What would happen if 95% of all Americans lived in cities? Would the 5% of rural voters still get 50% of the representation?
The obvious question to follow up with is "Which cities?"
If 95% of all Americans live in Chicago, the West Coast cities, and the stretch from Boston to Washington, D.C., (call it 12 states) then they will be under-represented.
Very badly in the Senate, where they would have 24 out of 100 senators,
least badly in the House where they would have a large majority of the representatives but still not 95%,
and somewhere in between in presidential elections.
Speaking as someone from a large western state with relatively few people, great scenic beauty, and rich in natural resources, let me say that replacing the current system with one that was based solely on population would be terrifying.
I can easily envision the 95% who live in the 12 states (in this example) passing federal laws that do a variety of things:
requiring that we strip-mine the resources;
requiring that we operate massive land-fills in the non-scenic areas to dispose of waste from the urban states;
requiring that we ban all development in scenic areas (even though the large majority of that 95% will never visit them);
requiring energy-efficiency standards that make sense in an urban setting but are simply not practical in my state.
One of the key issues that the Founders wrestled with in writing the Constitution was how to make it difficult for a small group of states with large populations to impose their will on the other states.
I would be happy to entertain systems other than the current one.
Can you suggest one that guarantees my state's ability to have a meaningful say in governing the nation that doesn't give me "over representation" relative to our population?
The debates are not publicly funded so the Libs are bound to lose this case.
If I were the Libertarians, I would make it a point to argue in court that the CPD is using the reputation of ASU.
They are using it to foster the image that the debates are important intellectual endeavors.
This is the reason that all of the debates are being held at universities;
they could as easily have been held in other meeting facilities in Florida, Missouri, and Arizona.
But having an announcer say "Tonight, from Arizone State University..." carries more weight than saying "Tonight, from the Hilton Hotel in Phoenix..."
There is no question that ASU's reputation has been funded by the public.
The counter argument is that ASU (hence the public that funds it) is receiving something equivalent in value by hosting the debate.
The counter to that is that they would receive an equal value by hosting a debate that included all of the candidates on the ballot in Arizona.
No one has a clue about what the judge might rule.
The fact that he ordered a hearing suggests he thinks there might a valid argument.
The US contains 5% of the world's population but consumes 25% of the world's resources.
And produces just over 21% of the world's goods and services.
Yes, Japan and Germany are more efficient about it than we are, but not that much more once you consider that they have some geographic advantages.
Canada, whom no one ever seems to bitch about, uses more energy per-capita than the US.
The simple fact is that the only way the US can cut its use significantly is to become "poorer" by consuming less:
one car per family, not two;
1000 sq ft homes, not 2000 sq ft;
one TV, one PC per household;
a radically different diet because shipping food around the country or across the ocean takes up sizeable amounts of energy;
less air conditioning (try living in Houston that way);
and so on.
For the life of me, when will cable companies find a new vendor for their equipment?
A very large part of the problem is that the cable companies are locked into the proprietary encryption systems used by SA and Motorola (each has their own).
The cable companies have a big investment in the necessary compatible headend equipment.
Neither vendor is in a hurry to license the encryption technology.
So while other companies can build much better set top boxes (STBs) in terms of the UI, they can't build boxes that are compatible with the existing digital system.
I used to work for a cable company that desperately wanted to have more vendors building STBs, but the options of (a) licensing the security IP or (b) building a logical overlay network using some other technology were both ridiculously expensive.
If ever widely adopted, CableLabs' OpenCable system shows some promise of separating the security functions from the rest of the box and making it possible for other companies to get into the business.
In the mean time, we're stuck with the crud built by the incumbents.
The problem here is the fucking stupid patent system! Submarine patents should be illegal. If you want a lottery ticket, go buy one. Don't clutter up the courts with nonsense bullshit gold digging.
What's submarine about this?
As several others have pointed out, Honeywell has been using this in their own military products, and has licensed it to multiple large manufacturers of LCD panels.
Now Honeywell discovers that some other manufacturers are infringing on the patent so they take them to court.
This is exactly how the patent system is supposed to work.
I agree with you about real submarine patents -- where the holder lets everyone infringe for years and then tries to nail them -- but Honeywell has not done that, as the licenses evidence.
Nor can we insist that they take all infringers to court within some relatively short time -- that would put small businesses and individuals in the impossible situation of having to monitor everyone doing business in the country and mounting multiple potentially expensive lawsuits at once.
There are probably two ways of judging how bad an invasive species is: the negative effects on other "native" species and ecology, and how hard it is to eradicate. As an example lets look at the salt cedar , which is bad on both of these counts.
Here in Colorado the salt cedar is widely known as tamarisk, and its principle impact is its effect on the water supply.
Tamarisk along rivers and streams uses enormously more water than the native species it displaces.
The best estimates are that the increase in water use amounts to some 450,000 acre-feet per year -- far more than used by Denver Water!
Colorado has been experiencing a multi-year drought and tamarisk has been a significant contributor to the water shortages created by the drought.
They do not "remove themselves from the main political process" - they are voting for what they believe in just like everyone else. Dust up a bit on your history, and you will find that third parties have always played an important role...
Indeed.
In at least one case a third party displaced one of the existing "mainstream" parties -- today's Republicans replaced the Whigs.
Many third parties tend to be one-issue parties, and cease to exist in any meaningful way after their issue is adopted by one of the major parties.
Or more complicated evolutions -- much of the Populist Party's platform was absorbed into Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party, and eventually ended up in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal Democratic platform.
While third parties seldom have success in the sense of winning elections, they can accelerate the pace at which the major parties change.
One of these first days I expect to see a new third party based on the "moderate" views that polls suggest are held by 40% of voters -- fiscally conservative (in a balance-the-budget sense) and socially liberal.
Assume that they get to where such predictions are reliable enough that it's worth adjusting building codes.
That applies to new construction; retrofitting an existing house will never be cost-effective.
But the insurance companies will drop coverage for earthquake damage in those areas almost immediately, regardless of the code, or set the rates so high as to price most people out of the market.
Florida had the same problem with hurricane damage and homeowners insurance; they got the insurance companies to continue writing coverage only by changing their regulations so that there was an extremely large deductable (at least $5K IIRC) for hurricane damage.
since an entire kilo is slightly less powerful than the most powerful nuke ever detonated
So this raises the interesting (at least to me) question: in the most powerful nuke ever detonated, how much hydrogen isotope was converted to helium?
Since the conversion of mass to energy in such bombs is much less than 100% (IIRC), there must be quite a lot involved.
Or is some energy other than mass-to-energy conversion involved in today's fusion weapons?
The dilemma you mention is a serious one: do our voters know what's best for the country?
Indeed.
I recently had reason to reread some of the Federalist papers -- the arguments written by the authors of the Constitution in favor of its adoption.
They clearly stated their intent to separate the government from the day-to-day passions of the populace.
The election arrangements for the Senate in particular were intended to do that:
six-year terms,
only a third up for reelection at one time,
originally selected by each state's legislature rather than popular vote.
The authors were actually quite distrustful of direct democracy in action.
Keep your wallet slim and it will cut down on back pain and discomfort. You spend a lot of time on your bum. I'll often put my wallet next to my keyboard while I work.
Which raises the question of which pocket to keep it in.
Since I'm a jeans and no-jacket kind of guy, it goes in the left rear.
I always figured that it ended up there so that I can take it out with my left hand and then extract whatever I'm after with my right hand, being right-handed.
Which other pockets to people keep it in, and why?
It's strange, though. About 85% of the land area of Illinois contains primarily republicans, but it's really just the vote of Chicago that matters.
Pull up the county-by-county red-blue map from the 2000 Presidential election from here.
It is clear that, with some small exceptions, we are becoming a country polarized along urban/rural lines.
California, one of the bluest of states, is in reality blue only along the coast -- the much larger interior appears to be solidly red.
While many such maps like to point out how many more square miles the red counties occupy, I prefer the estimate (without link at hand, darn it) that says over 60% of GDP is produced in the blue counties.
I guess I take at least a bit of a contrary view on whether the standard is closed or not.
Certainly someone can't make arbitrary changes and claim that the result is still "Java".
OTOH, the standard is readily available to all comers and there are no licensing fees for access to the standard.
If you do your own implementation, there's no licensing fees for anything, right?
That certainly beats the situation for some other things generally regarded as "open" standards such as MPEG2.
There you can't add arbitrary extensions and claim that it's still MPEG2.
Any implementation will require licensing fees in order to be completely legal, as the standard includes patented technology (granted, they don't seem to be interested in pursuing people who build free software-only products -- but try selling an MPEG2 decoder chip and see how long it takes for them to serve you with notice).
The Sun standard seems at least that open.
Demographics like gender, race and political party, preference, etc., are usually corrected for,
And yet, the Gallop people release poll results, apparently uncorrected, in which their sample differs substantially from the known population parameters in terms of percentage of declared Republicans and Democrats.
IIRC, a simple correction to that poll would have erased about 11 points of the 13-point difference that was used in the headlines.
Having a nasty, suspicious mind, I think it likely that Gallop knows that controversial polls provided to the news media will get them more attention than otherwise.
I'm quite sure that poll results that they were selling to private organizations (eg, the Republicans) would have been corrected to account for the different in party affiliation, and that the correction would have been noted prominently.
Red Grape Juice. I lack propper sources, but apparently red grape juice is just as good with the free radicals as wine was found to be.
However, one alcoholic drink per day (12 oz beer, 5 oz wine) has been shown to increase insulin sensitivity, which may be a good thing if you have a family history of adult-onset diabetes.
And maybe then, people in the US will FINALLY realize that the US is not the center of the universe... It isn't a big surprise that the "rest of the world" will catch up to and probably surpass us in lots of things. Think automobile production in the 70s. Think electronics.
Yet, from an economic perspective, the US continues to be the center of the universe -- or at least the global economy on Earth.
Last year, the US GDP was just about 25% of the world GDP.
An even larger fraction of world economic growth for the past few years has been due to the US.
The US has, for the most part, been quite willing to open its markets to foreign firms.
To your point, Japanese auto makers led the way in developing reliable, well-engineered cars -- but would they have been able to do so without the US market in which to sell those cars?
Much of the growth of the "Asian Tigers" has been possible because we were willing to buy their goods and services, to buy more from them than they were from us, effectively to share our wealth with them.
It is interesting to note that when there were recent proposals to close US military bases in countries where their role has disappeared, the response was not "Thank goodness you're finally leaving!" but rather "Wait! We need you to keep spending that money in our country!"
As The Economist has noted on numerous occasions, the world economy is FAR too dependent on the US for anyone's real good.
Put it in an example: the US can live without motherboards from Taiwan or DVD players from China; we're perfectly capable of building them ourselves, even if that would make them somewhat more expensive; but Taiwan and China would be much more seriously hurt if the US quit buying those products.
Until the US gets to quit being the market of last resort for everyone else, the US is going to be the dominant player in the world economy.
The Constitution doesn't spell out HOW the Senate must do it,
Probably the only argument that would be valid for anyone to take to the Supreme Court on this would involve WHEN the Senate must do it.
The President nominates someone as a judge;
the Constitution requires that the Senate give "advice and consent";
it doesn't say anything about how quickly or slowly the Senate must act.
It seems to me that the Constitution, in not spelling out a timeframe, intended to include the possibility that the Senate simply would not act.
It very carefully spells out how quickly the President must make decisions about passed bills, and what happens if the President does not act.
If the authors had intended to REQUIRE that the Senate act within some amount of time, they would have spelled out something similar.
As a general principle, the Founding Fathers seem to have been fond of "when in doubt, do nothing" rather than requiring action.
Prof. Samuelson is right in the sense that we seem to be moving beyond traditional economic trade theory.
Wynne Godley, a British economist of note, likes to point out that the trade theories in which everyone is better off have unstated assumptions that trade does not affect unemployment or average wages.
The older "comparative advantage" theories were based on trade in goods only, and were pretty explicit that neither capital nor labor flowed across borders.
These assumptions held until quite recently; the Bretton Woods agreements after WWII intentionally made capital flows difficult.
Even when capital flows got much easier, reality was rather at odds with economic theory.
Capital should produce larger returns when applied to small, less developed economies;
therefore it should flow away from the developed countries and towards the less developed;
yet until the last couple of years, capital flows generally ran in the opposite direction.
Now that the Internet and other cheap transport and communications systems have made it possible for many jobs to be done overseas, trade economists are suddently talking about "factor price equalization" in which everyone is clearly NOT better off.
I personally don't hold out a lot of hope that any of the politicians can make policy that will improve the situation.
I am a believer in the law of unintended consequences, and suspect that tax policies in particular will be subject to companies who can profit finding loopholes, and that the problems created thereby may be worse than the ones that the politicians are trying to solve.
OnDemand seems to be lower quality (picture wise and sound wise) than most DVDs though
Absolutely true.
Content encoded for a standard-definition DVD is constrained to a maximum bit rate of 10 Mbps, and the typical bit rate is around 5-6 Mbps.
Content encoded for delivery over digital cable typically runs at a relatively constant rate in the range of 1-3.5 Mbps, depending mostly on what kind of service it is (low-end digital-tier channels get the lowest rates; premium content like HBO gets the higher ones).
Both are encoded using MPEG-2 video.
There is no substitute for bit rate.
Material coded at 3.5 Mbps will have lower effective resolution and more artifacts than material coded at higher rates.
There's been a bunch of research done with both typical viewers and expert viewers, and for standard definition and practical purposes, 12 Mbps is visually lossless encoding.
DVDs are almost but not quite that good.
My point is that I access and read a butt-load of "pedigreed" papers. Gusss what? They're loaded to the eye-teeth with opinion, half-assed research, and error. Their citations are near-impossible to find.
No disrespect intended, but we must live in different publishing universes (possible, given that my technical fields -- networks and compression -- are quite different from yours).
If I'm reading your comment correctly, you're saying that the published literature in molecular evolution is loaded with "opinion, half-assed research, and error".
Scary, if true, and says really bad things about their review process.
And in the case of hard-to-find citations, are the authors unhelpful?
One of the advantages of pedigrees is that the author is identified to the point that contact with them is straightforward.
The last sentence displays ignorance about Wikipedia's versioning.
I picked an economic topic of current interest to me and looked it up.
Examined the complete history of the article.
The majority of changes were attributed to anonymous IP addresses.
Where author information was available, it was not encouraging.
One was described as "Tim" who lived in Lucerne and was interested in economics -- several items of interest to tourists visiting Lucerne, but no economic credentials provided.
Another was self-described as a biologist.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fascinated with Wikipedia as a concept, and quite impressed with the amount of information available.
But particularly where opinion can creep in, it's important to know that "John Smith, Ph.D. in Economics Purdue '87" stated the opinion and that no one has changed it.
Also it is worth pointing out that one should never cite sources in a paper from an encyclopedia, rather you should find the sources the encyclopedia gets its facts from and cite those.
From an academic perspective, Wikipedia suffers the same problem that most of the Internet suffers:
the information provided has no pedigree.
There is a loud debate going on these days about the high costs of publishing academic papers.
One of the points that is seldom made is that printed journals provide a pedigree for the articles that is hard to forge:
the article was authored by a certain person,
published on a certain date,
said whatever it said.
Far too much of the content that is quoted from the Internet is simply untraceable.
It cannot be reliably attributed to anyone,
it can often be changed at will,
often by someone other than the original author.
Re:One Dirty Bomb - you siad it..
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
we need to be focusing on distributed energy creation using renewable especially in the developing countries.
While I appreciate the sentiment, name a renewable source that can reliably provide 50-90% of peak capacity on a continuous basis and provides positive net energy.
Once a city in a developing country has, say, a 100 MW plant, it's going to become completely and absolutely depend on that power source.
Water treatment, sewage plants, hospitals, phone networks, will all become better, but dependent.
You can't tell them, "If the wind's not blowing, don't bother coming to work."
The positive net energy part -- LARGE positive net energy -- could be critical.
If some wonderful biomass system ends up consuming 90% of its own output, why bother?
The "lovely" thing about oil and natural gas and coal is that you get much more energy back when you burn them than it takes to extract them and deliver them to a power plant.
China's need for energy in the future is going to be enormous...
Indeed.
If China's economy continues to grow at anything close to its current pace, the amount of generating capacity that they will need is going to be truly staggering.
There's no way that they're going to produce it with oil or natural gas.
They have large amounts of coal at their disposal, but from what I understand about the air quality currently, burning that much more coal is likely to make the cities uninhabitable anyway.
So nuclear it is.
More and more often, technical projects will be done on a geographically-distributed basis.
Not only because of outsourcing and offshoring, but because the database group is in Houston and the Web developers are in Chicago.
And the graphics people are in NY.
And the people producing the video clips which must be integrated into the whole package are in LA.
Students who are comfortable with such an arrangement will be more valuable when they get out and go to work.
Distributed working groups have been going on for a long time.
More than ten years ago, I was working on some prototypes of tools for real-time "sharing" of various kinds of media.
One of my test groups involved people writing the platform code in Denver and people writing the educational packages that ran on top of the platform in Minnepolis.
I was giving a lunchtime technical talk to other researchers in Denver about some of the protocols I was using (multicast vs client-server, etc).
One of the women from Minnepolis happened to sit in while she ate lunch.
Afterwards, she basically tackled me and demanded to know if I could make my software work over the corporate network between Minneapolis and Denver.
Once they were using it, both groups made any number of very useful suggestions.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious question to follow up with is "Which cities?" If 95% of all Americans live in Chicago, the West Coast cities, and the stretch from Boston to Washington, D.C., (call it 12 states) then they will be under-represented. Very badly in the Senate, where they would have 24 out of 100 senators, least badly in the House where they would have a large majority of the representatives but still not 95%, and somewhere in between in presidential elections.
Speaking as someone from a large western state with relatively few people, great scenic beauty, and rich in natural resources, let me say that replacing the current system with one that was based solely on population would be terrifying. I can easily envision the 95% who live in the 12 states (in this example) passing federal laws that do a variety of things: requiring that we strip-mine the resources; requiring that we operate massive land-fills in the non-scenic areas to dispose of waste from the urban states; requiring that we ban all development in scenic areas (even though the large majority of that 95% will never visit them); requiring energy-efficiency standards that make sense in an urban setting but are simply not practical in my state.
One of the key issues that the Founders wrestled with in writing the Constitution was how to make it difficult for a small group of states with large populations to impose their will on the other states. I would be happy to entertain systems other than the current one. Can you suggest one that guarantees my state's ability to have a meaningful say in governing the nation that doesn't give me "over representation" relative to our population?
If I were the Libertarians, I would make it a point to argue in court that the CPD is using the reputation of ASU. They are using it to foster the image that the debates are important intellectual endeavors. This is the reason that all of the debates are being held at universities; they could as easily have been held in other meeting facilities in Florida, Missouri, and Arizona. But having an announcer say "Tonight, from Arizone State University..." carries more weight than saying "Tonight, from the Hilton Hotel in Phoenix..." There is no question that ASU's reputation has been funded by the public.
The counter argument is that ASU (hence the public that funds it) is receiving something equivalent in value by hosting the debate. The counter to that is that they would receive an equal value by hosting a debate that included all of the candidates on the ballot in Arizona. No one has a clue about what the judge might rule. The fact that he ordered a hearing suggests he thinks there might a valid argument.
And produces just over 21% of the world's goods and services. Yes, Japan and Germany are more efficient about it than we are, but not that much more once you consider that they have some geographic advantages. Canada, whom no one ever seems to bitch about, uses more energy per-capita than the US. The simple fact is that the only way the US can cut its use significantly is to become "poorer" by consuming less: one car per family, not two; 1000 sq ft homes, not 2000 sq ft; one TV, one PC per household; a radically different diet because shipping food around the country or across the ocean takes up sizeable amounts of energy; less air conditioning (try living in Houston that way); and so on.
A very large part of the problem is that the cable companies are locked into the proprietary encryption systems used by SA and Motorola (each has their own). The cable companies have a big investment in the necessary compatible headend equipment. Neither vendor is in a hurry to license the encryption technology. So while other companies can build much better set top boxes (STBs) in terms of the UI, they can't build boxes that are compatible with the existing digital system. I used to work for a cable company that desperately wanted to have more vendors building STBs, but the options of (a) licensing the security IP or (b) building a logical overlay network using some other technology were both ridiculously expensive.
If ever widely adopted, CableLabs' OpenCable system shows some promise of separating the security functions from the rest of the box and making it possible for other companies to get into the business. In the mean time, we're stuck with the crud built by the incumbents.
What's submarine about this? As several others have pointed out, Honeywell has been using this in their own military products, and has licensed it to multiple large manufacturers of LCD panels. Now Honeywell discovers that some other manufacturers are infringing on the patent so they take them to court. This is exactly how the patent system is supposed to work. I agree with you about real submarine patents -- where the holder lets everyone infringe for years and then tries to nail them -- but Honeywell has not done that, as the licenses evidence. Nor can we insist that they take all infringers to court within some relatively short time -- that would put small businesses and individuals in the impossible situation of having to monitor everyone doing business in the country and mounting multiple potentially expensive lawsuits at once.
Here in Colorado the salt cedar is widely known as tamarisk, and its principle impact is its effect on the water supply. Tamarisk along rivers and streams uses enormously more water than the native species it displaces. The best estimates are that the increase in water use amounts to some 450,000 acre-feet per year -- far more than used by Denver Water! Colorado has been experiencing a multi-year drought and tamarisk has been a significant contributor to the water shortages created by the drought.
Indeed. In at least one case a third party displaced one of the existing "mainstream" parties -- today's Republicans replaced the Whigs. Many third parties tend to be one-issue parties, and cease to exist in any meaningful way after their issue is adopted by one of the major parties. Or more complicated evolutions -- much of the Populist Party's platform was absorbed into Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party, and eventually ended up in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal Democratic platform.
While third parties seldom have success in the sense of winning elections, they can accelerate the pace at which the major parties change. One of these first days I expect to see a new third party based on the "moderate" views that polls suggest are held by 40% of voters -- fiscally conservative (in a balance-the-budget sense) and socially liberal.
Assume that they get to where such predictions are reliable enough that it's worth adjusting building codes. That applies to new construction; retrofitting an existing house will never be cost-effective. But the insurance companies will drop coverage for earthquake damage in those areas almost immediately, regardless of the code, or set the rates so high as to price most people out of the market. Florida had the same problem with hurricane damage and homeowners insurance; they got the insurance companies to continue writing coverage only by changing their regulations so that there was an extremely large deductable (at least $5K IIRC) for hurricane damage.
So this raises the interesting (at least to me) question: in the most powerful nuke ever detonated, how much hydrogen isotope was converted to helium? Since the conversion of mass to energy in such bombs is much less than 100% (IIRC), there must be quite a lot involved. Or is some energy other than mass-to-energy conversion involved in today's fusion weapons?
Indeed. I recently had reason to reread some of the Federalist papers -- the arguments written by the authors of the Constitution in favor of its adoption. They clearly stated their intent to separate the government from the day-to-day passions of the populace. The election arrangements for the Senate in particular were intended to do that: six-year terms, only a third up for reelection at one time, originally selected by each state's legislature rather than popular vote. The authors were actually quite distrustful of direct democracy in action.
Which raises the question of which pocket to keep it in. Since I'm a jeans and no-jacket kind of guy, it goes in the left rear. I always figured that it ended up there so that I can take it out with my left hand and then extract whatever I'm after with my right hand, being right-handed. Which other pockets to people keep it in, and why?
Pull up the county-by-county red-blue map from the 2000 Presidential election from here. It is clear that, with some small exceptions, we are becoming a country polarized along urban/rural lines. California, one of the bluest of states, is in reality blue only along the coast -- the much larger interior appears to be solidly red. While many such maps like to point out how many more square miles the red counties occupy, I prefer the estimate (without link at hand, darn it) that says over 60% of GDP is produced in the blue counties.
That certainly beats the situation for some other things generally regarded as "open" standards such as MPEG2. There you can't add arbitrary extensions and claim that it's still MPEG2. Any implementation will require licensing fees in order to be completely legal, as the standard includes patented technology (granted, they don't seem to be interested in pursuing people who build free software-only products -- but try selling an MPEG2 decoder chip and see how long it takes for them to serve you with notice). The Sun standard seems at least that open.
And yet, the Gallop people release poll results, apparently uncorrected, in which their sample differs substantially from the known population parameters in terms of percentage of declared Republicans and Democrats. IIRC, a simple correction to that poll would have erased about 11 points of the 13-point difference that was used in the headlines. Having a nasty, suspicious mind, I think it likely that Gallop knows that controversial polls provided to the news media will get them more attention than otherwise. I'm quite sure that poll results that they were selling to private organizations (eg, the Republicans) would have been corrected to account for the different in party affiliation, and that the correction would have been noted prominently.
However, one alcoholic drink per day (12 oz beer, 5 oz wine) has been shown to increase insulin sensitivity, which may be a good thing if you have a family history of adult-onset diabetes.
Yet, from an economic perspective, the US continues to be the center of the universe -- or at least the global economy on Earth. Last year, the US GDP was just about 25% of the world GDP. An even larger fraction of world economic growth for the past few years has been due to the US. The US has, for the most part, been quite willing to open its markets to foreign firms. To your point, Japanese auto makers led the way in developing reliable, well-engineered cars -- but would they have been able to do so without the US market in which to sell those cars? Much of the growth of the "Asian Tigers" has been possible because we were willing to buy their goods and services, to buy more from them than they were from us, effectively to share our wealth with them. It is interesting to note that when there were recent proposals to close US military bases in countries where their role has disappeared, the response was not "Thank goodness you're finally leaving!" but rather "Wait! We need you to keep spending that money in our country!"
As The Economist has noted on numerous occasions, the world economy is FAR too dependent on the US for anyone's real good. Put it in an example: the US can live without motherboards from Taiwan or DVD players from China; we're perfectly capable of building them ourselves, even if that would make them somewhat more expensive; but Taiwan and China would be much more seriously hurt if the US quit buying those products. Until the US gets to quit being the market of last resort for everyone else, the US is going to be the dominant player in the world economy.
Probably the only argument that would be valid for anyone to take to the Supreme Court on this would involve WHEN the Senate must do it. The President nominates someone as a judge; the Constitution requires that the Senate give "advice and consent"; it doesn't say anything about how quickly or slowly the Senate must act. It seems to me that the Constitution, in not spelling out a timeframe, intended to include the possibility that the Senate simply would not act. It very carefully spells out how quickly the President must make decisions about passed bills, and what happens if the President does not act. If the authors had intended to REQUIRE that the Senate act within some amount of time, they would have spelled out something similar.
As a general principle, the Founding Fathers seem to have been fond of "when in doubt, do nothing" rather than requiring action.
Prof. Samuelson is right in the sense that we seem to be moving beyond traditional economic trade theory. Wynne Godley, a British economist of note, likes to point out that the trade theories in which everyone is better off have unstated assumptions that trade does not affect unemployment or average wages. The older "comparative advantage" theories were based on trade in goods only, and were pretty explicit that neither capital nor labor flowed across borders. These assumptions held until quite recently; the Bretton Woods agreements after WWII intentionally made capital flows difficult. Even when capital flows got much easier, reality was rather at odds with economic theory. Capital should produce larger returns when applied to small, less developed economies; therefore it should flow away from the developed countries and towards the less developed; yet until the last couple of years, capital flows generally ran in the opposite direction. Now that the Internet and other cheap transport and communications systems have made it possible for many jobs to be done overseas, trade economists are suddently talking about "factor price equalization" in which everyone is clearly NOT better off.
I personally don't hold out a lot of hope that any of the politicians can make policy that will improve the situation. I am a believer in the law of unintended consequences, and suspect that tax policies in particular will be subject to companies who can profit finding loopholes, and that the problems created thereby may be worse than the ones that the politicians are trying to solve.
the California state government didn't get the memo: How do you tell when a vendor is lying? Their lips move.
Absolutely true. Content encoded for a standard-definition DVD is constrained to a maximum bit rate of 10 Mbps, and the typical bit rate is around 5-6 Mbps. Content encoded for delivery over digital cable typically runs at a relatively constant rate in the range of 1-3.5 Mbps, depending mostly on what kind of service it is (low-end digital-tier channels get the lowest rates; premium content like HBO gets the higher ones). Both are encoded using MPEG-2 video. There is no substitute for bit rate. Material coded at 3.5 Mbps will have lower effective resolution and more artifacts than material coded at higher rates.
There's been a bunch of research done with both typical viewers and expert viewers, and for standard definition and practical purposes, 12 Mbps is visually lossless encoding. DVDs are almost but not quite that good.
No disrespect intended, but we must live in different publishing universes (possible, given that my technical fields -- networks and compression -- are quite different from yours). If I'm reading your comment correctly, you're saying that the published literature in molecular evolution is loaded with "opinion, half-assed research, and error". Scary, if true, and says really bad things about their review process. And in the case of hard-to-find citations, are the authors unhelpful? One of the advantages of pedigrees is that the author is identified to the point that contact with them is straightforward.
I picked an economic topic of current interest to me and looked it up. Examined the complete history of the article. The majority of changes were attributed to anonymous IP addresses. Where author information was available, it was not encouraging. One was described as "Tim" who lived in Lucerne and was interested in economics -- several items of interest to tourists visiting Lucerne, but no economic credentials provided. Another was self-described as a biologist.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fascinated with Wikipedia as a concept, and quite impressed with the amount of information available. But particularly where opinion can creep in, it's important to know that "John Smith, Ph.D. in Economics Purdue '87" stated the opinion and that no one has changed it.
From an academic perspective, Wikipedia suffers the same problem that most of the Internet suffers: the information provided has no pedigree. There is a loud debate going on these days about the high costs of publishing academic papers. One of the points that is seldom made is that printed journals provide a pedigree for the articles that is hard to forge: the article was authored by a certain person, published on a certain date, said whatever it said. Far too much of the content that is quoted from the Internet is simply untraceable. It cannot be reliably attributed to anyone, it can often be changed at will, often by someone other than the original author.
While I appreciate the sentiment, name a renewable source that can reliably provide 50-90% of peak capacity on a continuous basis and provides positive net energy. Once a city in a developing country has, say, a 100 MW plant, it's going to become completely and absolutely depend on that power source. Water treatment, sewage plants, hospitals, phone networks, will all become better, but dependent. You can't tell them, "If the wind's not blowing, don't bother coming to work." The positive net energy part -- LARGE positive net energy -- could be critical. If some wonderful biomass system ends up consuming 90% of its own output, why bother? The "lovely" thing about oil and natural gas and coal is that you get much more energy back when you burn them than it takes to extract them and deliver them to a power plant.
Indeed. If China's economy continues to grow at anything close to its current pace, the amount of generating capacity that they will need is going to be truly staggering. There's no way that they're going to produce it with oil or natural gas. They have large amounts of coal at their disposal, but from what I understand about the air quality currently, burning that much more coal is likely to make the cities uninhabitable anyway. So nuclear it is.
More and more often, technical projects will be done on a geographically-distributed basis. Not only because of outsourcing and offshoring, but because the database group is in Houston and the Web developers are in Chicago. And the graphics people are in NY. And the people producing the video clips which must be integrated into the whole package are in LA. Students who are comfortable with such an arrangement will be more valuable when they get out and go to work.
Distributed working groups have been going on for a long time. More than ten years ago, I was working on some prototypes of tools for real-time "sharing" of various kinds of media. One of my test groups involved people writing the platform code in Denver and people writing the educational packages that ran on top of the platform in Minnepolis. I was giving a lunchtime technical talk to other researchers in Denver about some of the protocols I was using (multicast vs client-server, etc). One of the women from Minnepolis happened to sit in while she ate lunch. Afterwards, she basically tackled me and demanded to know if I could make my software work over the corporate network between Minneapolis and Denver. Once they were using it, both groups made any number of very useful suggestions.