2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end. I agree (mostly) with your other points, but this one shows a misconception of how the scientific world works. There are several problems with your idea:
First, researchers' careers rely on publishing in good journals. When you go on the job market, or when you are up for tenure, the committees look at the quality of the journals you have published in. While it is not unheard of to start a new journal for a new niche field, to start a journal just to avoid publishing in bigger-named journals would be career suicide for many, many researchers.
Second (and this is related to the first point), your research has much more impact when it is published in higher impact journals. If you have good research, you publish in the journals that your peers publish in, and that helps your research get disseminated. It is hard to get others to even see your research otherwise (of course there are conferences, etc, but you get the picture).
If you want to do good research, you don't have time to START a journal. Say you're a researcher. You typically have classes to teach, graduate students to advise, research to do and write up, grants to apply for, and all kinds of other random BS. Do you REALLY want to (and can you) start a new journal, find a suitable group of editors, compile a list of peer reviewers, start a website to accept submissions, and then play the role of head editor? No. You want to do research. It would be a colossal waste of time and effort to start a new journal.
Here is a better approach: Since researchers typically publish in more than one journal, put pressure on the journals to change their policies. Tell them you will start publishing in other journals of comparable quality with better policies if they don't. Get your fellow researchers to do the same. Also, decline to peer-review for journals with bad policies. Without peer-reviewers, a journal dies.
And, while you're at it, get them to stop asking for dreadful MS documents.
I thought I was into some kinky shit, but I never tried to stick my genome into someone. I recommend you try it some time. It turns out it is pretty fun.
Did you read the link I provided? I was referring to ANOTHER program that Sprint was also involved in. The NSA program was very much illegal, under federal statute and the 4th amendment. It was so bad that John Ashcroft threatened to resign because of it.
The last time I looked at changing cellphone carriers, my PRIMARY concern was looking for a carrier that wasn't involved in the NSA illegal wiretapping. ATT/Cingular were, of course, up to their necks in it, and other carriers admitted to being involved. But, at the time, I couldn't find anything about Sprint being involved and they had denied it. So, even with their horrible customer service, I stuck with Sprint.
After seeing this article, I decided to start snooping around for more information. It isn't necessarily bad that Sprint runs a private network for the government, as long as it isn't abused. But then I found this: Sprint implicated in illegal NSA program. So, combined with my previous research, this means that EVERY MAJOR CELL CARRIER was involved in the NSA program.
Conservatives will tell you that you have to vote with your wallet to change companies' behavior. Support the ones that don't allow illegally wiretapping, right? Well, when every major cell carrier is involved, and then, to make matters worse, they keep MERGING with one another, where do you turn?
If the Constitution doesn't stop them, and the law doesn't stop them, and we can't select a company that is good because one doesn't exist, what are we to to? Our elected officials aren't listening.
Just in terms of a cell carrier: is it possible to find one that probably wasn't involved in this crap?
Who says a moral code has to be an objective axiomatic system? Ask yourself this: what is the objective moral code? Then, ask yourself, "why does God follow the objective moral code?" and "why did God create the objective moral code (if he did)." You will quickly see, hopefully, why theists are in the same position as nontheists with respect to morality - except nontheists KNOW that an objective, normative moral system fails, and theists just push the logical problem back a level to God.
Learning to do something doesn't need to directly teach a skill to be useful. Teaching a child to replace a motherboard does more than just give them the skill to replace a motherboard. It also teaches them to think about technology in a less magical way by showing them the electronics on the inside of the computer. In addition, it causes them to be less afraid of using technology; sometimes kids are afraid of doing things because they are intimidated by complexity or afraid that they'll break something. I believe that breaking them in by showing them that they have the power to manipulate technology, rather than be manipulated by it, is important for any child.
Newsflash: Brains developed over millions of years still outperform computers that have been in development only in the last few centuries. Verdict: Human ingenuity isn't advanced enough to outrun natural evolution (at least not yet), and we still don't know everything about intelligence and computation. Is this a surprise? We don't know, from the article, how it would do against a sample of average poker players. If it would beat them more than 50% of the time, would you think THAT was a newsflash? Why do you have to question the interest of an article like this just because "we still don't know everything about intelligence and computation." Did anyone say we did?
Cut and paste much? You didn't even bother to cite the source, which was here. Or maybe here. Word for word.
You fail to mention that only 29% said SDI was positive (source). If 71% of respondents don't think your massively expensive program (which, by the way, had the potential to employ many of the people asked in the poll) has positive value, I'd say that could be described as "profound and pervasive skepticism". I do, however, agree that the poll is biased. You could have said it in your own words rather than cut and pasting it from some website somewhere.
That said, Science alone cannot be trusted to provide morals, or even scruples...Worshiping Science blindly is just as bad as worshiping any being, creature, or ideal with equal blindness. I've never met anyone that "worshiped" science. I've never met anyone that thinks that science should have sole control over policy. I've also never met anyone who believes that science, as practiced, is perfect. Science cannot tell you what your goals should be; it can only tell you, once you have those goals and constraints, what better ways of approaching them are.
That is a left-wing fantasy. There is no instance of that. Richard Carmona, the former Surgeon General for Bush, begs to differ: "The vetting was done by political appointees who were specifically there to be able to spin, if you will, my words in such a way that would be preferable to a political or an ideologically preconceived notion that had nothing to do with science..." Link here.
It happened at NASA too...a political appointee, who never graduated from college (but lied about it) was rewriting text by scientists, for the SOLE purpose of inserting comments friendly to the administration's allies. Wanting to insert "theory" after every instance of "Big Bang", he wrote that "it not proven fact; it is opinion... It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator... This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue." Link here. That is BS, of course. The Big Bang is a scientific issue. Period.
We send a person to walk around on the moon, but it's impossible to shoot down a missile? Tell me another one. Two different problems. Also, "impossible" is a straw man; I can't recall any scientist saying it was impossible, just too hard and expensive to be viable.
You mention AIDS as an issue to oppose Republicans, yet Republican Presidents have spent more on combating AIDS (on a per year in office basis) than Democratic Presidents. More money doesn't solve problems; having a good approach and spending money on that solves problems. If you want to argue that Bush's abstinence heavy approach works better than other approaches, feel free to do so. But simply citing spending doesn't mean anything.
But then you support the Democrats, so I guess you prefer talk over action. Troll.
Science, because it is a principled method of determining how the world works, SHOULD have an influence over policy. However, policy and ideology should not have an influence over science. But this is what the Bush administration wants. A major problem with SDI, as many saw it, is that it was a massive waste of money. Scientists and engineers, who are the authorities on this matter, saw that the system was largely unworkable and required a huge amount of money. It is reasonable for them to have their say. This is science having an influence over policy. (I will not deny that some had other motives, and to the extent that scientists confused political arguments and scientific arguments, they were wrong.)
However, it is NOT reasonable for political considerations or the favor of particular individuals and industries to affect scientific reasoning. I also reject the notion that every organization should support Republicans and Democrats equally. If you are anti-abortion and that is an important issue for you, you would be unprincipled to support most Democrats. Likewise, it appears to me a pro-science citizen should lean toward the Democrats more often than not. Between evolution, climate change, AIDS, and sex education, and several other issues I could name, frankly, it would be hard to pick a worse party than the Republicans.
It is silly to think that "fair" people should always be split 50% between Republicans and Democrats. It all depends on the issue at hand.
A travels into the future (from B's perspective). Surely, from A's perspective that is the same as B travelling into the past. We are constantly "traveling" into the future. Since we are in roughly the same relativistic frame, it appears that we are traveling at about the same rate.
I will not chip into the freedom to contract to prevent large manufacturers from being stupid. The problem here is that the both parties in the types of contracts may not actually be "free" to negotiate the terms of the contract. Take a small retailer, for instance. If there are a limited number of brands of an item, in order to be competitive a retailer must stock a good variety of them. Company X says "You must sell our product for Y dollars." The small retailer knows that if they don't stock the product, then people won't come to their store, they will go to the big-box store down the street. The small retailer has no leverage to negotiate. Contracts such as these actually THREATEN people's freedom to contract because of the power relationship difference between the two parties.
Freedom of contract only exists where the playing field is not grossly out of balance. Today's decision, while it may appear to restore freedom to contract, actually threatens it.
Probably about the same percentage as any other year you only hear about the 5-4's because, well, usually those are the news worthy cases. You are wrong. There have been almost TWICE as many 5-4 decisions this year as last year. See the transcript here.
I Dont feel sorry for some European nations (Im not even going to name them) despite the fact people die waiting to see a doctor there its their health care system and for whatever reason they like what they got. I can see you like making things up.
You can do Pearson's Chi-squared test of association. The Chi-square is an approximation, and may not hold for smaller sample sizes. Find a p-value by simulation. When you do this, the p-value is.009, indicating that a difference this large would only occur by chance.9% of the time. It is safe to conclude that there is something going down and that the campaigns of Republicans and Democrats do indeed have different preferences with respect to their server OS.
Distracted driving should be a crime. IF the person is observed driving distracted, then ticket them. I don't care why they were distracted, whether it is cell phone use, putting on make up, or getting a blow job.
Yes, and the whole point is research shows that cell phones make you distracted. So talking on a cellphone while driving should be illegal, just as the post suggested.
Of course, I cannot speak about the research in much detail. Journals don't like that much. I suspect I go to the same conferences you do, and I can't recall any journals threatening me when I talk about my research in detail.
Um, the CIA is an executive agency and is thus under the President. George W. Bush is the ultimately in charge of the CIA. Also, the quotes are before Bush took office are irrelevant to whether he had/was looking for WMDs in the run up to the war aren't they? So the point stands.
Because they GOT the information from Bush. They (foolishly) assumed that the man in charge of the intelligence agencies in the United States would know what he is talking about. Instead, we found that he was manipulating the intelligence. I believe that every person you listed should have been more skeptical, but the fact is, that information started with the Bush Administration. Congress does not have its own intelligence agency; They relied on the ones the White House is in charge of.
And that's where opera and the Broadway-style musical differ. Opera is about presenting music through a story. Musicals are about presenting a story through music.
This is not true; it is an artificial distinction. Opera is simply musical theater done without microphones. The lack of microphones caused singers to be required to develop refined techniques allowing them to sing longer and louder. Musical theater IS the opera of our time (in addition to some composers still writing "art" music these days). The stories are just as bad, and much of the music is just as mediocre as in opera. The difference is, we only know about the BEST opera because that is all that is remembered. There may be some argument to be made for separating modern musical theater and opera based on the social class they are written to appeal to, but it has nothing to do with the music or the stories.
AFAIK, you are wrong, and that is simply spin. A quick google search yielded this:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200511090012
During its 2004-05 term, the Supreme Court reversed 84 percent of the cases it chose to hear from appeals of 9th Circuit decisions, compared to a 73 percent average reversal rate for all circuit courts of appeals.* But the high court reversed 100 percent of the decisions it heard from the 1st, 2nd, and 10th Circuit Courts of Appeals.* Moreover, as Media Matters for America has documented, the 9th Circuit's reversal rate was slightly lower than the national average for all circuit courts during the 2003-04 Supreme Court term (76 percent for 9th Circuit vs. 77 percent nationally), and only slightly higher than the national average during the 2002-03 term (75 percent for 9th Circuit vs. 73 percent nationally) and the 2001-02 term (76 percent for 9th Circuit vs. 75 percent nationally). and
While it is true that the Supreme Court has reversed more decisions by the 9th Circuit than by any other circuit court in terms of numbers alone, the 9th Circuit has a far bigger caseload than any other circuit (including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit). People have tried to label them as some kind of crazy pinko judges, always on the wrong side of the Supreme Court, but it isn't true. And even if it WERE, with some of the decisions we've gotten lately you could do much better than always siding with the Supreme Court.
Except that kind of reasoning is the job of legislators, not judges. Like many judges, he has forgotten his role and taken the job of dictator for life. Actually, all this judge did was say that this law was inconsistent with another, higher law (the Constitution). Simply because he notes that the First Amendment is a good idea for adults doesn't mean he's a dictator.
When did protecting Constitutional rights become being a dictator? This is EXACTLY his job.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree (mostly) with your other points, but this one shows a misconception of how the scientific world works. There are several problems with your idea:
First, researchers' careers rely on publishing in good journals. When you go on the job market, or when you are up for tenure, the committees look at the quality of the journals you have published in. While it is not unheard of to start a new journal for a new niche field, to start a journal just to avoid publishing in bigger-named journals would be career suicide for many, many researchers.
Second (and this is related to the first point), your research has much more impact when it is published in higher impact journals. If you have good research, you publish in the journals that your peers publish in, and that helps your research get disseminated. It is hard to get others to even see your research otherwise (of course there are conferences, etc, but you get the picture).
If you want to do good research, you don't have time to START a journal. Say you're a researcher. You typically have classes to teach, graduate students to advise, research to do and write up, grants to apply for, and all kinds of other random BS. Do you REALLY want to (and can you) start a new journal, find a suitable group of editors, compile a list of peer reviewers, start a website to accept submissions, and then play the role of head editor? No. You want to do research. It would be a colossal waste of time and effort to start a new journal.
Here is a better approach: Since researchers typically publish in more than one journal, put pressure on the journals to change their policies. Tell them you will start publishing in other journals of comparable quality with better policies if they don't. Get your fellow researchers to do the same. Also, decline to peer-review for journals with bad policies. Without peer-reviewers, a journal dies.
And, while you're at it, get them to stop asking for dreadful MS documents.
Did you read the link I provided? I was referring to ANOTHER program that Sprint was also involved in. The NSA program was very much illegal, under federal statute and the 4th amendment. It was so bad that John Ashcroft threatened to resign because of it.
The last time I looked at changing cellphone carriers, my PRIMARY concern was looking for a carrier that wasn't involved in the NSA illegal wiretapping. ATT/Cingular were, of course, up to their necks in it, and other carriers admitted to being involved. But, at the time, I couldn't find anything about Sprint being involved and they had denied it. So, even with their horrible customer service, I stuck with Sprint. After seeing this article, I decided to start snooping around for more information. It isn't necessarily bad that Sprint runs a private network for the government, as long as it isn't abused. But then I found this: Sprint implicated in illegal NSA program. So, combined with my previous research, this means that EVERY MAJOR CELL CARRIER was involved in the NSA program. Conservatives will tell you that you have to vote with your wallet to change companies' behavior. Support the ones that don't allow illegally wiretapping, right? Well, when every major cell carrier is involved, and then, to make matters worse, they keep MERGING with one another, where do you turn? If the Constitution doesn't stop them, and the law doesn't stop them, and we can't select a company that is good because one doesn't exist, what are we to to? Our elected officials aren't listening. Just in terms of a cell carrier: is it possible to find one that probably wasn't involved in this crap?
Who says a moral code has to be an objective axiomatic system? Ask yourself this: what is the objective moral code? Then, ask yourself, "why does God follow the objective moral code?" and "why did God create the objective moral code (if he did)." You will quickly see, hopefully, why theists are in the same position as nontheists with respect to morality - except nontheists KNOW that an objective, normative moral system fails, and theists just push the logical problem back a level to God.
Learning to do something doesn't need to directly teach a skill to be useful. Teaching a child to replace a motherboard does more than just give them the skill to replace a motherboard. It also teaches them to think about technology in a less magical way by showing them the electronics on the inside of the computer. In addition, it causes them to be less afraid of using technology; sometimes kids are afraid of doing things because they are intimidated by complexity or afraid that they'll break something. I believe that breaking them in by showing them that they have the power to manipulate technology, rather than be manipulated by it, is important for any child.
You fail to mention that only 29% said SDI was positive (source). If 71% of respondents don't think your massively expensive program (which, by the way, had the potential to employ many of the people asked in the poll) has positive value, I'd say that could be described as "profound and pervasive skepticism". I do, however, agree that the poll is biased. You could have said it in your own words rather than cut and pasting it from some website somewhere.
We send a person to walk around on the moon, but it's impossible to shoot down a missile? Tell me another one. Two different problems. Also, "impossible" is a straw man; I can't recall any scientist saying it was impossible, just too hard and expensive to be viable.It happened at NASA too...a political appointee, who never graduated from college (but lied about it) was rewriting text by scientists, for the SOLE purpose of inserting comments friendly to the administration's allies. Wanting to insert "theory" after every instance of "Big Bang", he wrote that "it not proven fact; it is opinion... It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator... This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue." Link here. That is BS, of course. The Big Bang is a scientific issue. Period.
However, it is NOT reasonable for political considerations or the favor of particular individuals and industries to affect scientific reasoning. I also reject the notion that every organization should support Republicans and Democrats equally. If you are anti-abortion and that is an important issue for you, you would be unprincipled to support most Democrats. Likewise, it appears to me a pro-science citizen should lean toward the Democrats more often than not. Between evolution, climate change, AIDS, and sex education, and several other issues I could name, frankly, it would be hard to pick a worse party than the Republicans.
It is silly to think that "fair" people should always be split 50% between Republicans and Democrats. It all depends on the issue at hand.
Freedom of contract only exists where the playing field is not grossly out of balance. Today's decision, while it may appear to restore freedom to contract, actually threatens it.
I used R's chisq.test() function.
Ron Paul is not "moderate". He is a libertarian.
Distracted driving should be a crime. IF the person is observed driving distracted, then ticket them. I don't care why they were distracted, whether it is cell phone use, putting on make up, or getting a blow job.
Yes, and the whole point is research shows that cell phones make you distracted. So talking on a cellphone while driving should be illegal, just as the post suggested.
Um, the CIA is an executive agency and is thus under the President. George W. Bush is the ultimately in charge of the CIA. Also, the quotes are before Bush took office are irrelevant to whether he had/was looking for WMDs in the run up to the war aren't they? So the point stands.
Because they GOT the information from Bush. They (foolishly) assumed that the man in charge of the intelligence agencies in the United States would know what he is talking about. Instead, we found that he was manipulating the intelligence. I believe that every person you listed should have been more skeptical, but the fact is, that information started with the Bush Administration. Congress does not have its own intelligence agency; They relied on the ones the White House is in charge of.
And that's where opera and the Broadway-style musical differ. Opera is about presenting music through a story. Musicals are about presenting a story through music.
This is not true; it is an artificial distinction. Opera is simply musical theater done without microphones. The lack of microphones caused singers to be required to develop refined techniques allowing them to sing longer and louder. Musical theater IS the opera of our time (in addition to some composers still writing "art" music these days). The stories are just as bad, and much of the music is just as mediocre as in opera. The difference is, we only know about the BEST opera because that is all that is remembered. There may be some argument to be made for separating modern musical theater and opera based on the social class they are written to appeal to, but it has nothing to do with the music or the stories.When did protecting Constitutional rights become being a dictator? This is EXACTLY his job.