As Paul Farmer said, Aristide was developing a health care system with centralized planning and control, and he was handling priorities like clean water and sanitation, with his Harvard-trained public health experts.
Unfortunately the U.S. government, under Democratic and Republican administrations, didn't like the way Haiti's democratically-elected government was treating their terrorist friends in the Haitian elite, so we overthrew Aristide and replaced him with our favorite.
American-installed dictators don't have a good track record of providing the basics of public health, like clean water and sanitation, much less electricity.
If you want the uncomfortable details, you can start by reading Paul Farmer's articles.
I think we can all agree that it's wrong for the U.S. to overthrow the leaders of elected democracies. Or can we?
I remember reading an article perhaps 9 months after the cholera outbreak, I think in the New England Journal of Medicine about how the epidemiologists had identified the source of the cholera infection to the Nepalese troops. It's fairly absurd that the UN has continued to deny that this happened for well over 2 years.
Yes, I read that in the NEJM too. They've also had some good articles on the politics of Haitian health care.
There were some good articles by Paul Farmer, who probably did more to help the Haitian health care system than any other American.
This is the result of U.S. efforts to undermine Aristide by undermining his health care system.
Farmer said that the way to help a third-world country's health care system is to teach them the skills, give them the money, and let them do it themselves, so they can be independent of foreign aid.
People who give them assistance also have to be in the clinics making sure that the money goes to health services, not to some corrupt politician's Swiss bank account.
Farmer said that a health care system has to have central coordination. You can't have flying in to perform their pet projects. You have to focus on the medical interventions to address the highest-priority problems, like infant and childbirth mortality. The health care clinics have to be stocked with necessary supplies.
Farmer said that the U.S. government was hostile to Aristide, and used health care policy to undermine Aristide. The U.S. prevented Aristide from getting international assistance for his health care programs, and sent that assistance to NGOs that were competing politically with Aristide.
As a result, the health care system got, not what it needed, but whatever the NGOs were offering, whether it was one of Haiti's health care priorities or not.
If you want to help, you have to ask doctors on the ground what they need.
For example, after the earthquake, the U.S. sent Marines to "secure the perimeter." Experts in disaster said that people in disaster situations don't usually need military assistance. There usually isn't much looting or crime, and local people can manage for themselves. The best thing to give them is money, so they can hire local workers to do the job themselves -- and to make sure the money is getting to where it's supposed to go.
And that's why Haiti's health care system is such a mess. It's not because the Haitian people (some of whom are Harvard graduates) can't figure out how to do things. It's because when they do figure out how to do things, the U.S. intervenes to protect its friends in the right-wing Haitian aristocracy.
I can't find out any legitimate purpose to bringing Nepalese troops in. If they didn't have the training to build sanitary latrines, then it's unlikely that they knew enough to be useful in that situation. They weren't doing anything that the Haitians couldn't have done themselves.
There have been articles in medical journals for doctors who want to go to disasters and "help out." The first lesson is, "If you don't have experience in disaster work, stay out, because you'll do more harm than good."
There were articles in scientific journals in 2011 that pinpointed the source of the cholera epidemic to the Nepalese troops. That's easy to do with DNA fingerprinting. There's no scientific doubt.
In this country, there are many libertarians (particularly on the right) who believe that, on principle, the government should never do anything without unanimous consent.
In other words, we shouldn't have to pay taxes just because a majority decides to do it; we should only pay taxes if there is unanimous agreement.
That's one of the justifications for proposition 13 in California, which required (not a unanimous but) a 2/3 majority of the legislature to pass a tax bill. The stated purpose of that, and the result, was to shrink (or destroy) the government, and it succeeded. Among other things, it destroyed the California public university system.
So that shows you the limitations -- some would say failure -- of rejecting majority rule.
I'm not sure what the benefit is of a degree that somebody takes over several years while she's working.
For some jobs, particularly in the sciences and technology, the degree gives you information and understanding you need to do your job. But if you're already working in your profession, what else do you need?
I realize that in some professions, like teaching, an advanced degree is high regarded for promotions and pay increases. I'm not sure whether that's just credentialization for its own sake or whether they become better teachers after a masters' degree.
Again, I'm not sure what benefit a masters' in non-profit administration has. I've met people with degrees in non-profit administration. It sounds like they studied MBA-style case histories to better understand how non-profit organizations work.
I'm not sure why people get these degrees and what the purpose is. Traditionally, people learned by meeting regularly in small groups to have discussions. You can supplement that with books and technology, but I wonder whether you can accomplish the same thing if you take away the face-to-face meetings in small groups. In a university, you can read a book or article and walk down the hall to talk to the professor who wrote it. Can you do that online? Is an online discussion with a low-paid temporary teaching assistant the same as a discussion with a professor?
This MOOC is supposed to give you a master's in computer science. Is that a testable hypothesis? Do CS students get specific knowledge in their masters' programs that you can test for? What do you learn in a CS master's anyway?
I've heard of people using their master's to develop some project, like a robotic device or a computer-assisted tool. Some of those projects take advantage of a university machine shop and other hardware resources. Some people develop a technology that they turn into a business.
Can you do that online? I don't know. Education is prone to fads, and most of them don't work out. What are the goals of a masters' program in computer science? What are the goals of this masters' program? How will they evaluate it? Will they evaluate it? Is this a real masters' program, or have they just selected everything that they can do online and tossed out everything that they can't? Is there something missing? Are they missing the point of a masters' program?
I wish the NYT had gotten into that. I'll have to read it in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
I notice from the NYT story that the projected profits are $240,000 for the first year, and $4.7 million for the third year.
Do these people have enough integrity to say, "I don't care about the $4.7 million. This program isn't working. It's not as good as a regular masters' program. We have to shut it down."
Does anybody have enough integrity to turn down $4.7 million profits when they realize a project isn't working?
When you get a masters' degree, you spend a year or more committing yourself 24 hours a day to learning something, and you're in a community of people who are engaged in the same commitment to learning something. Your eating, sleeping, and social life revolves around an intellectual community. You learn a lot through serendipity. A chance meeting in the hall can give you a direction for your career.
When you take a MOOC, you're not giving it the same commitment and you're not among the same community. That's especially true if you take it free.
You could just read the same textbooks that masters' degree students read. But you'd be missing something.
I could read transcripts of the Feynmann lectures. But that wouldn't be the same as going to school and taking lectures with Feynmann.
Any public defender worth making his salary should be able to show a message being taken by an innocent bystander, I've seen such scenarios play out in courts. Inncent bystanders usually don't get rail roaded, at least as a matter of prosecutorial policy.
Not usually, but it does happen. Some prosecutors think that their job is to prosecute as many people as they can and get the longest sentences they can. When defense lawyers start collecting cases of unjust sentences, there are a lot of cases of drug dealers' girlfriends who were peripherally involved but got longer sentences than the actual dealers, because the girlfriends had nothing to offer in a deal.
The quality (and salary) of public defenders varies greatly.
Even the real crooked prosecutors get warned by judges to lay off innocent people from time to time, if its plain to see they are in fact innocent.
Maybe it's just the outrageous cases that wind up in the newspapers, but I read about a lot of them. America seems to have turned into the world's biggest police state. College kids get 10, 20 years for dealing drugs? It's sin and punishment run amuck.
I've worked in the graphic arts industry, pasting up magazine pages. I worked for several publishers, and we always had an art department next door. Every magazine and commercial web site you read was designed by a graphic designer. I know lots of graphic artists, most of whom were making a good living before the economic bust. Most working artists don't "paint." There's a lot to learn about art in order to do practical stuff.
If you want something more systematic and authoritative than my personal experiences, look it up in the U.S. Occupational Outlook Handbook http://www.bls.gov/ooh/arts-and-design/home.htm which squares with my first-hand knowledge.
JOB SUMMARY Art directors are responsible for the visual style and images in magazines, newspapers, product packaging, and movie and television productions. They create the overall design and direct others who develop artwork or layouts.
ENTRY-LEVEL EDUCATION Bachelor’s degree
2010 MEDIAN PAY $80,630
Oh, yeah, you may have heard that one of the benefits of going to a good college is to make contacts that will be useful in getting a job.
One of the characteristics of the engineering profession is that it's highly specialized. You learn to design widgets, and if the widget industry booms, you can name your price. If widgets go bust, you might not be able to get a job anywhere in engineering. That's what happened to the aerospace engineers. That's what I heard from the director of the MIT employment office, anyway. I met one former aerospace engineer who went into the real estate market. At least he knew how to fix a leaky faucet. Remember that woman who asked Obama to help her husband get a job? He was a manufacturing engineer. Not a great career after the manufacturing industry moved to China.
I'm not putting down engineering but it's no longer a secure employment.
And I don't like this idea, "It's your own fault you can't pay off your college loans, you chose the wrong major." That's just an excuse for a failed economic system.
You obviously don't know anything about liberal arts. The first think you learn in a liberal arts education is not to go shooting off your mouth when you don't know the facts.
We don't know exactly what the conversation was between the undercover agents and the instructors, but judging by past cases, they set these things up very carefully to get the suspect to cross the line into illegality.
They must have said something like, "I'm committing a crime and I want to know how to beat the lie detector in case the cops question me about it," that would cross the line. The instructor would believe that he was helping the a criminal to break the law.
There have been cases where a drug dealer's girlfriend picked up the phone, wrote down a message, and was convicted of drug dealing.
Suppose instead of water, they were using beef broth, and had infected the beef broth with just a few bacteria. They could dilute and shake 30 times and still get infected beef broth at the end.
They could hypothesis that there is some similar mechanism in water which will still be found after 30 dilutions.
Suppose the ancient Greeks were considering homeopathy, before they had confirmed the existence of molecules and so forth. Homeopathy could have been plausible to them.
Rather than argue about how plausible that is, it's easier to try to confirm or disconfirm it using the experimental method.
It's good to examine mistaken ideas because they force you to define the scientific method very precisely.
It was a while ago, probably in the 1960s. His name was Eric, he was probably in his 50s or 60s, and he was a doctor (a radiologist). He used to lead day hikes in the New York City area for the American Youth Hostels, and his hikes were very popular.
One day, he was hiking with his wife (I think in Bear Mountain park). He was coming down a mountain, and told his wife, "You go down that way, and I'll go down this way." His wife got to the bottom and he didn't show up.
Volunteers launched a massive effort to find the body. They combed the mountain slope shoulder-to-shoulder, but never found anything. (This was fairly dense woods.)
I remember seeing the "Missing" poster.
Given how he felt about the outdoors, it was as good a way to die as any. But his wife, family, and friends had a lot of discomfort at not knowing for certain that he was dead. It's sort of like being "missing" in the Latin American dictatorships.
Years later, somebody found the body.
If I can be free to speculate, it was most likely that he died of a heart attack. Perhaps he felt it coming on and didn't want his wife to watch him die. But that doesn't make sense. Most heart attacks aren't fatal, and they could have gotten him to the hospital. He was also diagnosed as being clinically depressed (like lots of people his age). Maybe he just decided to give up. We'll never know.
The moral of this story is that dying in a favorite place is a good way to face the inevitable. But just disappearing is painful for your survivors.
The issue isn't any of the First Amendment rights. The issue is that the undercover agents tricked the instructors into believing that they were helping people commit a crime.
Several people familiar with the investigation said Dixon and Williams had agreed to meet with undercover agents and teach them how to pass polygraph tests for a fee. The agents then posed as people connected to a drug trafficker and as a correctional officer who’d smuggled drugs into a jail and had received a sexual favor from an underage girl.
I think it's entrapment, but the Supreme Court doesn't agree.
Some lawyers take the position that it is unethical for them to allow a client to commit perjury on the stand. There are 2 cases:
(1) Lawyers tell their clients that they don't want to hear any admissions of guilt. Sometimes this results in a lawyer thinking that his client is guilty, when the client is really innocent, as Jesse Friedman claimed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capturing_the_Friedmans
(2) Lawyers occasionally have reported their clients' admissions to the court. There was one case in which a client had stabbed somebody, and he told his lawyer that he was going to testify that he saw something silvery and thought it was a gun, so he acted in self-defense.
If an undercover agent went into a bookstore and said, "Do you have any books on cryptography? I have to send some nuclear bomb secrets to America's enemies," and they sold him a book, they could probably prosecute that.
RTFA. It suggests that prosecution is possible only if the instructor has specific knowledge that one of his students intends to use the abilities taught to hide evidence of a criminal offence, so clearly authors of a book would not be prosecutable in this fashion.
That's an important point.
Several people familiar with the investigation said Dixon and Williams had agreed to meet with undercover agents and teach them how to pass polygraph tests for a fee. The agents then posed as people connected to a drug trafficker and as a correctional officer who’d smuggled drugs into a jail and had received a sexual favor from an underage girl.
If the agents had simply asked the instructors to teach them how to beat a polygraph test, it would have been hard to get a conviction. Instead, they told the instructors that they wanted to beat a polygraph test for the purpose of committing a crime.
Several people familiar with the investigation said Dixon and Williams had agreed to meet with undercover agents and teach them how to pass polygraph tests for a fee. The agents then posed as people connected to a drug trafficker and as a correctional officer who’d smuggled drugs into a jail and had received a sexual favor from an underage girl.
As soon as the "customers" started to talk about illegal activities, the instructors should have refused to deal with them and given them their money back.
Chad Dixon, who wasn't too sophisticated about these things, might have fallen for it. But I don't know how Doug Williams, who used to work for the cops, could fall for it.
I don't know if there's any legal duty to report your suspicion of the commission of a crime. I don't think so, but they included child sex into it for a reason. It might be good for them to say, "You know what? I think you're an undercover agent." Then they could (correctly) argue later that they didn't think the claim of committing a crime was credible.
Homeopathy is a practice with a plausible scientific mechanism behind it. That's the first requirement of medical science.
The second requirement of medical science is that somebody tests it in a randomized, controlled trial to see if it works. At that point, homeopathy failed.
(Or I think it did. I can't cite off the top of my head a randomized trial in which homeopathy was ineffective. I assume there is one.)
As AntiPolygraph.org has pointed out, one use of the polygraphs is simply to conduct interviews with subjects without a lawyer present, so that the examiners can use interviewing techniques with unrestricted questions that an informed, rational person would never submit to.
If interviewers started asking questions about your sex life, a lot of applicants would walk out there, and it would usually be illegal. But in a polygraph exam, they might permit it.
I still don't understand why people assume monitoring breathing, heart rate, and skin conductivity is a 'crackpot' solution. There is a scientific basis behind it, unlike most actual 'crackpot' areas. It doesn't ALWAYS work, and it's (clearly) beatable, but it's still a science.
That's a fair question. Suppose you have a technique that was developed by scientific exploration, it's tested, and it turns out not to work. Is it science (but discredited science), or is it just not science at all?
It's not like they're praying to the aliens in orbit to read the person's mind and tell them if they're lying or not.
I'd like to see a controlled trial in which one team reads peoples' minds by praying to aliens, and the other team uses a lie detector. Which team will be better at detecting lies?
One option would be that mothers who allow their kids the have so much sugar in their diet is failing in probably more ways than one. So not only is the child getting improper nutrition but also not being taught how to act & respect people or things
The authors agree with you:
Many factors may affect both soda consumption and problem behaviors of children. Poor dietary behaviors, such as high soda consumption among young children, may be associated with other parenting practices, such as excessive TV viewing or high consumption of sweets in the child’s diet. Furthermore, parenting practices may be associated with social factors known to be associated with child behavior. In stressful home environments, for example, a child’s needs are likely to be unmet and unhealthy behavioral practices may be more prevalent. An extensive literature has documented a relationship between stressful home environments and child behavior. For example, children who are victims of violent acts or who witness violence have been found to have more externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, more aggression problems and to show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder [9-11]. Furthermore, caretaker mental health can be a strong contributor to both behavioral and developmental problems in children through its effects, in part, on parenting quality and overall home environment [12]. Children of depressed mothers have been shown to develop more social and emotional problems during childhood, including higher internalizing and externalizing problems [13]. Thus, it is possible that observed associations between behavior and soda consumption among adolescents can be attributed to unadjusted social risk factors.
Slashdot Mirror
As Paul Farmer said, Aristide was developing a health care system with centralized planning and control, and he was handling priorities like clean water and sanitation, with his Harvard-trained public health experts.
Unfortunately the U.S. government, under Democratic and Republican administrations, didn't like the way Haiti's democratically-elected government was treating their terrorist friends in the Haitian elite, so we overthrew Aristide and replaced him with our favorite.
American-installed dictators don't have a good track record of providing the basics of public health, like clean water and sanitation, much less electricity.
If you want the uncomfortable details, you can start by reading Paul Farmer's articles.
I think we can all agree that it's wrong for the U.S. to overthrow the leaders of elected democracies. Or can we?
I remember reading an article perhaps 9 months after the cholera outbreak, I think in the New England Journal of Medicine about how the epidemiologists had identified the source of the cholera infection to the Nepalese troops. It's fairly absurd that the UN has continued to deny that this happened for well over 2 years.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1012928
Yes, I read that in the NEJM too. They've also had some good articles on the politics of Haitian health care.
There were some good articles by Paul Farmer, who probably did more to help the Haitian health care system than any other American.
This is the result of U.S. efforts to undermine Aristide by undermining his health care system.
Farmer said that the way to help a third-world country's health care system is to teach them the skills, give them the money, and let them do it themselves, so they can be independent of foreign aid.
People who give them assistance also have to be in the clinics making sure that the money goes to health services, not to some corrupt politician's Swiss bank account.
Farmer said that a health care system has to have central coordination. You can't have flying in to perform their pet projects. You have to focus on the medical interventions to address the highest-priority problems, like infant and childbirth mortality. The health care clinics have to be stocked with necessary supplies.
Farmer said that the U.S. government was hostile to Aristide, and used health care policy to undermine Aristide. The U.S. prevented Aristide from getting international assistance for his health care programs, and sent that assistance to NGOs that were competing politically with Aristide.
As a result, the health care system got, not what it needed, but whatever the NGOs were offering, whether it was one of Haiti's health care priorities or not.
If you want to help, you have to ask doctors on the ground what they need.
For example, after the earthquake, the U.S. sent Marines to "secure the perimeter." Experts in disaster said that people in disaster situations don't usually need military assistance. There usually isn't much looting or crime, and local people can manage for themselves. The best thing to give them is money, so they can hire local workers to do the job themselves -- and to make sure the money is getting to where it's supposed to go.
And that's why Haiti's health care system is such a mess. It's not because the Haitian people (some of whom are Harvard graduates) can't figure out how to do things. It's because when they do figure out how to do things, the U.S. intervenes to protect its friends in the right-wing Haitian aristocracy.
I can't find out any legitimate purpose to bringing Nepalese troops in. If they didn't have the training to build sanitary latrines, then it's unlikely that they knew enough to be useful in that situation. They weren't doing anything that the Haitians couldn't have done themselves.
There have been articles in medical journals for doctors who want to go to disasters and "help out." The first lesson is, "If you don't have experience in disaster work, stay out, because you'll do more harm than good."
There were articles in scientific journals in 2011 that pinpointed the source of the cholera epidemic to the Nepalese troops. That's easy to do with DNA fingerprinting. There's no scientific doubt.
In this country, there are many libertarians (particularly on the right) who believe that, on principle, the government should never do anything without unanimous consent.
In other words, we shouldn't have to pay taxes just because a majority decides to do it; we should only pay taxes if there is unanimous agreement.
That's one of the justifications for proposition 13 in California, which required (not a unanimous but) a 2/3 majority of the legislature to pass a tax bill. The stated purpose of that, and the result, was to shrink (or destroy) the government, and it succeeded. Among other things, it destroyed the California public university system.
So that shows you the limitations -- some would say failure -- of rejecting majority rule.
Did he spend the entire 7 hours saying, "I don't know how to answer that question until I speak to my lawyer"?
In the U.S., you could do that.
Unless the interrogators violate the Constitution, and they would never do such a thing.
I'm not sure what the benefit is of a degree that somebody takes over several years while she's working.
For some jobs, particularly in the sciences and technology, the degree gives you information and understanding you need to do your job. But if you're already working in your profession, what else do you need?
I realize that in some professions, like teaching, an advanced degree is high regarded for promotions and pay increases. I'm not sure whether that's just credentialization for its own sake or whether they become better teachers after a masters' degree.
Again, I'm not sure what benefit a masters' in non-profit administration has. I've met people with degrees in non-profit administration. It sounds like they studied MBA-style case histories to better understand how non-profit organizations work.
I'm not sure why people get these degrees and what the purpose is. Traditionally, people learned by meeting regularly in small groups to have discussions. You can supplement that with books and technology, but I wonder whether you can accomplish the same thing if you take away the face-to-face meetings in small groups. In a university, you can read a book or article and walk down the hall to talk to the professor who wrote it. Can you do that online? Is an online discussion with a low-paid temporary teaching assistant the same as a discussion with a professor?
This MOOC is supposed to give you a master's in computer science. Is that a testable hypothesis? Do CS students get specific knowledge in their masters' programs that you can test for? What do you learn in a CS master's anyway?
I've heard of people using their master's to develop some project, like a robotic device or a computer-assisted tool. Some of those projects take advantage of a university machine shop and other hardware resources. Some people develop a technology that they turn into a business.
Can you do that online? I don't know. Education is prone to fads, and most of them don't work out. What are the goals of a masters' program in computer science? What are the goals of this masters' program? How will they evaluate it? Will they evaluate it? Is this a real masters' program, or have they just selected everything that they can do online and tossed out everything that they can't? Is there something missing? Are they missing the point of a masters' program?
I wish the NYT had gotten into that. I'll have to read it in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
I notice from the NYT story that the projected profits are $240,000 for the first year, and $4.7 million for the third year.
Do these people have enough integrity to say, "I don't care about the $4.7 million. This program isn't working. It's not as good as a regular masters' program. We have to shut it down."
Does anybody have enough integrity to turn down $4.7 million profits when they realize a project isn't working?
we haven't been quite so out of touch with reality to call the UK the "land of the free" - that seems to be a peculiarly american delusion.
We read Areopagitica and all that stuff. You mean they don't really follow it?
But you'd be missing something.
Not wasting money leaves an empty hole in my heart.
Just because some people are lazy, unmotivated, and unintelligent doesn't mean that everyone is.
Either you're very hard-working, motivated and intelligent, or you're an example of the Dunning–Kruger effect. I wonder which is more likely?
When you get a masters' degree, you spend a year or more committing yourself 24 hours a day to learning something, and you're in a community of people who are engaged in the same commitment to learning something. Your eating, sleeping, and social life revolves around an intellectual community. You learn a lot through serendipity. A chance meeting in the hall can give you a direction for your career.
When you take a MOOC, you're not giving it the same commitment and you're not among the same community. That's especially true if you take it free.
You could just read the same textbooks that masters' degree students read. But you'd be missing something.
I could read transcripts of the Feynmann lectures. But that wouldn't be the same as going to school and taking lectures with Feynmann.
Any public defender worth making his salary should be able to show a message being taken by an innocent bystander, I've seen such scenarios play out in courts. Inncent bystanders usually don't get rail roaded, at least as a matter of prosecutorial policy.
Not usually, but it does happen. Some prosecutors think that their job is to prosecute as many people as they can and get the longest sentences they can. When defense lawyers start collecting cases of unjust sentences, there are a lot of cases of drug dealers' girlfriends who were peripherally involved but got longer sentences than the actual dealers, because the girlfriends had nothing to offer in a deal.
The quality (and salary) of public defenders varies greatly.
Even the real crooked prosecutors get warned by judges to lay off innocent people from time to time, if its plain to see they are in fact innocent.
Maybe it's just the outrageous cases that wind up in the newspapers, but I read about a lot of them. America seems to have turned into the world's biggest police state. College kids get 10, 20 years for dealing drugs? It's sin and punishment run amuck.
A lot of the plausible mechanisms that science tested in the 17th century did come from magic and superstition.
Earth, air, fire and water. Sounds plausible. You couldn't know unless you tested it.
Actually they got the concept right. It just turned out that there were 92 elements instead of 4. Why is 92 elements more plausible than 4?
I've worked in the graphic arts industry, pasting up magazine pages. I worked for several publishers, and we always had an art department next door. Every magazine and commercial web site you read was designed by a graphic designer. I know lots of graphic artists, most of whom were making a good living before the economic bust. Most working artists don't "paint." There's a lot to learn about art in order to do practical stuff.
If you want something more systematic and authoritative than my personal experiences, look it up in the U.S. Occupational Outlook Handbook http://www.bls.gov/ooh/arts-and-design/home.htm which squares with my first-hand knowledge.
JOB SUMMARY
Art directors are responsible for the visual style and images in magazines, newspapers, product packaging, and movie and television productions. They create the overall design and direct others who develop artwork or layouts.
ENTRY-LEVEL EDUCATION
Bachelor’s degree
2010 MEDIAN PAY
$80,630
Oh, yeah, you may have heard that one of the benefits of going to a good college is to make contacts that will be useful in getting a job.
One of the characteristics of the engineering profession is that it's highly specialized. You learn to design widgets, and if the widget industry booms, you can name your price. If widgets go bust, you might not be able to get a job anywhere in engineering. That's what happened to the aerospace engineers. That's what I heard from the director of the MIT employment office, anyway. I met one former aerospace engineer who went into the real estate market. At least he knew how to fix a leaky faucet. Remember that woman who asked Obama to help her husband get a job? He was a manufacturing engineer. Not a great career after the manufacturing industry moved to China.
I'm not putting down engineering but it's no longer a secure employment.
And I don't like this idea, "It's your own fault you can't pay off your college loans, you chose the wrong major." That's just an excuse for a failed economic system.
You obviously don't know anything about liberal arts. The first think you learn in a liberal arts education is not to go shooting off your mouth when you don't know the facts.
We don't know exactly what the conversation was between the undercover agents and the instructors, but judging by past cases, they set these things up very carefully to get the suspect to cross the line into illegality.
They must have said something like, "I'm committing a crime and I want to know how to beat the lie detector in case the cops question me about it," that would cross the line. The instructor would believe that he was helping the a criminal to break the law.
There have been cases where a drug dealer's girlfriend picked up the phone, wrote down a message, and was convicted of drug dealing.
That's another way to put it. Cops like to dominate people.
Take a look at that memo from the New York City stop-and-frisk lawsuit that we discussed on Slashdot yesterday.
"Plausible mechanism" is a pretty low barrier.
Suppose instead of water, they were using beef broth, and had infected the beef broth with just a few bacteria. They could dilute and shake 30 times and still get infected beef broth at the end.
They could hypothesis that there is some similar mechanism in water which will still be found after 30 dilutions.
Suppose the ancient Greeks were considering homeopathy, before they had confirmed the existence of molecules and so forth. Homeopathy could have been plausible to them.
Rather than argue about how plausible that is, it's easier to try to confirm or disconfirm it using the experimental method.
It's good to examine mistaken ideas because they force you to define the scientific method very precisely.
I know somebody who died in the woods on a hike.
It was a while ago, probably in the 1960s. His name was Eric, he was probably in his 50s or 60s, and he was a doctor (a radiologist). He used to lead day hikes in the New York City area for the American Youth Hostels, and his hikes were very popular.
One day, he was hiking with his wife (I think in Bear Mountain park). He was coming down a mountain, and told his wife, "You go down that way, and I'll go down this way." His wife got to the bottom and he didn't show up.
Volunteers launched a massive effort to find the body. They combed the mountain slope shoulder-to-shoulder, but never found anything. (This was fairly dense woods.)
I remember seeing the "Missing" poster.
Given how he felt about the outdoors, it was as good a way to die as any. But his wife, family, and friends had a lot of discomfort at not knowing for certain that he was dead. It's sort of like being "missing" in the Latin American dictatorships.
Years later, somebody found the body.
If I can be free to speculate, it was most likely that he died of a heart attack. Perhaps he felt it coming on and didn't want his wife to watch him die. But that doesn't make sense. Most heart attacks aren't fatal, and they could have gotten him to the hospital. He was also diagnosed as being clinically depressed (like lots of people his age). Maybe he just decided to give up. We'll never know.
The moral of this story is that dying in a favorite place is a good way to face the inevitable. But just disappearing is painful for your survivors.
The issue isn't any of the First Amendment rights. The issue is that the undercover agents tricked the instructors into believing that they were helping people commit a crime.
Several people familiar with the investigation said Dixon and Williams had agreed to meet with undercover agents and teach them how to pass polygraph tests for a fee. The agents then posed as people connected to a drug trafficker and as a correctional officer who’d smuggled drugs into a jail and had received a sexual favor from an underage girl.
I think it's entrapment, but the Supreme Court doesn't agree.
Some lawyers take the position that it is unethical for them to allow a client to commit perjury on the stand. There are 2 cases:
(1) Lawyers tell their clients that they don't want to hear any admissions of guilt. Sometimes this results in a lawyer thinking that his client is guilty, when the client is really innocent, as Jesse Friedman claimed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capturing_the_Friedmans
(2) Lawyers occasionally have reported their clients' admissions to the court. There was one case in which a client had stabbed somebody, and he told his lawyer that he was going to testify that he saw something silvery and thought it was a gun, so he acted in self-defense.
If an undercover agent went into a bookstore and said, "Do you have any books on cryptography? I have to send some nuclear bomb secrets to America's enemies," and they sold him a book, they could probably prosecute that.
What if you read them at the library? Oh! Or what if you borrow them from a friend who checked them out?
It wouldn't work. They would ask you, "Have you ever read a book on how to beat the polygraph?"
RTFA. It suggests that prosecution is possible only if the instructor has specific knowledge that one of his students intends to use the abilities taught to hide evidence of a criminal offence, so clearly authors of a book would not be prosecutable in this fashion.
That's an important point.
Several people familiar with the investigation said Dixon and Williams had agreed to meet with undercover agents and teach them how to pass polygraph tests for a fee. The agents then posed as people connected to a drug trafficker and as a correctional officer who’d smuggled drugs into a jail and had received a sexual favor from an underage girl.
The way they got the instructors was by having undercover agents tell them that they wanted to beat the polygraph to facilitate a crime.
It's a crime to help somebody else commit a crime. http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=446
If the agents had simply asked the instructors to teach them how to beat a polygraph test, it would have been hard to get a conviction. Instead, they told the instructors that they wanted to beat a polygraph test for the purpose of committing a crime.
Several people familiar with the investigation said Dixon and Williams had agreed to meet with undercover agents and teach them how to pass polygraph tests for a fee. The agents then posed as people connected to a drug trafficker and as a correctional officer who’d smuggled drugs into a jail and had received a sexual favor from an underage girl.
As soon as the "customers" started to talk about illegal activities, the instructors should have refused to deal with them and given them their money back.
Chad Dixon, who wasn't too sophisticated about these things, might have fallen for it. But I don't know how Doug Williams, who used to work for the cops, could fall for it.
I don't know if there's any legal duty to report your suspicion of the commission of a crime. I don't think so, but they included child sex into it for a reason. It might be good for them to say, "You know what? I think you're an undercover agent." Then they could (correctly) argue later that they didn't think the claim of committing a crime was credible.
Homeopathy is a practice with a plausible scientific mechanism behind it. That's the first requirement of medical science.
The second requirement of medical science is that somebody tests it in a randomized, controlled trial to see if it works. At that point, homeopathy failed.
(Or I think it did. I can't cite off the top of my head a randomized trial in which homeopathy was ineffective. I assume there is one.)
As AntiPolygraph.org has pointed out, one use of the polygraphs is simply to conduct interviews with subjects without a lawyer present, so that the examiners can use interviewing techniques with unrestricted questions that an informed, rational person would never submit to.
If interviewers started asking questions about your sex life, a lot of applicants would walk out there, and it would usually be illegal. But in a polygraph exam, they might permit it.
I still don't understand why people assume monitoring breathing, heart rate, and skin conductivity is a 'crackpot' solution. There is a scientific basis behind it, unlike most actual 'crackpot' areas. It doesn't ALWAYS work, and it's (clearly) beatable, but it's still a science.
That's a fair question. Suppose you have a technique that was developed by scientific exploration, it's tested, and it turns out not to work. Is it science (but discredited science), or is it just not science at all?
It's not like they're praying to the aliens in orbit to read the person's mind and tell them if they're lying or not.
I'd like to see a controlled trial in which one team reads peoples' minds by praying to aliens, and the other team uses a lie detector. Which team will be better at detecting lies?
One option would be that mothers who allow their kids the have so much sugar in their diet is failing in probably more ways than one. So not only is the child getting improper nutrition but also not being taught how to act & respect people or things
The authors agree with you:
Many factors may affect both soda consumption and problem behaviors of children. Poor dietary behaviors, such as high soda consumption among young children, may be associated with other parenting practices, such as excessive TV viewing or high consumption of sweets in the child’s diet. Furthermore, parenting practices may be associated with social factors known to be associated with child behavior. In stressful home environments, for example, a child’s needs are likely to be unmet and unhealthy behavioral practices may be more prevalent. An extensive literature has documented a relationship between stressful home environments and child behavior. For example, children who are victims of violent acts or who witness violence have been found to have more externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, more aggression problems and to show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder [9-11]. Furthermore, caretaker mental health can be a strong contributor to both behavioral and developmental problems in children through its effects, in part, on parenting quality and overall home environment [12]. Children of depressed mothers have been shown to develop more social and emotional problems during childhood, including higher internalizing and externalizing problems [13]. Thus, it is possible that observed associations between behavior and soda consumption among adolescents can be attributed to unadjusted social risk factors.