Childbirth is easy. Millions of women all over the planet deliver babies every day and then go back to work in the fields.
My wife would have bled to death during childbirth had she not been in a great hospital receiving great care. Saving her life didn't look easy, judging by the doctors' stress level.
Your wife's experience is not representative of the biological process involved that woman have been going through since homo sapiens started as a species. Hospitals, particularly those with modern maternity facilities are a relatively new phenomenon and not available to most of the world's women. The world wide mortality rate for women during child birth is 1.5% (1500/100,000). In the US it is.01% (10/100,000). Since most of the births, these days, are happening in second and third world countries without access to hospitals, it would seem that over all, while there are risks associated with child birth, the process itself is well understood and considered simple (your wife's experience, not withstanding).
The point being that if childbirth was such a complicated thing, how would the human species ever survived to the point where we could create the modern hospital system? The human gestation rate is very long and if it were fraught with peril, one would expect that nature would have us reproduce more like bunnies than we do, or we would never have made it.
Online is just one of many ways to meet someone initially... it still takes a shitload of work to make it work.
Bit of a digression, but during the UKs recent Gay Marriage debate, an awful lot of conservative/religious commentators were spouting endlessly about how 'natural' marriage is.
If that's so, why do married people always go on about what hard work it is. Surly 'natural'='easy'.
Fusion is natural, too. Controlling it on the other hand is the hard part.
An interesting thought. But is your premise, natural=easy, true?
Childbirth is completely natural. Easy? Hell no.
What about "living off the land"? Hunter/gather is a more "natural" way to live. A lot harder than shopping at Publix.
So maybe natural != easy.
Childbirth is easy. Millions of women all over the planet deliver babies every day and then go back to work in the fields. It is easy, but also very painful, but painful doesn't mean it is difficult (calculus is difficult).
Living off the land is a lot simpler than shopping at Publix. What is needed to shop at Publix? Well, you need funds to pay for the goods and you need transportation to get there and to get the goods back. How do you acquire those funds? You need to work a job. What is required to work that job? There are direct things like certain skills and equipment and many indirect things, probably like electricity and the like. How is all of that acquired? Skills usually comes from training or education, equipment needs to be manufactured and electricity, well that is a whole long list of additional requirements needed. Anyway, the list goes on and on and on.
Living off the land is not necessarily easy, but when you compare what is truly involved in both methods, you will find that it is a lot less complicated than shopping at Publix.
First wife was traditional, ended in a horrible train wreck as she was insane. Current Wife met via the internet and 11 years later we are still the best of friends and still madly in love with each other.
From my experience, Meeting a mate IRL is a recipe for failure, you get infatuated with their looks and not their mind first.
And you would chalk this up solely because you met on the internet or to some other factor? According to the article, it is all because of the internet.
Online dating that has been available en masse has existed for how long, a decade? The non-statistically valid study looks at marriages less than 7 years old to determine that if you met online and got married, your marriage is just as satisfying as traditional dating. That seems like an awfully short time frame to compare marriage against. Even if it was a statistically valid study, at best the conclusion could be that for the first seven years of marriage, marriages spawned from on-line dating and traditional dating are equally satisfying.
On a different note, don't most online dating sites work by setting up traditional dating? The purpose of eHarmony (mentioned in the article) is not to find somebody for cyberdate, but to find somebody to actually date. As such, what the study actually shows, if the sample were valid, would be that meeting a potential mate online versus in the traditional way (whatever that would be) produces the same satisfaction if the the relationship ends up in marriage. That would make sense as the online service provides the introduction, but the couple must still build the relationship.
But then, maybe I'm missing something and people really are dating on line and never meeting until they walk down the aisle.
It was not enforced in the past because nobody doing the state fair jumping had qualified for the ISEF before. It's in the article.
The US science fair system is poorly organized, which is why things like this happen. It's disappointing for the kid but he did not qualify at his own state fair anyway.
That's beside's the point. If entering multiple times is prohibited, then it should not be allowed regardless of whether somebody finally qualifies or not. Selective enforcement of a rule or a law begs the question as to why in this instance and not others? If rules and laws are not evenly applied, then they are subjective and subjective rules are not fair to anybody.
The way you rationalize it is like saying that cheating in school is okay as long as you aren't valedictorian.
“The South Dakota fair is close and gives our kids another opportunity to present their work,” Scribner said. “I think that was some of our motivation, and it did give our kids another chance to qualify.”
The school absolutely used multiple fairs to get extra chances to qualify - they outright say so. And that's exactly why the rule's in place.
They put the rule in place to stop people failing at one using other fairs as a chance to succeed at another. He failed at one then used another to succeed. The school uses the second fair for exactly that purpose. And then they're shocked when they discover there was a rule to prevent the loophole they thought they'd discovered. That's not an unintended consequence. That's the intended consequence.
You left out the part about the school not being aware of the rule and the officials not being aware of the rule and the colleges involved not being aware of the rule all because the rule was not enforced in the past. If it is an obscure rule that nobody is aware of, it is hard to cry foul with an intent to cheat. If it is enforceable, why was only his project disqualified and not all of the duplicated projects? If it was correct, why was the chairwoman dismissed over this?
Maine has a law about how many pounds of cherries must be in a pie before it can be called a cherry pie. Not a pie sold today meets that standard, but the rule is on the books. Missouri doesn't allow margerine to be sold, or at least for it to be called that and yet grocery stores are full of it. There are all sorts of rules on the books that are old and obsolete, just like the rule in question with the science fair. The question people should be asking is why was it enforced all of a sudden and only selectively and if it was all on the up and up, why was the director let go?
From article: "Conrad Farnsworth is the first person in Wyoming to build a nuclear fusion reactor. He is one of only 15 high school students in the world to successfully achieve fusion. He made it using parts he ordered online, traded with other fusioneers and created himself."
So this and 15 other high school students have been able to achieve what no other scientist in the world has been able to achieve to date? Hmmm.
The article doesn't say that only 15 high schoolers have been able to do this and no other scientists have. OTOH, it is pretty impressive that some high schoolers have been able to achieve what professional scientists have by spending a fraction of the cost on education and materials. These kids, wherever they may be in the world are similar to the kids that were building rockets at the dawn of the space age or breadboard computers prior to the PC.
If that capability isn't enough to win a science fair, I wonder what did win?
This right here, TFS is so distorted. He didn't make it past round 1 in his state, so he jumped the border (with his schools's permission) in order to try again. They had rules against this for a very good reason.
From TFA the school did not know it was a problem. The events did not know it was a problem. The kid in question did not know it was a problem. Not included in the article but elsewhere online, it was not the same "experiment" but modified based on feedback from the first science fair. (Isn't that how science advances?)
There was no intent to cheat here, just a well meaning rule to prevent cheating that was erroneously applied (the director who singled him out has been fired). What the real story is that has not been answered is that there were several other kids that had equivelantly the same experiment, as the high school entered both events, but only he was disqualified. As TFA states, the director is no longer employed with the institution after this and the rule is being rewritten to keep this from happening again.
The nice thing is that he took the high road and didn't blame anybody. His only regret is that he didn't get to discuss his project further with the judges to gain more insight (again from TFA). He's been accepted at the South Dakota School of Mines for college. Hopefully they gave him a scholarship.
That has nothing to do with this story at all. He entered different lower-level competitions with the same entry in order to maximize his odds of making it to the next level. The problem with allowing this would be that to even the odds, everybody would have to enter every competition, where the same set of projects would be re-evaluated over and over.
That is false. His high school entered both competitions and he along with other students submitted projects for both competitions. His was not the only disqualified project, the difference is that his was interesting enough that it had already caught the public's attention. The rule in question is an old rule and this is not the situation it was intended to prevent. As such, the committee is looking at revamping the rule and the official who disqualified him has been dismissed.
disqualifying someone just because they failed to win too many times is low
That's not why he was disqualified. He was disqualified because he failed to advance to the next level and then jumped over the state border to try again with the same project in another state. Without this rule, you could have kids entering a dozen different state competitions with the same project, just hoping to get the right set of judges to advance you.
While what you say is technically true, the way you say it implys that he did this to circumvent the system. From the article itself, it was his high school that entered both the Wyoming and the South Dakota events and they, along with the people at both Universities involved were unaware of the rule. It seems like this was one of those rules put in place to prevent cheating that had unintended consequences. Even the article states the rule is looking at being rewritten because of it.
The thick crustal material and low magnetic field have led to the loss of the atmosphere and lack of currently flowing water. Low magnetic field led to large impingement by solar wind and stripping of atmosphere. Low average density of planet let atmosphere escape. The thick crust has kept the mantle deep and there is no regeneration of gases and liquids from the interior. Low atmosphere, more radiational cooling and first water goes to ice and then CO2 goes to ice and reduces the atmosphere again. The Earth could have gone the same route, had an impact not spawned the moon and thined the planet of the lighter, thicker crustal material. Lots of imparted spin from the impact and a denser planet gets deep iron core spin to generate a protective magentic field. That field both protects the atmosphere and the biologicals from getting zapped. Would be fun to send lots of water and gas bearing comets to impact and terraform Mars, but it would all still leak out. So --- we are seeing prehistoric water, frozen in time,and relected by the rounded pebbles left behind in ancient Martian canals.
Wouldn't the question be, given those conditions, not be where did the water go, but how did it ever form in the first place?
It was going to take me way too long to accomplish this (while going stir-crazy on nothing but math), so I ended up switching to the MIS path, which didn't have the absurd math requirement.
This. My state U had two different paths to a CS degree, BSc and BBA. The former required calculus, which I tried three times and failed three times before I realized it just wasn't going to happen*. Switched to the BBA which required a couple of accounting and marketing courses I never used, but at least I was able to get that piece of paper saying I know how to write computer programs.
Sadly, they were still pushing COBOL as the pinnacle of software development and by the time I was out looking for a job, it was all PCs.
* It may have turned out differently if I actually read the lessons and did the homework and stayed awake in class, but at 19 I was an idiot.
Too bad, COBOL programmers are still in high demand in the finance and banking industry along with government, particularly as the baby boomers start to retire.
if you're going into app development or IT, probably not much math needed. i've been in app dev for a long time (and quite successful). Those times that i actually need math? I just look it up, program it, then forget it. I never have needed much math.
However, if you're going into some CS field that requires math, well, obviously, it's worth your while to study it.
I think that was the point of the query here, exactly what fields remain today that require the level of math that is (rather arcanely) still infused within a CS degree?
I fell into this same trap when initially pursuing my degree. Avoiding all the advance math requirements due to my own hatred of it, I was facing three separate tracks of nothing but I/II/III math courses, which were obviously best taken in succession. It was going to take me way too long to accomplish this (while going stir-crazy on nothing but math), so I ended up switching to the MIS path, which didn't have the absurd math requirement.
The reality is that many people go the CS route because they are told that is where the jobs are, but most of those jobs are in corporate america. A better route for corporate america is a business administration degree with a minor in computer science or even just some programming classes. The traditional Computer Science major is more akin to an engineering degree than anything else. Nobody gets an electrical engineering degree for the purpose of becoming an electrician, that would be overkill. Likewise, a CS degree for the purpose of becoming a corporate programmer is overkill.
When I used to work for a large Fortune 100 company, we very often pulled employees from operations and taught them to program. It was much simpler than taking programmers and teaching them the business and business culture. I always encourage business majors to pick up extra computer classes and computer majors to pick up business classes. Unless you are going to work for clandestine government organizations or one of the giant software companies, you will get much further in your career being average with a mixture of those skills than being great with only one or the other.
I'd feel better about it if the kids on scholarship took good advantage of their opportunity. If they're getting an education in exchange for providing a form of entertainment to their fellow students... yeah, I can see that. It's hard to quantify the value of entertainment, and a lot of alumni seem to feel pretty strongly about it.
But while sports fans among the alums may it, that seems too much like subsidizing their entertainment if there isn't any other benefit. If the student-athletes aren't also students for real, then the vast majority of them are wasting their time, and it seems a poor mission for the college to serve as a pro-sports incubator as well. Let the NFL teams pay the colleges for the privilege.
While sports do not cover the total cost, there are benefits to sports programs, just as there are benefits to cultural and arts programs. The good news is that most student athletes do graduate (usually in six years instead of four) and in real degree programs. Many sports programs other than football and basketball have a higher graduation rate than the college/university rate as a whole. Part of this is that to keep their scholarship, many of these athletes have to maintain certain course loads and GPA. Another reason is that there is less presure to "pass" a swimmer or sprinter than there is a football or basketball player. But even in football and basketball, the two high revenue college sports, most programs have graduation rates in the 70% to 80% rate, at least at the Division I schools.
So, for many of these kids, while the system may be using them to bring in the bucks and for entertainment purposes, they are getting the opportunity for a quality education. For most of them, it appears that they are not squandering that opportunity, either.
>Maybe if we changed the system so that we didn't reward the win at all cost mentality,
Nature is a system that favors the win at all costs.The winners (in wars) are the ones that write the history books. The winners in games are the ones the viewers. The winners in finance are the ones that make the most money. You are going to have a hard time changing the system because being the winner is what most people want.
Nature does not favor winning at all cost and usually is just the opposite. It is the cooperative or symbiotic relationship that prospers.
The writers of history have nothing to do with nature. Nor do the winners in games or finance. As for that being what people want, well what happened to Enron? What happened to Lance Armstrong? What happened to the Romans? All those embraced winning at all cost and all were toppled.
Society tolerates winning at all cost only to a point, then like bullying, they rise up against it. That is where anti-trust laws came from in business and anti-doping laws in sports and even the Geneva convention in war. Eventually, civilized people settle on rules of fair play.
So does nature. The giant redwood does take all of the nutrients in the forest, just those it needs. Same for the fox or a bear. In our own bodies, we call cells that take too much cancer and cut them out. Why? because even those those cells are the fittest, they destroy the body. In nature, if the animal at the top of the food chain eats all the food, the animal dies, too. So, in nature, a proper balance is maintained (unless man does something to upset it, like introduce a non native species or change the habitat or environment).
Not even Darwin believed in survival of the fittest. He used that expression only twice in the entire On the Origen of the Species. He actually proposed cooperation as the better model using human beings as the example since we were not the fastest or strongest nor did we posses the sharpest claws or teeth. Instead in cooperating we were successful in dominating the planet.
So, even in nature, the win at all cost model does not win.
I don't know what your problem is, or why you are so against sports, but there are many people who feel that it is important to exercise one's body along with one's mind, even Einstein, Feynman and Hawking did in their younger days before infirmity took the ability away.
Yes, I am a job creator. I am also a bona fide democrat if that helps your sensibilities any, since you use the phrase in a perjorative way. As for the dumb jocks, you assume I hire. Well, the next time you need an ACL repaired or nerves grafted or any type of mircosurgery, remember this exchange and you can thank them. Not all of our engineers and researchers participated in organized athletics, but many did and I surely wouldn't turn down somebody who did if they had the qualifications we were looking for.
You should have done a little research before posting. Baseball scholarships have some of the highest graduation rates among college athletes, with many schools in in the 90% to 100% range (actually higher than the non-athlete population). Part of this reasoning compared to say, football and basketball is that most of the season is during summer and not in the fall semester. Regardless, though, baseball scholarships also are very high graduates in the STEM fields.
As for what do sports and higher education have in common, well that is simple, most "gifted" individuals tend to be gifted across the board, so they are gifted academically and athletically. The stereotype of the dumb jock is just that, a stereotype. Most, but not all, college athletes are very good students and go on to be successful in their career choices as most do not become professional athletes. On the otherhand, as a prospective employer, I am always interested in somebody who has demonstrated the ability to be a "team" player, is disciplined and any number of other attributes we attribute to sports. That doesn't mean that non-college athletes also don't posses these traits, but usually to succeed on the collegiate level, you have demonstrated that you do.
If you ask them, they'll tell you that the sports programs pay for themselves by attracting donations from alumni with fond memories of school spirit at games.
Studies do not actually back that up, and in fact contradict it. However, if you try to abolish the sports programs, you will hear it from enraged alumni.
The studies only show that sports pay for themself when you don't include building and property expenditures which are in a separate fund in college and university accounting. If you include the costs of maintaining the brick and mortar facilities, sports do not bring in enough revenue. Most schools do not include it because it is funded from a debt service fund, but again, that is usually covered from the general fund, not funds from sporting activities.
So yes, sports covers there cost, well, at least as long as you eliminate the major costs from the programs. Colleges and Universities would be better served if they admitted that sports do not cover their costs and instead focused on the positive things sports bring to the school.
Well, they are taking a risk. If they are caught cheating they might end up with nothing. It is referees and the tournament organizations job to make sure that the risk of getting caught and the punishment for it outweighs the benefit of cheating.
False, it is coaches and owners job to make sure that getting caught and the punishment for cheating outweighs the benefit. The referees and tournament organization sets and enforces the rules, but it is the coaches and owners that set the culture that tolerates cheating or not.
Most people will do what it takes to get what they want in life...period.
Lying to women to get laid...check
Speeding to get a delivery made quicker and have low turnaround time....check
Checking your answer on a test with your neighbors'....check
When competition is up for ANYTHING....people that are really driven to succeed, will often do what it takes to win. Sure, I'd say most people prefer to do everything honest and aboveboard (I'm an optimist), but I also think most people that are consistently successful and manage to stay on top of their game in any en devour, have gone outside the 'rules' in order to win (I'm realistic).
Maybe if we changed the system so that we didn't reward the win at all cost mentality, then people wouldn't try to win at all cost. Take just baseball - if a player is caught cheating, the player is suspended for x amount of games, fined x amount, the team forfeits any games the player played in that season and the team is fined x amount. If the owners are hurt financially when cheating occurs, then they will create an environment the discourages cheating. Take business, if an employee violates a law in the service of the company, the employee is fined/jailed and the company who benefited from the infraction is fined, too (and not some measly fine). The higher up the organization or the more gregarious the violation, the bigger the corporate penalty. Oh, yeah, and the penalties are not deductible from taxes. If the shareholders and board of directors get fed up with losing dividends, then they will insist on management that will see that these violations do not occur.
Right now, there is such a disconnect between what the employee/player is encouraged to do and what the consequences are for those who encourage, that all the risk is absorbed by the employee/player. Change that dynamic and you will begin to clean up the system.
I don't care what sport it is - when contracts worth millions of dollars are on the line, there will always be talented people willing to do whatever they have to in order to stay competitive and even excel.
Stay competitive, maybe, but if one is cheating then technically, they aren't excelling, they are, well, cheating.
That's a REALLY good way to generate positive publicity for your company - act like a douche.
Yeah, Paypal is a douche for following a law that is designed to protect minors from being taken advantage of. I guess banks and credit cards are also douches because they won't extend credit to minors for the same reasons.
These laws are on the books to protect minors, to potect kids from unscrupolus adults. The fact that in this specific case a kid was not able to reap the reward of his work does not change the fact that he is the exception and not the rule. Think of seatbelts in the car. We all know of somebody who wasn't wearing one and was thrown clear and survived. However, they are the exception. The vast majority of people are better protected with a seatbelt than without. Likewise, for evertime the inability to enter into a contract works against a minor, there a many more cases where a minor was protected by it. They are so common, in fact, that they don't even make the/.
So, yes, PayPal is a douche, but not because of this example. In this case, they were actually following the law that was designed to protect kids from the douches of the world.
I'm pretty sure that if you enlist in the military under the age of 18 and without parental consent, you are not bound by that. The issue with contracts and minors has to deal with consent. Is a minor capable of understanding and consenting to the the terms of the contract.
With regards to the Paypal contract, the minor in question is giving up all sorts of legal rights. Does a minor have the understanding of what that means? If not, they cannot actually consent to something they do not know or understand that they are being asked to consent to. That is why contracts with minors require a parent or guardian to be valid. Or a minor can be emancipated, in which caase the courts declare them an adult and the protections afforded minors are no longer available to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Childbirth is easy. Millions of women all over the planet deliver babies every day and then go back to work in the fields.
My wife would have bled to death during childbirth had she not been in a great hospital receiving great care. Saving her life didn't look easy, judging by the doctors' stress level.
Your wife's experience is not representative of the biological process involved that woman have been going through since homo sapiens started as a species. Hospitals, particularly those with modern maternity facilities are a relatively new phenomenon and not available to most of the world's women. The world wide mortality rate for women during child birth is 1.5% (1500/100,000). In the US it is .01% (10/100,000). Since most of the births, these days, are happening in second and third world countries without access to hospitals, it would seem that over all, while there are risks associated with child birth, the process itself is well understood and considered simple (your wife's experience, not withstanding).
The point being that if childbirth was such a complicated thing, how would the human species ever survived to the point where we could create the modern hospital system? The human gestation rate is very long and if it were fraught with peril, one would expect that nature would have us reproduce more like bunnies than we do, or we would never have made it.
Online is just one of many ways to meet someone initially... it still takes a shitload of work to make it work.
Bit of a digression, but during the UKs recent Gay Marriage debate, an awful lot of conservative/religious commentators were spouting endlessly about how 'natural' marriage is.
If that's so, why do married people always go on about what hard work it is. Surly 'natural'='easy'.
Fusion is natural, too. Controlling it on the other hand is the hard part.
to continue the digression....
An interesting thought. But is your premise, natural=easy, true?
Childbirth is completely natural. Easy? Hell no.
What about "living off the land"? Hunter/gather is a more "natural" way to live. A lot harder than shopping at Publix.
So maybe natural != easy.
Childbirth is easy. Millions of women all over the planet deliver babies every day and then go back to work in the fields. It is easy, but also very painful, but painful doesn't mean it is difficult (calculus is difficult).
Living off the land is a lot simpler than shopping at Publix. What is needed to shop at Publix? Well, you need funds to pay for the goods and you need transportation to get there and to get the goods back. How do you acquire those funds? You need to work a job. What is required to work that job? There are direct things like certain skills and equipment and many indirect things, probably like electricity and the like. How is all of that acquired? Skills usually comes from training or education, equipment needs to be manufactured and electricity, well that is a whole long list of additional requirements needed. Anyway, the list goes on and on and on.
Living off the land is not necessarily easy, but when you compare what is truly involved in both methods, you will find that it is a lot less complicated than shopping at Publix.
First wife was traditional, ended in a horrible train wreck as she was insane.
Current Wife met via the internet and 11 years later we are still the best of friends and still madly in love with each other.
From my experience, Meeting a mate IRL is a recipe for failure, you get infatuated with their looks and not their mind first.
And you would chalk this up solely because you met on the internet or to some other factor? According to the article, it is all because of the internet.
Online dating that has been available en masse has existed for how long, a decade? The non-statistically valid study looks at marriages less than 7 years old to determine that if you met online and got married, your marriage is just as satisfying as traditional dating. That seems like an awfully short time frame to compare marriage against. Even if it was a statistically valid study, at best the conclusion could be that for the first seven years of marriage, marriages spawned from on-line dating and traditional dating are equally satisfying.
On a different note, don't most online dating sites work by setting up traditional dating? The purpose of eHarmony (mentioned in the article) is not to find somebody for cyberdate, but to find somebody to actually date. As such, what the study actually shows, if the sample were valid, would be that meeting a potential mate online versus in the traditional way (whatever that would be) produces the same satisfaction if the the relationship ends up in marriage. That would make sense as the online service provides the introduction, but the couple must still build the relationship.
But then, maybe I'm missing something and people really are dating on line and never meeting until they walk down the aisle.
It was not enforced in the past because nobody doing the state fair jumping had qualified for the ISEF before. It's in the article.
The US science fair system is poorly organized, which is why things like this happen. It's disappointing for the kid but he did not qualify at his own state fair anyway.
That's beside's the point. If entering multiple times is prohibited, then it should not be allowed regardless of whether somebody finally qualifies or not. Selective enforcement of a rule or a law begs the question as to why in this instance and not others? If rules and laws are not evenly applied, then they are subjective and subjective rules are not fair to anybody.
The way you rationalize it is like saying that cheating in school is okay as long as you aren't valedictorian.
“The South Dakota fair is close and gives our kids another opportunity to present their work,” Scribner said. “I think that was some of our motivation, and it did give our kids another chance to qualify.”
The school absolutely used multiple fairs to get extra chances to qualify - they outright say so. And that's exactly why the rule's in place.
They put the rule in place to stop people failing at one using other fairs as a chance to succeed at another. He failed at one then used another to succeed. The school uses the second fair for exactly that purpose. And then they're shocked when they discover there was a rule to prevent the loophole they thought they'd discovered. That's not an unintended consequence. That's the intended consequence.
You left out the part about the school not being aware of the rule and the officials not being aware of the rule and the colleges involved not being aware of the rule all because the rule was not enforced in the past. If it is an obscure rule that nobody is aware of, it is hard to cry foul with an intent to cheat. If it is enforceable, why was only his project disqualified and not all of the duplicated projects? If it was correct, why was the chairwoman dismissed over this?
Maine has a law about how many pounds of cherries must be in a pie before it can be called a cherry pie. Not a pie sold today meets that standard, but the rule is on the books. Missouri doesn't allow margerine to be sold, or at least for it to be called that and yet grocery stores are full of it. There are all sorts of rules on the books that are old and obsolete, just like the rule in question with the science fair. The question people should be asking is why was it enforced all of a sudden and only selectively and if it was all on the up and up, why was the director let go?
From article: "Conrad Farnsworth is the first person in Wyoming to build a nuclear fusion reactor. He is one of only 15 high school students in the world to successfully achieve fusion. He made it using parts he ordered online, traded with other fusioneers and created himself."
So this and 15 other high school students have been able to achieve what no other scientist in the world has been able to achieve to date? Hmmm.
The article doesn't say that only 15 high schoolers have been able to do this and no other scientists have. OTOH, it is pretty impressive that some high schoolers have been able to achieve what professional scientists have by spending a fraction of the cost on education and materials. These kids, wherever they may be in the world are similar to the kids that were building rockets at the dawn of the space age or breadboard computers prior to the PC.
If that capability isn't enough to win a science fair, I wonder what did win?
This right here, TFS is so distorted. He didn't make it past round 1 in his state, so he jumped the border (with his schools's permission) in order to try again. They had rules against this for a very good reason.
From TFA the school did not know it was a problem. The events did not know it was a problem. The kid in question did not know it was a problem. Not included in the article but elsewhere online, it was not the same "experiment" but modified based on feedback from the first science fair. (Isn't that how science advances?)
There was no intent to cheat here, just a well meaning rule to prevent cheating that was erroneously applied (the director who singled him out has been fired). What the real story is that has not been answered is that there were several other kids that had equivelantly the same experiment, as the high school entered both events, but only he was disqualified. As TFA states, the director is no longer employed with the institution after this and the rule is being rewritten to keep this from happening again.
The nice thing is that he took the high road and didn't blame anybody. His only regret is that he didn't get to discuss his project further with the judges to gain more insight (again from TFA). He's been accepted at the South Dakota School of Mines for college. Hopefully they gave him a scholarship.
That has nothing to do with this story at all. He entered different lower-level competitions with the same entry in order to maximize his odds of making it to the next level. The problem with allowing this would be that to even the odds, everybody would have to enter every competition, where the same set of projects would be re-evaluated over and over.
That is false. His high school entered both competitions and he along with other students submitted projects for both competitions. His was not the only disqualified project, the difference is that his was interesting enough that it had already caught the public's attention. The rule in question is an old rule and this is not the situation it was intended to prevent. As such, the committee is looking at revamping the rule and the official who disqualified him has been dismissed.
disqualifying someone just because they failed to win too many times is low
That's not why he was disqualified. He was disqualified because he failed to advance to the next level and then jumped over the state border to try again with the same project in another state. Without this rule, you could have kids entering a dozen different state competitions with the same project, just hoping to get the right set of judges to advance you.
While what you say is technically true, the way you say it implys that he did this to circumvent the system. From the article itself, it was his high school that entered both the Wyoming and the South Dakota events and they, along with the people at both Universities involved were unaware of the rule. It seems like this was one of those rules put in place to prevent cheating that had unintended consequences. Even the article states the rule is looking at being rewritten because of it.
The thick crustal material and low magnetic field have led to the loss of the atmosphere and lack of currently flowing water. Low magnetic field led to large impingement by solar wind and stripping of atmosphere. Low average density of planet let atmosphere escape. The thick crust has kept the mantle deep and there is no regeneration of gases and liquids from the interior. Low atmosphere, more radiational cooling and first water goes to ice and then CO2 goes to ice and reduces the atmosphere again. The Earth could have gone the same route, had an impact not spawned the moon and thined the planet of the lighter, thicker crustal material. Lots of imparted spin from the impact and a denser planet gets deep iron core spin to generate a protective magentic field. That field both protects the atmosphere and the biologicals from getting zapped. Would be fun to send lots of water and gas bearing comets to impact and terraform Mars, but it would all still leak out. So --- we are seeing prehistoric water, frozen in time,and relected by the rounded pebbles left behind in ancient Martian canals.
Wouldn't the question be, given those conditions, not be where did the water go, but how did it ever form in the first place?
It was going to take me way too long to accomplish this (while going stir-crazy on nothing but math), so I ended up switching to the MIS path, which didn't have the absurd math requirement.
This. My state U had two different paths to a CS degree, BSc and BBA. The former required calculus, which I tried three times and failed three times before I realized it just wasn't going to happen*. Switched to the BBA which required a couple of accounting and marketing courses I never used, but at least I was able to get that piece of paper saying I know how to write computer programs.
Sadly, they were still pushing COBOL as the pinnacle of software development and by the time I was out looking for a job, it was all PCs.
* It may have turned out differently if I actually read the lessons and did the homework and stayed awake in class, but at 19 I was an idiot.
Too bad, COBOL programmers are still in high demand in the finance and banking industry along with government, particularly as the baby boomers start to retire.
if you're going into app development or IT, probably not much math needed. i've been in app dev for a long time (and quite successful). Those times that i actually need math? I just look it up, program it, then forget it. I never have needed much math.
However, if you're going into some CS field that requires math, well, obviously, it's worth your while to study it.
I think that was the point of the query here, exactly what fields remain today that require the level of math that is (rather arcanely) still infused within a CS degree?
I fell into this same trap when initially pursuing my degree. Avoiding all the advance math requirements due to my own hatred of it, I was facing three separate tracks of nothing but I/II/III math courses, which were obviously best taken in succession. It was going to take me way too long to accomplish this (while going stir-crazy on nothing but math), so I ended up switching to the MIS path, which didn't have the absurd math requirement.
The reality is that many people go the CS route because they are told that is where the jobs are, but most of those jobs are in corporate america. A better route for corporate america is a business administration degree with a minor in computer science or even just some programming classes. The traditional Computer Science major is more akin to an engineering degree than anything else. Nobody gets an electrical engineering degree for the purpose of becoming an electrician, that would be overkill. Likewise, a CS degree for the purpose of becoming a corporate programmer is overkill.
When I used to work for a large Fortune 100 company, we very often pulled employees from operations and taught them to program. It was much simpler than taking programmers and teaching them the business and business culture. I always encourage business majors to pick up extra computer classes and computer majors to pick up business classes. Unless you are going to work for clandestine government organizations or one of the giant software companies, you will get much further in your career being average with a mixture of those skills than being great with only one or the other.
I'd feel better about it if the kids on scholarship took good advantage of their opportunity. If they're getting an education in exchange for providing a form of entertainment to their fellow students... yeah, I can see that. It's hard to quantify the value of entertainment, and a lot of alumni seem to feel pretty strongly about it.
But while sports fans among the alums may it, that seems too much like subsidizing their entertainment if there isn't any other benefit. If the student-athletes aren't also students for real, then the vast majority of them are wasting their time, and it seems a poor mission for the college to serve as a pro-sports incubator as well. Let the NFL teams pay the colleges for the privilege.
While sports do not cover the total cost, there are benefits to sports programs, just as there are benefits to cultural and arts programs. The good news is that most student athletes do graduate (usually in six years instead of four) and in real degree programs. Many sports programs other than football and basketball have a higher graduation rate than the college/university rate as a whole. Part of this is that to keep their scholarship, many of these athletes have to maintain certain course loads and GPA. Another reason is that there is less presure to "pass" a swimmer or sprinter than there is a football or basketball player. But even in football and basketball, the two high revenue college sports, most programs have graduation rates in the 70% to 80% rate, at least at the Division I schools.
So, for many of these kids, while the system may be using them to bring in the bucks and for entertainment purposes, they are getting the opportunity for a quality education. For most of them, it appears that they are not squandering that opportunity, either.
>Maybe if we changed the system so that we didn't reward the win at all cost mentality,
Nature is a system that favors the win at all costs.The winners (in wars) are the ones that write the history books. The winners in games are the ones the viewers. The winners in finance are the ones that make the most money. You are going to have a hard time changing the system because being the winner is what most people want.
Nature does not favor winning at all cost and usually is just the opposite. It is the cooperative or symbiotic relationship that prospers.
The writers of history have nothing to do with nature. Nor do the winners in games or finance. As for that being what people want, well what happened to Enron? What happened to Lance Armstrong? What happened to the Romans? All those embraced winning at all cost and all were toppled.
Society tolerates winning at all cost only to a point, then like bullying, they rise up against it. That is where anti-trust laws came from in business and anti-doping laws in sports and even the Geneva convention in war. Eventually, civilized people settle on rules of fair play.
So does nature. The giant redwood does take all of the nutrients in the forest, just those it needs. Same for the fox or a bear. In our own bodies, we call cells that take too much cancer and cut them out. Why? because even those those cells are the fittest, they destroy the body. In nature, if the animal at the top of the food chain eats all the food, the animal dies, too. So, in nature, a proper balance is maintained (unless man does something to upset it, like introduce a non native species or change the habitat or environment).
Not even Darwin believed in survival of the fittest. He used that expression only twice in the entire On the Origen of the Species. He actually proposed cooperation as the better model using human beings as the example since we were not the fastest or strongest nor did we posses the sharpest claws or teeth. Instead in cooperating we were successful in dominating the planet.
So, even in nature, the win at all cost model does not win.
I don't know what your problem is, or why you are so against sports, but there are many people who feel that it is important to exercise one's body along with one's mind, even Einstein, Feynman and Hawking did in their younger days before infirmity took the ability away.
Yes, I am a job creator. I am also a bona fide democrat if that helps your sensibilities any, since you use the phrase in a perjorative way. As for the dumb jocks, you assume I hire. Well, the next time you need an ACL repaired or nerves grafted or any type of mircosurgery, remember this exchange and you can thank them. Not all of our engineers and researchers participated in organized athletics, but many did and I surely wouldn't turn down somebody who did if they had the qualifications we were looking for.
"Even for the shortest of missions we are perilously close to the radiation career and health limits that we've established for our astronauts,
Easy solution -- just raise the limits.
You should have done a little research before posting. Baseball scholarships have some of the highest graduation rates among college athletes, with many schools in in the 90% to 100% range (actually higher than the non-athlete population). Part of this reasoning compared to say, football and basketball is that most of the season is during summer and not in the fall semester. Regardless, though, baseball scholarships also are very high graduates in the STEM fields.
As for what do sports and higher education have in common, well that is simple, most "gifted" individuals tend to be gifted across the board, so they are gifted academically and athletically. The stereotype of the dumb jock is just that, a stereotype. Most, but not all, college athletes are very good students and go on to be successful in their career choices as most do not become professional athletes. On the otherhand, as a prospective employer, I am always interested in somebody who has demonstrated the ability to be a "team" player, is disciplined and any number of other attributes we attribute to sports. That doesn't mean that non-college athletes also don't posses these traits, but usually to succeed on the collegiate level, you have demonstrated that you do.
If you ask them, they'll tell you that the sports programs pay for themselves by attracting donations from alumni with fond memories of school spirit at games.
Studies do not actually back that up, and in fact contradict it. However, if you try to abolish the sports programs, you will hear it from enraged alumni.
The studies only show that sports pay for themself when you don't include building and property expenditures which are in a separate fund in college and university accounting. If you include the costs of maintaining the brick and mortar facilities, sports do not bring in enough revenue. Most schools do not include it because it is funded from a debt service fund, but again, that is usually covered from the general fund, not funds from sporting activities.
So yes, sports covers there cost, well, at least as long as you eliminate the major costs from the programs. Colleges and Universities would be better served if they admitted that sports do not cover their costs and instead focused on the positive things sports bring to the school.
Well, they are taking a risk. If they are caught cheating they might end up with nothing.
It is referees and the tournament organizations job to make sure that the risk of getting caught and the punishment for it outweighs the benefit of cheating.
False, it is coaches and owners job to make sure that getting caught and the punishment for cheating outweighs the benefit. The referees and tournament organization sets and enforces the rules, but it is the coaches and owners that set the culture that tolerates cheating or not.
Hell, bring it to a more normal every day level.
Most people will do what it takes to get what they want in life...period.
Lying to women to get laid...check
Speeding to get a delivery made quicker and have low turnaround time....check
Checking your answer on a test with your neighbors'....check
When competition is up for ANYTHING....people that are really driven to succeed, will often do what it takes to win. Sure, I'd say most people prefer to do everything honest and aboveboard (I'm an optimist), but I also think most people that are consistently successful and manage to stay on top of their game in any en devour, have gone outside the 'rules' in order to win (I'm realistic).
Maybe if we changed the system so that we didn't reward the win at all cost mentality, then people wouldn't try to win at all cost. Take just baseball - if a player is caught cheating, the player is suspended for x amount of games, fined x amount, the team forfeits any games the player played in that season and the team is fined x amount. If the owners are hurt financially when cheating occurs, then they will create an environment the discourages cheating. Take business, if an employee violates a law in the service of the company, the employee is fined/jailed and the company who benefited from the infraction is fined, too (and not some measly fine). The higher up the organization or the more gregarious the violation, the bigger the corporate penalty. Oh, yeah, and the penalties are not deductible from taxes. If the shareholders and board of directors get fed up with losing dividends, then they will insist on management that will see that these violations do not occur.
Right now, there is such a disconnect between what the employee/player is encouraged to do and what the consequences are for those who encourage, that all the risk is absorbed by the employee/player. Change that dynamic and you will begin to clean up the system.
I don't care what sport it is - when contracts worth millions of dollars are on the line, there will always be talented people willing to do whatever they have to in order to stay competitive and even excel.
Stay competitive, maybe, but if one is cheating then technically, they aren't excelling, they are, well, cheating.
That's a REALLY good way to generate positive publicity for your company - act like a douche.
Yeah, Paypal is a douche for following a law that is designed to protect minors from being taken advantage of. I guess banks and credit cards are also douches because they won't extend credit to minors for the same reasons.
These laws are on the books to protect minors, to potect kids from unscrupolus adults. The fact that in this specific case a kid was not able to reap the reward of his work does not change the fact that he is the exception and not the rule. Think of seatbelts in the car. We all know of somebody who wasn't wearing one and was thrown clear and survived. However, they are the exception. The vast majority of people are better protected with a seatbelt than without. Likewise, for evertime the inability to enter into a contract works against a minor, there a many more cases where a minor was protected by it. They are so common, in fact, that they don't even make the /.
So, yes, PayPal is a douche, but not because of this example. In this case, they were actually following the law that was designed to protect kids from the douches of the world.
I'm pretty sure that if you enlist in the military under the age of 18 and without parental consent, you are not bound by that. The issue with contracts and minors has to deal with consent. Is a minor capable of understanding and consenting to the the terms of the contract.
With regards to the Paypal contract, the minor in question is giving up all sorts of legal rights. Does a minor have the understanding of what that means? If not, they cannot actually consent to something they do not know or understand that they are being asked to consent to. That is why contracts with minors require a parent or guardian to be valid. Or a minor can be emancipated, in which caase the courts declare them an adult and the protections afforded minors are no longer available to them.