The article mentions that the contractor was afraid to bring up problems.
That, plus the mentality from management that people who bring up problems are "troublemakers," "negative," "not team players," etc. (because they've put too much of their ego or political capital into a project) has got to be responsible for more disasters, large and small, than any other deadly combination.
I worked for a large nonprofit that blew money on doomed projects as though money grew on trees. Each time, it started with somebody, usually a contractor or somebody else who stood to gain from it, flattering the leadership that this was huge and visionary and would make or save them millions. Then the organizational mind control started, where everybody was saying that it was the greatest thing ever. Then the flawed project management started. Then when the cracks were obvious, people who pointed them out were vilified as naysayers. It was only the lower-downs who said anything because to rise, one had to be a "team player," and the organization was hierarchical enough that lower-downs were ignored. Then denial that there were problems, together with tossing more money at it (including adding more people to a software project at the last minute because that always works). Then even when the leadership [sic] team [sic] all realized there were problems, they all waited until the person responsible for the project was willing to concede defeat. because in a political environment, nobody wants to confront somebody who might retaliate
Those elements are the inevitable recipe for disaster for any project, but it's fear that drives virtually all of them. Fear of not looking good (note that the Congresscritter didn't yell about wasting taxpayer money, she yelled about being made to look bad), loss aversion, fear of admitting a mistake, fear of speaking up.
Pellerin was brave enough to do something technically illegal and scrape up the funds for servicing it.
Privacy for the individual developed as a concept when we moved away from living in small settings where everybody knew your name, your family, your business, what you bought and sold, and so on, and where families lived in one or two rooms, to the big cities where anonymity was possible. Even in the big city,people had their privacy only through anonymity and technical limitations--very few organizations had the ability to identify individuals out of the crowd unless that individual had done something to draw attention and they had the resources to track them.
My guess is that the perceived right to privacy is going to disappear very soon that virtually any corporation can track individuals.
The biggest precedent for a perceived right disappearing because it's 1) possible and 2) desirable for a large/powerful enough group to make it disappear is actually sharing media.
Society at large used to think that media couldn't be shared without paying for it and that there was an inherent right of the manufacturer to control how books and music were distributed. But when books and music went to a digital and easily reproduced and easily shared format, for many individuals, probably even the majority, a lot of people perceive it as a right that belong to the individual, once it was possible. It started small-scale, with audio cassettes, and now is wide-scale online.
Now that information about the individual can be as easily gathered and shared, corporations and individuals are changing their perspective of privacy and their rights. Because an organization can gather data about individuals incredibly easily, it will, and share it equally easily. I'd estimate that in 50-100 years, individuals will have redress for data gathering only if they can prove direct harm, not whether it was done with or without their knowledge or consent.
I think that was one of the more optimistic aspects of the Trekverse, that people would be inspired to continue to work in order to be part of a great undertaking or for other intrinsic motivations. (I nearly said "greater enterprise" there but my shame module kicked in at the last minute.)
Not everybody might, but in all the population of the galaxy, you figure that even if fifteen percent of the population is interested in making discoveries, improving things, perpetuating making things by hand for the pleasure of craftsmanship, improving lives, and so on, that would provide more than enough researchers, engineers, doctors and counselors, peacekeepers, artists and artisans, archaeologists, authors, explorers, and so on.
I'm thinking of the people I know who, if they were suddenly handed enough money that they didn't have to earn a living, would still work in some way, either because they love what they're doing now or to follow some kind of other dream. There are people who would be engineers still, some would be world travelers, some would try their hand at writing, others would do volunteer work, while others would happily enjoy leisure.
A world without need wouldn't necessarily be a world without work, it would just be one where work would be optional.
Why? Why do you want to understand these people? I'm serious. Why deliberately fill your head with hatred and evil and seek to know what motivates these people? Can you? Is it possible? To what end?
Not the original poster, but there are a lot of valid reasons to view hate sites. (Leaving aside the intellectual freedom issues, etc.)
1. Simple intellectual curiosity into the motivations of terrorists, militant racists, etc..
2. In order to better evaluate the positions that politicians take in fighting terrorism or hate crimes. If I don't know what drives them, how can I evaluate how people want to stop them? How can I best vote and contribute as a citizen?
3. The same morbid curiosity that drives people to read real crime novels/watch movies about serial killers. It's not necessarily a "good" reason but it's a valid one.
4. Professional interest from mental health/cognitive professionals.
5. A friend/family member's concern about somebody who seems to be increasingly sympathetic to terrorists, militant racists, etc. I can't counter the white supremacist's/terrorist's/ethnic cleanser arguments if I don't know what they're arguing.
6. The desire of moderate Christians/Jews/Hindus/Muslims to argue against religiously-motivated terrorism by their co-religionists in general. Most of them do.
No, for supplemental media I meant more things like soundtracks and song downloads, mini-episodes for purchase, etc., things that aren't full-scale productions. Nurturing a fanbase also encourages the fans actually to buy the materials, especially because it's immediately available for download from the time of creation.
You are being yelled at to make money for your network, and you have two options on how to do it. You can pay a half dozen juggalos (or "real" housewives") a couple million dollars a year to act like idiots and make hundreds of millions profit. Or, you can spend hundreds of millions on a high-tech sci-fi scripted TV show that doesn't even break even. If you don't make money for the network. You get fired.
Scripted shows, especially ones targeted to children or sci-fi ones, can rake in hundreds of millions with related product sales. Toys, action figures, books/comics, supplemental media like iTunes songs, etc.. Once you cultivate a fanbase, merchandising is the big moneymaker that can go on and on and pay long-term dividends, long after a "90 percent real, the rest is plastic" Housewife has become a trivia question.
However, it's asking the networks to gamble on being able to create a fanbase and it requires longer-term thinking.
I'd like to see networks become much more experimental with cheap pilots and lesser-known actors and writers, even releasing just on YouTube, using all of the possible social media metrics beyond just Nielsen numbers and demographics (e.g. what is the critical number of rabid, moderate, and tepid fans and how do you define each of these; what's the payoff point for developing merchandise; how much will fans pay for supplemental media like special podcasts), and developing a much stronger and more varied innovation strategy based on low-cost experiments and a solid plan for adding or withdrawing resources at just the right timing point.
It's not just the musicians, it's the listeners, especially because of so many listening through earphones. If you listen to music with dynamic variations in an open area, a room, or through speakers, you pay more attention to the softer passages. If you listen through headphones, as often as not, you turn it up to have a constant volume in your ears.
Some people say that it started with the Wall of Sound, where everybody wanted that massive effect on everything, regardless of whether it was right for the album or song or not, others say that it started later, with boomboxes, but in any case, we've lost one of the most powerful ways to create musical tension and drama. Now there's pretty much only abrupt changes in tempo, which doesn't work for music where you need a constant beat, or suspensions, which only work for a while before they get too self-indulgent.
I think the entire concept of a "hate crime" is wrong. Isn't stuff like this already covered by "making threats" and "intimidation"?
Here's two similar situations:
1) A man at a bar repeatedly punches another man because he is wearing a t-shirt that shows his endorsement of a rival sports team.
2) A man at a bar repeatedly punches another man because he is wearing a skirt.
The actual crime here is assault and battery, In 1), that's all it would be, but in 2) they would tack on "hate crime", "bias intimidation", and all kinds of other crap. It'd go from a fine and a couple hundred hours of community service (at most) to a community-wide (if not nationwide) spectacle.
Now, I do understand that certain classes of people have had really, really horrible shit happen to them in the past. This is true for every country. They demand equality, they fight for it, and they are getting it - but then they also get a lot of special laws to protect them. I don't really see this as equal - more like swinging the pendulum the other way.
Except that a crime based on hate is a crime that has the effect of threatening an entire group.
If there's a place where gay people get punched because they're gay, then that's a place where they do not feel free to go, even though others can. They feel less safe collectively. If somebody attacks me because I'm female, that threatens all females because they are female.
It's the same reason that terrorism is different from general violence. If I kill a bank guard in order to rob a bank, the bank guard is just as dead as if I killed the guard because she's black. But the impact on the community is different and greater, which is why the crime is greater.
Remembering that information would conflict with the "Everything that is wrong or has gone wrong in the last 10 - 15 years is George W Bush's fault" pillar. Thus, down the memory hole with that.
The OP also failed to mention Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" speech along with all the various speeches from him and others in their government saying Israel has no right to exist.
Except that there's valid controversy about whether he meant "wipe Israel off the map" or "see the Israeli government disappear."
And even so, rhetoric to appeal to the base isn't necessarily the same as a direct statement of intent. Remember Reagan declaring the Soviet Union illegal and saying bombing would begin (as a sound test) or McCain singing "Bomb, bomb Iran?"
I prefer the more direct: "Numbers are like people. Torture them enough and they'll say whatever you want to hear."
More seriously, though, a solid predictive system usually needs both the qualitative and the quantitative analyses. These tools can inform decision-making, but can't make the decisions for anybody, unless the decisions are in the same discrete closed system. There aren't that many entirely closed systems in the world.
Mustafa Kemal Attaturk (literally, "Father of Turkey") is revered deeply in Turkey. On the anniversary and time of his death, everything stops for a minute of observance. Insulting him is the equivalent of insulting the king or royal family in Thailand, not only a legal offense but a very deep insult.
He's credited with the rebirth of Turkey as a viable state after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and with making it a thoroughly secular political system within a deeply Muslim society.
When I was last in Istanbul, I was chatting with a Turkish gentleman who hypothesized that Turkey is so sensitive to "insulting Turkishness" because it was such a great empire for so long.
Not that this excuses either this or any other of their attempts of censorship, but it is an interesting background.
Another issue is that the traditional way of meeting a mate was through friends, schools, and physical social networks, so potential mates came more or less recommended or at least pre-approved. Meeting, courtship, and mating were almost entirely community functions that had a high community stake in success. We weren't fully conscious of our stake in their marriage and almost inevitable child-rearing, but we were aware that "good" marriages and families are an important part of our community's success.
Meeting online is more or less depriving the community of having a say, making a part-communal, part-individual function entirely individual. It's also possible that in a time where instead of involving marriage and children, many relationships and families involve neither, communities are adjusting to that, as well, the total redefinition of a family as being a contract between two individuals who do what pleases them, with less regard to traditional expectations of marriage and children.
In all my hiring, I've learned to look first for the aptitude and integrity. You can turn somebody with the aptitude and integrity into somebody with the skills, too.
You can't teach integrity (which I define as work ethic, honesty, and consideration of others) or aptitude (which I define roughly as a grounding in the discipline, accomplishments in that field or any other that show the potential to develop any skills they don't have, and those tell-tale signs of addiction to learning).
Then my job as a manager is to develop the heck out of them (coach, teach, send to training, whatever they tell me they need), move every single obstacle I can out of their way, and to raise them up on my shoulders, not the other way around.
Once I was desperate to fill a seat during a major project and hired the person who had every single skill I needed but whose work ethic I wondered about a bit during the interview. He was the only employee I ever fired.
Results of hiring for integrity: All the others I'd have trusted with my life, let alone my career (which as a manager, I do), and they have done nothing but exceed my expectations.
If you pick trustworthy people and genuinely trust them (which includes letting them make as many of their own decisions as possible on everything, helping them decide rather than dictating decisions, not just giving them access to the secure database or whatever), they will be the best security in the world.
Making a concordance (list of words and where they appear) is indeed easy. Turning that into an index, also easy.
Making a good index is hard.
For example, for an index, you need a controlled vocabulary, cross references, and logical and consistent taxonomy. For example, in a book about animals, you might have index entries on common name, variants of the common name, species, genus, or habitat.
It requires knowledge of the audience, to know how they're most likely to look for information, and of the topic itself, to make sure that all the text is covered appropriately and that the terms aren't misleading or counter-intuitive.
America's Second Harvest http://www.secondharvest.org/is also responding to the disaster. Please think about giving regularly to them or another food bank, as nearly all local food banks will be experiencing real difficulties probably for the next year. Or if regular gifts are out of your budget range, perhaps give once again after six months or so.
Many of the nearby food banks that aren't themselves in affected areas are sending their own supplies to the affected areas, so they're going to be going low for a while. Additionally, the food banks in the affected areas will experience increased demand over the next year, at least, as people try to recover economically, and many of their local donors will probably be unable to give to them because of their own changed financial circumstances.
Preserving the past gives people a sense of heritage and a sense of how far we've come. Having things like this around is a reminder, and it will be even more of a reminder in, oh, 100 years, when people will look at it and say "They went to space in THAT!?!?"
There's also, for most people, a sense of wonder at looking at the thing that made history, instead of looking at photographs or spec sheets. Probably everybody in the US has access to great photographs of the Washington Monument, Vietnam Vets wall, Lincoln Memorial, etc. but think of the hundreds of thousands who visit DC to see those with their own eyes. And they aren't the historians or the social scientists, they're the people who maybe develop a better sense of history through experiencing it that way.
It's probably the same thing that makes a lot of people want autographed books even though the ones without autographs have the exact same text and cover and so on. It's being one step closer to greatness.
At the risk of heading offtopic very rapidly, regardless of the show's other merits, Enterprise has one of the greatest openings of any show I've seen, because of the tribute it pays to people and projects that helped pave the way.
One problem might be that with bodies rotting so quickly in the heat and waterlogged conditions, mass burials are necessary and time might not allow for immediate identification. Possibly they might take some samples for later DNA testing?
Technology could also come into play much later, should forensics experts come back to identify bodies in those mass graves for individual burials.
Just guesses--I have absolutely no experience or expert knowledge.
Spam costs the user nothing to send because the recipient either buys in or deletes. What would happen if recipients who have no intention of buying string the spammer along, pretending to want to buy, getting quotes for bulk orders, wanting to know about origins, asking all kinds of pointless questions, etc..
Of course, if only a few people did this, it wouldn't have any effect, but if it happened on a huge scale, it would make spammers' lives more difficult.
There could be any number of reasons why you have insomnia and if you have health insurance, I'd strongly recommend going to your doctor and insisting on a thorough workup.
A thorough one would consist of allergy tests and various biochemical tests or examination of the possibilities. It would also look at things like whether you're sleeping in a dark enough room (melatonin can only be produced by the body under fairly dark conditions). The doctor might even be able to send you to a sleep lab.
As other posters have already mentioned, alcohol might get you to sleep but it will disrupt the quality of sleep, so that while you'll get some psychological relief, it won't provide much physical relief.
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions that the contractor was afraid to bring up problems.
That, plus the mentality from management that people who bring up problems are "troublemakers," "negative," "not team players," etc. (because they've put too much of their ego or political capital into a project) has got to be responsible for more disasters, large and small, than any other deadly combination.
I worked for a large nonprofit that blew money on doomed projects as though money grew on trees. Each time, it started with somebody, usually a contractor or somebody else who stood to gain from it, flattering the leadership that this was huge and visionary and would make or save them millions. Then the organizational mind control started, where everybody was saying that it was the greatest thing ever. Then the flawed project management started. Then when the cracks were obvious, people who pointed them out were vilified as naysayers. It was only the lower-downs who said anything because to rise, one had to be a "team player," and the organization was hierarchical enough that lower-downs were ignored. Then denial that there were problems, together with tossing more money at it (including adding more people to a software project at the last minute because that always works). Then even when the leadership [sic] team [sic] all realized there were problems, they all waited until the person responsible for the project was willing to concede defeat. because in a political environment, nobody wants to confront somebody who might retaliate
Those elements are the inevitable recipe for disaster for any project, but it's fear that drives virtually all of them. Fear of not looking good (note that the Congresscritter didn't yell about wasting taxpayer money, she yelled about being made to look bad), loss aversion, fear of admitting a mistake, fear of speaking up.
Pellerin was brave enough to do something technically illegal and scrape up the funds for servicing it.
That is what a leader does.
Privacy for the individual developed as a concept when we moved away from living in small settings where everybody knew your name, your family, your business, what you bought and sold, and so on, and where families lived in one or two rooms, to the big cities where anonymity was possible. Even in the big city,people had their privacy only through anonymity and technical limitations--very few organizations had the ability to identify individuals out of the crowd unless that individual had done something to draw attention and they had the resources to track them.
My guess is that the perceived right to privacy is going to disappear very soon that virtually any corporation can track individuals.
The biggest precedent for a perceived right disappearing because it's 1) possible and 2) desirable for a large/powerful enough group to make it disappear is actually sharing media.
Society at large used to think that media couldn't be shared without paying for it and that there was an inherent right of the manufacturer to control how books and music were distributed. But when books and music went to a digital and easily reproduced and easily shared format, for many individuals, probably even the majority, a lot of people perceive it as a right that belong to the individual, once it was possible. It started small-scale, with audio cassettes, and now is wide-scale online.
Now that information about the individual can be as easily gathered and shared, corporations and individuals are changing their perspective of privacy and their rights. Because an organization can gather data about individuals incredibly easily, it will, and share it equally easily. I'd estimate that in 50-100 years, individuals will have redress for data gathering only if they can prove direct harm, not whether it was done with or without their knowledge or consent.
I think that was one of the more optimistic aspects of the Trekverse, that people would be inspired to continue to work in order to be part of a great undertaking or for other intrinsic motivations. (I nearly said "greater enterprise" there but my shame module kicked in at the last minute.)
Not everybody might, but in all the population of the galaxy, you figure that even if fifteen percent of the population is interested in making discoveries, improving things, perpetuating making things by hand for the pleasure of craftsmanship, improving lives, and so on, that would provide more than enough researchers, engineers, doctors and counselors, peacekeepers, artists and artisans, archaeologists, authors, explorers, and so on.
I'm thinking of the people I know who, if they were suddenly handed enough money that they didn't have to earn a living, would still work in some way, either because they love what they're doing now or to follow some kind of other dream. There are people who would be engineers still, some would be world travelers, some would try their hand at writing, others would do volunteer work, while others would happily enjoy leisure.
A world without need wouldn't necessarily be a world without work, it would just be one where work would be optional.
Man, I need to make some friends who aren't bank robbers.
Not the original poster, but there are a lot of valid reasons to view hate sites. (Leaving aside the intellectual freedom issues, etc.)
1. Simple intellectual curiosity into the motivations of terrorists, militant racists, etc..
2. In order to better evaluate the positions that politicians take in fighting terrorism or hate crimes. If I don't know what drives them, how can I evaluate how people want to stop them? How can I best vote and contribute as a citizen?
3. The same morbid curiosity that drives people to read real crime novels/watch movies about serial killers. It's not necessarily a "good" reason but it's a valid one.
4. Professional interest from mental health/cognitive professionals.
5. A friend/family member's concern about somebody who seems to be increasingly sympathetic to terrorists, militant racists, etc. I can't counter the white supremacist's/terrorist's/ethnic cleanser arguments if I don't know what they're arguing.
6. The desire of moderate Christians/Jews/Hindus/Muslims to argue against religiously-motivated terrorism by their co-religionists in general. Most of them do.
No, for supplemental media I meant more things like soundtracks and song downloads, mini-episodes for purchase, etc., things that aren't full-scale productions. Nurturing a fanbase also encourages the fans actually to buy the materials, especially because it's immediately available for download from the time of creation.
Oh, yes, and the way they felt so slick in your hands and were sometimes warm right off the mimeograph machine.
You are being yelled at to make money for your network, and you have two options on how to do it. You can pay a half dozen juggalos (or "real" housewives") a couple million dollars a year to act like idiots and make hundreds of millions profit. Or, you can spend hundreds of millions on a high-tech sci-fi scripted TV show that doesn't even break even. If you don't make money for the network. You get fired.
Scripted shows, especially ones targeted to children or sci-fi ones, can rake in hundreds of millions with related product sales. Toys, action figures, books/comics, supplemental media like iTunes songs, etc.. Once you cultivate a fanbase, merchandising is the big moneymaker that can go on and on and pay long-term dividends, long after a "90 percent real, the rest is plastic" Housewife has become a trivia question. However, it's asking the networks to gamble on being able to create a fanbase and it requires longer-term thinking. I'd like to see networks become much more experimental with cheap pilots and lesser-known actors and writers, even releasing just on YouTube, using all of the possible social media metrics beyond just Nielsen numbers and demographics (e.g. what is the critical number of rabid, moderate, and tepid fans and how do you define each of these; what's the payoff point for developing merchandise; how much will fans pay for supplemental media like special podcasts), and developing a much stronger and more varied innovation strategy based on low-cost experiments and a solid plan for adding or withdrawing resources at just the right timing point.
Of course, the mice actually decided that this was the easiest way to get humans to serve as genetic test subjects for them.
It's not just the musicians, it's the listeners, especially because of so many listening through earphones. If you listen to music with dynamic variations in an open area, a room, or through speakers, you pay more attention to the softer passages. If you listen through headphones, as often as not, you turn it up to have a constant volume in your ears.
Some people say that it started with the Wall of Sound, where everybody wanted that massive effect on everything, regardless of whether it was right for the album or song or not, others say that it started later, with boomboxes, but in any case, we've lost one of the most powerful ways to create musical tension and drama. Now there's pretty much only abrupt changes in tempo, which doesn't work for music where you need a constant beat, or suspensions, which only work for a while before they get too self-indulgent.
Hey! Get off my lawn!
I think the entire concept of a "hate crime" is wrong. Isn't stuff like this already covered by "making threats" and "intimidation"?
Here's two similar situations:
1) A man at a bar repeatedly punches another man because he is wearing a t-shirt that shows his endorsement of a rival sports team.
2) A man at a bar repeatedly punches another man because he is wearing a skirt.
The actual crime here is assault and battery, In 1), that's all it would be, but in 2) they would tack on "hate crime", "bias intimidation", and all kinds of other crap. It'd go from a fine and a couple hundred hours of community service (at most) to a community-wide (if not nationwide) spectacle.
Now, I do understand that certain classes of people have had really, really horrible shit happen to them in the past. This is true for every country. They demand equality, they fight for it, and they are getting it - but then they also get a lot of special laws to protect them. I don't really see this as equal - more like swinging the pendulum the other way.
Except that a crime based on hate is a crime that has the effect of threatening an entire group. If there's a place where gay people get punched because they're gay, then that's a place where they do not feel free to go, even though others can. They feel less safe collectively. If somebody attacks me because I'm female, that threatens all females because they are female. It's the same reason that terrorism is different from general violence. If I kill a bank guard in order to rob a bank, the bank guard is just as dead as if I killed the guard because she's black. But the impact on the community is different and greater, which is why the crime is greater.
Remembering that information would conflict with the "Everything that is wrong or has gone wrong in the last 10 - 15 years is George W Bush's fault" pillar. Thus, down the memory hole with that.
The OP also failed to mention Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" speech along with all the various speeches from him and others in their government saying Israel has no right to exist.
Except that there's valid controversy about whether he meant "wipe Israel off the map" or "see the Israeli government disappear." And even so, rhetoric to appeal to the base isn't necessarily the same as a direct statement of intent. Remember Reagan declaring the Soviet Union illegal and saying bombing would begin (as a sound test) or McCain singing "Bomb, bomb Iran?"
Sasha Gomez? Is that you?
Which is odd, because Fire-breathing Chickens can easily start the flaming.
I prefer the more direct: "Numbers are like people. Torture them enough and they'll say whatever you want to hear."
More seriously, though, a solid predictive system usually needs both the qualitative and the quantitative analyses. These tools can inform decision-making, but can't make the decisions for anybody, unless the decisions are in the same discrete closed system. There aren't that many entirely closed systems in the world.
He's credited with the rebirth of Turkey as a viable state after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and with making it a thoroughly secular political system within a deeply Muslim society.
When I was last in Istanbul, I was chatting with a Turkish gentleman who hypothesized that Turkey is so sensitive to "insulting Turkishness" because it was such a great empire for so long.
Not that this excuses either this or any other of their attempts of censorship, but it is an interesting background.
Meeting online is more or less depriving the community of having a say, making a part-communal, part-individual function entirely individual. It's also possible that in a time where instead of involving marriage and children, many relationships and families involve neither, communities are adjusting to that, as well, the total redefinition of a family as being a contract between two individuals who do what pleases them, with less regard to traditional expectations of marriage and children.
In all my hiring, I've learned to look first for the aptitude and integrity. You can turn somebody with the aptitude and integrity into somebody with the skills, too.
You can't teach integrity (which I define as work ethic, honesty, and consideration of others) or aptitude (which I define roughly as a grounding in the discipline, accomplishments in that field or any other that show the potential to develop any skills they don't have, and those tell-tale signs of addiction to learning).
Then my job as a manager is to develop the heck out of them (coach, teach, send to training, whatever they tell me they need), move every single obstacle I can out of their way, and to raise them up on my shoulders, not the other way around.
Once I was desperate to fill a seat during a major project and hired the person who had every single skill I needed but whose work ethic I wondered about a bit during the interview. He was the only employee I ever fired.
Results of hiring for integrity: All the others I'd have trusted with my life, let alone my career (which as a manager, I do), and they have done nothing but exceed my expectations.
If you pick trustworthy people and genuinely trust them (which includes letting them make as many of their own decisions as possible on everything, helping them decide rather than dictating decisions, not just giving them access to the secure database or whatever), they will be the best security in the world.
Sorry, I wasn't fully clear. Often it's not the author who creates the index; very often, it's somebody at the publishers or a freelancer.
Making a good index is hard.
For example, for an index, you need a controlled vocabulary, cross references, and logical and consistent taxonomy. For example, in a book about animals, you might have index entries on common name, variants of the common name, species, genus, or habitat.
It requires knowledge of the audience, to know how they're most likely to look for information, and of the topic itself, to make sure that all the text is covered appropriately and that the terms aren't misleading or counter-intuitive.
Many of the nearby food banks that aren't themselves in affected areas are sending their own supplies to the affected areas, so they're going to be going low for a while. Additionally, the food banks in the affected areas will experience increased demand over the next year, at least, as people try to recover economically, and many of their local donors will probably be unable to give to them because of their own changed financial circumstances.
I'm not affiliated with Second Harvest or anything like that, but I respect their work. Less than two percent goes to overhead and all the rest goes to actual services. http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm/bay/sear ch.summary/orgid/5271.htm
There's also, for most people, a sense of wonder at looking at the thing that made history, instead of looking at photographs or spec sheets. Probably everybody in the US has access to great photographs of the Washington Monument, Vietnam Vets wall, Lincoln Memorial, etc. but think of the hundreds of thousands who visit DC to see those with their own eyes. And they aren't the historians or the social scientists, they're the people who maybe develop a better sense of history through experiencing it that way.
It's probably the same thing that makes a lot of people want autographed books even though the ones without autographs have the exact same text and cover and so on. It's being one step closer to greatness.
At the risk of heading offtopic very rapidly, regardless of the show's other merits, Enterprise has one of the greatest openings of any show I've seen, because of the tribute it pays to people and projects that helped pave the way.
Technology could also come into play much later, should forensics experts come back to identify bodies in those mass graves for individual burials.
Just guesses--I have absolutely no experience or expert knowledge.
Spam costs the user nothing to send because the recipient either buys in or deletes. What would happen if recipients who have no intention of buying string the spammer along, pretending to want to buy, getting quotes for bulk orders, wanting to know about origins, asking all kinds of pointless questions, etc..
Of course, if only a few people did this, it wouldn't have any effect, but if it happened on a huge scale, it would make spammers' lives more difficult.
Several folks have done this with the Nigerian Bank Frauds, sometimes getting the would-be fraudsters to make multiple trips to the airport, spend a lot of time in correspondence, and so on. Some have even gotten a bit of cash out of the scammers.
A thorough one would consist of allergy tests and various biochemical tests or examination of the possibilities. It would also look at things like whether you're sleeping in a dark enough room (melatonin can only be produced by the body under fairly dark conditions). The doctor might even be able to send you to a sleep lab.
As other posters have already mentioned, alcohol might get you to sleep but it will disrupt the quality of sleep, so that while you'll get some psychological relief, it won't provide much physical relief.
A good overview of insomnia and treatment from the sleep foundation.