Here is the quick summary of the historical trends by major: From 1970 until 2010, US population grew by about a third. However, the number of bachelor's degrees granted doubled. This is reasonable - we have a more knowledge driven economy. There were about 52 thousand engineering and computer degrees per year around 1970. By 2010, this number is about 120 thousand - so that more then doubled. Much of this is related to computer science/information degrees (not surprising). Engineering increased but failed to double.
Math/statistics degrees decreased from about 25 thousand per year to 15 thousand per year. That might be concerning.
Physical science degrees (mostly chemistry, some geology and physics) were unchanged: about 21 thousand per year up to about 23 thousand per year. That might not sound great.
Education degrees fell from 176 thousand per year to 101 thousand per year. Ya, that is probably not good.
So what boomed? Business degrees. From 115 thousand per year in 1970 up to 358 thousand per year in 2010, which is about 22% of all degrees granted. And if you look at salary and unemployment, they do not do too bad - about on par with life science majors; better than most majors.
After business degrees, social science degrees are the next largest category, but the raw number granted per year (from 1970 to 2010) did not grow very much.
Health care related degrees, performing arts and psychology also more then doubled.
If anyone knows more links to other data sets, I would be very interested. I want to provide my students with the best data available.
If you are interested in physics, the American Institute of Physics (aip.org) under "Physics Resources", "Statistical Research" has a huge amount of data - if anyone has similar data for other STEM majors (actually, for any major) I'm interested.
For example: Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/ a journal that is free, open web access, and still peer-reviewed by experts in the field.
I cannot find any such journal in physics or biophysics. I can either submit to a print journal where it will not be open (for at least some period of time) for free or an open access journal for a lot of money.
At my university, I can get away with going with a low profile publication but I know most people do not have that luxury.
Actually, many nonprofit professional societies publish the best journals, such as the American Physical Society (APS) which publishes the Physical Review series of journals. It costs them money to do this, they charge basically university libraries money to buy it back, and really make no profit off it.
The other society I'm a member of, the biophysical society, actually just moved the printing of their journal (the Biophysical Journal) over to a for-profit company since it would be cheaper (according to the society).
One option is for the government to go to the professional societies and just pay whatever it costs to run one broad open access, online only, journal per discipline.
As has been pointed out, there is basically no overhead: editors are unpaid, reviewers are unpaid. Sure you have to post the papers online and you probably have to have some people hire and monitor the editors, etc, but in reality, I just can't see this as much of a big cost.
Then any and all of us who wish can submit to the open access journals or the traditional ones.
Can you change the world in MMO's?
on
Quests
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In MMO's you can't change the world in the sense that if you do a quest, say slay Hogger, and it prevents another person from doing the same quest, then the world would need sort of an infinite number of quests. It would be difficult to program. Otherwise it's first come, first kill, first to get the gear, first to advance and prevent others from advancing.
The best resource for MMO's is the playerbase. Anyone who can harness that creative energy to create content, beta test new content, grade potential new content and vote to put it into the game world will open a new frontier.
If you put in puzzle quests, someone will post the answer on a spoiler site, and many players will just read the site since they are just interested in advancing.
How many people actually read the quest text in WoW in detail? Versus how many just skip to the "go here, do this" part? I bet it is at least 10 to one.
So your design options are limited. Use a renewable resource.
In single player games, some of the same difficulties exist, but at least your actions can change the world in more meaningful ways: you kill Hogger, he stays dead. Maybe a new farm crops up at his old stomping grounds. Maybe new people come in and have new quests.
But in an MMO, what if I have the Hogger quest, and now he's gone?
To be honest, I would not try to overcome that problem. I would try to work on the most pressing MMO problem, repetitive content. Maybe we have to accept the logical inconsistencies of the shared world (we kill Hogger, yet he is still there, we clear out all the Blackborrow Gnolls but they magically reappear).
But maybe we could have deep instanced content? Then the problem arises, what if I need a group? What if they are not all at the same place I am?
In conclusion, I think the MMO and single player experiences are so different it would be difficult to say something meaningful to both at once.
you don't like your job? Go get another. There's a bajillion IT jobs across a bunch of different industries, and IT workers are very, very mobile.
I couldn't express any more clearly the principle reason you IT folks should unionize.
The main argument against unionization is that your jobs will move overseas. A lot of that has already happened. However, there is a tremendous amount which will not, and can not, as the poster above points out.
This may not be the really interesting, high level work you want to do. It may mostly involve doing the mundane things needed on a daily basis to keep businesses moving. There is a lot of it, and right now as a consumer of IT, I can say it is done quite poorly.
The current situation with IT is what you get from market forces. You are not going to change them without doing something dramatic. If most of you IT folks are happy with it, that's fine.
However, I think there are good reasons to believe change will be well received. In my limited experience, both IT workers and their employers are unhappy with the current situation.
I'd recommend your new union start by: 1. setting a minimum and suggested salary table by state (region? zip code?) 2. only working hourly with paid overtime and vacation 3. fixed minimum pay for pager/emergency contacts of any kind 4. uniting against added visas 5. not trying to classify various IT people - it is a rapidly changing field. 6. publicly humiliate corporations which outsource.
What most of the critics of unions who posted above fail to understand is that there is no way we're going to have closed, union shops. That ship sailed long ago. Set a new standard as to how you should be treated and you have a chance to head that way.
Otherwise it's pager calls at 2am. If you are happy with that, be my guest.
Unions are run democratically. You elect your leaders. If you don't like them, fire them. If you elect idiots, you'll get what you deserve.
I'm pretty sure that is the point of the ESRB (regardless of personal opinion about its effectiveness). The biggest problem with the ESRB "tool" is that many (not all) parents either don't understand how to use the tool, don't think that the game content is an issue for their kid, or just don't care.
But once you give them the tool, it doesn't matter if they choose not to use it. The ball is in their court.
My wife and I do edit the content our kids see. I wish it were easier.
So now that I have kids, I play WoW since I can log off at any moment (so long as I'm not grouped) and just not care. I used to play Eq and I'm not sure if anyone would say that took "skill" but perhaps more attention then Wow. I sort of had pipe dreams about returning to Eq once my kids are a bit older. My friend played Eq with some botting software and it was better then me. I was good - but properly tuned the bot software was just perfect. And somehow I just lost interest.
No, it isn't totally rational. I enjoy leveling up in WoW. I guess the real high skill stuff such as raids and PvP are just not in the cards for me (since I don't group much - have to be able to log off at any moment). But if everyone were botting around me, I'm really not sure I would do it. I think I'd just quit.
And it seems likely the bot software would get good enough to be flawless in more complex situations so that you'd actually rather have the bot for some roles simply because they won't screw up. Maybe raiding in WoW is too sophisticated for that. I couldn't tell ya.
"I don't claim to know anything about journalism (just science), but one thing that I continually hear from experienced journalists is that every article needs to have a story. It's not enough to say that a theory that has undergone rigorous testing has now been extended in an esoterically exciting way. As much as the discovery is truly newsworthy, the effort to convince the audience that something is newsworthy in a non-technical forum is usually not worth the effort. However, if there is a narrative behind the story -- a conflict -- then perhaps people will keep reading and be compelled to research the science underlaying the story."
This is exactly the comment I wanted to make. However, my reading of it is not nearly as sympathetic as the parent. I don't read the news to be entertained, only informed. Any attempt to "spin" the facts into a narrative virtually invariably leads to the misrepresentation of facts. Of course science is complex and it is a great feat for the journalist to grasp it at all.
"Yet, I would rather see a light science articles that are interesting and easy to read than none at all, as long as the science is actually correct."
I totally agree, as would the author's article. However, the article cited is getting at a different point: perhaps the science is correct, but the addition of the "story" gives the wrong impression about how science works and, indirectly, how reliable the process is.
From Feynman's book "What do you Care what Other People Think": "the comptuers on teh shuttle are so obsolete that the manufacturers don't make them anymore. The memories in them are the old kind, made with little ferrite cores that have wires going through them. In the meantime we're developed much better hardware: the memory chips of today are much, much smaller; they have much greater capacity; and they're much more reliable." (page 192 of my copy, it's in chapter called An Inflamed Appendix).
Ran into a guy once who was in debt to Scientology. Apparently for a massive amount of money. It was very important to him to pay this off and to give them even more to "advance" within Scientology. I did not ask him but from everything I have read the story changes as you advance. These factors, in addition to what was mentioned above combine to separate Scientology from any major religion (in their current forms).
It should be trivial to separate Scientology from real religions. Whether or not you give genuine religions a tax break on property based on this is another story and one I don't particularly care about.
I was stunned when my first child was born how many acquaintances (including medical doctors) had latent anti-vaccination opinions. I've literally had people say to me: "Oh what a beautiful baby...I hope you're not vaccinating her."
But the shocking thing (to me) was that these folks have pediatricians who support zero vaccinations. One grandmother told me that none of her children had been vaccinated and that her grand children's pediatrician was a very careful man who studies all the outbreaks of various diseases and would only vaccinate her grand children if there was a nearby outbreak.
It's my understanding that these unvaccinated children cannot attend public schools - legally - but they do.
And so as long as the percentage of non-vaccinators stays very small, few of their children will die.
Despite the dozens of posts in this thread (many at least partly in jest) this is not darwinism, yet.
Further, some childhood diseases (most notably autism) show signs of onset some time during the rather lengthy vaccination cycle (often beginning at around 18 months of age).
With little hope of cure, even intelligent parents may be tempted to grasp for vengeance, even if the data is quite shaky.
Unless they are or become a sizable minority, the chances of any individual unvaccinated child dying a preventable death will remain pretty small. My question is not how many videos there are on youtube, but how many people don't vaccinate their children. The unvaccinated population may be quite significant already.
And, at the end of the day, that is why I know I made the right decision in vaccinating my child.
I'm wondering when technology will do away with the needs for as much server segregation. Yes, there need to be parallel copies of the world, but why can't I move between them more easily? I imagine if the game gets to the point where the low end of the level spectrum is nearly empty, there would be a self-organization of people playing lower level characters onto a specific copy of the world where they could group together.
The idea I voiced years ago for Everquest 1.0 was a server for 1-25 level players only. It would have been so much fun to play the game as it was originally intended, without the item influx and buff influx from all the bored end-level players. Warcraft has done away with virtually all of the more serious problems this could fix, however, if there was a need to concentrate the newbies in one place, open the server, limit the level to 25 (or whatever - I'm no WoW expert), and give every character a free transfer out when the reach maxlevel (or get within a couple/few levels of maxlevel). It would be such fun. People would stick around just to see what could be taken down by a dedicated horde of level 25's.
I looked into this briefly (on wowwiki). Are daily quests only for very high level players? Will there be new daily quests at the lower levels (under, say, 45)?
I had Madden Football one and two for the apple ][. Compared to contemporary games, they were great. Recently I was given, as gifts, modern versions (I think 1998 and 2004) and they had less functionality. Twenty years of development, and now I have virtually no control over my offensive line. I can't roll the pocket. I can't design my own trap or counter play. And my recollection is that I can design one custom pass route per play.
Further, I can't get updated player rosters - except from EA, and except for the year at hand. I don't understand why I can't copy EA's official San Diego Chargers team to my fake one and mess around with the stats or add or remove players.
Maybe I was unaware of all the features, but I lost interest pretty quickly.
At some point, it's no longer about telling a story. It's more about living in a world. I stopped at book six but I am curious how the whole thing turns out.
Ya, and since "[the judge] measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers" the sentence should be the movie makers handing cash to this guy. He's advertising their crappy movies for them, for free.
Moraelin, great post. I totally agree. However, I see a low cost partial solution to these issues: let the players do it.
My comments sort of refer to fantasy settings because that is what I'm more familiar with. Also, much of this will not help powergamers. If you want to progress as fast as possible, and are not willing to slow down to help others, ultimately you are going to have to find people like you to play with. However, in my experience most people are willing to help others even at some disadvantage to themselves. Especially within guilds. A really strong guild system (give people a reason to join and to stay) will help.
Content Quality/Quests/Scripts: Players should rate quests and low rating quests or quests which simply no one completes should be examined periodically by the real dev team. However, as a reward for play, players should have the right to actually contribute content (or say content fixes) and either: (A) the next person to do the quest or enter the zone (space) should have the option to choose from the original or the player mod or (B) the dev team should examine these.
Further, my guild or I should be able to set up a quest vendor who offers rewards for the completion of specific tasks. What I'm envisioning is (at a minimum) the vendor giving money for a specific item - so it is just an "I'll buy X" bot. However, what I'd like to see is something more like: deliver this to location X (another guild quest vendor?) or explore this area, or kill this mob - etc. And I'd like people completing this to gain some kind of experience point bonus or stat gain. This requires some kind of risk/reward algorithm (and perhaps some kind of "level" limit on quests) so that I don't hand out trivial quests. Perhaps each character could have a limited number of these player quests they can complete per day or something if all else fails.
Balance: players vote with their feet. It really isn't hard to see what "classes" are in demand: just look at how many are played. Give bonuses for either playing or grouping with the least popular classes. A slight bonus which automatically readjusts, say, monthly (real time) or perhaps weekly will encourage people to play what they really want to play. If everyone jumps on the bandwagon of, say, the "bad" class, then it becomes popular and thus looses the bonus. If the class is just broken or there are simply too many similar classes (for example in Everquest, there were simply too many classes to deal damage) people won't play the class, or spend lots of time seeking groups. This should be tracked and the results should be made public. Hiding or pretending not to know what is going on is no solution. At this point, there actually has to be dialog between players and designers and some code change has to occur. The whole slight exp bonus may help small imbalances, obviously it cannot cover large ones.
Content Balance: players won't use bad content. Analyze what is getting used. Give bonuses for switching or using under-used content. This will correct slight imbalances. If some content is really broken, no one will use it. Identify that content (publically) and have an open dialog. Experienced players as a reward can use a "suggestion point" to offer recommendations. This limits the feedback and allows players to focus on perhaps a limited number of areas where they feel strongly.
Item Balance: if every person of a certain class/level has the same item, this may be bad. But it will show up statistically. Make that info public (agian, no use hiding) and if it is just every level 10 warrior does quest X and gets the icy sword of slowing, is that so bad? Maybe make more varients of the quest (race dependant?). If "slow" is a killer effect, e.g. I'm not letting any warrior in my party if they cannot "slow" the monsters - this is a serious problem. It will show up statistically. Obviously, other classes or other items need the ability to "slow".
In general, there should not be a formula for the perfec
Players should get to create "alternative" content as a reward. Other players should have the opportunity to go through "An_Orc_Cave_01" yet again, or "So-and-so's_Orc_Cave" for a change. Then the other players should rate the experience on a few different fronts.
The shift that has to occur is that designers have to think of their playerbase as a wing of their dev team - from whom they take recommendations, get content, get feedback and work for free - in fact, they pay you to hire them - the first MMO to do this well can become more popular then WoW.
I sincerely doubt any one company will (1) write the game engine and (2) develop the content and (3) offer the customer service and (4) host the game on their servers in the future. In part, that is a different story.
dada wrote: "When doesn't government go overbudget?"
Care to explain why nationalized health care is vastly cheaper per person then in the US? Oh ya, and by virtually any objective standard, (say, rate of surgical errors, infant mortality) its better? Oh ya, and they cover everyone.
I think everyone agrees the US healthcare system is pathetic. Name one large, industiralized country which makes anything like the US system work better. (Name one that even tries?)
I live in California. We tried to deregulate the power industry. Didn't work out too well. Ever hear of the S&L bailout? Ya, that didn't work so well either. But theoretically they should have.
If the thoery doesn't fit reality, I toss out the theory first.
Just for scale, the US spends US$10 billion on health care about every two days (about 1/7th the GDP, convert annual GDP to per day...)
If we (the US) can pay the rate, say, Canada does per person (about 43% as much), there would have to be US$10 billion wastes of money every week to actually make health care cost more.
The most critical background to any LAPD abuse story is that LA has never had enough police officers. Apparently, the ratio of police to citizens is (at least historically) one of the smallest among major American cities. For decades there has been an unspoken agreement that LA won't hire enough cops, so those that we have use more force.
It is an idea our current police chief is trying to change.
Kirby wrote: Being happy and confident about doing mathematics does not imply compentency in mathematics. In fact, they have a reverse correlation
Between nations. Within nations it is the opposite. The article says: "Within a given nation, the high-confidence kids did better than their peers".
That is what makes the next statement more interesting: "Even the least confident students in Singapore outscored the most confident Americans." Meaning the worst students in Singapore are better then the best American students (at math). (Of course, this is an article, I didn't read the actual study - perhaps Singapore is an exception to the within a given nation norm - or has a bizzare curve).
So no, this isn't a correlation between confident about math and ability to do math at the individual level. It is between nations. That is why the article mentions the methods of instruction - which may not really matter much - perhaps the culture (particularly the parents emphasizing what is important) outweighs this factor.
If the authors wish to study the effacacy of various methods of instruction, it is pretty easy to look at America. As many others have mentioned here, many different types of instruction have been tried in America so it should be easy to find similar cultures with different methods to compare. As it stands, I doubt the actual study can disengage the cultural effect from the effect of a different method of instruction - although I have only read the article, so perhaps the full study acknowledges this and has some plan to deal with it.
I'm replying to this post not to critisize Kirby - the post is a highly valuable contribution to this discussion (so much of which is far, far from the content of the study) - but (hopefully) to clairify.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the quick summary of the historical trends by major:
From 1970 until 2010, US population grew by about a third. However, the number of bachelor's degrees granted doubled. This is reasonable - we have a more knowledge driven economy.
There were about 52 thousand engineering and computer degrees per year around 1970. By 2010, this number is about 120 thousand - so that more then doubled. Much of this is related to computer science/information degrees (not surprising). Engineering increased but failed to double.
Math/statistics degrees decreased from about 25 thousand per year to 15 thousand per year. That might be concerning.
Physical science degrees (mostly chemistry, some geology and physics) were unchanged: about 21 thousand per year up to about 23 thousand per year. That might not sound great.
Education degrees fell from 176 thousand per year to 101 thousand per year. Ya, that is probably not good.
So what boomed? Business degrees. From 115 thousand per year in 1970 up to 358 thousand per year in 2010, which is about 22% of all degrees granted. And if you look at salary and unemployment, they do not do too bad - about on par with life science majors; better than most majors.
After business degrees, social science degrees are the next largest category, but the raw number granted per year (from 1970 to 2010) did not grow very much.
Health care related degrees, performing arts and psychology also more then doubled.
You can find the breakdown of degrees by area in the US from:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp
You can find estimates of initial unemployment rates after getting a college degree, and expected earnings from:
http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/Unemployment.Final.update1.pdf
If anyone knows more links to other data sets, I would be very interested. I want to provide my students with the best data available.
If you are interested in physics, the American Institute of Physics (aip.org) under "Physics Resources", "Statistical Research" has a huge amount of data - if anyone has similar data for other STEM majors (actually, for any major) I'm interested.
A few reasons.
First, there actually are such organizations.
For example:
Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews
http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/
a journal that is free, open web access, and still peer-reviewed by experts in the field.
I cannot find any such journal in physics or biophysics. I can either submit to a print journal where it will not be open (for at least some period of time) for free or an open access journal for a lot of money.
At my university, I can get away with going with a low profile publication but I know most people do not have that luxury.
But some journals expressly forbid you posting your article there.
Actually, many nonprofit professional societies publish the best journals, such as the American Physical Society (APS) which publishes the Physical Review series of journals. It costs them money to do this, they charge basically university libraries money to buy it back, and really make no profit off it.
The other society I'm a member of, the biophysical society, actually just moved the printing of their journal (the Biophysical Journal) over to a for-profit company since it would be cheaper (according to the society).
One option is for the government to go to the professional societies and just pay whatever it costs to run one broad open access, online only, journal per discipline.
As has been pointed out, there is basically no overhead: editors are unpaid, reviewers are unpaid. Sure you have to post the papers online and you probably have to have some people hire and monitor the editors, etc, but in reality, I just can't see this as much of a big cost.
Then any and all of us who wish can submit to the open access journals or the traditional ones.
In MMO's you can't change the world in the sense that if you do a quest, say slay Hogger, and it prevents another person from doing the same quest, then the world would need sort of an infinite number of quests. It would be difficult to program. Otherwise it's first come, first kill, first to get the gear, first to advance and prevent others from advancing.
The best resource for MMO's is the playerbase. Anyone who can harness that creative energy to create content, beta test new content, grade potential new content and vote to put it into the game world will open a new frontier.
If you put in puzzle quests, someone will post the answer on a spoiler site, and many players will just read the site since they are just interested in advancing.
How many people actually read the quest text in WoW in detail? Versus how many just skip to the "go here, do this" part? I bet it is at least 10 to one.
So your design options are limited. Use a renewable resource.
In single player games, some of the same difficulties exist, but at least your actions can change the world in more meaningful ways: you kill Hogger, he stays dead. Maybe a new farm crops up at his old stomping grounds. Maybe new people come in and have new quests.
But in an MMO, what if I have the Hogger quest, and now he's gone?
To be honest, I would not try to overcome that problem. I would try to work on the most pressing MMO problem, repetitive content. Maybe we have to accept the logical inconsistencies of the shared world (we kill Hogger, yet he is still there, we clear out all the Blackborrow Gnolls but they magically reappear).
But maybe we could have deep instanced content? Then the problem arises, what if I need a group? What if they are not all at the same place I am?
In conclusion, I think the MMO and single player experiences are so different it would be difficult to say something meaningful to both at once.
you don't like your job? Go get another. There's a bajillion IT jobs across a bunch of different industries, and IT workers are very, very mobile.
I couldn't express any more clearly the principle reason you IT folks should unionize.
The main argument against unionization is that your jobs will move overseas. A lot of that has already happened. However, there is a tremendous amount which will not, and can not, as the poster above points out.
This may not be the really interesting, high level work you want to do. It may mostly involve doing the mundane things needed on a daily basis to keep businesses moving. There is a lot of it, and right now as a consumer of IT, I can say it is done quite poorly.
The current situation with IT is what you get from market forces. You are not going to change them without doing something dramatic. If most of you IT folks are happy with it, that's fine.
However, I think there are good reasons to believe change will be well received. In my limited experience, both IT workers and their employers are unhappy with the current situation.
I'd recommend your new union start by:
1. setting a minimum and suggested salary table by state (region? zip code?)
2. only working hourly with paid overtime and vacation
3. fixed minimum pay for pager/emergency contacts of any kind
4. uniting against added visas
5. not trying to classify various IT people - it is a rapidly changing field.
6. publicly humiliate corporations which outsource.
What most of the critics of unions who posted above fail to understand is that there is no way we're going to have closed, union shops. That ship sailed long ago. Set a new standard as to how you should be treated and you have a chance to head that way.
Otherwise it's pager calls at 2am. If you are happy with that, be my guest.
Unions are run democratically. You elect your leaders. If you don't like them, fire them. If you elect idiots, you'll get what you deserve.
I'm pretty sure that is the point of the ESRB (regardless of personal opinion about its effectiveness). The biggest problem with the ESRB "tool" is that many (not all) parents either don't understand how to use the tool, don't think that the game content is an issue for their kid, or just don't care.
But once you give them the tool, it doesn't matter if they choose not to use it. The ball is in their court.
My wife and I do edit the content our kids see. I wish it were easier.
So now that I have kids, I play WoW since I can log off at any moment (so long as I'm not grouped) and just not care. I used to play Eq and I'm not sure if anyone would say that took "skill" but perhaps more attention then Wow. I sort of had pipe dreams about returning to Eq once my kids are a bit older. My friend played Eq with some botting software and it was better then me. I was good - but properly tuned the bot software was just perfect. And somehow I just lost interest.
No, it isn't totally rational. I enjoy leveling up in WoW. I guess the real high skill stuff such as raids and PvP are just not in the cards for me (since I don't group much - have to be able to log off at any moment). But if everyone were botting around me, I'm really not sure I would do it. I think I'd just quit.
And it seems likely the bot software would get good enough to be flawless in more complex situations so that you'd actually rather have the bot for some roles simply because they won't screw up. Maybe raiding in WoW is too sophisticated for that. I couldn't tell ya.
I don't see why most games can't give users the tools to self filter. At that point, it's the parent's responsibility.
"I don't claim to know anything about journalism (just science), but one thing that I continually hear from experienced journalists is that every article needs to have a story. It's not enough to say that a theory that has undergone rigorous testing has now been extended in an esoterically exciting way. As much as the discovery is truly newsworthy, the effort to convince the audience that something is newsworthy in a non-technical forum is usually not worth the effort. However, if there is a narrative behind the story -- a conflict -- then perhaps people will keep reading and be compelled to research the science underlaying the story."
This is exactly the comment I wanted to make. However, my reading of it is not nearly as sympathetic as the parent. I don't read the news to be entertained, only informed. Any attempt to "spin" the facts into a narrative virtually invariably leads to the misrepresentation of facts. Of course science is complex and it is a great feat for the journalist to grasp it at all.
"Yet, I would rather see a light science articles that are interesting and easy to read than none at all, as long as the science is actually correct."
I totally agree, as would the author's article. However, the article cited is getting at a different point: perhaps the science is correct, but the addition of the "story" gives the wrong impression about how science works and, indirectly, how reliable the process is.
From Feynman's book "What do you Care what Other People Think": "the comptuers on teh shuttle are so obsolete that the manufacturers don't make them anymore. The memories in them are the old kind, made with little ferrite cores that have wires going through them. In the meantime we're developed much better hardware: the memory chips of today are much, much smaller; they have much greater capacity; and they're much more reliable." (page 192 of my copy, it's in chapter called An Inflamed Appendix).
Ran into a guy once who was in debt to Scientology. Apparently for a massive amount of money. It was very important to him to pay this off and to give them even more to "advance" within Scientology. I did not ask him but from everything I have read the story changes as you advance. These factors, in addition to what was mentioned above combine to separate Scientology from any major religion (in their current forms).
It should be trivial to separate Scientology from real religions. Whether or not you give genuine religions a tax break on property based on this is another story and one I don't particularly care about.
I was stunned when my first child was born how many acquaintances (including medical doctors) had latent anti-vaccination opinions. I've literally had people say to me: "Oh what a beautiful baby...I hope you're not vaccinating her."
But the shocking thing (to me) was that these folks have pediatricians who support zero vaccinations. One grandmother told me that none of her children had been vaccinated and that her grand children's pediatrician was a very careful man who studies all the outbreaks of various diseases and would only vaccinate her grand children if there was a nearby outbreak.
It's my understanding that these unvaccinated children cannot attend public schools - legally - but they do.
The reason it is unlikely we will have a vast deadly outbreak of, say, measles is that the vast majority of parents do vaccinate. (Although you can find recent outbreaks in American cities: http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/diseases/articles/2006/06/10/measles_outbreak_shows_a_global_threat/).
And so as long as the percentage of non-vaccinators stays very small, few of their children will die.
Despite the dozens of posts in this thread (many at least partly in jest) this is not darwinism, yet.
Further, some childhood diseases (most notably autism) show signs of onset some time during the rather lengthy vaccination cycle (often beginning at around 18 months of age).
With little hope of cure, even intelligent parents may be tempted to grasp for vengeance, even if the data is quite shaky.
Unless they are or become a sizable minority, the chances of any individual unvaccinated child dying a preventable death will remain pretty small. My question is not how many videos there are on youtube, but how many people don't vaccinate their children. The unvaccinated population may be quite significant already.
And, at the end of the day, that is why I know I made the right decision in vaccinating my child.
I'm wondering when technology will do away with the needs for as much server segregation. Yes, there need to be parallel copies of the world, but why can't I move between them more easily? I imagine if the game gets to the point where the low end of the level spectrum is nearly empty, there would be a self-organization of people playing lower level characters onto a specific copy of the world where they could group together.
The idea I voiced years ago for Everquest 1.0 was a server for 1-25 level players only. It would have been so much fun to play the game as it was originally intended, without the item influx and buff influx from all the bored end-level players. Warcraft has done away with virtually all of the more serious problems this could fix, however, if there was a need to concentrate the newbies in one place, open the server, limit the level to 25 (or whatever - I'm no WoW expert), and give every character a free transfer out when the reach maxlevel (or get within a couple/few levels of maxlevel). It would be such fun. People would stick around just to see what could be taken down by a dedicated horde of level 25's.
I looked into this briefly (on wowwiki). Are daily quests only for very high level players? Will there be new daily quests at the lower levels (under, say, 45)?
I had Madden Football one and two for the apple ][. Compared to contemporary games, they were great. Recently I was given, as gifts, modern versions (I think 1998 and 2004) and they had less functionality. Twenty years of development, and now I have virtually no control over my offensive line. I can't roll the pocket. I can't design my own trap or counter play. And my recollection is that I can design one custom pass route per play.
Further, I can't get updated player rosters - except from EA, and except for the year at hand. I don't understand why I can't copy EA's official San Diego Chargers team to my fake one and mess around with the stats or add or remove players.
Maybe I was unaware of all the features, but I lost interest pretty quickly.
At some point, it's no longer about telling a story. It's more about living in a world. I stopped at book six but I am curious how the whole thing turns out.
The Tomato Meter ratings of these films are: 14, 37, 44 - which (as I understand it) is the percent of favorable reviews.
Ya, and since "[the judge] measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers" the sentence should be the movie makers handing cash to this guy. He's advertising their crappy movies for them, for free.
Moraelin, great post. I totally agree. However, I see a low cost partial solution to these issues: let the players do it.
My comments sort of refer to fantasy settings because that is what I'm more familiar with. Also, much of this will not help powergamers. If you want to progress as fast as possible, and are not willing to slow down to help others, ultimately you are going to have to find people like you to play with. However, in my experience most people are willing to help others even at some disadvantage to themselves. Especially within guilds. A really strong guild system (give people a reason to join and to stay) will help.
Content Quality/Quests/Scripts: Players should rate quests and low rating quests or quests which simply no one completes should be examined periodically by the real dev team. However, as a reward for play, players should have the right to actually contribute content (or say content fixes) and either: (A) the next person to do the quest or enter the zone (space) should have the option to choose from the original or the player mod or (B) the dev team should examine these.
Further, my guild or I should be able to set up a quest vendor who offers rewards for the completion of specific tasks. What I'm envisioning is (at a minimum) the vendor giving money for a specific item - so it is just an "I'll buy X" bot. However, what I'd like to see is something more like: deliver this to location X (another guild quest vendor?) or explore this area, or kill this mob - etc. And I'd like people completing this to gain some kind of experience point bonus or stat gain. This requires some kind of risk/reward algorithm (and perhaps some kind of "level" limit on quests) so that I don't hand out trivial quests. Perhaps each character could have a limited number of these player quests they can complete per day or something if all else fails.
Balance: players vote with their feet. It really isn't hard to see what "classes" are in demand: just look at how many are played. Give bonuses for either playing or grouping with the least popular classes. A slight bonus which automatically readjusts, say, monthly (real time) or perhaps weekly will encourage people to play what they really want to play. If everyone jumps on the bandwagon of, say, the "bad" class, then it becomes popular and thus looses the bonus. If the class is just broken or there are simply too many similar classes (for example in Everquest, there were simply too many classes to deal damage) people won't play the class, or spend lots of time seeking groups. This should be tracked and the results should be made public. Hiding or pretending not to know what is going on is no solution. At this point, there actually has to be dialog between players and designers and some code change has to occur. The whole slight exp bonus may help small imbalances, obviously it cannot cover large ones.
Content Balance: players won't use bad content. Analyze what is getting used. Give bonuses for switching or using under-used content. This will correct slight imbalances. If some content is really broken, no one will use it. Identify that content (publically) and have an open dialog. Experienced players as a reward can use a "suggestion point" to offer recommendations. This limits the feedback and allows players to focus on perhaps a limited number of areas where they feel strongly.
Item Balance: if every person of a certain class/level has the same item, this may be bad. But it will show up statistically. Make that info public (agian, no use hiding) and if it is just every level 10 warrior does quest X and gets the icy sword of slowing, is that so bad? Maybe make more varients of the quest (race dependant?). If "slow" is a killer effect, e.g. I'm not letting any warrior in my party if they cannot "slow" the monsters - this is a serious problem. It will show up statistically. Obviously, other classes or other items need the ability to "slow".
In general, there should not be a formula for the perfec
Players should get to create "alternative" content as a reward. Other players should have the opportunity to go through "An_Orc_Cave_01" yet again, or "So-and-so's_Orc_Cave" for a change. Then the other players should rate the experience on a few different fronts.
The shift that has to occur is that designers have to think of their playerbase as a wing of their dev team - from whom they take recommendations, get content, get feedback and work for free - in fact, they pay you to hire them - the first MMO to do this well can become more popular then WoW.
I sincerely doubt any one company will (1) write the game engine and (2) develop the content and (3) offer the customer service and (4) host the game on their servers in the future. In part, that is a different story.
dada wrote: "When doesn't government go overbudget?"
n _health_care_systems_compared
Care to explain why nationalized health care is vastly cheaper per person then in the US? Oh ya, and by virtually any objective standard, (say, rate of surgical errors, infant mortality) its better? Oh ya, and they cover everyone.
I think everyone agrees the US healthcare system is pathetic. Name one large, industiralized country which makes anything like the US system work better. (Name one that even tries?)
I live in California. We tried to deregulate the power industry. Didn't work out too well. Ever hear of the S&L bailout? Ya, that didn't work so well either. But theoretically they should have.
If the thoery doesn't fit reality, I toss out the theory first.
Just for scale, the US spends US$10 billion on health care about every two days (about 1/7th the GDP, convert annual GDP to per day...)
If we (the US) can pay the rate, say, Canada does per person (about 43% as much), there would have to be US$10 billion wastes of money every week to actually make health care cost more.
See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_and_America
The most critical background to any LAPD abuse story is that LA has never had enough police officers. Apparently, the ratio of police to citizens is (at least historically) one of the smallest among major American cities. For decades there has been an unspoken agreement that LA won't hire enough cops, so those that we have use more force.
It is an idea our current police chief is trying to change.
Kirby wrote: Being happy and confident about doing mathematics does not imply compentency in mathematics. In fact, they have a reverse correlation
Between nations. Within nations it is the opposite. The article says: "Within a given nation, the high-confidence kids did better than their peers".
That is what makes the next statement more interesting: "Even the least confident students in Singapore outscored the most confident Americans." Meaning the worst students in Singapore are better then the best American students (at math). (Of course, this is an article, I didn't read the actual study - perhaps Singapore is an exception to the within a given nation norm - or has a bizzare curve).
So no, this isn't a correlation between confident about math and ability to do math at the individual level. It is between nations. That is why the article mentions the methods of instruction - which may not really matter much - perhaps the culture (particularly the parents emphasizing what is important) outweighs this factor.
If the authors wish to study the effacacy of various methods of instruction, it is pretty easy to look at America. As many others have mentioned here, many different types of instruction have been tried in America so it should be easy to find similar cultures with different methods to compare. As it stands, I doubt the actual study can disengage the cultural effect from the effect of a different method of instruction - although I have only read the article, so perhaps the full study acknowledges this and has some plan to deal with it.
I'm replying to this post not to critisize Kirby - the post is a highly valuable contribution to this discussion (so much of which is far, far from the content of the study) - but (hopefully) to clairify.