Well, not all law. Military Justice, for example, works a bit differently. Neither side is allowed to ignore or hide relevant facts, although the individual's' rights under the Constitution are still protected, in theory. In actuality, of course, a Colonel's word carries more weight in testimony than a Private's word. Still, Military Justice tends to be a bit more objective with less "salesmanship" and misdirection than what you see in civilian criminal cases. Criminal Justice in Iceland, Denmark and Sweden work similarly, though those countries have a different scope for individual rights. I'm in the process of researching "Justice" in different countries right now. I would suggest a book by Mortimer Adler called, "Six Great Ideas" for anybody who wants to have a mind-expanding introduction to things like Truth and Justice.
In Texas, the prosecutor does not have to provide exculpatory evidence until the trial starts. Many times this exculpatory evidence is buried in paperwork, and the defense has no time to evaluate the merits of the prosecution's case. Last week a guy was released who served 13 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The reason for his conviction was laid to this practice of withholding exculpatory evidence until the trial.
Impassioned pleas for guilt or innocence are entertaining, but when the name of the game is "win at any cost", Justice suffers.
Advocacy is good up until the point that you get to exclude relevant facts inimical to your argument. then it just becomes a matter of winning, justice, fairness and truth be damned.
AFAIK, computers have not been shown to produce a 10-fold increase in productivity. Productivity has been increasing slightly over 1% per year, and computer technology has been only a small part of it. It takes about 40 years or so for an invention to create a leap in productivity. This held true for the steam engine electricity, telephone, fax machine, etc., and each one of them changed substantially from the time of their invention to the time of elegant use. My guess is that computer aided intelligence IS the point at which productivity jumps as part of that substantial change.
I remember that, but that isn't what I ws thinking of. I think the product may have been called something like, "NewView Accounting", but I'm not sure.
There are all kinds of User Interfaces out there, and the simple elements such as buttons and boxes are popular mostly because they constitute the huge majority of "conventional" expectations. Tcl/Tk will give your a little more control over offbeat interactive elements, and early game books for C/C++ programmers will give you even more. What you learn from a book like Charles Petzold's, "Windows Programming" 5th Ed. will give you even more control over what happens on the screen. Petzold wrote some great books, and his books on C# and VB.Net are also terrific. That will cover the basics of controlling what is seen on your screen very elegantly.
IMO, design considerations fall into two categories; Visual design and Usability design. Check out some of the features of Croquet and Project Looking glass. Neither of them is totally up to speed visually, but they are creating new usability. A flight simulator or game requires a different approach to make it usable. You might find some ideas there. Here's a question: How come managers are still reading reports to manage their business rather than simulating the business operations through a game interface? How come reports are still 2-Dimensional? Back in the early 80's I remember seeing an accounting program that allowed you to drill down in layers from the final reports to the details. Wish I could remember the name.
Last guideline: Never let your Visual Design (or bad taste) detract from your usability.
The CBS Innertube has been a good thing for me. I don't often watch TV, but the CIS stuff is fairly good and I hate to miss it. And Innertube works! Fox.com has a similar service, and ABC sucks. ABC requires your firewall to be dormant, you adblocker to be off, and now you have to allow images from sites other than the original, plus they have installed tracking software with the viewer download. On top of all that, their streaming is spotty and the some programs 'way out of date.
A HUGE amount of the market is in retirement funds or investment funds designed to be liquidated through retirement. My generation will be retiring soon, and withdrawing their funds from the market. If the USA keeps producing, it may be a good place for foreign investment that will buy the stocks being sold. However, there's about 10 Trillion dollars of off-balance-sheet liabilities in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare out there. (If the USA was Enron or Worldcomm, the last 8 Presidents and all the legislators would be in prison today.) I suspect that the government will fund these liabilities by inflating the currency and raising taxes, making the USA attractive investment opportunity for only China. The gambling schemes, including the derivatives you talk about, will fold. The world will get hungry...invest in food.
I support the investor's right to be as stupid as they wish. A buy and hold regulation won't do as much good as something like the Fair Tax Plan, increased personal debt reduction, a balanced budget, and reduced spending. Presumably, investments are property that an investor should be able to divest anytime. Leave the government out of it.
In some cases, the result seems to work more consistently.
I had a friend who worked in the AI department of Lockheed (about 20 years ago) and they developed the software that was used for the Robert Prector's Elliot Wave newsletter. Every two years they would give the program to a couple of people to try for 6 months. These people would invest $10,000, use the program and follow the guidelines, then evaluate the results. I was privy to the outcomes of three of these tests in the mid-nineties, and the lowest was earned $15,000 and the highest was earned $36,000. These are pretty good results. (However, the stock market was steadily climbing during those years and I wasn't able to compare results with EWT competition. Still, if I was able to consistently get 30%/year on my investments...)
Back in the 70's, Dean Witter had a program called PACE. I know two people who had a system for using it that earned them over $100,000/year, and they never deviated from the program while I knew them.
Then I have a friend who is a very conservative money manager (manages a couple hundred million of other people's money), and over the period that stocks crashed (remember Enron and Worldcomm?) he only had two clients lose any money, and the biggest loss was less than %15. He claims that these programs are mostly bunk. (This guy is a perfectionist, and I bet a computer is no more disciplined than he is.)
These programs are not investment management programs. The principles of investment management are pretty simple. The best book I know on the subject is still Benjamin Graham and David Dodd's book, "Security Analysis". However, the problem is finding opportunities that comply with the principles. Systematic data analysis by computer could have a profound effect, and that's what most of these programs do.
BTW, the article mentions that profits are slowing down: In Robert Prector's book, "The Elliott Wave Theory" and in his newsletter, he sort of predicts that as information becomes more available for analysis trading will be done more rapidly on spreads that may show profits as low as 1.5%
IMO, most people spend more time evaluating their next computer or car purchase than they do their next politician purchase. A lot of this is done online.
After examining the links found in the replies and elsewhere, My criticism of the Dutch guide is that it is too short, the English questions appear to contain some biases, there is no ranking of important issues or criteria, the guide does not seem to score individual candidates against a ranking of issues and criteria (because that's missing), and therefore defaults to scoring agreement with particular party platforms. (Because of the distribution of votes in NL, representative party influence is a very important consideration.)
Similar tries at providing a guide in the USA have had sketchy results, and in the USA a politician can say anything to get elected, but not be held accountable for his/her actions once they have a seat.
The researcher who invented/championed function point analysis for IBM (Albrecht) also wrote a study that proved that, on the whole, programmers were more effective if they shared no more than 4 people to a work area and the personal workspace was about 200 square feet. Unfortunately I can't put my hands on the analysis right now, but someone could look it up. Again, this was on the whole, meaning averages. In a case like this, I'd be interested to know what the exceptions were, particularly the exceptions that produced the highest productivity.
Another former IBM'r, Tom DeMarco (Guru of Structured Analysis and Entity diagrams) wrote a book called, "Peopleware", and his conclusion was that programmers needed good-sized office space with no more than two people per office.
A number of the best architectural engineering offices I've seen use an open plan that promotes workflow. I suspect that a drafting table plus workspace produces enough anti-crowding to promote effectiveness.
A call for a new office plan is useless unless it solves a problem. A problem is a discrepancy between the way things are and the way you want them to be. If the discrepancy is a performance problem, jumping to solutions without a full analysis is probably counter-productive. (I've seen hundreds of thousands of dollars spent implementing changes that don't have any effect on the actual problem.) There is a good book, "Analyzing Performance Problems" by Mager and Pipe, that truly simplify the process, and another, "The New Rational Manager" by Kepner and Tregoe, that teaches a more formal method.
If your manager says he would commit to spending $100,000 on a new office plan, could you GUARANTEE $300,000 payback on the investment? (Pick your amount...$100,000 is just an example.) If not, you don't have a problem well-enough defined. Try a different approach: Read, "The Goal" and "It's Not Luck" by Goldratt, and figure out your bottlenecks. It's surprising how often the bottleneck is not an environmental problem, but a policy.
Another of John's books is "Dumbing us Down." There are other authors out there who have the same opinions, are better writers, but don't have John's inside experience.
Don't worry: My generation is retiring soon, and they will start letting the prisoners out early to earn money and pay the taxes necessary to support us old folks (who might have to depend on the Medicaid/Medicare/Social Security plans that have been so mismanaged by the government). Then the "dropout rate" will be encouraged rather than disparaged.
Since the USA workers will be too ignorant to earn high wages, look for more immigration in both the low-paying and high-tech areas. It's a real win for business and government. Business wins because they can pay 75% of what they would have to pay a US citizen, Government wins because the salaries earned are in the higher tax brackets, the immigrant wins because what he sends home is significantly more than his family would have if he were living and earning in his own country.
You said, "Disabling the uninformed does nothing more than create an elitist governing board who will no doubt become corrupt in no time at all." Actually, this describes our government pretty well. It's not as bad as Argentina (an example only), but it still exists. The uninformed can be "sold" whatever bill of goods the politicians want. The fight is to maintain the loyalty of those predisposed to support you (based on ideology, party affiliation, etc.) and enough of the remaining undecided in order to prevail. (Current common wisdom floating around political campaigns is that about 35% of the voting population favors Republicans, about 35% of the voting population favors Democrats, and about 30% can be swayed if they are approached correctly. The common wisdom ignores the percentage of people who may actually be informed and intellectually competent. Disabling the uninformed might be preferable to keeping everyone ignorant. My personal preference is to inform everybody. My fantasy is to run a series of 30-second or 60-second ads on TV, each informing the public about the "30 important things about the Declaration of Independence" or "50 important things about the Constitution of the United States". Surly, if Ford can make us aware of being "Ford tough", we can all be aware of "born equally human" and other concepts if they are presented continuously, in small increments and in unbiased format.
Just for grins, I recommend a book, "Politics as the Master Science: From Plato to Mao" by Herbert J. Spiro. It's out of print and expensive used, but you may find it in your library.
While the concept of global warming is important, the movie is serving up a bunch of propaganda designed to promote the author's current views on the solutions to a problems not clearly understood. A person can view the movie and be just as ignorant afterwards as when they started. The movie is designed to stir people up and get them behind a questionable course of action that may not resolve or diminish the problem at all. Unfortunately, the American public (the primary audience for this movie) lacks the intellectual skills to evaluate the problem and its solutions, so whatever action is taken is likely to be "sold" to the public through vehicles such as this.
Speaking of sales pitches: The article is a sales pitch for the DVD and is blatantly biased, yet slashdotters are discussing it as if it had real merit.
Sorry. The site you referenced is an example of the evils of government controlled thinking. If the Republicrats were in charge of administering the test, then the test would be biased to favor the Republicrats, and vice-versa for the Demopublicans.
The previous poster suggested a voting holiday with fines, etc...: Unfortunately, that would put voting into the category of "crowd behavior" and still wouldn't favor the informed consent of the people.
I'm thinking that what we need is something along the lines of faster feedback and faster correction of disparities after a person demonstrates they are not living up to the standards for the job they were elected to. For instance, in the case of the President, if he is not upholding the Constitution, why are we stuck with him for full term? Why are we not guiding him back to his responsibilities or getting rid of him? I believe it's because the system has been hacked to protect the politicians from their incompetence.
Although Scott Adams may be the best political and business parodist/cartoonist since Dave Barry, he hit upon a serious deficiency in American Politics: Most voters don't know what the job qualifications for President are. The President is supposed to be a leader and executive, guide the country in resolving problems (if possible), but his main job is to UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. (It's in his oath of office.) This has nothing to do with his religion, gender, party affiliation or appearance, but those are the qualifications upon which the voters seem to select our politicians these days.
Which brings up problem number two: Most Americans don't know the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, and are probably not qualified to vote. The Declaration of Independence defines the principles upon which this country was founded and the Constitution defines the process by which we govern ourselves. It is embarrassing that I meet so many foreigners who know all about the Constitution and the Declaration, but I seldom find an American college student who can even tell me what's in the Bill of Rights.
The YouTube is definitely a case of censorship. The Washington Post MAY have simply been editing the article for length. The blog regarding the WP contains a lot of insinuations, but but it does not carry any substantial evidence to support the insinuations or conclusions.
Again, the blogger insists that the blog subject is about the WP comitting censorship, not abut the President's evasiveness. IMO, the public has a right to know, but the administration has an agenda and a strategy, and we are not automatically entitled to know what that is. We, as the public, are not entitled in all cases, to pass on decisions that we have delegated to out elected representatives. The solution is to find a way to elect people who make good decisons in a trustworthy environment. Neither of those conditions exists at this time.
Uh, ok. I like your pragmatic attitude, but I think "global warming" is too much of a generalization for intelligent evaluation.
Here's how I tend to start sorting it out:
1. Some people claim that the average temperature of the Earth is increasing. 2. Some people claim that if the average temperature of the Earth is increasing, there will be unwanted effects or consequences. 3. A problem is defined as the discrepancy between what is and what is desired. 4. If the average temperature of the Earth is truly increasing, and if this produces unwanted effects, then those who do not want the effects have a problem. 5. Every problem has a specific identity, location and timing, and all three of these elements have a scope. 6. Every effect has a cause. A cause is something necessary and sufficient to explain the effect. Some causes are complex, meaning that multiple events might be necessary or depend on each other for the production of the effect. Some causes are unknown and cannot be completely uncovered. A cause is not a cause unless it can account for the identity, location and timing of the problem, and accounts for the scope of all three elements. 7. The problem is solved when there is no longer a discrepancy between what is desired and what exists. 8. One route to solving the problem may be to alleviate a causal event, another may be to achieve your desired objective by adapting to the undesirable effect, and maybe a combination. 9. Some problems cannot be resolved on an individual basis, but require teamwork among like-minded individuals and communities. 10. Solving the problem may reveal or produce other problems. There is risk.
So, the pragmatic view would suggest that a person should determine if there is really a problem and if the problem is important (some problems aren't worth the time to solve), whether steps can be taken to adjust to the unwanted effect, and then enlist the aid of others to alleviate the consequences for a broader community. This may mean doing some real investigation to find causal relationships leading to the unwanted effect.
One reason I think the article is non-helpful is that it draws a conclusion of universal importance without sufficient completeness.
If you would have read the post, you would have noticed that I don't believe credentials are sufficient for evaluating information. And if you had read the response to the AC, you would have seen the clarification on cites. I think you have jumped to a conclusion not warranted by the text. In fact, looking over your post, I see you have managed to exhibit 19 of the 83 common rhetorical fallacies (a couple more than once), and still miss the point: The founders of the Wikipedia hold the Wikipedia to be a reputable source of knowledge and information, yet some authors do not reveal their own expertise or biases. In fact, we have numerous instances where the authors have battled to change the content of articles to promote their own point of view without disclaimer, or to hide information inimical to their particular point of view. This problem, (I define a problem as a discrepancy between the way things are and the way I want them to be), is, IMO, something that could be resolved by a higher editorial policy. The Wikipedia is only a place to begin discussion, but it is not a reliable place to start discussion at this time. Although the majority of the articles have additional links, many times the links are selected for their bias rather than their objectivity.
Your point about trustability is well-taken. If I read something in the Wikipedia I want to know if it is a fact or an opinion. If it is a fact, I want to determine the probablility, "Is it true?" If it is an opinion, I want to know what the arguments are for and against the opinion. An argument should stand on its merits, but if I know a particular author of an article about Capitalism is a high-ranking member of the Socialist Workers Party, I am warned to examine the arguments a little closer. One strength of the Wikipedia is that a very biased article will probably get ammended or challenged pretty quickly. However, "article by consensus" is not really an unbiased source of information either.
As for the post-internet generation: I have seen no evidence that the internet has improved thinking and independent thought. Although somewhat of a ranter, John Taylor Gatto ( http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ ) has pointed out the deficiencies of our educational system. My interpretation of his writing is to conclude that the education system, particularly public schooling, suppresses independent, creative and objective thought. What I see personally on the internet, is a proliferation of what Sociologists term "crowd behavior", in which the intelligence exhibited by the crowd performs significantly below the average intelligence of the individual members. YMMV.
You are correct. I cannot expect the same standards of excellence from the Wikipedia that I can expect from the Britannica. It is a wiki, but the deficiencies of the Wikipedia can be ameliorated by a good editorial policy. I run into lots of product-oriented wikis that have very high standards and are very useful to their users.
And although I seldom reply to a**holes, I agree that the AC had a point, so I indulged myself in a reply.
Sorry, maybe I should have been a little clearer for the comic book intellectuals out there: I wouldn't write a scientific paper citing an encyclopaedia entry, but in discussion I like to be able to report where I obtained information without having to discount the information as a frivolous source. I can easily say, "I read an article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition, by T. E. Lawrence, regarding Guerilla Warfare. In the article, he said,...etc., etc." Now go look up the article on Neuro-Linguistic Programming in the Wikipedia, read the notes and rhetorical bullshit, and you will realize it was mostly written by offensive egomaniacs (I presume you can relate), with highly biased views, little expertise in NLP, and not much intellectual integrity. The article is useless, even as a starting point for discussion.
The problem as I see it, is that the founders of the Wikipedia would like to have it regarded seriously as an information source, but the editorial standards are too low. Identifying the qualifications of the authors would allow us to ignore articles written by raving idiots like yourself.
I originally got this information from a person who was following the "Protein Power Life Plan", and directed to the book, "Protein Power" by Eades and Eades. The book gives a good little chapter on eicosanoids (and I apologize for the multiple mis-spellings in my earlier post). The Eades' claim that nothing in their book contains any theories or facts that are not taught to all medical students, so I looked up some basic Physiology and Biochemistry books. As a result, I changed sources from flaxseed to fish oil.
In the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other published, for-sale reference works, the articles' sources are not only attributed, but the author of the article is attributed and his/her credentials displayed as a guide to their qualifications in providing the article.
Now, an article presenting facts can be written by someone who has no academic qualifications but still represents the facts fairly and accurately, so I don't claim that a person MUST be academically qualified to write a good article, nor do I claim that an article is good just because a person with "academic" qualifications writes it. However, I believe that the articles' authors should be identified, and the article parts should be identified as primary, secondary or tertiary.
I go to the Wikipedia for information, but I'm cautious. I want to be able to cite the information in the Wikipedia, and that requires authors and accurate attribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not all law. Military Justice, for example, works a bit differently. Neither side is allowed to ignore or hide relevant facts, although the individual's' rights under the Constitution are still protected, in theory. In actuality, of course, a Colonel's word carries more weight in testimony than a Private's word. Still, Military Justice tends to be a bit more objective with less "salesmanship" and misdirection than what you see in civilian criminal cases. Criminal Justice in Iceland, Denmark and Sweden work similarly, though those countries have a different scope for individual rights. I'm in the process of researching "Justice" in different countries right now. I would suggest a book by Mortimer Adler called, "Six Great Ideas" for anybody who wants to have a mind-expanding introduction to things like Truth and Justice.
In Texas, the prosecutor does not have to provide exculpatory evidence until the trial starts. Many times this exculpatory evidence is buried in paperwork, and the defense has no time to evaluate the merits of the prosecution's case. Last week a guy was released who served 13 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The reason for his conviction was laid to this practice of withholding exculpatory evidence until the trial.
Impassioned pleas for guilt or innocence are entertaining, but when the name of the game is "win at any cost", Justice suffers.
Advocacy is good up until the point that you get to exclude relevant facts inimical to your argument. then it just becomes a matter of winning, justice, fairness and truth be damned.
Uhhg..Should have read the parent closer. The article says 10-fold per decade...which is about right.
AFAIK, computers have not been shown to produce a 10-fold increase in productivity. Productivity has been increasing slightly over 1% per year, and computer technology has been only a small part of it. It takes about 40 years or so for an invention to create a leap in productivity. This held true for the steam engine electricity, telephone, fax machine, etc., and each one of them changed substantially from the time of their invention to the time of elegant use. My guess is that computer aided intelligence IS the point at which productivity jumps as part of that substantial change.
I remember that, but that isn't what I ws thinking of. I think the product may have been called something like, "NewView Accounting", but I'm not sure.
There are all kinds of User Interfaces out there, and the simple elements such as buttons and boxes are popular mostly because they constitute the huge majority of "conventional" expectations. Tcl/Tk will give your a little more control over offbeat interactive elements, and early game books for C/C++ programmers will give you even more. What you learn from a book like Charles Petzold's, "Windows Programming" 5th Ed. will give you even more control over what happens on the screen. Petzold wrote some great books, and his books on C# and VB.Net are also terrific. That will cover the basics of controlling what is seen on your screen very elegantly.
IMO, design considerations fall into two categories; Visual design and Usability design. Check out some of the features of Croquet and Project Looking glass. Neither of them is totally up to speed visually, but they are creating new usability. A flight simulator or game requires a different approach to make it usable. You might find some ideas there. Here's a question: How come managers are still reading reports to manage their business rather than simulating the business operations through a game interface? How come reports are still 2-Dimensional? Back in the early 80's I remember seeing an accounting program that allowed you to drill down in layers from the final reports to the details. Wish I could remember the name.
Last guideline: Never let your Visual Design (or bad taste) detract from your usability.
The CBS Innertube has been a good thing for me. I don't often watch TV, but the CIS stuff is fairly good and I hate to miss it. And Innertube works! Fox.com has a similar service, and ABC sucks. ABC requires your firewall to be dormant, you adblocker to be off, and now you have to allow images from sites other than the original, plus they have installed tracking software with the viewer download. On top of all that, their streaming is spotty and the some programs 'way out of date.
A HUGE amount of the market is in retirement funds or investment funds designed to be liquidated through retirement. My generation will be retiring soon, and withdrawing their funds from the market. If the USA keeps producing, it may be a good place for foreign investment that will buy the stocks being sold. However, there's about 10 Trillion dollars of off-balance-sheet liabilities in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare out there. (If the USA was Enron or Worldcomm, the last 8 Presidents and all the legislators would be in prison today.) I suspect that the government will fund these liabilities by inflating the currency and raising taxes, making the USA attractive investment opportunity for only China. The gambling schemes, including the derivatives you talk about, will fold. The world will get hungry...invest in food.
I support the investor's right to be as stupid as they wish. A buy and hold regulation won't do as much good as something like the Fair Tax Plan, increased personal debt reduction, a balanced budget, and reduced spending. Presumably, investments are property that an investor should be able to divest anytime. Leave the government out of it.
In some cases, the result seems to work more consistently.
I had a friend who worked in the AI department of Lockheed (about 20 years ago) and they developed the software that was used for the Robert Prector's Elliot Wave newsletter. Every two years they would give the program to a couple of people to try for 6 months. These people would invest $10,000, use the program and follow the guidelines, then evaluate the results. I was privy to the outcomes of three of these tests in the mid-nineties, and the lowest was earned $15,000 and the highest was earned $36,000. These are pretty good results. (However, the stock market was steadily climbing during those years and I wasn't able to compare results with EWT competition. Still, if I was able to consistently get 30%/year on my investments...)
Back in the 70's, Dean Witter had a program called PACE. I know two people who had a system for using it that earned them over $100,000/year, and they never deviated from the program while I knew them.
Then I have a friend who is a very conservative money manager (manages a couple hundred million of other people's money), and over the period that stocks crashed (remember Enron and Worldcomm?) he only had two clients lose any money, and the biggest loss was less than %15. He claims that these programs are mostly bunk. (This guy is a perfectionist, and I bet a computer is no more disciplined than he is.)
These programs are not investment management programs. The principles of investment management are pretty simple. The best book I know on the subject is still Benjamin Graham and David Dodd's book, "Security Analysis". However, the problem is finding opportunities that comply with the principles. Systematic data analysis by computer could have a profound effect, and that's what most of these programs do.
BTW, the article mentions that profits are slowing down: In Robert Prector's book, "The Elliott Wave Theory" and in his newsletter, he sort of predicts that as information becomes more available for analysis trading will be done more rapidly on spreads that may show profits as low as 1.5%
IMO, most people spend more time evaluating their next computer or car purchase than they do their next politician purchase. A lot of this is done online.
After examining the links found in the replies and elsewhere, My criticism of the Dutch guide is that it is too short, the English questions appear to contain some biases, there is no ranking of important issues or criteria, the guide does not seem to score individual candidates against a ranking of issues and criteria (because that's missing), and therefore defaults to scoring agreement with particular party platforms. (Because of the distribution of votes in NL, representative party influence is a very important consideration.)
Similar tries at providing a guide in the USA have had sketchy results, and in the USA a politician can say anything to get elected, but not be held accountable for his/her actions once they have a seat.
The researcher who invented/championed function point analysis for IBM (Albrecht) also wrote a study that proved that, on the whole, programmers were more effective if they shared no more than 4 people to a work area and the personal workspace was about 200 square feet. Unfortunately I can't put my hands on the analysis right now, but someone could look it up. Again, this was on the whole, meaning averages. In a case like this, I'd be interested to know what the exceptions were, particularly the exceptions that produced the highest productivity.
Another former IBM'r, Tom DeMarco (Guru of Structured Analysis and Entity diagrams) wrote a book called, "Peopleware", and his conclusion was that programmers needed good-sized office space with no more than two people per office.
A number of the best architectural engineering offices I've seen use an open plan that promotes workflow. I suspect that a drafting table plus workspace produces enough anti-crowding to promote effectiveness.
A call for a new office plan is useless unless it solves a problem. A problem is a discrepancy between the way things are and the way you want them to be. If the discrepancy is a performance problem, jumping to solutions without a full analysis is probably counter-productive. (I've seen hundreds of thousands of dollars spent implementing changes that don't have any effect on the actual problem.) There is a good book, "Analyzing Performance Problems" by Mager and Pipe, that truly simplify the process, and another, "The New Rational Manager" by Kepner and Tregoe, that teaches a more formal method.
If your manager says he would commit to spending $100,000 on a new office plan, could you GUARANTEE $300,000 payback on the investment? (Pick your amount...$100,000 is just an example.) If not, you don't have a problem well-enough defined. Try a different approach: Read, "The Goal" and "It's Not Luck" by Goldratt, and figure out your bottlenecks. It's surprising how often the bottleneck is not an environmental problem, but a policy.
Another of John's books is "Dumbing us Down." There are other authors out there who have the same opinions, are better writers, but don't have John's inside experience.
Don't worry: My generation is retiring soon, and they will start letting the prisoners out early to earn money and pay the taxes necessary to support us old folks (who might have to depend on the Medicaid/Medicare/Social Security plans that have been so mismanaged by the government). Then the "dropout rate" will be encouraged rather than disparaged.
Since the USA workers will be too ignorant to earn high wages, look for more immigration in both the low-paying and high-tech areas. It's a real win for business and government. Business wins because they can pay 75% of what they would have to pay a US citizen, Government wins because the salaries earned are in the higher tax brackets, the immigrant wins because what he sends home is significantly more than his family would have if he were living and earning in his own country.
You said, "Disabling the uninformed does nothing more than create an elitist governing board who will no doubt become corrupt in no time at all." Actually, this describes our government pretty well. It's not as bad as Argentina (an example only), but it still exists. The uninformed can be "sold" whatever bill of goods the politicians want. The fight is to maintain the loyalty of those predisposed to support you (based on ideology, party affiliation, etc.) and enough of the remaining undecided in order to prevail. (Current common wisdom floating around political campaigns is that about 35% of the voting population favors Republicans, about 35% of the voting population favors Democrats, and about 30% can be swayed if they are approached correctly. The common wisdom ignores the percentage of people who may actually be informed and intellectually competent. Disabling the uninformed might be preferable to keeping everyone ignorant. My personal preference is to inform everybody. My fantasy is to run a series of 30-second or 60-second ads on TV, each informing the public about the "30 important things about the Declaration of Independence" or "50 important things about the Constitution of the United States". Surly, if Ford can make us aware of being "Ford tough", we can all be aware of "born equally human" and other concepts if they are presented continuously, in small increments and in unbiased format.
Just for grins, I recommend a book, "Politics as the Master Science: From Plato to Mao" by Herbert J. Spiro. It's out of print and expensive used, but you may find it in your library.
While the concept of global warming is important, the movie is serving up a bunch of propaganda designed to promote the author's current views on the solutions to a problems not clearly understood. A person can view the movie and be just as ignorant afterwards as when they started. The movie is designed to stir people up and get them behind a questionable course of action that may not resolve or diminish the problem at all. Unfortunately, the American public (the primary audience for this movie) lacks the intellectual skills to evaluate the problem and its solutions, so whatever action is taken is likely to be "sold" to the public through vehicles such as this.
Speaking of sales pitches: The article is a sales pitch for the DVD and is blatantly biased, yet slashdotters are discussing it as if it had real merit.
Sorry. The site you referenced is an example of the evils of government controlled thinking. If the Republicrats were in charge of administering the test, then the test would be biased to favor the Republicrats, and vice-versa for the Demopublicans.
The previous poster suggested a voting holiday with fines, etc...: Unfortunately, that would put voting into the category of "crowd behavior" and still wouldn't favor the informed consent of the people.
I'm thinking that what we need is something along the lines of faster feedback and faster correction of disparities after a person demonstrates they are not living up to the standards for the job they were elected to. For instance, in the case of the President, if he is not upholding the Constitution, why are we stuck with him for full term? Why are we not guiding him back to his responsibilities or getting rid of him? I believe it's because the system has been hacked to protect the politicians from their incompetence.
I really like your response. I'm going to steal the line about discriminating against stupid people who are going to be governed anyway...
Although Scott Adams may be the best political and business parodist/cartoonist since Dave Barry, he hit upon a serious deficiency in American Politics: Most voters don't know what the job qualifications for President are. The President is supposed to be a leader and executive, guide the country in resolving problems (if possible), but his main job is to UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. (It's in his oath of office.) This has nothing to do with his religion, gender, party affiliation or appearance, but those are the qualifications upon which the voters seem to select our politicians these days.
A dler/dp/0020641303
Which brings up problem number two: Most Americans don't know the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, and are probably not qualified to vote. The Declaration of Independence defines the principles upon which this country was founded and the Constitution defines the process by which we govern ourselves. It is embarrassing that I meet so many foreigners who know all about the Constitution and the Declaration, but I seldom find an American college student who can even tell me what's in the Bill of Rights.
I hope some of you are feeling guilty... http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/constRedir.html http://www.amazon.com/Hold-These-Truths-Mortimer-
The YouTube is definitely a case of censorship. The Washington Post MAY have simply been editing the article for length. The blog regarding the WP contains a lot of insinuations, but but it does not carry any substantial evidence to support the insinuations or conclusions.
Again, the blogger insists that the blog subject is about the WP comitting censorship, not abut the President's evasiveness. IMO, the public has a right to know, but the administration has an agenda and a strategy, and we are not automatically entitled to know what that is. We, as the public, are not entitled in all cases, to pass on decisions that we have delegated to out elected representatives. The solution is to find a way to elect people who make good decisons in a trustworthy environment. Neither of those conditions exists at this time.
Uh, ok. I like your pragmatic attitude, but I think "global warming" is too much of a generalization for intelligent evaluation.
O WLTutorial.pdf
Here's how I tend to start sorting it out:
1. Some people claim that the average temperature of the Earth is increasing.
2. Some people claim that if the average temperature of the Earth is increasing, there will be unwanted effects or consequences.
3. A problem is defined as the discrepancy between what is and what is desired.
4. If the average temperature of the Earth is truly increasing, and if this produces unwanted effects, then those who do not want the effects have a problem.
5. Every problem has a specific identity, location and timing, and all three of these elements have a scope.
6. Every effect has a cause. A cause is something necessary and sufficient to explain the effect. Some causes are complex, meaning that multiple events might be necessary or depend on each other for the production of the effect. Some causes are unknown and cannot be completely uncovered. A cause is not a cause unless it can account for the identity, location and timing of the problem, and accounts for the scope of all three elements.
7. The problem is solved when there is no longer a discrepancy between what is desired and what exists.
8. One route to solving the problem may be to alleviate a causal event, another may be to achieve your desired objective by adapting to the undesirable effect, and maybe a combination.
9. Some problems cannot be resolved on an individual basis, but require teamwork among like-minded individuals and communities.
10. Solving the problem may reveal or produce other problems. There is risk.
So, the pragmatic view would suggest that a person should determine if there is really a problem and if the problem is important (some problems aren't worth the time to solve), whether steps can be taken to adjust to the unwanted effect, and then enlist the aid of others to alleviate the consequences for a broader community. This may mean doing some real investigation to find causal relationships leading to the unwanted effect.
One reason I think the article is non-helpful is that it draws a conclusion of universal importance without sufficient completeness.
This sounds like a perfect test for a community of Protege-OWL users, right?
http://protege.stanford.edu/
http://www.co-ode.org/resources/tutorials/Protege
Just a note: Do you really think environmentalism isn't a religion?
hehehe
If you would have read the post, you would have noticed that I don't believe credentials are sufficient for evaluating information. And if you had read the response to the AC, you would have seen the clarification on cites. I think you have jumped to a conclusion not warranted by the text. In fact, looking over your post, I see you have managed to exhibit 19 of the 83 common rhetorical fallacies (a couple more than once), and still miss the point: The founders of the Wikipedia hold the Wikipedia to be a reputable source of knowledge and information, yet some authors do not reveal their own expertise or biases. In fact, we have numerous instances where the authors have battled to change the content of articles to promote their own point of view without disclaimer, or to hide information inimical to their particular point of view. This problem, (I define a problem as a discrepancy between the way things are and the way I want them to be), is, IMO, something that could be resolved by a higher editorial policy. The Wikipedia is only a place to begin discussion, but it is not a reliable place to start discussion at this time. Although the majority of the articles have additional links, many times the links are selected for their bias rather than their objectivity.
Your point about trustability is well-taken. If I read something in the Wikipedia I want to know if it is a fact or an opinion. If it is a fact, I want to determine the probablility, "Is it true?" If it is an opinion, I want to know what the arguments are for and against the opinion. An argument should stand on its merits, but if I know a particular author of an article about Capitalism is a high-ranking member of the Socialist Workers Party, I am warned to examine the arguments a little closer. One strength of the Wikipedia is that a very biased article will probably get ammended or challenged pretty quickly. However, "article by consensus" is not really an unbiased source of information either.
As for the post-internet generation: I have seen no evidence that the internet has improved thinking and independent thought. Although somewhat of a ranter, John Taylor Gatto ( http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ ) has pointed out the deficiencies of our educational system. My interpretation of his writing is to conclude that the education system, particularly public schooling, suppresses independent, creative and objective thought. What I see personally on the internet, is a proliferation of what Sociologists term "crowd behavior", in which the intelligence exhibited by the crowd performs significantly below the average intelligence of the individual members. YMMV.
You are correct. I cannot expect the same standards of excellence from the Wikipedia that I can expect from the Britannica. It is a wiki, but the deficiencies of the Wikipedia can be ameliorated by a good editorial policy. I run into lots of product-oriented wikis that have very high standards and are very useful to their users.
And although I seldom reply to a**holes, I agree that the AC had a point, so I indulged myself in a reply.
Sorry, maybe I should have been a little clearer for the comic book intellectuals out there: I wouldn't write a scientific paper citing an encyclopaedia entry, but in discussion I like to be able to report where I obtained information without having to discount the information as a frivolous source. I can easily say, "I read an article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition, by T. E. Lawrence, regarding Guerilla Warfare. In the article, he said,...etc., etc." Now go look up the article on Neuro-Linguistic Programming in the Wikipedia, read the notes and rhetorical bullshit, and you will realize it was mostly written by offensive egomaniacs (I presume you can relate), with highly biased views, little expertise in NLP, and not much intellectual integrity. The article is useless, even as a starting point for discussion.
The problem as I see it, is that the founders of the Wikipedia would like to have it regarded seriously as an information source, but the editorial standards are too low. Identifying the qualifications of the authors would allow us to ignore articles written by raving idiots like yourself.
I originally got this information from a person who was following the "Protein Power Life Plan", and directed to the book, "Protein Power" by Eades and Eades. The book gives a good little chapter on eicosanoids (and I apologize for the multiple mis-spellings in my earlier post). The Eades' claim that nothing in their book contains any theories or facts that are not taught to all medical students, so I looked up some basic Physiology and Biochemistry books. As a result, I changed sources from flaxseed to fish oil.
s /PDFs/Ch01.pdfs /PDFs/Ch07.pdfs /PDFs/Ch21.pdfs /PDFs/Ch26.pdfs /PDFs/Ch37.pdfn ts/smch27.pdfn ts/smch30.pdfm ents/41869%20ch%2003(35-48).pdfm ents/41869%20ch%2015(215-230).pdf
http://connection.lww.com/Products/smith/document
http://connection.lww.com/Products/smith/document
http://connection.lww.com/Products/smith/document
http://connection.lww.com/Products/smith/document
http://connection.lww.com/Products/smith/document
http://connection.lww.com/products/rhoades/docume
http://connection.lww.com/products/rhoades/docume
http://connection.lww.com/products/lieberman/docu
http://connection.lww.com/products/lieberman/docu
I hope that helps. Unfortunately, you will have to do a little brainsweat to get to the answers.
In the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other published, for-sale reference works, the articles' sources are not only attributed, but the author of the article is attributed and his/her credentials displayed as a guide to their qualifications in providing the article.
Now, an article presenting facts can be written by someone who has no academic qualifications but still represents the facts fairly and accurately, so I don't claim that a person MUST be academically qualified to write a good article, nor do I claim that an article is good just because a person with "academic" qualifications writes it. However, I believe that the articles' authors should be identified, and the article parts should be identified as primary, secondary or tertiary.
I go to the Wikipedia for information, but I'm cautious. I want to be able to cite the information in the Wikipedia, and that requires authors and accurate attribution.