On the other hand, that would make it a lot tougher for "observers to use the building as a fully functioning time piece" using those "12 o'clock markings on the ground and the podium."
The blurb and the original article are a bit spotty, unfortunately. One quote suggests the tower will move at 5mm/second, which means it almost certainly turns 360 degrees per day, just like a 24-hour timepiece's hour hand. (Although I suppose it could turn twice per day...) I had to go digging to find out what is correct. The 5mm per second makes sense on a per day basis(140x140 meter footprint vs. 1000x1000 meter footprint), but this article seems to suggest a per week basis:
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1773 432006
Twenty small electric engines will turn the building a few degrees each hour. Which would be on a week basis. They also mention specifically that it will be on a week basis in this article as well (something that was said in the previous article). Perhaps the engineer (who was quoted for both the 5mm per second and few degrees each hour), should go back and recheck his calculations...
Thanks for the correction. 360 degrees over 7 days means that there are still apartments with premium views on premium days. Getting stuck with a wall view on a Saturday/Sunday with a nice view of the river on Monday and Tuesday is like having it sunny all week and always raining on the weekends. Perhaps if they made it 360 degrees every 6 days then everyone could experience different views on different days and eliminate the issue of premium view apartments.
I read an article 5 or 6 years ago that predicted this change of thinking, that the smartest/brightest individuals wouldn't be the ones that knew everything, but the ones that could figure out information the fastest. Google, wikipedia, gps are all articles that allow you quick access to information. The authors argument that this will hinder our mental thought process ignores the fact that google, wikipedia, gps are all pretty useless unless we know what we are looking for in the first place.
Dude, your mistake was in quoting Foxnews as a reliable source for global warming news. This is the same station who claimed that Happy Feat was a propoganada attempt set forth by liberals to undermine American children http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/21/happy-feet-inc onvenient-truth/
Hibernation doesn't save any time when it comes back up to rebooting, it's more of a convenience when you need to shut down and don't feel like closing all your apps. You might get the 10 seconds off your reboot when it comes back up, but you're probably looking at several minutes of extra paging time once you get back to using your apps. I once made the mistake of hibernating my machine when it had Photoshop, Matlab, Visual studio, and 5-6 firefox windows open. I spent an additional 5 minutes just trying to close all those apps so I could restart the machine to get my performance back.
The only time I hibernate now is when my carpool is leaving and I need to shut down my laptop quick and don't have time to shut down everything. Standby isn't bad, but any savings that hibernate gives you are short lived.
This isn't true for Law and Order. At one of the top 10 law schools in the nation, law students watch law and order specifically to try and pick out parts that are not factual. It turns into a study guide for them as the writers actually took their time and made the law in the episodes as factual as possible.
I think everyone agrees that our social networking behavior is changing-- this has been known and suggested some five years prior to O'Reilly's statement. The issue most people have is with calling it a "problem" or "epidemic" on a social level. Some of the drawbacks you mention are already being filled in: People are using myspace to find other local people, online dating is starting to replace current dating practices-- socially these gaps will eventually be filled in.
Health wise, however, is another problem. Some of the healthiest things we can do impede with our technological social circles that we have created: It's difficult to talk on the phone while working out/running, nevermind check your email/myspace page. Eating at the dinner table means that we are disconnected from IM, so most of us end up bringing our food in front of our computer. Let's not even go on the effect that the digital lighting world has on our eyes.
What O'Reilly and businesses need to do is stop ignoring the digitial world and start using it to benefit others. Put funding into developing interior environments that are more suited for human eyes (this is a huge market that I, and many others, would certainly be consumers of). Design gyms, dieting, and other health activities that will recruit technology savy people to go to them (e.g. the iPod already has developed many extensions to their iPod's for health related activities). And lastly, stop pointing your fingers at the digital era and saying "Shame on you!". The only effect this will have is an increase in social anxiety and will have the exact opposite result that you wanted.
You got modded funny, but during the 2004 election, there were a group of people in my area that went around to the predominately poor and minority neighborhoods reminding people to vote... of course, the date they told them to go vote was the day after the election.
I can understand misleading commercials and the general propaganda that comes around election time (although I don't agree with it); but directly misleading with the basic information on how to vote is reminiscent of the laws created preventing blacks from voting in the south-- creating loophole laws that predominately favored whites. It is incredible that it still happens today. A prime example is the politician in California who sent a letter that ambiguously targeted both illegal and legal immigrants-- warning them not to vote.
#426527 +(4338)- [X]
We vegetarians love the environment. carnivores are sick freaks.
How can vegetarians possibly love the environment.. you keep eating all the fucking plants
A frog leaps out of the magical forest where he has lived all his life and into a real forest. Since he lived in the magical forest he has magical powers. He sees a bear chasing a rabbit and thinks to himself, this isn't right, everyone should live in peace. So he stops the bear and rabbit and tells them that if they stop chasing each other he'll give them both three wishes.
The bear thinks for a second and wishes that all the rest of the bears in the forest were female. Poof, all of them are female. Next the rabbit wishes for a crash helmet. The bear looks at the rabbit wondering why he would want a crash helmet.
The bear thinks for a second making sure he makes a good second wish and wishes that all the rest of the bears in the country were female. Again -- poof -- all the rest became female. Then the rabbit wishes for a motorcycle. Now the bear steps back and looks at the rabbit in amazment. How dumb is this rabbit he thinks to himself. All he had to do was wish for money and he could buy all the motorcycles he ever wanted. This has to be the dumbest creature the bear has ever seen, he thinks to himself.
It is time for the bear's final wish and he takes a second to think and makes sure he doesn't waste it. After a minute he wishes that all the other bears in the whole world were female. And again poof they are all female.
Next the rabbit puts on his helmet and jumps on the bike. He turns around and smiles. Then he says, ''I wish that that bear is gay.''
Nature vs. Nurture
on
The Next X Prize
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Before this turns into a large nature vs. nurture argument, I thought I'd pipe in here with a really great paper that really throws a wrench into the argument.
In one of the largest Nature vs. Nurture shakeups, it was shown that the maternal behavior of the mother can cause epigenetic variations in the child that ultimately cause the child to grow up to become a nurturing mother or a non-nurturing mother (http://www.neurobio.ucla.edu/~lmp/Meaney.pdf ). This is one of the biggest breakthroughs in Neurobiology connecting specific epigenetic alterations to behavioral response (yes, there were controls, switching mothers/children, read the paper for the full details).
However, the genetic alterations here are not on the sequence level, but rather on the Epigenetic level (the state of the DNA). Therefore sequencing the genome of two identical twins who had different mothers (one nurturing, one non-nurturing), can lead to entirely different epigenetic levels, yet the sequences would be identical. The take home message here is that while the underlying sequence is important and full sequences will certainly help in the understanding of biology, the underlying state is just as important. This epigenetic variation is also one of the causes of cellular differentiation (stem cells, etc.), and also certain cancer types. In an effort to make my post slightly controversial, I'd go as far to say that a high throughput epigenetic snapshot is probably more important for understanding success in individuals than the underlying DNA sequence (however, it is my hope that a high-throughput sequencing approach would be a first step towards a high-throughput epigenetic approach, as they are tightly coupled in a sense)-- as well as providing great breakthroughs in other areas of biology (tissue regeneration, cancer treatement, etc.).
So what if the ant goes by the amount of time it's been traveling; nothing to do with counting steps at all --?
Out of curiosity, how do you make an ant run? Besides the obvious magnifying glass on a hot sunny day (something tells me that might not stand up to the review process).
I'm aware of the funding etc. The reason why I say that it is more of a matter of opinion is that there is more going on here than just raw numbers. Being in Academia, I can tell you that the overall acceptance of grants submitted has dropped by 1/2 within the past few years. While asking science funding to increase to what it was like during the Cold War is a bit much, having a grant acceptance rate of 7-8% (which is some of the figures I've heard of recently). It doesn't help science at all when PI's are spending 2-3 times the amount of time writing grants to get funding than they did several years ago.
Again, there are so many ways to interpret science funding that it becomes more of a matter of opinion on how to interpret the facts.
I can see where some people would mark the parent as being a troll, but he really does hit on some good points.
It's a pretty well known fact that Graduate students and post docs are cheap labor for Academia. In most cases, Post-docs are cheaper to higher than Tech's. In reality, if we were to only train the number of PhD's that we have jobs for, then there would be no people to do science in Academia. This is where the well known phrase: "A PI is only as good as his/her graduate students" comes from. The glut of PhDs is being created to maintain the system. I'm not advocating that all PI's are cold hearted people, but you can usually tell those who are actually interested in "training" graduate students from those who need a few extra warm bodies to do work. This is why I've always gotten a chuckle when I hear people refer to graduate support as "training" grants.
However, stoping the flushing of newly minted PhD's out of the system is not the solution. What should be done is stoping the flushing of PhD STUDENTS out of the system. Some 40% of graduate students never complete their PhD. There are many reasons for this that I won't cover here, but this is where the waste and rip-off to US taxpayers comes from. Those who do graduate are actually doing productive work, perhaps have a few papers, etc-- taxpayers are usually getting their moneys worth from them regardless of whether they continue on in their chosen field or decide to work at McDonalds. Those who drop out often don't have anything productive to show for their training, and have basically justed wasted everyone's time (most especially their own).
As for the shortage of funding fallacy-- it is no fallacy. The NIH budget this year isn't good at all. The lack of funding for Academia is more prevelant now than ever before. If the funding opportunity was good, we wouldn't have so many new PhDs leaving the system. I don't want to start an argument about funding though-- there are so many ways/avenues/opinions that people can take on the matter that there really is no "correct" answer on whether it's good.
This is one of the most immature, angry responses I've ever read. If you can't put your emotions aside to respond to a post then any credibility on your part gets thrown out the window.
If the requirements in education for getting a job are going up, then so is the divide. If we have a job that requires skill level 2, and we remove it and replace it with a job that requires skill level 3 without adding any that are skill level 2, then the divide is growing. This article is evidence in and of itself that a divide in education requirements is occuring. As for the economical divide, the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is documented quite well.
We can argue the barriers that some people have for furthering their education all day long. The fact of the matter is that not everyone has the time to further their education. There are many reasons that this could exist, most of which are that the they don't have the finacial luxary to support themselves going through school-- especially considering that most college costs have doubled. Case in point: My great-grandfather dropped out of high school to help support the family. It wasn't what he had planned for in life, but he did it as the times required it. In another example: Are you saying that the man who lost his job and has a wife and 3 kids to support can take the time (and money) out of his life to better himself? That, in the less than 9 months before his unemployment runs out, he'll be able to get the education required to get that level 3 job? Chances are that he'll be spending every week living from paycheck to paycheck working two jobs just to make ends meet. Your definition of what "access" to education is varies from person to person. If it wasn't for my great-grandfather giving up his life for his families I probably wouldn't be sitting here where I am now-- 1/2 way through completing a Ph.D.
It's easy to look back on the past and say "they should have saw it coming and got out/prepared themselves better". The fact of the matter is that 10 years ago Computer Jobs such as programming and IT were the hot fields that everyone was trying to get themselves into so that when their job crashed they had somewhere to go. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.
In other words, outsourcing has actually helped our economy and provided new employment opportunities for the displaced, just like almost every respectable economist has said it would, just like it has always done over the years.
It's helped IT workers the same that it helped Autoworkers 20 years ago. From TFA:
expanding opportunities for those trained in fields such as software architecture, product design, project management and IT consulting
Depending on what one would call Software Architecture, most of these "expanding" fields are ones that require higher education than those who were displaced. The jobs that have been lost are the ones of entry level programmers, IT support individuals-- in fact, the expanding opportunities are ones that have not been moved, or have been minimally affected. The problem with the statement "everything is going to be ok" is that it's not ok for everyone.
Taking away a job from someone and then saying there's another job available but that it requires more skills is like taking a bone away from a dog and putting it onto of the fridge and saying "if you can get it, it's yours". Yes, the jobs are there, but unless you provide some assistance in training those displaced to fill those jobs then it still doesn't help those whos jobs were outsourced in the first place.
Every day the US is becoming a country where the educational and economical divide grows. The problem is that those on the top are increasing looking down on those below them, and those below them, are becoming increasing bitter of the fact that no-one is watching out for them. (I'm not advocating that outsourcing be banned, however, I am advocating that something be done to help those who were displaced)
But, how many people have heard about the silent protests the Hindus had? I personally didn't and I usually read international news sites as well. Now compare that to how many people are aware of the current protests. It woke the world up to the growing divide between the western world and muslims (both the cartoons and the protests).
Reminds me of that famous bumper sticker that went something along the lines of "Well behaved women rarely make history". This isn't always the case with history (e.g. MLK Jr.), but violent extremists do tend to be more of a wakeup call.
It's an article talking about how easy it is to implant memories that never existed into peoples minds. In fact, not only do people end up remembering things they've never seen, but they also end up adding additional information to the stories. It's a bit scary actually, but it's a good thought on how one might "break" the system.
Quoting the article: "It's one thing when implanting false memories is a laboratory experiment, but it's quite another when the accused wrongly end up in jail..."
I recently attended a talk about longetivity of humanity-- in particular about finding logetivity genes. One of the figures that was presented was on the average lifespan given per year. Since the late 1800's or so, every 10 years, the average lifespan increases by 2 1/2 years. It's a linear relationship that hasn't shown signs of slowing.
Not as impressive as the doubling of chip speeds, but when you think about it, the average person born today is going to live about 20 years longer than the people that were dying when they was born.
Some of these breakthroughs have been in the prevention of late term deaths, etc (I think the majority has been in lowering infant mortality). One of the problems I see is that we are living longer, but our metabolic rates are still at the same rate. The longer lifespan is starting to push back the age of marriage, and children. Unfortunately, our biological clocks are still set for a 25 and younger childbirth. While increasing the average lifespan is great, I think we need to actually start focusing on improving the quality of life before we end up with 1/2 our population in wheel chairs and wearing diapers far beyond their time because medicine is keeping them alive.
Can't find the original, but here's another that used playstations to teach students. A bit more comprehensive than the original one, but interesting nonetheless.
http://www.plato.com/downloads/evaluations/rodney. pdf
They did a study a few years ago where they took two seperate kindergarten classes and gave one class a (I believe) playstation as well as playstation learning games. I believe the playstation class was required to use the playstation for 1/2 an hour each day during class, and something like 1/2-1 hour later at home.
They tested the children before and after for both classes. They found that after the year was over, the children in the kindergarten class had a 25% improvement in their verbal skills, while the control class only had a 4% improvement. The math skills weren't significantly different at all (both had a 4% improvement), but they suggested that this was perhaps due to children not being that interested in math for that age.
I've been trying to find the original paper, but I don't have it on hand right now. I think it was done around 2000.
You can also figure out how much someone's house is worth, what they paid in taxes, etc.
It starts to get a little scary though when your search for public records reveals mortage applications with the individual's SS# listed on the sheet. All available online, and provided for by your very own government!
Same reason you would buy a lexus when you could buy kia. The more money you spend, the better the attorney, the more likely you will win.
I don't think you can have a public defender for a civil case though.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't read the discussion of the paper, but I'm curious if any of this can be attributed to the Uncanny Valley theory.
Thanks for the correction. 360 degrees over 7 days means that there are still apartments with premium views on premium days. Getting stuck with a wall view on a Saturday/Sunday with a nice view of the river on Monday and Tuesday is like having it sunny all week and always raining on the weekends. Perhaps if they made it 360 degrees every 6 days then everyone could experience different views on different days and eliminate the issue of premium view apartments.
I read an article 5 or 6 years ago that predicted this change of thinking, that the smartest/brightest individuals wouldn't be the ones that knew everything, but the ones that could figure out information the fastest. Google, wikipedia, gps are all articles that allow you quick access to information. The authors argument that this will hinder our mental thought process ignores the fact that google, wikipedia, gps are all pretty useless unless we know what we are looking for in the first place.
Dude, your mistake was in quoting Foxnews as a reliable source for global warming news. This is the same station who claimed that Happy Feat was a propoganada attempt set forth by liberals to undermine American children http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/21/happy-feet-inc onvenient-truth/
Hibernation doesn't save any time when it comes back up to rebooting, it's more of a convenience when you need to shut down and don't feel like closing all your apps. You might get the 10 seconds off your reboot when it comes back up, but you're probably looking at several minutes of extra paging time once you get back to using your apps. I once made the mistake of hibernating my machine when it had Photoshop, Matlab, Visual studio, and 5-6 firefox windows open. I spent an additional 5 minutes just trying to close all those apps so I could restart the machine to get my performance back.
The only time I hibernate now is when my carpool is leaving and I need to shut down my laptop quick and don't have time to shut down everything. Standby isn't bad, but any savings that hibernate gives you are short lived.
This isn't true for Law and Order. At one of the top 10 law schools in the nation, law students watch law and order specifically to try and pick out parts that are not factual. It turns into a study guide for them as the writers actually took their time and made the law in the episodes as factual as possible.
I think everyone agrees that our social networking behavior is changing-- this has been known and suggested some five years prior to O'Reilly's statement. The issue most people have is with calling it a "problem" or "epidemic" on a social level. Some of the drawbacks you mention are already being filled in: People are using myspace to find other local people, online dating is starting to replace current dating practices-- socially these gaps will eventually be filled in.
Health wise, however, is another problem. Some of the healthiest things we can do impede with our technological social circles that we have created: It's difficult to talk on the phone while working out/running, nevermind check your email/myspace page. Eating at the dinner table means that we are disconnected from IM, so most of us end up bringing our food in front of our computer. Let's not even go on the effect that the digital lighting world has on our eyes.
What O'Reilly and businesses need to do is stop ignoring the digitial world and start using it to benefit others. Put funding into developing interior environments that are more suited for human eyes (this is a huge market that I, and many others, would certainly be consumers of). Design gyms, dieting, and other health activities that will recruit technology savy people to go to them (e.g. the iPod already has developed many extensions to their iPod's for health related activities). And lastly, stop pointing your fingers at the digital era and saying "Shame on you!". The only effect this will have is an increase in social anxiety and will have the exact opposite result that you wanted.
You got modded funny, but during the 2004 election, there were a group of people in my area that went around to the predominately poor and minority neighborhoods reminding people to vote... of course, the date they told them to go vote was the day after the election.
I can understand misleading commercials and the general propaganda that comes around election time (although I don't agree with it); but directly misleading with the basic information on how to vote is reminiscent of the laws created preventing blacks from voting in the south-- creating loophole laws that predominately favored whites. It is incredible that it still happens today. A prime example is the politician in California who sent a letter that ambiguously targeted both illegal and legal immigrants-- warning them not to vote.
Before this turns into a large nature vs. nurture argument, I thought I'd pipe in here with a really great paper that really throws a wrench into the argument.
In one of the largest Nature vs. Nurture shakeups, it was shown that the maternal behavior of the mother can cause epigenetic variations in the child that ultimately cause the child to grow up to become a nurturing mother or a non-nurturing mother (http://www.neurobio.ucla.edu/~lmp/Meaney.pdf ). This is one of the biggest breakthroughs in Neurobiology connecting specific epigenetic alterations to behavioral response (yes, there were controls, switching mothers/children, read the paper for the full details).
However, the genetic alterations here are not on the sequence level, but rather on the Epigenetic level (the state of the DNA). Therefore sequencing the genome of two identical twins who had different mothers (one nurturing, one non-nurturing), can lead to entirely different epigenetic levels, yet the sequences would be identical. The take home message here is that while the underlying sequence is important and full sequences will certainly help in the understanding of biology, the underlying state is just as important. This epigenetic variation is also one of the causes of cellular differentiation (stem cells, etc.), and also certain cancer types. In an effort to make my post slightly controversial, I'd go as far to say that a high throughput epigenetic snapshot is probably more important for understanding success in individuals than the underlying DNA sequence (however, it is my hope that a high-throughput sequencing approach would be a first step towards a high-throughput epigenetic approach, as they are tightly coupled in a sense)-- as well as providing great breakthroughs in other areas of biology (tissue regeneration, cancer treatement, etc.).
I'm aware of the funding etc. The reason why I say that it is more of a matter of opinion is that there is more going on here than just raw numbers. Being in Academia, I can tell you that the overall acceptance of grants submitted has dropped by 1/2 within the past few years. While asking science funding to increase to what it was like during the Cold War is a bit much, having a grant acceptance rate of 7-8% (which is some of the figures I've heard of recently). It doesn't help science at all when PI's are spending 2-3 times the amount of time writing grants to get funding than they did several years ago.
Again, there are so many ways to interpret science funding that it becomes more of a matter of opinion on how to interpret the facts.
I can see where some people would mark the parent as being a troll, but he really does hit on some good points.
It's a pretty well known fact that Graduate students and post docs are cheap labor for Academia. In most cases, Post-docs are cheaper to higher than Tech's. In reality, if we were to only train the number of PhD's that we have jobs for, then there would be no people to do science in Academia. This is where the well known phrase: "A PI is only as good as his/her graduate students" comes from. The glut of PhDs is being created to maintain the system. I'm not advocating that all PI's are cold hearted people, but you can usually tell those who are actually interested in "training" graduate students from those who need a few extra warm bodies to do work. This is why I've always gotten a chuckle when I hear people refer to graduate support as "training" grants.
However, stoping the flushing of newly minted PhD's out of the system is not the solution. What should be done is stoping the flushing of PhD STUDENTS out of the system. Some 40% of graduate students never complete their PhD. There are many reasons for this that I won't cover here, but this is where the waste and rip-off to US taxpayers comes from. Those who do graduate are actually doing productive work, perhaps have a few papers, etc-- taxpayers are usually getting their moneys worth from them regardless of whether they continue on in their chosen field or decide to work at McDonalds. Those who drop out often don't have anything productive to show for their training, and have basically justed wasted everyone's time (most especially their own).
As for the shortage of funding fallacy-- it is no fallacy. The NIH budget this year isn't good at all. The lack of funding for Academia is more prevelant now than ever before. If the funding opportunity was good, we wouldn't have so many new PhDs leaving the system. I don't want to start an argument about funding though-- there are so many ways/avenues/opinions that people can take on the matter that there really is no "correct" answer on whether it's good.
This is one of the most immature, angry responses I've ever read. If you can't put your emotions aside to respond to a post then any credibility on your part gets thrown out the window.
If the requirements in education for getting a job are going up, then so is the divide. If we have a job that requires skill level 2, and we remove it and replace it with a job that requires skill level 3 without adding any that are skill level 2, then the divide is growing. This article is evidence in and of itself that a divide in education requirements is occuring. As for the economical divide, the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is documented quite well.
We can argue the barriers that some people have for furthering their education all day long. The fact of the matter is that not everyone has the time to further their education. There are many reasons that this could exist, most of which are that the they don't have the finacial luxary to support themselves going through school-- especially considering that most college costs have doubled. Case in point: My great-grandfather dropped out of high school to help support the family. It wasn't what he had planned for in life, but he did it as the times required it. In another example: Are you saying that the man who lost his job and has a wife and 3 kids to support can take the time (and money) out of his life to better himself? That, in the less than 9 months before his unemployment runs out, he'll be able to get the education required to get that level 3 job? Chances are that he'll be spending every week living from paycheck to paycheck working two jobs just to make ends meet. Your definition of what "access" to education is varies from person to person. If it wasn't for my great-grandfather giving up his life for his families I probably wouldn't be sitting here where I am now-- 1/2 way through completing a Ph.D.
It's easy to look back on the past and say "they should have saw it coming and got out/prepared themselves better". The fact of the matter is that 10 years ago Computer Jobs such as programming and IT were the hot fields that everyone was trying to get themselves into so that when their job crashed they had somewhere to go. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.
In other words, outsourcing has actually helped our economy and provided new employment opportunities for the displaced, just like almost every respectable economist has said it would, just like it has always done over the years.
It's helped IT workers the same that it helped Autoworkers 20 years ago. From TFA:
expanding opportunities for those trained in fields such as software architecture, product design, project management and IT consulting
Depending on what one would call Software Architecture, most of these "expanding" fields are ones that require higher education than those who were displaced. The jobs that have been lost are the ones of entry level programmers, IT support individuals-- in fact, the expanding opportunities are ones that have not been moved, or have been minimally affected. The problem with the statement "everything is going to be ok" is that it's not ok for everyone.
Taking away a job from someone and then saying there's another job available but that it requires more skills is like taking a bone away from a dog and putting it onto of the fridge and saying "if you can get it, it's yours". Yes, the jobs are there, but unless you provide some assistance in training those displaced to fill those jobs then it still doesn't help those whos jobs were outsourced in the first place.
Every day the US is becoming a country where the educational and economical divide grows. The problem is that those on the top are increasing looking down on those below them, and those below them, are becoming increasing bitter of the fact that no-one is watching out for them.
(I'm not advocating that outsourcing be banned, however, I am advocating that something be done to help those who were displaced)
But, how many people have heard about the silent protests the Hindus had? I personally didn't and I usually read international news sites as well. Now compare that to how many people are aware of the current protests. It woke the world up to the growing divide between the western world and muslims (both the cartoons and the protests).
Reminds me of that famous bumper sticker that went something along the lines of "Well behaved women rarely make history". This isn't always the case with history (e.g. MLK Jr.), but violent extremists do tend to be more of a wakeup call.
I'd like to point to: http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1213245. htm
It's an article talking about how easy it is to implant memories that never existed into peoples minds. In fact, not only do people end up remembering things they've never seen, but they also end up adding additional information to the stories. It's a bit scary actually, but it's a good thought on how one might "break" the system.
Quoting the article:
"It's one thing when implanting false memories is a laboratory experiment, but it's quite another when the accused wrongly end up in jail..."
I recently attended a talk about longetivity of humanity-- in particular about finding logetivity genes. One of the figures that was presented was on the average lifespan given per year. Since the late 1800's or so, every 10 years, the average lifespan increases by 2 1/2 years. It's a linear relationship that hasn't shown signs of slowing.
Not as impressive as the doubling of chip speeds, but when you think about it, the average person born today is going to live about 20 years longer than the people that were dying when they was born.
Some of these breakthroughs have been in the prevention of late term deaths, etc (I think the majority has been in lowering infant mortality). One of the problems I see is that we are living longer, but our metabolic rates are still at the same rate. The longer lifespan is starting to push back the age of marriage, and children. Unfortunately, our biological clocks are still set for a 25 and younger childbirth. While increasing the average lifespan is great, I think we need to actually start focusing on improving the quality of life before we end up with 1/2 our population in wheel chairs and wearing diapers far beyond their time because medicine is keeping them alive.
Can't find the original, but here's another that used playstations to teach students. A bit more comprehensive than the original one, but interesting nonetheless. http://www.plato.com/downloads/evaluations/rodney. pdf
They did a study a few years ago where they took two seperate kindergarten classes and gave one class a (I believe) playstation as well as playstation learning games. I believe the playstation class was required to use the playstation for 1/2 an hour each day during class, and something like 1/2-1 hour later at home.
They tested the children before and after for both classes. They found that after the year was over, the children in the kindergarten class had a 25% improvement in their verbal skills, while the control class only had a 4% improvement. The math skills weren't significantly different at all (both had a 4% improvement), but they suggested that this was perhaps due to children not being that interested in math for that age.
I've been trying to find the original paper, but I don't have it on hand right now. I think it was done around 2000.
In my county in NC, if you want a party affiliation all you need to do is look it up on the public records website:f m
http://www.co.durham.nc.us/common/PublRecordsdB.c
You can also figure out how much someone's house is worth, what they paid in taxes, etc.
It starts to get a little scary though when your search for public records reveals mortage applications with the individual's SS# listed on the sheet. All available online, and provided for by your very own government!
Same reason you would buy a lexus when you could buy kia. The more money you spend, the better the attorney, the more likely you will win. I don't think you can have a public defender for a civil case though.