The persuasiveness of the anti-global warming crowd has its origins in the argumentation structure of Holocaust Deniers. Please refer to Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" for a description of how to go about constructing the argument in an effective way.
Unfortunately, there are those among us who feel that Global Warming is a singular argument that can be disproven by one set of observations or by re-labeling part of the system.
Global Warming is a theory that arises from the confluence of many thousands of observations. It is generally accepted by the scientific community (see the Union of Concerned Scientists.) There are a very small number of scientists who believe otherwise.
Scroll down this list to Exxon and take a look at the list of foundations. Visit a few and then go to the excellent Exxon Secrets which was funded by Greenpeace a few years ago. Cool social networking analysis. You will see how sixteen million dollars was used to persuade you and I that it is not necessary to do anything about CO2.
I got it for free at one job, but only read it a couple of times as it was always full of self-serving crap.
You know, like when you agree to answer a survey and realize it's your bank when they ask questions like: "Please rate how much you like Washington Mutual. One, love it. Two, think it's awesome. Three, would marry my teller. Four, wish they would adopt me."
It does look that way, doesn't it. That's because credit reporting agencies create credit scores as well as banks. It's silly since they are evaluating risk in so doing but have no business doing it. There is a circle of supply businesses around the banking industry. You have to go back to the S&L debacle to see some of them exposed. If you do research, look at First American Bank or the word "Talmosized or Talmoized." I am NOT saying that Equifax has any affiliation or complicity with any banking institution.
When I was young, I had the privelege to work with a man who worked at the Federal Reserve Board through the Depression. When I was in college, I had a professor who had sat on the board of the Fed. The two of them instillled what I consider a healthy fear.
Retail Credit subsequently named Equifax has, in the past, ignored injunctions that demanded they change their business practices. They wanted to test the will of the judiciary.
Their resistance to showing consumers what was in the file on the person and their resistance to changing it was infamous.
Now they have been forced to behave in such a way as to prevent much harm. This does not make them good citizens. Sophistocation and goodness don't walk hand-in-hand which is why we have white collar crime.
All of that is true. However we should keep things in perspective. The credit companies are data brokers. They are fairly incompetent and close enough to being full time criminals. There are plenty of people in the banking business who are just a cut above this. The trick is finding one who uses his brain and keeps his loans instead of selling them off. Maybe it can't even be done anymore and I'm just out of touch.
Don't take it too seriously or get too excited because as soon as you think you are in good shape, things will change. The reason the system stays in place is because it works without screwing *too* many people. Just enough to make it fun.
So maybe the college students in the study are making a decision that 'suffices' in order to survive economically and the survey guys were anal retentive. I don't know about you, but I only get credit card offers from two addresses. Lots of banks, but only two real locations.
Also remember that Viasnet is the tail that wags the dog. The revenue comes from transaction fees and overnight float offshore. The transactions simply must happen, so it is a balancing act. I once ran up $5.50 in fees for running three failed transactions (bad password) from a gas company's network through to our own network. Those fees are generally not charged to you, but rather to the bank so you don't see them. Besides most people don't want to screw up a transaction as badly as I.
Would the term "temporal" be more like a "temporary injunction" ??? The proper meaning of temporal of course is simply the opposite of eternal. So most english speakers don't use it because it is imprecise. You *know* how concerned we are about precise language! OMG I can't go on. Just too funny..... We can't understand our own language. Babble gabble blah blah blah. Will have to create a set of triplets.....
Dvorak is seldom right when it comes to this kind of thing. Anyway, when anybody says something like this, it just contributes to the power of Microsoft's next Barney Job.
I teach at in a technology magnet department in a high school in Fort Lauderdale. We have three labs running Win 2k (apps, electronics, robotics), one running Fedora (programming), and three running OSX (apps, graphics, multimedia.) All classrooms using the machines to deliver instruction, complete projects, and run testing. Our school district has outreach to people from industry who want to go into teaching, so they have a huge support system for pedagogy.
BTW, Firefox is not an alternative browser. It is standards compliant.
Actually, I am in favor of getting rid of disk drives, CD drives, printers, and high end grpahics in most classrooms. I feel that students in our high school could benefit from being able to type up an essay and having instant feedback from an automated grading solution, then allowing the teacher to retreive it - et cetera. Web services, no paper. I figure we can use the computers other schools throw away when they upgrade to the latest fastest yada yada. Side benefit - teachers use the same technology. I use Moodle and see no reasom everybody on campus shouldn't love online testing when they have enough machines to go around.
That's actually quite true. At the AAAS convention (2-20) it was mentioned that a committment of five thousand dollars per teacher was necessary to bring elementary and middle school teachers up to speed on math and science over a three year period.
Message to Trolls: Yes, what you always thought is in fact now confirmed.:-))
Foremost, the all flash and bang mentioned earlier. - It is my contention that educators don't understand what computers are. Period. Hence, they don't know what to do with them. My classroom has 25 G5s and there is a huge amount of distraction to deal with.
My current lesson is having my kids talk with somebody who went to college over 20 years ago to find out how they did research. Where they went, how much they spent. Particularly questioning them about the social contacts ind interactions.
I want them to develop an understanding of how much as changed.
The largest expense in any enterprise is payroll. NCLB requires schools to increase the number of teachers without funding the increase. Period. There are indeed many dollars that school districts don't take advantage of. Things like computer labs and funding for supplies are examples of available funding.
Unfortunately, NCLB is kind of similar to faith healing. They just yell at you - "Get up and walk!" If you don't, it's your fault.
Often surveys like the one cited are accompanied by disclaimers that explain some issues. For instance, there may be a system where students who aren't interested in academics are sent to learn mechanical skills at age 14. Another system may introduce a subject at an earlier age.
Progressive's history of intrusive and pseudo-scientific behavior began when Jack Green retired. They would definitely try to deny a claim if they felt like it. The fact is that the insurance industry is built on well documented statistics, but they have very real limits. Unfortunately, when marketing became more powerful than underwriting at the board table, the marketing guys imposed their own warped view of reality. (Think spammers in charge of network) All kinds of pricing alterations became common that were not adequately - or independently - justified by actuaries. The person who spearheaded it at Progressive was a real paranoid who took the rating structure to the next company she went to work for. Unfortunately, Progressive decided to keep the structure thinking that it had something to do with their marketing success. Maybe and maybe not.
My point is that stuff like this can get away from insurers easily and ends up badly when it is not supervised by adults.
The newbies seemed split on it - I checked them last semester. (That was a joke for those who wish to report me to the purity patrol.)
I needed to have interactive design students look at something they had never seen - so I gave them Blender. Half had used 3D Studio Max. The rest, just Adobe and typical high school student fare. There were 17 students. They had to write a tutorial on creating an object that wasn't just a primitive.
Half of the 3D Studio Max users loved it, the rest were irritated, but found it usable. There was only one student who copped out of the assignment and the rest *really newbies* were able to do a credible job.
The general consensus was that the interface was different but good if you are a macro stroke user and a pain if you use menuing. I think they were saying 'different' compared to things like Photoshop. Of course 3D is a different interface, so their expectations could not be met. As with anything else, everybody has an opinion! Mine is, as we all know, irrelevant and uninformed, so please, I have a headache. Curtman, I obviously have no idea about Soft Image and others. I can't even remember the name of the first one I used in the mid eighties. I am still amazed by meshes.
What I can't believe is that Photoshop users think that there have been these great leaps forward in bitmap editing programs because they no longer have to open Illustrator to make type flow on a path. Maybe Zanax would help.
Of course the Gimp isn't like Photoshop. Of course you can't use it professionally. did I say that? I really don"t care how sloppy your die cuts are. I said die cuts for machinery - like key pads not business cards and wedding invitations. Of course I don't mean render on the monitor for God's sake.
Yes, Adobe's color profiling is good, but it is not perfect. So you didn't notice. It's my fault?
If you live in NY and are a member of the Guild, than you have seen the surveys and know you live in heaven compared to everybody else. Don't be a Troll. You don't honestly use those cheesy liquify tools?
The point is that everybody in the world doesn't use Adobe products. That is good. The fact that you get along on them is fine for you.
There are not "millions and millions of designers" in the known universe.
I teach media design and find that Photoshop has offered me nothing of substance since version 4. The color rendition is NOT terrifically accurate. It is a computer industry issue that isn't settled to anyone's satisfaction. Adobe stuck their foot in it big time and thousands of printers went balistic two years ago when they changed things a bit. CS is looking very pedestrian at this point. Having to hit an extra button that is unlabeled to set transparency in a gif is a fine example improvement in the interface. Illustrator is overshadowed by Corel Draw when it comes to accuracy. In order to impose, you can use Corel, but not Illustrator. At all. Nada, zip zero. It's unusable for flexography, and you can't do die cuts for any kind of machinery or casting with it. A design professional has to use what works best. That's life. I don't think that a few thousand designers should rule the world. My students who don't end up in media, will need a good cheap program. I would resent having them called bodgers or clods. Often, they go into something more lucrative. Remember, designers have an average income like first year teachers. (GAG Annual surveys)
I liked this part: 0.08 The sixthparagraph, based on the proposals of Kenya and the United States of America, stresses the benefits of the protection of broadcasting organizations to other rightholders.
Well finally somebody agreed with us. Kenya. Um, what does that mean, exactly? Kenya?
But seriously folks, what I don't like is the fact that a broadcaster gets fifty years of protection for what . . . you can buy a broadcaster for 3 or 4 hunderd grand. A pittance for that kind of power.
The only problem is that the schools have gobs of legacy stuff creating tons of Appletalk traffic and the switches have ports that are choked to support the old printers. Looks like broadcasting all the time is the same for appletalk or rendezvous.
My logs don't show as much of an improvement as I would expect with the cat 6 and new Apple machines and they won't until we chuck out the crap that is getting in the way. Oh yeah, network gaming and movie trailers too.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The persuasiveness of the anti-global warming crowd has its origins in the argumentation structure of Holocaust Deniers. Please refer to Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" for a description of how to go about constructing the argument in an effective way.
Unfortunately, there are those among us who feel that Global Warming is a singular argument that can be disproven by one set of observations or by re-labeling part of the system.
Global Warming is a theory that arises from the confluence of many thousands of observations. It is generally accepted by the scientific community (see the Union of Concerned Scientists.) There are a very small number of scientists who believe otherwise.
Scroll down this list to Exxon and take a look at the list of foundations. Visit a few and then go to the excellent Exxon Secrets which was funded by Greenpeace a few years ago. Cool social networking analysis. You will see how sixteen million dollars was used to persuade you and I that it is not necessary to do anything about CO2.
I got it for free at one job, but only read it a couple of times as it was always full of self-serving crap.
You know, like when you agree to answer a survey and realize it's your bank when they ask questions like: "Please rate how much you like Washington Mutual. One, love it. Two, think it's awesome. Three, would marry my teller. Four, wish they would adopt me."
Wait! I do love her! Come back!
Because life is short and he is a waste of meat.
It does look that way, doesn't it. That's because credit reporting agencies create credit scores as well as banks. It's silly since they are evaluating risk in so doing but have no business doing it. There is a circle of supply businesses around the banking industry. You have to go back to the S&L debacle to see some of them exposed. If you do research, look at First American Bank or the word "Talmosized or Talmoized." I am NOT saying that Equifax has any affiliation or complicity with any banking institution.
When I was young, I had the privelege to work with a man who worked at the Federal Reserve Board through the Depression. When I was in college, I had a professor who had sat on the board of the Fed. The two of them instillled what I consider a healthy fear.
Retail Credit subsequently named Equifax has, in the past, ignored injunctions that demanded they change their business practices. They wanted to test the will of the judiciary.
Their resistance to showing consumers what was in the file on the person and their resistance to changing it was infamous.
Now they have been forced to behave in such a way as to prevent much harm. This does not make them good citizens. Sophistocation and goodness don't walk hand-in-hand which is why we have white collar crime.
All of that is true. However we should keep things in perspective. The credit companies are data brokers. They are fairly incompetent and close enough to being full time criminals. There are plenty of people in the banking business who are just a cut above this. The trick is finding one who uses his brain and keeps his loans instead of selling them off. Maybe it can't even be done anymore and I'm just out of touch.
Don't take it too seriously or get too excited because as soon as you think you are in good shape, things will change. The reason the system stays in place is because it works without screwing *too* many people. Just enough to make it fun.
So maybe the college students in the study are making a decision that 'suffices' in order to survive economically and the survey guys were anal retentive. I don't know about you, but I only get credit card offers from two addresses. Lots of banks, but only two real locations.
Also remember that Viasnet is the tail that wags the dog. The revenue comes from transaction fees and overnight float offshore. The transactions simply must happen, so it is a balancing act. I once ran up $5.50 in fees for running three failed transactions (bad password) from a gas company's network through to our own network. Those fees are generally not charged to you, but rather to the bank so you don't see them. Besides most people don't want to screw up a transaction as badly as I.
Would the term "temporal" be more like a "temporary injunction" ???
The proper meaning of temporal of course is simply the opposite of eternal. So most english speakers don't use it because it is imprecise. You *know* how concerned we are about precise language! OMG I can't go on. Just too funny..... We can't understand our own language. Babble gabble blah blah blah. Will have to create a set of triplets.....
2nd that
Dvorak is seldom right when it comes to this kind of thing. Anyway, when anybody says something like this, it just contributes to the power of Microsoft's next Barney Job.
The company they were going to tie into is owned by Choicepoint who is owned by Lexis Nexis who is owned by Elsievier which is a foreign woned entity.
I think the issue is "Do we own our own information?"
If you can call it news, it's really old.
Fingers on keys and the part about web services. A little php, some SQL, and presto.
I teach at in a technology magnet department in a high school in Fort Lauderdale. We have three labs running Win 2k (apps, electronics, robotics), one running Fedora (programming), and three running OSX (apps, graphics, multimedia.) All classrooms using the machines to deliver instruction, complete projects, and run testing. Our school district has outreach to people from industry who want to go into teaching, so they have a huge support system for pedagogy.
BTW, Firefox is not an alternative browser. It is standards compliant.
Actually, I am in favor of getting rid of disk drives, CD drives, printers, and high end grpahics in most classrooms. I feel that students in our high school could benefit from being able to type up an essay and having instant feedback from an automated grading solution, then allowing the teacher to retreive it - et cetera. Web services, no paper. I figure we can use the computers other schools throw away when they upgrade to the latest fastest yada yada. Side benefit - teachers use the same technology. I use Moodle and see no reasom everybody on campus shouldn't love online testing when they have enough machines to go around.
That's actually quite true. At the AAAS convention (2-20) it was mentioned that a committment of five thousand dollars per teacher was necessary to bring elementary and middle school teachers up to speed on math and science over a three year period.
:-))
Message to Trolls: Yes, what you always thought is in fact now confirmed.
Computers come out of capital improvement funds.
Better to ask about the ratio of administrators to teachers.
There are several factors at work.
Foremost, the all flash and bang mentioned earlier. - It is my contention that educators don't understand what computers are. Period. Hence, they don't know what to do with them. My classroom has 25 G5s and there is a huge amount of distraction to deal with.
My current lesson is having my kids talk with somebody who went to college over 20 years ago to find out how they did research. Where they went, how much they spent. Particularly questioning them about the social contacts ind interactions.
I want them to develop an understanding of how much as changed.
The largest expense in any enterprise is payroll. NCLB requires schools to increase the number of teachers without funding the increase. Period. There are indeed many dollars that school districts don't take advantage of. Things like computer labs and funding for supplies are examples of available funding.
Unfortunately, NCLB is kind of similar to faith healing. They just yell at you - "Get up and walk!" If you don't, it's your fault.
Often surveys like the one cited are accompanied by disclaimers that explain some issues. For instance, there may be a system where students who aren't interested in academics are sent to learn mechanical skills at age 14. Another system may introduce a subject at an earlier age.
Progressive's history of intrusive and pseudo-scientific behavior began when Jack Green retired. They would definitely try to deny a claim if they felt like it. The fact is that the insurance industry is built on well documented statistics, but they have very real limits. Unfortunately, when marketing became more powerful than underwriting at the board table, the marketing guys imposed their own warped view of reality. (Think spammers in charge of network) All kinds of pricing alterations became common that were not adequately - or independently - justified by actuaries. The person who spearheaded it at Progressive was a real paranoid who took the rating structure to the next company she went to work for. Unfortunately, Progressive decided to keep the structure thinking that it had something to do with their marketing success. Maybe and maybe not.
My point is that stuff like this can get away from insurers easily and ends up badly when it is not supervised by adults.
The newbies seemed split on it - I checked them last semester.
(That was a joke for those who wish to report me to the purity patrol.)
I needed to have interactive design students look at something they had never seen - so I gave them Blender. Half had used 3D Studio Max. The rest, just Adobe and typical high school student fare. There were 17 students. They had to write a tutorial on creating an object that wasn't just a primitive.
Half of the 3D Studio Max users loved it, the rest were irritated, but found it usable. There was only one student who copped out of the assignment and the rest *really newbies* were able to do a credible job.
The general consensus was that the interface was different but good if you are a macro stroke user and a pain if you use menuing. I think they were saying 'different' compared to things like Photoshop. Of course 3D is a different interface, so their expectations could not be met. As with anything else, everybody has an opinion! Mine is, as we all know, irrelevant and uninformed, so please, I have a headache. Curtman, I obviously have no idea about Soft Image and others. I can't even remember the name of the first one I used in the mid eighties. I am still amazed by meshes.
What I can't believe is that Photoshop users think that there have been these great leaps forward in bitmap editing programs because they no longer have to open Illustrator to make type flow on a path. Maybe Zanax would help.
Of course the Gimp isn't like Photoshop. Of course you can't use it professionally. did I say that?
I really don"t care how sloppy your die cuts are. I said die cuts for machinery - like key pads not business cards and wedding invitations.
Of course I don't mean render on the monitor for God's sake.
Yes, Adobe's color profiling is good, but it is not perfect.
So you didn't notice. It's my fault?
If you live in NY and are a member of the Guild, than you have seen the surveys and know you live in heaven compared to everybody else. Don't be a Troll. You don't honestly use those cheesy liquify tools?
The point is that everybody in the world doesn't use Adobe products. That is good. The fact that you get along on them is fine for you.
There are not "millions and millions of designers" in the known universe.
I teach media design and find that Photoshop has offered me nothing of substance since version 4. The color rendition is NOT terrifically accurate. It is a computer industry issue that isn't settled to anyone's satisfaction. Adobe stuck their foot in it big time and thousands of printers went balistic two years ago when they changed things a bit. CS is looking very pedestrian at this point. Having to hit an extra button that is unlabeled to set transparency in a gif is a fine example improvement in the interface.
Illustrator is overshadowed by Corel Draw when it comes to accuracy. In order to impose, you can use Corel, but not Illustrator. At all. Nada, zip zero. It's unusable for flexography, and you can't do die cuts for any kind of machinery or casting with it.
A design professional has to use what works best. That's life. I don't think that a few thousand designers should rule the world. My students who don't end up in media, will need a good cheap program. I would resent having them called bodgers or clods. Often, they go into something more lucrative. Remember, designers have an average income like first year teachers. (GAG Annual surveys)
from MIT.
Anyway take a gander around. There is:
dspace.mit.edu
and
dspace.org which is their portal, I guess.
I liked this part:
0.08 The sixthparagraph, based on the proposals of Kenya and the United States of America, stresses the benefits of the protection of broadcasting organizations to other rightholders.
Well finally somebody agreed with us. Kenya. Um, what does that mean, exactly? Kenya?
But seriously folks, what I don't like is the fact that a broadcaster gets fifty years of protection for what . . . you can buy a broadcaster for 3 or 4 hunderd grand. A pittance for that kind of power.
You just pay the broadcaster for copies of the clip. (Microsoft owns a big archiver.)
OOPS, what if they contributed to his campaign and don't want you to make the piece and tell you it just doesn't show up in their inventory?
The only problem is that the schools have gobs of legacy stuff creating tons of Appletalk traffic and the switches have ports that are choked to support the old printers. Looks like broadcasting all the time is the same for appletalk or rendezvous.
;-)
My logs don't show as much of an improvement as I would expect with the cat 6 and new Apple machines and they won't until we chuck out the crap that is getting in the way. Oh yeah, network gaming and movie trailers too.