Generally, the bigger the budget you have, the less efficient and more wasteful you become. You've only got to look at some of the excesses of the.com era to realise that.
You are overgeneralizing. The lesson you should learn from the.com era is that a little prodigy company cannot grow faster than its natural growth rate, no matter how much money you throw at it.
It is a lesson we should have known already, because we make the same mistakes every generation. NASA is also a product of these mistakes. Capital is not the limiting factor anymore at some point.
I really dislike the whining about foreign teaching assistants and professors. Yes, it can be a bit challenging sometimes but this is relevant job-training experience. You will be working with these people in the future.
Just imagine it from the other side - not only does your TA have to be engineers/scientist, but much of the relevant research is written only in English, and they must be able to speak English to do their jobs. Despite the complaints, it is a lot easier to struggle to communicate in your own language than in the other guy's language. We Americans have the good end of the bargain in this matter.
This guy has huge difficulties understanding materials carefully selected for clear exposition and good writing, in his native language. That makes you wonder whether he will ever be able to recognize a good idea expressed in bad English by a foreigner in a workshop paper.
Native speakers have the good end of the bargain in many ways, also as scientists: many native speakers primarily cite eachother, many scientists systematically undervalue scientific contributions from non-native speakers in peer reviews, universities in non-English-speaking countries also prefer articles and books written by native speakers of English for undergraduate students (which inflates the scientific reputation of native speakers with good writing skills), etc.
Native speakers of English also have an advantage when it comes to the composition of international research consortia. We usually want at least one British partner in a consortium to make sure reports are legible, and to make us laugh; Being funny in another language is a skill only the most talented ever master.
The attitude in the article demonstrates the disadvantage: complacency and arrogance. The real problem is that the US, and parts of Europe, take their position as indispensable "knowledge economies" for granted.
Since the study deliberately avoided confusion by removing the choice of text to read, the researchers concluded that, all things being equal, people seemed to prefer their on-line textual information in smaller hyperlinked chunks.
I have a little niece who likes books that make sounds and have things popping out of them. She can't actually read, so we can safely assume normal books would bore her. I don't think the ceteris paribus generalization is valid.
I do think most readers (and dyslectic readers in particular) find pages with less text on them easier to read, but that has little to do with boredom or the benefits of clicking occasionally.
This actually makes sense when you think about it - why are the overwhelming majority of films roughly 1.5-2 hours long?
1. Because some people's bladders only last that long. 2. Because some people's brains only last that long. 3. Because watching long movies with partner or friends is difficult to plan if you have a life. Movies that are too long don't leave time for a real dinner.
Why don't people mind TV adverts too much, but hate them on the web?
This year our football competition television rights were sold for the first time to a commercial channel (instead of public television who could no longer compete with taxpayers money). Number of viewers on sunday evening dropped from 1.5 million to 300.000. Guess why? Besides that TV adverts are usually easier to avoid, and there are other things to do to fill that time.
Why do books commonly have chapters?
To help people remember where they stopped reading, and what happened before they stopped.
Funnily enough, this actually encourages the Average User (a mythical beast, only whose footprints have ever been found) to read the whole article. Usability reports I remember reading a few months ago indicated that on an interactive medium like the web, users get "bored" if they don't have to interact with a page for too long. If you don't provide regular user-interaction (eg, by making them click for the next page) they get fractious and are more likely to drop out of reading the article.
Because they can scan through the article faster, and use ctrl-f on the whole article, they will find out quicker that the article was a false positive on their search. It has nothing to do with preventing boredom: Most pageviews on the Internet are more or less accidental, and bad design is rewarded with more clicks. The reader is still bored.
The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages (probably from early Scandinavian), whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin (a good deal of it comes via French, thanks to the Normans). Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.
The core vocabulary, which is inseparable from the grammar, is clearly predominantly Germanic. There is no grammar left without to, of, a, the, and, or, etc. Core religious vocabulary like god and hell is also Germanic, just like the days of the week, the numbers, basic agricultural and hunting vocabulary etc. Just nouns and verbs are to a large extent derived from Latin, and remarkably it is the only Germanic language, as far as I know, that uses non-Germanic words and concepts for core legal vocabulary (law, violation, guilt, responsibility, liability, act, court, etc.).
German changed a lot over a long period during the High German consonant shift (look at the map) originating from northern Italy in the early Dark Ages. That is why nowadays you find so-called High German dialects, closely related to standard German, in the south, and Low German, which is more distant to standard German and closer to Dutch, and English, in the north. Morpholinguistic distances between (remnants of) dialects of villages from Austria to England are a lot less than the difference between standard German and English would suggest. English also changed a lot through Romance influence, but in another period and in a completely different way. English became much simpler: a kind of pidgin Germanic for French conquerors.
In my opinion, the Germanic core of English only appears to be more related to the Scandinavian languages, or minority languages in the Netherlands and Belgium like Frysian and coastal Flemish/Zeeuws, because these changed less than standard German or - to a lesser extent - standard Dutch. One of the problems facing Dutch linguists for instance is that old Dutch is completely indistinguishable from Old Kentish on the opposite shore of the North Sea, making it impossible to attribute sources. British historians unfortunately read too much into these modern similarities, and pretend that Angel, Dane and Saxon tribes tribes more or less jumped to England from southern Scandinavia.
A sideline: History makes a lot more sense if you note that people in northwestern France around Calais (where the Channel is at its narrowest) still spoke a - Germanic - dialect of coastal Flemish in the 19th century, and that the language border between Germanic and Romance languages hardly moved for two millenia. The burden of proof is on those that claim that whole nations moved and invaded areas not even adjacent to the area they were born in. There is little hard evidence for mass migrations before the modern colonial ones. The 'genetic evidence' for Germanic invasion based on the close relatedness of English and Frysians in the Netherlands overlooks the possibility that a 'Germanic' population already lived in England in Ceasar's time and gradually expanded over the centuries, even though there is as much Roman and Celtic lore about the 'Belgian' (Fir Bolg etc.) migration into Britain as there is for a Saxon invasion.
It's very interesting and much easier than English. When you take a closer look at it, it seems as someone really thought about it and removed every trace of difficult grammar. The one thing you have to learn is the vocabulary.
When I travelled to Jakarta (capital of Indonesia) the first time, I found out that that noone really speaks Indonesian there.
Bahasa Indonesia is a derivative of what we used to call Dienstmaleis ('service malay') in the Netherlands. This is the standardized language taught in the Netherlands to civil servants who were sent to the Netherlands Indies, and it is based on similarities between Malay dialects of Islamic merchants who travelled between the islands. It became the national language of Indonesia because it was the only language, besides Dutch, that the native civil service class on the islands shared with eachother. This precursor language has never been a living language; It was designed at the universities of the colonial oppressor. Indonesia doesn't like to acknowledge this, because these mythological Indonesian-speaking merchants who existed before the Dutch are central to the claim of being a historical 'nation'.
Hold, now! We only spend half of the world's total military spending. If the rest of the world bands together, and they took out our nuclear weapons first, they could defeat us militarily. We must be prepared.
You are forgetting the cost of labour. 'The rest of the world' buys more military for the same money. Having the rest of the world as an enemy is obviously not a viable defense doctrine: the rest of the world is much bigger.
What Google is doing is interesting, but it's no magic bullet. And I'm not even sure I'd use this system to place money on the markets.
I certainly will, if many people use the system. It is extremely useful to know what the majority believes. It is one thing to predict accurately what will happen, and another thing to gauge to what extent this knowledge is already factored into market prices. the point of reading the headlines of financial publications has always been to know where the herds are going, as far as I am concerned.
I wonder how come the ESA doesn't launch things like this. Russia that hungry for business maybe?
Russians are much cheaper, but the ESA still owns half the world market because it is more likely to deliver the payload unharmed and in the right orbit. Still ESA itself also sends up payloads on Russian rockets for reasons of economy. Apparently they decided that this payload is not valuable enough to pay for a trip on an Ariane. The students can always build another one.
No, I wasn't really referring to that. I was referring to the fact that even the democrats are more to the right than the right-wing politicials here in social-democratic Norway, for example.
Americans tend to refer to social-democracy as communism. While I was just stating that there are fundamental differences.
This is a reflection of different historical development, I believe. It is more about words than political programs.
Before WWII socialism and communism was considered evil by mainstream media everywhere -- hence the development of fascism as a reactionary force. After WWII the UK and US simply congratulated themselves while the formerly occupied countries generally reappreciated democratic socialism (which had been on the right side all along, and was a victim of the Nazis and therefore good).
Consequence is that European 'Liberal' parties permanently moved to the moderate right while social-democrats and socialists replaced them on the left side of the spectrum, while US and UK socialist all but disappeared. US Liberals and UK Labour are traditionally considered 'sister' parties by continental social-democrats, but these parties tend to shun the word 'socialism' because it has a negative connotation.
If the US/UK district system didn't exist we would probably see similar distinctions as in continental Europe. Liberals would split in for instance social liberals, social democrats, socialists, environmentalists, and Conservatives in christian-democrats, christian fundamentalists, conservative liberals, fascists. Since in a two party system both parties compete for the voters in the middle much of the diversity in opinions is nearly invisible from a distance.
'Neoliberalism' is a much newer thing, which tends to have less (but still too much) influence on continental social-democrats. It is neoliberal market-think that makes it seem nearly the whole US population is right wing.
Personally, I don't really mind paying taxes as long as I know it's used sensible.
I am also a happy European social-democratic taxpayer.
If you see any new concrete bridges going up near the Redmond campus, a discontinued blog and a mysterious cavity showing up when using GPR, we will know how seriously Microsoft takes criticism.
You misunderstand. Steve Ballmer is the mysterious blogger: he has the political instinct to know that, as a leader, you are your own perfect enemy. Any people found buried in concrete will be secretaries who know to much. He will have to dictate his subversive messages to someone, after all.
Reminder to self: check 'post anonymously' after submit.
There's a lot of stuff written down in books that happens to be nonsense. And I don't just mean fringe nonsense like Mein Kampf. I mean "authoritative" sources like Encyclopedia Britannica.
I definitely agree to that, but in my view the present Internet tends to strengthen the authority of sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica because it does not distinguish points of view. To be able to do that one must be able to specify what kind of source on wants to trust on what kind of subject.
Take a subject like History: the egalizing effect of mainstream Anglosaxon school book History on the world is far more insidious than neo-nazi fringe nonsense. In one generation the whole world population will for instance believe that it is dogma that 1) Hitler was some kind of Odinist heathen and not a Christian, 2) Pearl Harbor was attacked by surprise, 3) Saxons massacred or chased away the Celtic population of England etc., and that the alternative theories are a 'conspiracy theories', or mark you as a kind of Nazi or simply a nutcase.
Any German historian with mainstream beliefs will tell you 1 is not true, any Dutch historian with mainstream beliefs will tell you 2 cannot be true, and most continental historians will not believe 3 is true because they do not believe the evidence supports the idea of nations wandering around.
Internet has the potential of sharing this information and discovering who has the most plausible story, and to some extent it has done that. But the current Internet model almost guarantees that 149.000 hits on for instance "pearl harbor" "conspiracy theory" will not be undone.
What is worse, is that Dutch school children will be writing papers for school based on the Anglosaxon version of history, even if it is contradictory with the Dutch version, because that is what they found through Google. Same thing happens to law (my field) and politics. In the past people were ill-informed, and now they are well-informed by the wrong sources.
Of course the Internet will continue to develop, and lots of material that isn't on the Web will be some day, but for lots of knowledge it will be too late: it will be destroyed because it isn't actively exercised in any minds anymore. Too much communication with the rest of the world from an early age on can be a bad thing for diversity of opinions.
Very appropriate. Since God is also in the Wikipedia, and God, FSM, and the Boogeyman exist on the same ontological level, I really don't see why FSM shouldn't get an article devoted to it. The God article obviously took a lot of effort too.
Meanwhile, the basic work of building an encyclopedia, like researching obscure historical subjects and even basic fact-checking, is largely neglected.
Wikipedia reflects the content of the Web, and the Web itself is starting to become a problem. Paradoxically, it destroys knowledge because nobody can tell the difference between experts and teenagers with an opinion.
Nowadays if you can't provide clickable links to back up your statements, you will be ignored by young people. An ISBN for a pre-1995 book or PhD thesis on the subject is not good enough, certainly not if you can't buy it on Amazon or if it is in a foreign language. Merely showing the physical book is, or at least used to be, enough to convince people in real life - not of the verity of the statements but of the credibility of the speaker. On the Internet this 'trust the expert' mechanism is lacking.
That villa seems like it's just irregular enough to look like it's just another feature of the land. Too insignificant to do major earthmoving, so the farmer who works that piece of land just works around it.
He might have suspected. It is just a Roman villa in Italy: nothing to risk losing income over while archeologists turn the site inside out.
Land owners may even destroy traces to avoid becoming subject to some strict spatial planning regime if a Roman Villa is as unexciting to Italians as Iron Age village leftovers are to many Western Europeans.
Roman leftovers are of great interest at the boundaries of the Roman Empire because even small settlements may prove or disprove theories about when the Romans left, or just whether the area was safe enough for Romans to actually settle there etc. The stuff you have a lot of tends to be pretty uninteresting to laymen. Who cares about more pottery and foundations of walls?
Even WITHOUT the Kyoto Protocol, the planet's mean temperature is expected to increase by 6-8 degrees over the 300 years. I think we'll survive, as will the food we depend upon.
This is more than enough to scare me. This is a map of the coastline where I live (Netherlands) according to Ptolemaeus' Geographia in the early Dark Ages when most of the ice on Greenland had disappeared, compared to a projection of a higher sea level on the current coastline. It takes a 2-3 degree rise in Greenland to reach this level, so I suggest taking it easy with the CO2 until I die at least. I still have huge mortgage loan to pay on a house in the middle of the darkblue area, and am not willing to emigrate to another country.
Wikipedia may be interesting, but it is hardly an official document. Basically it guarantees nothing: content may be (and often is) relevant and correct, but that's it. IMHO it should only be used as an initial pointer. Would you perform any critical action (open heart surgery, nuclear power plant control,...) based on Wikipedia's information? I surely would not. I would not be surprised if its legal value turned out to be limited.
You are setting higher standards for the legal system than it can meet. You can try to bring whatever evidence you like. The judge habitually relies on what he learned in school as a child, what he saw on television, what he read in a book, what his colleagues told him, etc. In addition to that, he will accept as truth the opinion of experts on subjects he knows nothing about.
There is no problem in backing up your arguments in a court with a Wikipedia entry or Google search results, as long as the argument you are trying to provide evidence for is not considered too controversial by the judge. A Wikipedia entry that has not been challenged for a long time indicates that the information in the entry is apparently not controversial. If there is a problem with the information, the opposing side will surely challenge it.
I once won a case without presenting any form of backup for my claims, because the position my opponent was trying to defend was so ridiculous the judge immediately decided in my favour after determining the opponent didn't actually want to challenge any of my claims.
My link to the subject is also my wife, btw., who has worked as a gardian/gezinsvoogd.
My wife diagnoses and gives behavioral therapy to (both criminal and traumatized) children. In her second job she educates people on recognizing the signals of child abuse and interviewing children (police academy, two universities, academic hospitals, etc.).
We have one experience where the guardian was very afraid of some parents, and my wife adviced to take the children away because the guardian didn't dare to. A parent, who was already convicted for two attempted murders, threatened her and she had police protection for some time. She did go to work every day though, as opposed to some members of parliament. This certainly gave me a fresh insight into why nobody acts in some extreme cases.
There was talk (last year)of explicitly making hitting a child illegal, which I think would be a good start. I don't think it came through, though.
Last thing I heard is that it is in the pipeline now. You will hear again of it in a short while. It will not be in the BW, as was suggested before, but there will be a guideline defining hitting children as child abuse.
The biggest problem here is finding the right criteria for taking the children away from their parents. Take away too few, and you end up with deaths, even if the agencies visit the family frequently. Take away too many, and you'll surely get a public outcry.
This is exactly the main problem. My wife and some of my friends work in the involved organizations in the Netherlands. They do very good work generally speaking, but the problem is that they basically have almost no clear criteria in making big decisions about other people's lives. They have too many families to look after, get death threats from parents, their interventions get regularly overturned by the courts for vague reasons, and the shortage of suitable places for children means that children who are taken away from parents can end up in jail because there are no better places.
In the nineties the media was ranting continually about child protection taking away children from innocent parents, based on stories of parents, and now they are ranting about a few cases of children dying because nobody interfered.
The Dutch historian Wesseling once made the famous statement that there cannot be such a thing as liberal art (as opposed to socialist, fascist, catholic art) since liberalism is constitutionally unable to define what art is good. We are talking about liberal in the sense of "tolerant", of course, and not the more limited (and in many ways opposite) American meaning of the word. I would add that liberal child protection cannot be too, since any definition of child abuse involves a government setting criteria for good child rearing, or even for good parents. The left-wing opposition and civil servants have for instance suggested that mentally handicapped couples should not be allowed to have children (which would really reduce the workload, to be honest), but most people simply don't want to face such choices.
Failing to set criteria is exactly what this Dutch government is good at: it talks about values all the time, but never creates any clarity about which (and whose) values they mean and they continually "deregulate" to "give people more responsibility".
Child's safety first. Also, it suddenly makes the government (politically) responsible for the actions of the parents: the government should have taken the child away if its abused.
The law does indeed state that the rights of the child as described by the UN declaration take priority, but the fact of the matter is that you can only get sued by adults. The UN declaration also states that children have a right not to be separated from their parents, which is extremely helpful for parents.
A clear and global view makes clear guidelines possible. It is essential to make informed decisions. A better record of the past, observations made by various people (doctors, police, whatever) put together help do this. Being able to keep the child you abuse merely because you move to another city is inexcusable. Not being able to prevent a child's death just because agencies didn't inform each other properly, is inexcusable too.
The main argument for the increasing decentralization of child protection over the last decade is that regions in the country are apparently so different that you cannot use the same criteria everywhere. The actual reason is that the child care subject is so impopular that the government wants to get rid of the responsibility for it. It is also a way to move responsibility for the budget to the municipalities, which saves money because municipal governments are poor anyway.
Creating a system which collects the relevant information and can alarm the proper agencies, is a structural way to solve both.
I think such a system is indeed part of the solution, but I doubt very much that the government actually wants to take on the real issue: setting the criteria. The government should also become better at parenting itself: taking away a child should be an improvement for the child. This is simply a mon
It's instructive to note how few Dutch Jews survived the war with how many Danish Jews did. In Denmark, there wasn't a population register with religion on it, and the civil service behaved impeccably.
"After the German invasion and military occupation on April 9, Denmark became an exception amongst the occupied countries. It formally remained a sovereign state and governed its own affairs, thus differentiating it with regard to international law and the practice of occupation. The situation in Denmark has even been characterized as an "anomaly" in German occupied Europe. This was foremost a consequence of a unique occupation regime. Unlike other countries, Denmark was not put under the control of a German civil or military administration. In theory, and more or less in practice, the basic social, political, and legal situation in Denmark remained intact."
In other words, Denmark was pretty much able to do whatever it wanted as long as it didn't provoke Germany into imposing a stricter occupation regime. Denmark did not defend itself, its government collaborated with the Nazis and never went into exile, and it was never part of the Allies.
In terms of occupation regimes, The Netherlands represents the complete opposite: a Nazi civil occupation regime. It was, like the states in Germany itself, and for instance Austria, and former Prussia in conquered Poland, ruled by a Nazi Gauleiter (Governor), the infamous Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart, from the outset. In all areas that were treated as original parts of the First Reich by the Nazis the jews nearly disappeared.
The Netherlands was militarily defeated, its government went into exile, it was at war with the axis nations, it never surrendered its sovereignty to anyone but only most of its terrirory, and the civil administration in the Netherlands was considered clearly illegitimate by the majority of the population.
The intermediate type of regime is represented by for instance northern France and the Balkan countries that merely suffered a German military occupation regime.
It *might* be the case that carrier battle groups are sitting ducks for diesel subs, but I don't think we can say that with any confidence based on generalist media reports on military exercises.
The results of NATO military exercises are usually classified, and leak to specialist fora through military colleges and the participants in the exercises. I came to know of the Walrus slaughter through Dutch Navy people. The reference is merely to back up what I already know from other sources I cannot link to. The vulnerability of carriers is well established by now.
There's always the suspicion in exercises, particularly ones involving the US, that the participants are deliberately handicapping themselves.
All artificial setups can handicap the involved parties in some way, and sometimes you introduce deliberate handicaps based on the goals of the exercise. The weakness of DE subs is for instance that they are in action only for a short time and in a limited area compared to nuclear subs. In a real war scenario these things run a significant risk of being destroyed while resupplying. In that sense the format of the exercise gives a bonus to the DE subs. Outcomes of exercises are never a reflection anyway of who is the stronger or more competent country.
Still I think no country with a limited number of warheads will waste them on carrier battle groups in a full scale war if it also has subs. It is plausible, given the strengths and weaknesses of DE subs, that the first hostile act against the US in a war would be a DE sub surprise attack on the carrier battle groups: it would severely cripple power projection capabilities of the US, and the method would not be considered reprehensible by neutral bystanders as nukes would.
Weapons systems in service may also have secret capabilities that are hidden, of course. We don't know who can jam whose electronic systems (is it for instance still the case that the Germans can jam US Abrams M1 series tanks, or did the US catch up?) or which countries can see stealth planes for instance, but predictions about what will happen can only be based on what we know or suspect about capabilities. Most wealthy countries will have some small tricks up their sleeves, I suppose. Except for the Russians, it appears, who will immediately offer any halfbaked idea for sale nowadays.
Quite surprisingly, modern nuclear balance is not about the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, or at least not in its original form. Indeed, few countries (if any) except Russia would have the power to completely wipe out the United States from the planet. The logic behind the British and French nuclear arsenal size is the following : make sure that under any circonstances, the disasters caused by the nuclear retaliation of these countries would greatly overthrow the possible gains of initiating a nuclear war against them.
Well said, but I wouldn't call the doctrine modern though. The doctrine of 'making it prohibitively expensive to attack/occupy us' is as old as warfare and the very reason being small has never really proven an evolutionary disadvantage to countries. Make yourself unattractive to attack or occupation and you are reasonably safe.
I'll think you'll find that it's rather hard to use ICBM's against carrier battle groups or other mobile targets.
Assigning ICBM's to US carrier battle groups is a waste anyway. Diesel-electric subs will take care of the US carrier battle groups very nicely, as has been demonstrated repeatedly by NATO allies in military exercises.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally, the bigger the budget you have, the less efficient and more wasteful you become. You've only got to look at some of the excesses of the .com era to realise that.
.com era is that a little prodigy company cannot grow faster than its natural growth rate, no matter how much money you throw at it.
You are overgeneralizing. The lesson you should learn from the
It is a lesson we should have known already, because we make the same mistakes every generation. NASA is also a product of these mistakes. Capital is not the limiting factor anymore at some point.
I really dislike the whining about foreign teaching assistants and professors. Yes, it can be a bit challenging sometimes but this is relevant job-training experience. You will be working with these people in the future.
Just imagine it from the other side - not only does your TA have to be engineers/scientist, but much of the relevant research is written only in English, and they must be able to speak English to do their jobs. Despite the complaints, it is a lot easier to struggle to communicate in your own language than in the other guy's language. We Americans have the good end of the bargain in this matter.
This guy has huge difficulties understanding materials carefully selected for clear exposition and good writing, in his native language. That makes you wonder whether he will ever be able to recognize a good idea expressed in bad English by a foreigner in a workshop paper.
Native speakers have the good end of the bargain in many ways, also as scientists: many native speakers primarily cite eachother, many scientists systematically undervalue scientific contributions from non-native speakers in peer reviews, universities in non-English-speaking countries also prefer articles and books written by native speakers of English for undergraduate students (which inflates the scientific reputation of native speakers with good writing skills), etc.
Native speakers of English also have an advantage when it comes to the composition of international research consortia. We usually want at least one British partner in a consortium to make sure reports are legible, and to make us laugh; Being funny in another language is a skill only the most talented ever master.
The attitude in the article demonstrates the disadvantage: complacency and arrogance. The real problem is that the US, and parts of Europe, take their position as indispensable "knowledge economies" for granted.
Marihuana is a perfectly correct name in many languages, and was used in American English: 1937 Marihuana Tax Act.
Since the study deliberately avoided confusion by removing the choice of text to read, the researchers concluded that, all things being equal, people seemed to prefer their on-line textual information in smaller hyperlinked chunks.
I have a little niece who likes books that make sounds and have things popping out of them. She can't actually read, so we can safely assume normal books would bore her. I don't think the ceteris paribus generalization is valid.
I do think most readers (and dyslectic readers in particular) find pages with less text on them easier to read, but that has little to do with boredom or the benefits of clicking occasionally.
This actually makes sense when you think about it - why are the overwhelming majority of films roughly 1.5-2 hours long?
1. Because some people's bladders only last that long.
2. Because some people's brains only last that long.
3. Because watching long movies with partner or friends is difficult to plan if you have a life. Movies that are too long don't leave time for a real dinner.
Why don't people mind TV adverts too much, but hate them on the web?
This year our football competition television rights were sold for the first time to a commercial channel (instead of public television who could no longer compete with taxpayers money). Number of viewers on sunday evening dropped from 1.5 million to 300.000. Guess why? Besides that TV adverts are usually easier to avoid, and there are other things to do to fill that time.
Why do books commonly have chapters?
To help people remember where they stopped reading, and what happened before they stopped.
Funnily enough, this actually encourages the Average User (a mythical beast, only whose footprints have ever been found) to read the whole article. Usability reports I remember reading a few months ago indicated that on an interactive medium like the web, users get "bored" if they don't have to interact with a page for too long. If you don't provide regular user-interaction (eg, by making them click for the next page) they get fractious and are more likely to drop out of reading the article.
Because they can scan through the article faster, and use ctrl-f on the whole article, they will find out quicker that the article was a false positive on their search. It has nothing to do with preventing boredom: Most pageviews on the Internet are more or less accidental, and bad design is rewarded with more clicks. The reader is still bored.
Here you are: Voltaic Systems. Use a standard car charger to connect the battery pack to your electronic equipment.
Nope. The Nordic languages have lov(Norwegian/Danish) and lag (Swedish). I also believe this word is very old in Nordic languages.
I Stand Corrected.
These Nordic, English and Romance words appear to be cognates. But related to what historical language?
The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages (probably from early Scandinavian), whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin (a good deal of it comes via French, thanks to the Normans). Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.
The core vocabulary, which is inseparable from the grammar, is clearly predominantly Germanic. There is no grammar left without to, of, a, the, and, or, etc. Core religious vocabulary like god and hell is also Germanic, just like the days of the week, the numbers, basic agricultural and hunting vocabulary etc. Just nouns and verbs are to a large extent derived from Latin, and remarkably it is the only Germanic language, as far as I know, that uses non-Germanic words and concepts for core legal vocabulary (law, violation, guilt, responsibility, liability, act, court, etc.).
German changed a lot over a long period during the High German consonant shift (look at the map) originating from northern Italy in the early Dark Ages. That is why nowadays you find so-called High German dialects, closely related to standard German, in the south, and Low German, which is more distant to standard German and closer to Dutch, and English, in the north. Morpholinguistic distances between (remnants of) dialects of villages from Austria to England are a lot less than the difference between standard German and English would suggest. English also changed a lot through Romance influence, but in another period and in a completely different way. English became much simpler: a kind of pidgin Germanic for French conquerors.
In my opinion, the Germanic core of English only appears to be more related to the Scandinavian languages, or minority languages in the Netherlands and Belgium like Frysian and coastal Flemish/Zeeuws, because these changed less than standard German or - to a lesser extent - standard Dutch. One of the problems facing Dutch linguists for instance is that old Dutch is completely indistinguishable from Old Kentish on the opposite shore of the North Sea, making it impossible to attribute sources. British historians unfortunately read too much into these modern similarities, and pretend that Angel, Dane and Saxon tribes tribes more or less jumped to England from southern Scandinavia.
A sideline: History makes a lot more sense if you note that people in northwestern France around Calais (where the Channel is at its narrowest) still spoke a - Germanic - dialect of coastal Flemish in the 19th century, and that the language border between Germanic and Romance languages hardly moved for two millenia. The burden of proof is on those that claim that whole nations moved and invaded areas not even adjacent to the area they were born in. There is little hard evidence for mass migrations before the modern colonial ones. The 'genetic evidence' for Germanic invasion based on the close relatedness of English and Frysians in the Netherlands overlooks the possibility that a 'Germanic' population already lived in England in Ceasar's time and gradually expanded over the centuries, even though there is as much Roman and Celtic lore about the 'Belgian' (Fir Bolg etc.) migration into Britain as there is for a Saxon invasion.
It's very interesting and much easier than English. When you take a closer look at it, it seems as someone really thought about it and removed every trace of difficult grammar. The one thing you have to learn is the vocabulary.
When I travelled to Jakarta (capital of Indonesia) the first time, I found out that that noone really speaks Indonesian there.
Bahasa Indonesia is a derivative of what we used to call Dienstmaleis ('service malay') in the Netherlands. This is the standardized language taught in the Netherlands to civil servants who were sent to the Netherlands Indies, and it is based on similarities between Malay dialects of Islamic merchants who travelled between the islands. It became the national language of Indonesia because it was the only language, besides Dutch, that the native civil service class on the islands shared with eachother. This precursor language has never been a living language; It was designed at the universities of the colonial oppressor. Indonesia doesn't like to acknowledge this, because these mythological Indonesian-speaking merchants who existed before the Dutch are central to the claim of being a historical 'nation'.
Hold, now! We only spend half of the world's total military spending. If the rest of the world bands together, and they took out our nuclear weapons first, they could defeat us militarily. We must be prepared.
You are forgetting the cost of labour. 'The rest of the world' buys more military for the same money. Having the rest of the world as an enemy is obviously not a viable defense doctrine: the rest of the world is much bigger.
What Google is doing is interesting, but it's no magic bullet. And I'm not even sure I'd use this system to place money on the markets.
I certainly will, if many people use the system. It is extremely useful to know what the majority believes. It is one thing to predict accurately what will happen, and another thing to gauge to what extent this knowledge is already factored into market prices. the point of reading the headlines of financial publications has always been to know where the herds are going, as far as I am concerned.
I wonder how come the ESA doesn't launch things like this. Russia that hungry for business maybe?
Russians are much cheaper, but the ESA still owns half the world market because it is more likely to deliver the payload unharmed and in the right orbit. Still ESA itself also sends up payloads on Russian rockets for reasons of economy. Apparently they decided that this payload is not valuable enough to pay for a trip on an Ariane. The students can always build another one.
No, I wasn't really referring to that. I was referring to the fact that even the democrats are more to the right than the right-wing politicials here in social-democratic Norway, for example.
Americans tend to refer to social-democracy as communism. While I was just stating that there are fundamental differences.
This is a reflection of different historical development, I believe. It is more about words than political programs.
Before WWII socialism and communism was considered evil by mainstream media everywhere -- hence the development of fascism as a reactionary force. After WWII the UK and US simply congratulated themselves while the formerly occupied countries generally reappreciated democratic socialism (which had been on the right side all along, and was a victim of the Nazis and therefore good).
Consequence is that European 'Liberal' parties permanently moved to the moderate right while social-democrats and socialists replaced them on the left side of the spectrum, while US and UK socialist all but disappeared. US Liberals and UK Labour are traditionally considered 'sister' parties by continental social-democrats, but these parties tend to shun the word 'socialism' because it has a negative connotation.
If the US/UK district system didn't exist we would probably see similar distinctions as in continental Europe. Liberals would split in for instance social liberals, social democrats, socialists, environmentalists, and Conservatives in christian-democrats, christian fundamentalists, conservative liberals, fascists. Since in a two party system both parties compete for the voters in the middle much of the diversity in opinions is nearly invisible from a distance.
'Neoliberalism' is a much newer thing, which tends to have less (but still too much) influence on continental social-democrats. It is neoliberal market-think that makes it seem nearly the whole US population is right wing.
Personally, I don't really mind paying taxes as long as I know it's used sensible.
I am also a happy European social-democratic taxpayer.
If you see any new concrete bridges going up near the Redmond campus, a discontinued blog and a mysterious cavity showing up when using GPR, we will know how seriously Microsoft takes criticism.
You misunderstand. Steve Ballmer is the mysterious blogger: he has the political instinct to know that, as a leader, you are your own perfect enemy. Any people found buried in concrete will be secretaries who know to much. He will have to dictate his subversive messages to someone, after all.
Reminder to self: check 'post anonymously' after submit.
There's a lot of stuff written down in books that happens to be nonsense. And I don't just mean fringe nonsense like Mein Kampf. I mean "authoritative" sources like Encyclopedia Britannica.
I definitely agree to that, but in my view the present Internet tends to strengthen the authority of sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica because it does not distinguish points of view. To be able to do that one must be able to specify what kind of source on wants to trust on what kind of subject.
Take a subject like History: the egalizing effect of mainstream Anglosaxon school book History on the world is far more insidious than neo-nazi fringe nonsense. In one generation the whole world population will for instance believe that it is dogma that 1) Hitler was some kind of Odinist heathen and not a Christian, 2) Pearl Harbor was attacked by surprise, 3) Saxons massacred or chased away the Celtic population of England etc., and that the alternative theories are a 'conspiracy theories', or mark you as a kind of Nazi or simply a nutcase.
Any German historian with mainstream beliefs will tell you 1 is not true, any Dutch historian with mainstream beliefs will tell you 2 cannot be true, and most continental historians will not believe 3 is true because they do not believe the evidence supports the idea of nations wandering around.
Internet has the potential of sharing this information and discovering who has the most plausible story, and to some extent it has done that. But the current Internet model almost guarantees that 149.000 hits on for instance "pearl harbor" "conspiracy theory" will not be undone.
What is worse, is that Dutch school children will be writing papers for school based on the Anglosaxon version of history, even if it is contradictory with the Dutch version, because that is what they found through Google. Same thing happens to law (my field) and politics. In the past people were ill-informed, and now they are well-informed by the wrong sources.
Of course the Internet will continue to develop, and lots of material that isn't on the Web will be some day, but for lots of knowledge it will be too late: it will be destroyed because it isn't actively exercised in any minds anymore. Too much communication with the rest of the world from an early age on can be a bad thing for diversity of opinions.
I think, "Evil Twin" is much more appropriate.
Very appropriate. Since God is also in the Wikipedia, and God, FSM, and the Boogeyman exist on the same ontological level, I really don't see why FSM shouldn't get an article devoted to it. The God article obviously took a lot of effort too.
Meanwhile, the basic work of building an encyclopedia, like researching obscure historical subjects and even basic fact-checking, is largely neglected.
Wikipedia reflects the content of the Web, and the Web itself is starting to become a problem. Paradoxically, it destroys knowledge because nobody can tell the difference between experts and teenagers with an opinion.
Nowadays if you can't provide clickable links to back up your statements, you will be ignored by young people. An ISBN for a pre-1995 book or PhD thesis on the subject is not good enough, certainly not if you can't buy it on Amazon or if it is in a foreign language. Merely showing the physical book is, or at least used to be, enough to convince people in real life - not of the verity of the statements but of the credibility of the speaker. On the Internet this 'trust the expert' mechanism is lacking.
That villa seems like it's just irregular enough to look like it's just another feature of the land. Too insignificant to do major earthmoving, so the farmer who works that piece of land just works around it.
He might have suspected. It is just a Roman villa in Italy: nothing to risk losing income over while archeologists turn the site inside out.
Land owners may even destroy traces to avoid becoming subject to some strict spatial planning regime if a Roman Villa is as unexciting to Italians as Iron Age village leftovers are to many Western Europeans.
Roman leftovers are of great interest at the boundaries of the Roman Empire because even small settlements may prove or disprove theories about when the Romans left, or just whether the area was safe enough for Romans to actually settle there etc. The stuff you have a lot of tends to be pretty uninteresting to laymen. Who cares about more pottery and foundations of walls?
Even WITHOUT the Kyoto Protocol, the planet's mean temperature is expected to increase by 6-8 degrees over the 300 years. I think we'll survive, as will the food we depend upon.
This is more than enough to scare me. This is a map of the coastline where I live (Netherlands) according to Ptolemaeus' Geographia in the early Dark Ages when most of the ice on Greenland had disappeared, compared to a projection of a higher sea level on the current coastline. It takes a 2-3 degree rise in Greenland to reach this level, so I suggest taking it easy with the CO2 until I die at least. I still have huge mortgage loan to pay on a house in the middle of the darkblue area, and am not willing to emigrate to another country.
Wikipedia may be interesting, but it is hardly an official document. Basically it guarantees nothing: content may be (and often is) relevant and correct, but that's it. IMHO it should only be used as an initial pointer. Would you perform any critical action (open heart surgery, nuclear power plant control,...) based on Wikipedia's information? I surely would not. I would not be surprised if its legal value turned out to be limited.
You are setting higher standards for the legal system than it can meet. You can try to bring whatever evidence you like. The judge habitually relies on what he learned in school as a child, what he saw on television, what he read in a book, what his colleagues told him, etc. In addition to that, he will accept as truth the opinion of experts on subjects he knows nothing about.
There is no problem in backing up your arguments in a court with a Wikipedia entry or Google search results, as long as the argument you are trying to provide evidence for is not considered too controversial by the judge. A Wikipedia entry that has not been challenged for a long time indicates that the information in the entry is apparently not controversial. If there is a problem with the information, the opposing side will surely challenge it.
I once won a case without presenting any form of backup for my claims, because the position my opponent was trying to defend was so ridiculous the judge immediately decided in my favour after determining the opponent didn't actually want to challenge any of my claims.
My link to the subject is also my wife, btw., who has worked as a gardian/gezinsvoogd.
My wife diagnoses and gives behavioral therapy to (both criminal and traumatized) children. In her second job she educates people on recognizing the signals of child abuse and interviewing children (police academy, two universities, academic hospitals, etc.).
We have one experience where the guardian was very afraid of some parents, and my wife adviced to take the children away because the guardian didn't dare to. A parent, who was already convicted for two attempted murders, threatened her and she had police protection for some time. She did go to work every day though, as opposed to some members of parliament. This certainly gave me a fresh insight into why nobody acts in some extreme cases.
There was talk (last year)of explicitly making hitting a child illegal, which I think would be a good start. I don't think it came through, though.
Last thing I heard is that it is in the pipeline now. You will hear again of it in a short while. It will not be in the BW, as was suggested before, but there will be a guideline defining hitting children as child abuse.
The biggest problem here is finding the right criteria for taking the children away from their parents. Take away too few, and you end up with deaths, even if the agencies visit the family frequently. Take away too many, and you'll surely get a public outcry.
This is exactly the main problem. My wife and some of my friends work in the involved organizations in the Netherlands. They do very good work generally speaking, but the problem is that they basically have almost no clear criteria in making big decisions about other people's lives. They have too many families to look after, get death threats from parents, their interventions get regularly overturned by the courts for vague reasons, and the shortage of suitable places for children means that children who are taken away from parents can end up in jail because there are no better places.
In the nineties the media was ranting continually about child protection taking away children from innocent parents, based on stories of parents, and now they are ranting about a few cases of children dying because nobody interfered.
The Dutch historian Wesseling once made the famous statement that there cannot be such a thing as liberal art (as opposed to socialist, fascist, catholic art) since liberalism is constitutionally unable to define what art is good. We are talking about liberal in the sense of "tolerant", of course, and not the more limited (and in many ways opposite) American meaning of the word. I would add that liberal child protection cannot be too, since any definition of child abuse involves a government setting criteria for good child rearing, or even for good parents. The left-wing opposition and civil servants have for instance suggested that mentally handicapped couples should not be allowed to have children (which would really reduce the workload, to be honest), but most people simply don't want to face such choices.
Failing to set criteria is exactly what this Dutch government is good at: it talks about values all the time, but never creates any clarity about which (and whose) values they mean and they continually "deregulate" to "give people more responsibility".
Child's safety first. Also, it suddenly makes the government (politically) responsible for the actions of the parents: the government should have taken the child away if its abused.
The law does indeed state that the rights of the child as described by the UN declaration take priority, but the fact of the matter is that you can only get sued by adults. The UN declaration also states that children have a right not to be separated from their parents, which is extremely helpful for parents.
A clear and global view makes clear guidelines possible. It is essential to make informed decisions. A better record of the past, observations made by various people (doctors, police, whatever) put together help do this. Being able to keep the child you abuse merely because you move to another city is inexcusable. Not being able to prevent a child's death just because agencies didn't inform each other properly, is inexcusable too.
The main argument for the increasing decentralization of child protection over the last decade is that regions in the country are apparently so different that you cannot use the same criteria everywhere. The actual reason is that the child care subject is so impopular that the government wants to get rid of the responsibility for it. It is also a way to move responsibility for the budget to the municipalities, which saves money because municipal governments are poor anyway.
Creating a system which collects the relevant information and can alarm the proper agencies, is a structural way to solve both.
I think such a system is indeed part of the solution, but I doubt very much that the government actually wants to take on the real issue: setting the criteria. The government should also become better at parenting itself: taking away a child should be an improvement for the child. This is simply a mon
It's instructive to note how few Dutch Jews survived the war with how many
Danish Jews did. In Denmark, there wasn't a population register with religion on
it, and the civil service behaved impeccably.
Impeccable? This is complete bullshit. You are comparing apples and oranges. Denmark never suffered an occupation regime:
"After the German invasion and military occupation on April 9, Denmark became an exception amongst the occupied countries. It formally remained a sovereign state and governed its own affairs, thus differentiating it with regard to international law and the practice of occupation. The situation in Denmark has even been characterized as an "anomaly" in German occupied Europe. This was foremost a consequence of a unique occupation regime. Unlike other countries, Denmark was not put under the control of a German civil or military administration. In theory, and more or less in practice, the basic social, political, and legal situation in Denmark remained intact."
In other words, Denmark was pretty much able to do whatever it wanted as long as it didn't provoke Germany into imposing a stricter occupation regime. Denmark did not defend itself, its government collaborated with the Nazis and never went into exile, and it was never part of the Allies.
In terms of occupation regimes, The Netherlands represents the complete opposite: a Nazi civil occupation regime. It was, like the states in Germany itself, and for instance Austria, and former Prussia in conquered Poland, ruled by a Nazi Gauleiter (Governor), the infamous Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart, from the outset. In all areas that were treated as original parts of the First Reich by the Nazis the jews nearly disappeared.
The Netherlands was militarily defeated, its government went into exile, it was at war with the axis nations, it never surrendered its sovereignty to anyone but only most of its terrirory, and the civil administration in the Netherlands was considered clearly illegitimate by the majority of the population.
The intermediate type of regime is represented by for instance northern France and the Balkan countries that merely suffered a German military occupation regime.
It *might* be the case that carrier battle groups are sitting ducks for diesel subs, but I don't think we can say that with any confidence based on generalist media reports on military exercises.
The results of NATO military exercises are usually classified, and leak to specialist fora through military colleges and the participants in the exercises. I came to know of the Walrus slaughter through Dutch Navy people. The reference is merely to back up what I already know from other sources I cannot link to. The vulnerability of carriers is well established by now.
There's always the suspicion in exercises, particularly ones involving the US, that the participants are deliberately handicapping themselves.
All artificial setups can handicap the involved parties in some way, and sometimes you introduce deliberate handicaps based on the goals of the exercise. The weakness of DE subs is for instance that they are in action only for a short time and in a limited area compared to nuclear subs. In a real war scenario these things run a significant risk of being destroyed while resupplying. In that sense the format of the exercise gives a bonus to the DE subs. Outcomes of exercises are never a reflection anyway of who is the stronger or more competent country.
Still I think no country with a limited number of warheads will waste them on carrier battle groups in a full scale war if it also has subs. It is plausible, given the strengths and weaknesses of DE subs, that the first hostile act against the US in a war would be a DE sub surprise attack on the carrier battle groups: it would severely cripple power projection capabilities of the US, and the method would not be considered reprehensible by neutral bystanders as nukes would.
Weapons systems in service may also have secret capabilities that are hidden, of course. We don't know who can jam whose electronic systems (is it for instance still the case that the Germans can jam US Abrams M1 series tanks, or did the US catch up?) or which countries can see stealth planes for instance, but predictions about what will happen can only be based on what we know or suspect about capabilities. Most wealthy countries will have some small tricks up their sleeves, I suppose. Except for the Russians, it appears, who will immediately offer any halfbaked idea for sale nowadays.
Quite surprisingly, modern nuclear balance is not about the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, or at least not in its original form. Indeed, few countries (if any) except Russia would have the power to completely wipe out the United States from the planet.
The logic behind the British and French nuclear arsenal size is the following : make sure that under any circonstances, the disasters caused by the nuclear retaliation of these countries would greatly overthrow the possible gains of initiating a nuclear war against them.
Well said, but I wouldn't call the doctrine modern though. The doctrine of 'making it prohibitively expensive to attack/occupy us' is as old as warfare and the very reason being small has never really proven an evolutionary disadvantage to countries. Make yourself unattractive to attack or occupation and you are reasonably safe.
I'll think you'll find that it's rather hard to use ICBM's against carrier battle groups or other mobile targets.
Assigning ICBM's to US carrier battle groups is a waste anyway. Diesel-electric subs will take care of the US carrier battle groups very nicely, as has been demonstrated repeatedly by NATO allies in military exercises.