to protect privacy.
The thinking now among newspaper editors is that personal information like that from police blotters and other sources shouldn't be made public. So that news story is unusual. It sounds like a small paper.
The law depends on the state. Under Florida law, as I understand it, most information in government documents is public record, unless there is a specific exception. For example, Governor Jeb Bush's Social Security number was public record, and a privacy activist posted it on a web site.
In New York, the police won't give public access to that kind of information any more. One day I walked down the hall and saw that the door of one of my elderly neighbors had a police seal on it. There was a rumor that she died. I called the local police station to find out if it was true. They wouldn't tell me.
The issue in the animal rights activist cases is that some of these organizations have actually set off bombs, burned down buildings, and intimidated scientists into stopping research out of fear of harm to their families.
Legally, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in the recent al-Manar case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Manar#Banning_of_broadcasts that it's constitutional for the government to outlaw media outlets that directly incite and direct violent action. Some of the animal activist organizations are doing that.
Furthermore, posting the address of a judge in the case, in order to try to influence or harass that judge, would be illegal.
The purpose of their activities is significant. They're publishing these addresses for purposes of harassment. I've read these animal activist web sites. They disingenuously claim they're posting addresses so you can peacefully protest to these people, and don't endorse illegal activities (wink wink). Then after a firebombing, they post anonymized messages from the people who did it justifying their actions. So their claim not to be advocating violence is a sham. These posts are part of a violent campaign to intimidate scientists, and the police are trying to track it down.
Science magazine and New Scientist have run stories about scientists who have stopped doing certain kinds of research, such as brain research in animals, because they were frankly intimidated by firebombings at their homes.
So if you or your parents get a stroke or Parkinson's, they won't be able to help you. One of their firebomb targets was Chiron Corporation, which makes drugs like betaseron, which is a moderately effective treatment for multiple sclerosis.
Your right to protest animal testing ends (1) with nonviolent methods and (2) where my need to use animal testing in medical research begins.
There's a tradeoff. There's a right to free speech and a right to privacy. Newspapers used to say that they should have all the rights. Now they usually acknowledge that there is a right to privacy. There are also laws protecting privacy. I don't know whether you could print addresses like that in every state.
Personally, I would prefer to err on the side of free speech, but like the NYCLU I do acknowledge that limits on publishing personal information for purposes of harassment are constitutional and appropriate.
If I had to choose between the problems of too much free speech, and the problems of too little, I would choose too much. If the price of free speech in China is to make it more difficult to track down violent animal activists, I'll take free speech. If someone can set up a message board in which it's technically possible to defy local laws and post messages without being traced back, that would be better for society than the alternative.
But it doesn't matter what I think. They don't need my permission. It's either technically possible or it's not, and with Tor and international jurisdictions, it seems to be possible.
That's an interesting development in a well-known genetic heart defect. Myosin binding protein C is well known, and mutations in MYPBC3 are one of the most common causes of heart defects in humans (and cats).
If parents are comfortable with prenatal testing and abortion, this genetic defect could be effectively eliminated, in the same way that Down's syndrome has declined dramatically. In principle, the MYPBC3 defect would eventually be eliminated from the population.
MYPBC3 is a pretty cool protein, BTW. It connects the light chains and the heavy chains that make up muscle fibers. Obviously if the proteins that make up muscle fibers come apart you're going to have problems.
Here's a beautiful illustration http://pawpeds.com/pawacademy/health/mybpc3/figure1.jpg which shows how MYPBC3 comes out of the thick filament and holds onto the thin filament, sort of like this:
____________
====/==/====
(That illustration comes from an article here http://pawpeds.com/pawacademy/health/mybpc3/ about how Dr. Kittleson, in a stroke of nominative determinism, studied the defect in kittens.)
Another common cause of heart defects is protein called beta-myosin heavy chain (MYH7). MYH7 also comes out of the heavy chain. It's the one that looks like a bean pod. It looks a little like this:
____________
====P==P====
Here's a kewl animation of how it works http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/movies/actin_myosin.html with myosin walking along actin filaments. If you don't think this animation is funny, then molecular biology is not one of your aptitudes.
Or just do a Google image search for actin and myosin http://images.google.com/images?rls=ig&hl=en&q=actin+and+myosin
I'm sorry to say that the Wikipedia entries on this subject are not too user-friendly right now. Somebody should work on that.
The main mistake Circuit City made IMHO was that their prices were always higher than their primary competitors
I'm willing to pay as much as 10% more for an expensive product to buy it from a reliable vendor rather than an unreliable vendor.
I used to buy from J&R. First time I bought a computer there, I pulled out an ad from the NYT, and asked the salesman, "Why should I buy from you when X store is selling the same thing for $100 less?"
He said, "Because X store was censured by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs and the Better Business Bureau for selling used products, for swapping components..." and a long list of sleazy stunts, that I didn't believe until he showed me the BBB reports that said so. I bought my computer at J&R, and I still buy expensive stuff at J&R. They're a member of the BBB, BTW.
I studied game theory. I'm better off paying $1,100 and get a working computer, than paying $1,000 and get nothing.
X store, BTW, went out of business a few months later.
CompUSA
Did you ever hear of the curse of the lowest bidder?
As a journalist, I always want to know: What kind of information do my readers want to know?
What do you want from your newspaper?
When's the last time you saw a good story that was worth reading? That would have even been worth paying for?
What would you like to know about that you're not getting?
Trolls are OK. I'm willing to sort out the bad jokes from the useful answers. I do that all day anyway.
The most important thing I learned in journalism was that you have to figure out how to give your readers information that's useful to them.
For example, if somebody has cancer, he's very interested in a story about a new treatment for cancer. The more reliable, the better.
Nothing else counts. If flash and blinking lights will help do that, fine. If not, kill the lights.
If you don't give them useful information, it doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on it, they won't read it.
The real problem in the United States is that investigative reporting, digging around, doing follow-up, attributing sources, getting people to go on record - is hard work and nobody wants to do it.
There are lots of people who want to do it. The problem is that they can't earn enough to live on while they do it.
Sheep dogs are descended from the natural predators of sheep, which is why they are behaviorally suited to get sheep to do what they want.
When sheep don't want to move, sheep dogs will "eye" them, or stare at them the way a canine predator does before he attacks a prey. That usually gets the sheep to move.
Don't ever stare at a strange dog. He might get the wrong idea.
No. I'm not lying. No this isn't an urban legend. No I didn't hear this from a friend of a friend, I heard this directly from the mouths of the people who can point out names and faces of the people who have said stuff like this--Just so we're clear.
Yeah, that's what the urban legends always say.
If somebody actually did say that to you, they're putting you on.
Are you still going to believe them when they tell you about having sex with corpses?
I want a cute little baby velociraptor!
The services are free, what else would you expect?
Not quite. There's a principle in law called reasonable reliance. (Wikipedia doesn't have an entry, and I can't find a good definition on the web.)
If you reasonably rely on someone else's assurances, and you get screwed, that person can be liable for your damages.
If somebody offers me free software, and I use the software to set up my business data, and the software becomes unusable (say, their copy protection goes psycho), I could argue that I relied on their assurances about their software and now I'm screwed. I might get damages. I don't know for sure because IANAL.
I remember one famous case in which a chemical company gave a science teacher a free case full of bottles labeled with different kinds of petroleum products. The teacher needed some kerosine to store sodium, so he used their bottle labeled kerosine, but it wasn't actually kerosine -- they used water. The sodium blew up, he was injured, sued the chemical company, and won, even though he got it free.
One of the elements of a contract is "consideration" -- if you use AOL's service, they have to get some "consideration" back in order to have an obligation through contract. But delivering your eyeballs to their advertisers might be consideration.
In New York City, the tenants' rights are pretty strong. It's almost impossible for a landlord to evict a tenant who pays the rent, and it takes 6 months to evict a tenant who doesn't pay the rent. My landlord has to renew my yearly lease, at an increase regulated by law. After living here several years, I'm paying about half as much as the people who are now moving in paying what we call "market rent."
That's because (1) There are more tenants in New York City than landlords (2) We had a long tradition of socialist movements in New York City that taught people how to organize into tenants' organizations and demand that our City Council pass strong laws protecting tenants. The strongest, most aggressive organization was the Metropolitan Council on Housing, whose leader, Esther Rand, openly supported the Communist Party (Lenin never liked landlords). For all their faults, those Communists knew how to organize people.
Surprisingly (for those of you who believe in the free market) it works pretty well. The landlords are still getting rich (some of them very rich). There's lots of new housing being built. And a lot of people are able to live in New York City who could never have afforded to live here otherwise. There were some houses abandoned during the economic downturn of the 80s, but that seemed to affect both rent-controlled and uncontrolled housing equally, and it happened in cities without rent control too.
In contrast, Boston had a rent control law, but a few years ago they voted it out. The last I heard, the rents have gone up, it was much harder to get an apartment in Boston, there's no building boom in affordable housing, and from a tenant's POV they're worse off than they used to be. But I'd be interested in first-hand information.
I personally don't think rent control is the ideal solution. I think people who can't afford market-rate rents should be able to live in public housing projects (which also work better than you'd think), and landlords should be allowed to get as rich they want (provided they don't do it at my expense). But rent control was part of a grand bargain that the landlords in New York City struck with the tenants' organizations.
I think the lesson is that tenants can get a much better housing market, with more affordable rents, if they organize and pass laws that benefit them, than they would if they leave it to the free market. If you want to learn how to organize, do a Google search for an MP3 of Pete Seeger's song, "Talking Union." Or search for "Howard Zinn".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scandal
As a rather extreme example, a far left wing reporter might put out a story that President Bush has been communicating with members of the armed forces without going through the DoD, and make it sound like he's planning a coup to stay in office.
You mean, let's take a fictional example rather than the real situation in which reporters suck up to President Bush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_(journalist) and believe his lies https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm until he fucks up so completely that the truth becomes undeniable and even his sycophants desert him.
four letters: CIPA. From the FCC's webpage:
Schools and libraries subject to CIPA are required to adopt and implement a policy addressing: (a) access by minors to inappropriate matter on the Internet; (b) the safety and security of minors when using electronic mail, chat rooms, and other forms of direct electronic communications; (c) unauthorized access, including so-called "hacking," and other unlawful activities by minors online; (d) unauthorized disclosure, use, and dissemination of personal information regarding minors; and (e) restricting minors' access to materials harmful to them.
If the President of the United States can, with a signing statement, ignore laws that he thinks are unconstitutional, why can't a K-12 student do the same?
A student could reasonably argue that those rules violate the Bill of Rights, despite what any court may say.
Many of those provisions are merely attempts by conservative religious groups to impose their own religious doctrines upon people who follow another religion (or no religion at all). For example, they define nudity per se as "harmful to minors," even though there's no evidence that nudity (or even obscenity) is harmful to anyone by any rational definition.
The real lesson for students is: (a) You have rights to explore ideas (b) You don't get those rights at the sufferance of your school or the government; the Constitution says that those are inalienable rights (c) If anybody tries to take your rights away from you, you have to fight them, and fight for your rights.
These statistics?
72.2% men, 28.8% women? In 2006?
No, I said young doctors and medical students. Those statistics include people who started to practice medicine over the last 30 years or more, and they specifically exclude medical students.
I'm a non-(computer) geek.
Can somebody explain to me how I can tell if my computer is infected by a bot?
Is there something that will tell me what's running in the background, so I can identify a bot spewing out spam from my system?
(Yes, I promise to learn linux.)
Yeah, I just posted about that NEJM article. That's pretty strong evidence of genetically inherent differences.
Except that there's also the question of "Why are women overwhelmingly prevalent in nursing, but underrepresented in doctor positions?"
About half the medical students and young doctors today are women. You can look up the statistics yourself.
One reason people can't (or at least shouldn't) "just accept" that "they don't think the same and have different interests" is that it is for the most part demonstrably untrue. For evidence, please see Janet S. Hyde's meta-analyses of thousands of sex/gender difference studies. Sometimes you can find mean differences that meet statistical significance, but when you look at the effect sizes, it becomes clear that the differences are too small to have practical significance.
I read Hyde's article in Science and I was very disappointed. She made broad, sweeping claims of equal abilities, but in the article she admitted that she didn't have any data on high-level mathematical abilities.
Science 25 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5888, pp. 494 - 495
DOI: 10.1126/science.1160364
Education Forum ...
DIVERSITY:
Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance
Janet S. Hyde,1* Sara M. Lindberg,1 Marcia C. Linn,2 Amy B. Ellis,3 Caroline C. Williams3
Today, with the gender gap erased in taking advanced math courses, does the gender gap remain in complex problem-solving? To answer this question, we coded test items from all states where tests were available, using a four-level depth of knowledge framework (15). Level 1 (recall) includes recall of facts and performing simple algorithms. Level 2 (skill/concept) items require students to make decisions about how to approach a problem and typically ask students to estimate or compare information. Level 3 (strategic thinking) includes complex cognitive demands that require students to reason, plan, and use evidence. Level 4 (extended thinking) items require complex reasoning over an extended period of time and require students to connect ideas within or across content areas as they develop one among alternate approaches. We computed the percentage of items at levels 3 or 4 for each state for each grade, as an index of the extent to which the test tapped complex problem-solving. The results were disappointing. For most states and most grade levels, none of the items were at levels 3 or 4. Therefore, it was impossible to determine whether there was a gender difference in performance at levels 3 and 4.
I would like to see women engaged in every kind of work without discrimination, and I would like to believe that women are equally capable in CS, engineering and everything else. But the evidence I've seen goes against it.
What convinced me was a study of boys who had been operated on at birth for exstrophy. That's a birth defect in which the bladder is not contained within the abdomen but is exposed on the surface. It was difficult to repair it and preserve male genitals, so male infants used to be "converted" to female and raised as girls. This was the ultimate natural experiment. Even though their male origins was kept a secret from them, they overwhelmingly assumed male interests, attitudes and behavior. This proves with as much evidence as we're likely to get that there is a strong genetic component to many male preferences. Engineering and computer science may be one of those preferences.
NEJM, 22 Jan 2004, 350(4):333-41. Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males With Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth, W.G. Reiner and J.P. Gearhart. 16 genetically male (XY) children had severe cloacal exstrophy including microphallus or phallic inadequacy (incidence 1/400,000). Following medical recommendation, 14 were surgically converted, including orchiectomy, and raised as female. "Parents were instructed to avoid revealing information on their child's sex to anyone at any time, especially to the subject, and were instructed that disclosure of such information might harm the subject's psychosexual development." Parents of 2 children refused surgery and raised children as male. All 16 were reassessed at ages 5-19. Subjects sorted themselves into 3 categories. (1) 5 were living as female (2) 3 had "unclear" sexual id