"racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and... deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture.... this concept -- the social and cultural construction of race over time -- remains harder for many people to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and cultural construction, unlike sex."
The constitution authorizes the Federal government to conduct a decennial enumeration of the people, but it also forbids racial classification of the American People. The Census Bureau has allocated one-quarter of the space on this year's census form to questions about race and ethnicity, which if not unconstitutional, are clearly contrary to its spirit.
Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household).
I will answer Question 9 by checking the last option -- "Some other race" -- and writing in "American." It is a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for me as an ordinary citizens to object to unconstitutional racial classification schemes.
"American," was counted by the Census Bureau when it reported the results of the 2000 census. In fact, the number of people answering "American" grew from 12.4 million in the 1990 census to 20.2 million in 2000, "the largest numerical growth of any ancestry group," according to Wikipedia. "American" was the most common answer to that question on the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
It is a violation of the law to lie or to not answer a question on the census form, that is why I will answer question 9 with "American". Some people maybe tempted to check an inapplicable box. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really -- don't do it.
If you are not a member of an enrolled tribe, don't check Native American -- they won't count it. Cutesy answers such as "human" or 100 Yard Dash will not be counted by the Census Bureau.
So remember: Question 9 -- "Some other race" -- "American". Pass it on. If you are hassled about answering American by the census bureaucrats or the ACORN minion who comes to your door, you have legal support for your answer:
"In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
Justice Scalia, concurring in Adarand Constructors v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995).
AT&T used to have an enormous R&D program. It invented transistors, UNIX, C, information theory,... And they even won a couple of Nobel prizes. IBM wasn't AT&T, but they still made enormous contributions like RISC and relational databases. Micro$oft has done nothing.
The Bussard ramjet is a system of spacecraft propulsion proposed in 1960 by the physicist Robert W. Bussard. A moving spacecraft would use enormous electro-magnetic fields to collect and compress hydrogen from the interstellar medium. The hydrogen would be forced into a progressively constricted magnetic field, which would compress it until thermonuclear fusion occurs. The magnetic field would then direct the heated gas in the direction opposite to the intended direction of travel, thereby accelerating the vessel.
"We are asked to address whether a nonrecourse advance of funds secured solely by an interest in a pending lawsuit and at a contracted return exceeding 180 percent per year is permissible under Ohio law. We hold that it is not. Such an agreement constitutes champerty and maintenance and thus is void under Ohio law."
The Federal Small Business Administration website has lots of really useful information. You should also cruise over to your state government's websites. Many states have useful information for entrepreneurs.
Nature is a journal that publishes "peer reviewed" articles. However the article linked in the OP is not peer reviewed. It is clearly marked as an "Editorial". Furthermore, as it is unsigned, we do not know who wrote it, whether he, she, it, or they know whereof they speak, nor the nature and sources of their biases and viewpoints.
Furthermore: "Peer Review" is not synonymous with audited, verified, nor replicated:
In the end, it is the anonymous and secret nature of the peer review process that marks it as not part of actual science. The entire point of science is that all observers of a phenomenon can agree they see the same thing. Critical to creating that agreement is ruthless transparency. Secrecy is antithetical to the functioning of science, and peer review is a secret process....
Mere peer review should never be the basis of public policy, because when you get right down to it, we have only the word of the journal's editor that a peer review was even performed. There is no formal mechanism to assure that peer reviewed is performed or that the reviewers have the competence to review the paper in question. If the journal's editor is corrupt, then there is no independent mechanism that forces a peer review or ensures its quality. The entire system is based on a presumption of trust and on the discipline of the free market in scientific publishing....
Even if everyone is honest, the inevitable professional biases of peer reviewers can cause them to reject papers that call into question the tenets upon which the reviewer's own work rests. If a scientific field is relatively small and all the peers share the same scientific blind spots or misapprehensions, then peer review can't catch even gross errors that become obvious in hindsight. It is common for peer reviewers to repeatedly reject papers that substantially alter a major tenet of a field. Most of the game-changing papers of the last century were rejected by multiple peer reviewers at multiple journals.
People who try to defend a scientific assertion by claiming it appears in a peer reviewed journal are making the weakest defense possible for the assertion. All it means is that some editor and the reviewers he selected thought it met their minimum quality standards for publishing. Once you raise the specter of political corruption on the part of editors and peer reviewers, it doesn't even mean that.
Replication and proven predictive power, not the opinions of peers, test science assertions. Those iron objective tests separate science from all other disciplines.... Link
"It's lucky then that the data comes from many different independent sources and is therefore not bogus at all then, isn't it?"
Please question your assumptions:
"...we have only one raw dataset comprised of all the world's surface temperature measurements." However, what this means is that the 0.9C increase in the global average surface temperature during the last 150 years is guaranteed to be closely replicated by each of the research centers that are analyzing the data. Link
At least one large portion of the raw data source has decided that there is a real problem:
The [U.K.] Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012. The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN's main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week's climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions. The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics. Link
Further, it is not clear that measured air temperatures are the sole or best indicator of the state of the global climate system. Link
To complain about this. Asimov himself had begun the work of integrating the Robot stories with his Foundation/Galactic Empire stories. All kinds of prequels and sequels were written by the master himself and by other authors and this is just more of the same. Details here.
Now, here is my question. In the original I Robot stories, the robot's positronic brains were made out of something referred to as Platinum-Iridium sponge. As this is written, Platinum is $1325/troy oz. and Iridium is $425. Aren't you grateful that real computers are made out of silicon. Was any adjustment of technology made in the subsequent Robot stories?
Unfortunately, it is required by law in certain contract clauses:
See, e.g. Uniform Commercial Code Section 2-316 (2) requirement that exclusions of warranties be "conspicuous" and the definition of that word at Sec. 1-201 (b)(10).
Sorry to go statutory on you, but I don't like all caps any more than you do.
This means that politicians will have to go back to old fashioned fraud, like ballot box stuffing, having bums vote for dead people, registering phantoms from empty lots, and on and on.
Moosesocks is not focused on the larger and real issues.
A smart grid is indeed intended, and needed, to repair and enhance our electric grid. However, technical things cannot live in isolation from the real world.
In the real world technical things are tools and they can be used, as any tool can, benignly, or malignly. A smart grid will place an agent in everyone's home. If the homeowner controls the agent, I see no problem. If the utility controls the agent, it may create problems. But, if the government controls the agent, that is a problem. Politics is more subject to Murphy's law than any other sphere of human endeavor.
I do not foresee a man on horseback, or a legion of jackbooted thugs. However, there is always a danger that the American Experiment might miscarry. America's most perceptive critic long ago foresaw that possibility.
I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories....
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood:...
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I am not trolling. I am genuinely concerned that in our anxiety to solve an undoubtedly real engineering and economic problem, we will wind up opening a Pandora's box of things we may not be able to control and which may have a deleterious effect on us.
The whole smart grid idea gives me the willies. First, it will be used an excuse to block the building of generating capacity of any type. All electric generators have an environmental downside. The existence of a "smart" grid will be another excuse to not boost generating capacity. If the wind mills don't produce electricity, so what? we will just turn off your computer. Problem solved.
Second, the smart grid is a new avenue for government intrusion into our lives. Members of "minority" groups will claim that any action to cut power to their neighborhoods is racism. Power cuts to the districts of Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and Barney Frank will be rarer than hen's teeth. Don't bother to buy a new refrigerator if you live in John Boehner's district.
Non-union factories won't get electricity, but Government Motors and Fiatsler will have all they need. But wait, there is more. Too fat? No electricity for your kitchen. Want to stay up late. Sorry, lights are out at 10 p.m. in this town.
Slashdot Mirror
"racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and ... deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture. ... this concept -- the social and cultural construction of race over time -- remains harder for many people to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and cultural construction, unlike sex."
"Who's White? " by Linda Gordon, a review of "The History of White People," by Nell Irvin Painter, (496 pp. W. W. Norton & Company, New York) in the NYTimes Sunday Book Review on March 28, 2010 at p. 1.
RTWT, it is worthwhile.
read above complete with citation.
Biologically, you are correct. Politically, and the census is a political event, my answer is correct.
The Supreme Court has long held that the 14th Amendments Equal Protection Clause is violated by racial classification.
Neither is Korean. Most biologists these days will tell you that race is not a biologically meaningful concept.
The constitution authorizes the Federal government to conduct a decennial enumeration of the people, but it also forbids racial classification of the American People. The Census Bureau has allocated one-quarter of the space on this year's census form to questions about race and ethnicity, which if not unconstitutional, are clearly contrary to its spirit.
Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household).
I will answer Question 9 by checking the last option -- "Some other race" -- and writing in "American." It is a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for me as an ordinary citizens to object to unconstitutional racial classification schemes.
"American," was counted by the Census Bureau when it reported the results of the 2000 census. In fact, the number of people answering "American" grew from 12.4 million in the 1990 census to 20.2 million in 2000, "the largest numerical growth of any ancestry group," according to Wikipedia. "American" was the most common answer to that question on the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
It is a violation of the law to lie or to not answer a question on the census form, that is why I will answer question 9 with "American". Some people maybe tempted to check an inapplicable box. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really -- don't do it.
If you are not a member of an enrolled tribe, don't check Native American -- they won't count it.
Cutesy answers such as "human" or 100 Yard Dash will not be counted by the Census Bureau.
So remember: Question 9 -- "Some other race" -- "American". Pass it on.
If you are hassled about answering American by the census bureaucrats or the ACORN minion who comes to your door, you have legal support for your answer:
"In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
Justice Scalia, concurring in Adarand Constructors v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995).
AT&T used to have an enormous R&D program. It invented transistors, UNIX, C, information theory, ... And they even won a couple of Nobel prizes. IBM wasn't AT&T, but they still made enormous contributions like RISC and relational databases. Micro$oft has done nothing.
That means they can bring it up to full power in 2012. Anybody want to bet on 12/21/2012?
The Bussard Collector is part of a Bussard Ramjet.
The Bussard ramjet is a system of spacecraft propulsion proposed in 1960 by the physicist Robert W. Bussard. A moving spacecraft would use enormous electro-magnetic fields to collect and compress hydrogen from the interstellar medium. The hydrogen would be forced into a progressively constricted magnetic field, which would compress it until thermonuclear fusion occurs. The magnetic field would then direct the heated gas in the direction opposite to the intended direction of travel, thereby accelerating the vessel.
More generally.
Rancman v. Interim Settlement Funding Corp. 99 Ohio St.3d 121 (2003):
"We are asked to address whether a nonrecourse advance of funds secured solely by an interest in a pending lawsuit and at a contracted return exceeding 180 percent per year is permissible under Ohio law. We hold that it is not. Such an agreement constitutes champerty and maintenance and thus is void under Ohio law."
The Federal Small Business Administration website has lots of really useful information. You should also cruise over to your state government's websites. Many states have useful information for entrepreneurs.
I thought they did software like Notes and were owned by IBM.
Nature is a journal that publishes "peer reviewed" articles. However the article linked in the OP is not peer reviewed. It is clearly marked as an "Editorial". Furthermore, as it is unsigned, we do not know who wrote it, whether he, she, it, or they know whereof they speak, nor the nature and sources of their biases and viewpoints.
Furthermore: "Peer Review" is not synonymous with audited, verified, nor replicated:
"The only safe thing to do is destroy the hard drive."
Amen.
Physically and thoroughly, say with a sledge hammer. Then bury the pieces underneath Jimmy Hoffa.
"It's lucky then that the data comes from many different independent sources and is therefore not bogus at all then, isn't it?"
Please question your assumptions:
At least one large portion of the raw data source has decided that there is a real problem:
Further, it is not clear that measured air temperatures are the sole or best indicator of the state of the global climate system. Link
No Red Eyes.
"The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC."
The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between Bud Lite and real beer.
To complain about this. Asimov himself had begun the work of integrating the Robot stories with his Foundation/Galactic Empire stories. All kinds of prequels and sequels were written by the master himself and by other authors and this is just more of the same. Details here.
Now, here is my question. In the original I Robot stories, the robot's positronic brains were made out of something referred to as Platinum-Iridium sponge. As this is written, Platinum is $1325/troy oz. and Iridium
is $425. Aren't you grateful that real computers are made out of silicon. Was any adjustment of technology made in the subsequent Robot stories?
Yes, the thing they are most worried about is Apple. They don't want an opening to that world.
When I saw the head line about plugging the analog hole, I thought they were going to gouge our eyes out.
Unfortunately, it is required by law in certain contract clauses:
See, e.g. Uniform Commercial Code Section 2-316 (2) requirement that exclusions of warranties be "conspicuous" and the definition of that word at Sec. 1-201 (b)(10).
Sorry to go statutory on you, but I don't like all caps any more than you do.
Only if you can find a floppy drive and a floppy. I think they are in the closet with the dead printers in the basement.
This means that politicians will have to go back to old fashioned fraud, like ballot box stuffing, having bums vote for dead people, registering phantoms from empty lots, and on and on.
Moosesocks is not focused on the larger and real issues.
A smart grid is indeed intended, and needed, to repair and enhance our electric grid. However, technical things cannot live in isolation from the real world.
In the real world technical things are tools and they can be used, as any tool can, benignly, or malignly. A smart grid will place an agent in everyone's home. If the homeowner controls the agent, I see no problem. If the utility controls the agent, it may create problems. But, if the government controls the agent, that is a problem. Politics is more subject to Murphy's law than any other sphere of human endeavor.
I do not foresee a man on horseback, or a legion of jackbooted thugs. However, there is always a danger that the American Experiment might miscarry. America's most perceptive critic long ago foresaw that possibility.
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, Volume II, Section 4: Influence of Democratic Ideas and Feelings on Political Society; Chapter VI: What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear:
I am not trolling. I am genuinely concerned that in our anxiety to solve an undoubtedly real engineering and economic problem, we will wind up opening a Pandora's box of things we may not be able to control and which may have a deleterious effect on us.
The whole smart grid idea gives me the willies. First, it will be used an excuse to block the building of generating capacity of any type. All electric generators have an environmental downside. The existence of a "smart" grid will be another excuse to not boost generating capacity. If the wind mills don't produce electricity, so what? we will just turn off your computer. Problem solved.
Second, the smart grid is a new avenue for government intrusion into our lives. Members of "minority" groups will claim that any action to cut power to their neighborhoods is racism. Power cuts to the districts of Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and Barney Frank will be rarer than hen's teeth. Don't bother to buy a new refrigerator if you live in John Boehner's district.
Non-union factories won't get electricity, but Government Motors and Fiatsler will have all they need. But wait, there is more. Too fat? No electricity for your kitchen. Want to stay up late. Sorry, lights are out at 10 p.m. in this town.