There are a number of assumptions I have been forced to make while analyzing my data, many of which are critical for both my methodology and the development of few of my arguments. Why? Often, the information I require simply isn't available (the studies haven't been done, or the studies that exist are based on assumptions of their own).
Or worse yet for your readers, even the studies that do exist are locked behind a pay-to-read model of electronic publishing- so they can't tell assumption from fact. My suggestion: Make everything explicit. If you're forced to make an assumption, admit that it is an assumption up front and explain why you're making that assumption. If you are referencing a study, don't just link to the study or reference it in a bibliography, also copy the relevant portion of the data and explain the assumptions of that study AND it's relevance to your study.
Until the peer review system stops being broken by pay-to-read studies, I see no other option. And remember- to anybody outside of your special field of study, any assumptions at all will look like sloppy science based more on emotion than data.
My "phone" (a T-Mobile MDA) has a flight mode which switches off all of the radios (EDGE/GSM, Bluetooth, and WIFI) at the click of an icon. No problem there- even though the mythbusters proved pretty conclusively that the FFA tower part is pure FUD.
Around what I like to read- and I own the database, not the US Government.....in other words, TSA security goons might make a note about a book about pot, but they're highly unlikely to turn on a phone to note that the memory card in the phone contains a book about pot. All you've got to do to be smarter than the US government here is be lazy and not want to carry several pounds of paper around when a couple of ounces of silicon will do.
If you're carrying the Anarchist Cookbook, why the hell would you be carrying it in hard copy? The obvious way around this, with the idiocy of the TSA, is e-books; easier to carry on your flight and it looks like just another fancy cell phone or PDA to them. My MDA even has a special flight mode that turns off all the radios.
But what if that increase were due to a greater demand for programmers?
Then I'd expect to see companies recruiting at the high school level and offering scholarships with agreement to hire in 4 years. Are you seeing that yet? I've been looking for it (especially as in my case, a proposal to fund graduate school might be accepted) and I haven't yet. No, instead we have the argument to add more programmers WITHOUT paying for the education of those programmers by poaching them from other countries, which tells me that the real attempt is to lower the marginal utility of the skillsets.
Soooo, children and others were slaughtered at the whim of the BATFE and FBI and then the evidence(At least 6 different cameras) was lost/mysteriously malfunctioned?
Or families ripped apart as the fathers are sent off to live in Cuba for a while- outside of American jurisdiction. Same idea, different universe.
And there was an accompanying suicide probably over the outcome of the issue at cabinet level?
Nah, just a few mysterious waves of amnesia, the Republican version of the same thing. Amazing how, when faced with Congress, members of the administration at the Cabinet level can't remember their own names, isn't it?
Oh, when you have Portland, Salem, and Eugene protesting for peace and the Al Harmin Center in Ashland being shut down for funneling funds to al Qaida, vs the small towns that have a parade and a week of grief for every casket that comes back from Iraq and still send their sons to join the army, you have a separation between urban and rural that can't be easily joined back together.
It's happening in my state- really showed during the last six elections. But you can deny that the cold portion of the civil war is happening if you want to.
Except that Titor's predictions (or "memories") were specifically that this would all revolve around rural US vs city folk - NOT anyone else vs Islamic fundamentalists.
Have you seen who ends up in these Islamic centers? This IS rural US vs city folk- those who would tolerate radicalism vs those who don't tolerate any change. Plus, in addition to that, you do know that John Titor's own claimed time travel method would REQUIRE that his predictions be slightly off, right?
That was the entire point of the civil war. And I don't think a wiretapping scandal can quite be compared to a physical standoff like Waco.
Once again. Slightly off. Just enough to be a parallel universe. Just like would be predicted by the quantum model he quoted, once some idiot stole an IBM 5100 portable computer from 1975 or 1982 or whenever. One butterfly in the Pacific causes an Atlantic hurricane. Same idea.
Normal skin doesn't stop radio waves either, unless they are extremely weak. This weapon only penetrates to 1/64th of an inch. But you're right- you might have to soak the burqa in water for it to work....still this isn't going to stop anybody premeditated enough to be prepared for such an attack.
I'd also be surprised if this was any use against anybody other than protesters. Certainly there are plenty of Burkas available in the Middle East that use cloth more than 1/64" thick....
See, this is the problem I have with other models of quantum physics. Nobody seems to realize that anything that happens on the quantum level *MUST* affect the macro level. Thus if causation does not exist and everything is truly random and there is only ONE universe, then science itself is a worthless pursuit because no predictions can be true.
Uh, given who our current President believes himself to be- aren't we already on that fictional tract? I thought the speech to the Amish about how God speaks through his mouth was quite obvious.
Actually, we've had a number of Waco type events since 9-11 if you think about it. It's just that nobody has minded because the targets have primarily been Islamic organizations. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way- by John Titor's own words, his prophecies are going to be slightly wrong (his stealing an IBM 5100 from the past would have inevitably changed the future according to the Everett-Wheeler model of quantum physics- he's probably avoided the 2nd American civil war unless Hilary gets elected).
Hiring someone who does as good or a better job than you for cheaper instead of you means your company can save money; hence, your company's customers can save money.
Ah, yes, the skills/efficiency argument. See the other post on why this is a denial of classical microeconomics.
The only person who isn't benefited is the person who only had a job because government regulation (via H-1b visas) restricted the market.
Which is just about every American, since our standard of living has pretty much priced us out of the global market.
Of course it could- after all, the whole idea behind the Everett-Wheeler model of quantum physics is that everything that could possibly happen, happens. And any time travel would absolutely include a degree of sideways as well as past travel, because the time traveler himself would cause a disturbance that would propagate into new universes in the multiverse (or superverse as Titor called it). Thus a mark of a real time traveler under those rules would be predictions that would start out somewhat accurate, but become increasingly wrong.
Objective proof is something that is rather elusive in economics- since economics is usually based on some implicit axioms that may or may not be true, it's hard to be objective about such things.
In fact, I think the cheap labor movement comes down to a single pair of completely irreconcilable beliefs about labor. The first is the supply/demand theory of wages, in which whenever you raise the supply of something the price MUST go down, thus increasing the amount of labor available will depress wages. The second belief is the skills/efficiency belief, in which cheap labor merely frees up money for more expensive labor to go elsewhere, and skills are always in demand regardless of supply. These two axioms are diametrically opposed- those who believe one are implicitly denying the other.
I'm not sure which is true myself, but for any given skill that has become a commodity, as technical engineering and computer programming has, I tend towards the supply/demand theory- that a skill can only demand a wage that fits the supply of that skill in the marketplace, thus increasing the size of the marketplace will increase the supply of that skill and drive real wages down. Skills this doesn't apply to are rare enough skills not to be commodities YET- but given 6.5 billion human beings and limitations on human ability, I personally think we could commoditize just about any skill you can name- including C-level executives.
Only Norm Matloff's work and the Programmer's Guild's own internal surveys, which I assume you've already found since those are the two most popular sources, and only one of them is a formal study.
The second, if you're not familiar with it, was a secret on-site survey done at several workplaces by techies who are working with H-1b visa holders, and it showed a $12,000/year salary difference ($6000/year if you discount by the fact that the business has to spend a lot of money to get an H-1b to begin with, but the difference in cost is obvious).
The actual effect on wages is somewhat discounted by the current caps in place, of course (65,000 regular H-1bs, 144,000 exempt from cap H-1bs, is a very small percentage of the total American workforce, and that's across all skills. Second after techies is nurses.).
Gets twisted to mean "Corporate Tech Industry" instead of mere "Tech Industry" when money is involved. More H-1b visas only helps those hiring techies, it depresses the wages of the techies themselves, for instance. And of course, they look towards more closed source options as well- you don't see any of this money trying to provide policy for alternative energy or open source projects.
I've had an "internal compass" most of my life- as has my father and brother. I think some people are just born with it. But I still prefer a GPS unit....and riding the MAX train I completely missed the turn west then the U-Turn East just before the Sunset Transit Center (but then again, I think my internal compass is based on a strong internal clock and the sun- and the U-Turn happens underground).
What about the inverse of Moore's Law.. Every 2 years, the average IQ of all users on the internet halves.
Which of course raises the question- what will the average consumer do with all of this? When your phone is more powerful than the desktop, there seems to be a natural endpoint like what happened with word processing- a point where the used market is larger than the new market, and everybody can afford enough technology to do anything they reasonably want to do. I suggest that point will be reached *before* the endpoint of Moore's law- and thus the law of supply and demand will insure that we NEVER reach the endpoint of Moore's law, because there will be no demand to do so.
If you think that a kid willing to beat out 98% of the population of the second most populous country on earth to get one of 4000 seats in a high tech school, then beat the odds to get an H-1b visa, doesn't have a passion for technology...then I can't break through that level of denial, and in fact refuse to try.
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There are a number of assumptions I have been forced to make while analyzing my data, many of which are critical for both my methodology and the development of few of my arguments. Why? Often, the information I require simply isn't available (the studies haven't been done, or the studies that exist are based on assumptions of their own).
Or worse yet for your readers, even the studies that do exist are locked behind a pay-to-read model of electronic publishing- so they can't tell assumption from fact. My suggestion: Make everything explicit. If you're forced to make an assumption, admit that it is an assumption up front and explain why you're making that assumption. If you are referencing a study, don't just link to the study or reference it in a bibliography, also copy the relevant portion of the data and explain the assumptions of that study AND it's relevance to your study.
Until the peer review system stops being broken by pay-to-read studies, I see no other option. And remember- to anybody outside of your special field of study, any assumptions at all will look like sloppy science based more on emotion than data.
My "phone" (a T-Mobile MDA) has a flight mode which switches off all of the radios (EDGE/GSM, Bluetooth, and WIFI) at the click of an icon. No problem there- even though the mythbusters proved pretty conclusively that the FFA tower part is pure FUD.
Around what I like to read- and I own the database, not the US Government.....in other words, TSA security goons might make a note about a book about pot, but they're highly unlikely to turn on a phone to note that the memory card in the phone contains a book about pot. All you've got to do to be smarter than the US government here is be lazy and not want to carry several pounds of paper around when a couple of ounces of silicon will do.
Good thing I can't afford to fly in the first place....
If you're carrying the Anarchist Cookbook, why the hell would you be carrying it in hard copy? The obvious way around this, with the idiocy of the TSA, is e-books; easier to carry on your flight and it looks like just another fancy cell phone or PDA to them. My MDA even has a special flight mode that turns off all the radios.
But what if that increase were due to a greater demand for programmers?
Then I'd expect to see companies recruiting at the high school level and offering scholarships with agreement to hire in 4 years. Are you seeing that yet? I've been looking for it (especially as in my case, a proposal to fund graduate school might be accepted) and I haven't yet. No, instead we have the argument to add more programmers WITHOUT paying for the education of those programmers by poaching them from other countries, which tells me that the real attempt is to lower the marginal utility of the skillsets.
Soooo, children and others were slaughtered at the whim of the BATFE and FBI and then the evidence(At least 6 different cameras) was lost/mysteriously malfunctioned?
Or families ripped apart as the fathers are sent off to live in Cuba for a while- outside of American jurisdiction. Same idea, different universe.
And there was an accompanying suicide probably over the outcome of the issue at cabinet level?
Nah, just a few mysterious waves of amnesia, the Republican version of the same thing. Amazing how, when faced with Congress, members of the administration at the Cabinet level can't remember their own names, isn't it?
Oh, when you have Portland, Salem, and Eugene protesting for peace and the Al Harmin Center in Ashland being shut down for funneling funds to al Qaida, vs the small towns that have a parade and a week of grief for every casket that comes back from Iraq and still send their sons to join the army, you have a separation between urban and rural that can't be easily joined back together.
It's happening in my state- really showed during the last six elections. But you can deny that the cold portion of the civil war is happening if you want to.
Except that Titor's predictions (or "memories") were specifically that this would all revolve around rural US vs city folk - NOT anyone else vs Islamic fundamentalists.
Have you seen who ends up in these Islamic centers? This IS rural US vs city folk- those who would tolerate radicalism vs those who don't tolerate any change. Plus, in addition to that, you do know that John Titor's own claimed time travel method would REQUIRE that his predictions be slightly off, right?
That was the entire point of the civil war. And I don't think a wiretapping scandal can quite be compared to a physical standoff like Waco.
Once again. Slightly off. Just enough to be a parallel universe. Just like would be predicted by the quantum model he quoted, once some idiot stole an IBM 5100 portable computer from 1975 or 1982 or whenever. One butterfly in the Pacific causes an Atlantic hurricane. Same idea.
Normal skin doesn't stop radio waves either, unless they are extremely weak. This weapon only penetrates to 1/64th of an inch. But you're right- you might have to soak the burqa in water for it to work....still this isn't going to stop anybody premeditated enough to be prepared for such an attack.
True enough in a way- though I'd point out that our universe almost certainly isn't the one he came from.
I'd also be surprised if this was any use against anybody other than protesters. Certainly there are plenty of Burkas available in the Middle East that use cloth more than 1/64" thick....
See, this is the problem I have with other models of quantum physics. Nobody seems to realize that anything that happens on the quantum level *MUST* affect the macro level. Thus if causation does not exist and everything is truly random and there is only ONE universe, then science itself is a worthless pursuit because no predictions can be true.
Uh, given who our current President believes himself to be- aren't we already on that fictional tract? I thought the speech to the Amish about how God speaks through his mouth was quite obvious.
Actually, we've had a number of Waco type events since 9-11 if you think about it. It's just that nobody has minded because the targets have primarily been Islamic organizations. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way- by John Titor's own words, his prophecies are going to be slightly wrong (his stealing an IBM 5100 from the past would have inevitably changed the future according to the Everett-Wheeler model of quantum physics- he's probably avoided the 2nd American civil war unless Hilary gets elected).
Hiring someone who does as good or a better job than you for cheaper instead of you means your company can save money; hence, your company's customers can save money.
Ah, yes, the skills/efficiency argument. See the other post on why this is a denial of classical microeconomics.
The only person who isn't benefited is the person who only had a job because government regulation (via H-1b visas) restricted the market.
Which is just about every American, since our standard of living has pretty much priced us out of the global market.
Of course it could- after all, the whole idea behind the Everett-Wheeler model of quantum physics is that everything that could possibly happen, happens. And any time travel would absolutely include a degree of sideways as well as past travel, because the time traveler himself would cause a disturbance that would propagate into new universes in the multiverse (or superverse as Titor called it). Thus a mark of a real time traveler under those rules would be predictions that would start out somewhat accurate, but become increasingly wrong.
John Titor predicted that the reason for the development of such weapons was for use against the general population of the United States.
Objective proof is something that is rather elusive in economics- since economics is usually based on some implicit axioms that may or may not be true, it's hard to be objective about such things.
In fact, I think the cheap labor movement comes down to a single pair of completely irreconcilable beliefs about labor. The first is the supply/demand theory of wages, in which whenever you raise the supply of something the price MUST go down, thus increasing the amount of labor available will depress wages. The second belief is the skills/efficiency belief, in which cheap labor merely frees up money for more expensive labor to go elsewhere, and skills are always in demand regardless of supply. These two axioms are diametrically opposed- those who believe one are implicitly denying the other.
I'm not sure which is true myself, but for any given skill that has become a commodity, as technical engineering and computer programming has, I tend towards the supply/demand theory- that a skill can only demand a wage that fits the supply of that skill in the marketplace, thus increasing the size of the marketplace will increase the supply of that skill and drive real wages down. Skills this doesn't apply to are rare enough skills not to be commodities YET- but given 6.5 billion human beings and limitations on human ability, I personally think we could commoditize just about any skill you can name- including C-level executives.
Only Norm Matloff's work and the Programmer's Guild's own internal surveys, which I assume you've already found since those are the two most popular sources, and only one of them is a formal study.
The second, if you're not familiar with it, was a secret on-site survey done at several workplaces by techies who are working with H-1b visa holders, and it showed a $12,000/year salary difference ($6000/year if you discount by the fact that the business has to spend a lot of money to get an H-1b to begin with, but the difference in cost is obvious).
The actual effect on wages is somewhat discounted by the current caps in place, of course (65,000 regular H-1bs, 144,000 exempt from cap H-1bs, is a very small percentage of the total American workforce, and that's across all skills. Second after techies is nurses.).
Gets twisted to mean "Corporate Tech Industry" instead of mere "Tech Industry" when money is involved. More H-1b visas only helps those hiring techies, it depresses the wages of the techies themselves, for instance. And of course, they look towards more closed source options as well- you don't see any of this money trying to provide policy for alternative energy or open source projects.
I've had an "internal compass" most of my life- as has my father and brother. I think some people are just born with it. But I still prefer a GPS unit....and riding the MAX train I completely missed the turn west then the U-Turn East just before the Sunset Transit Center (but then again, I think my internal compass is based on a strong internal clock and the sun- and the U-Turn happens underground).
What about the inverse of Moore's Law.. Every 2 years, the average IQ of all users on the internet halves.
Which of course raises the question- what will the average consumer do with all of this? When your phone is more powerful than the desktop, there seems to be a natural endpoint like what happened with word processing- a point where the used market is larger than the new market, and everybody can afford enough technology to do anything they reasonably want to do. I suggest that point will be reached *before* the endpoint of Moore's law- and thus the law of supply and demand will insure that we NEVER reach the endpoint of Moore's law, because there will be no demand to do so.
If you think that a kid willing to beat out 98% of the population of the second most populous country on earth to get one of 4000 seats in a high tech school, then beat the odds to get an H-1b visa, doesn't have a passion for technology...then I can't break through that level of denial, and in fact refuse to try.
I recommend you read up on dale carnegie and "how to be people smart" by les gibson.
My amazon search didn't turn this up- do you have a copy near you and an ISBN # for me to reference?