2% - one in 50 - committing fraud to get ahead (or simply to keep their job) in a very competitive, volatile career environment. Sounds like it's in the right ballpark, and probably comparable to other professions. Some people are so career and status driven, and so unconcerned with the effects of their actions on other people, that they will break rules and cut corners no matter what the field.
I do question the other figures though, simply because "questionable research conduct" is such a very nebulous kind of categorization. You can delimit it in very different ways, all perfectly reasonable. You could even effectively decide which number you want then define the term in such a way that you reach it (a practice that would most likely be included in the term). Notably, the author excludes plagiarism, even though that is a serious offense in research for good reason, and one that I'd expect most surveys to include, not drop.
Also, the numbers for incidents by colleagues is rather pointless, since there is no indication of how many those colleagues are. If each participant has had a minimum total of eight colleagues altogether in their career up until this point, then the 14% rate fits very well with the self-reported 2% above. But of course, the participants do not know how many incidents they missed, and the number of times the mistakenly thought fraud was taking place is unknown. I would be very hesitant in trying to read anything at all into the numbers about witnessed incidents.
1) up and coming browser makers see speed as an easy differentiating factor and target their browser for it; or
2) Newer products tend to be faster since they have the older ones to compare to. And newer products also are "up and coming" and thus have lower uptake than "old and entrenched" ones. or;
3) the public puts very little value on browser speed. Those spending their resources optimizing for it rather than other features get few users as a result.
So does this mean that Mosaic is the most efficient one out there?
I'm willing to entertain the notion that yes, it would be extremely fast if you got it running on modern hardware. It wouldn't do much of course, but what little it did would probably be faster than any current browser.
What you CAN'T get from 'anywhere' is local (or even possibly state) news
True to some degree, but depending on what you mean by "local", and what you mean by "news".
I used to live in Lund, Sweden, which has about 100k people, and close to two larger cities. If by "news" you mean anything of any import happening in the town then every regional newspaper and television channel website will tend to cover it. Same thing for public announcements, street planning, city hall debates and anything like that; that is in addition easily found on the city web site, the political parties' sites and similar places regardless of whether a newspaper will carry it.
But if by "news" you mean the small, local "Drunk cat rescued from tree; bottle lost" or irate letters to the editor about nefarious neighbors willfully spreading leaves over their lawn then no, there's not many sources for that. There's good reason for that; I would never even notice if that disappeared.
On the other hand, right now I live in Osaka, Japan. The "local" news market is about as big as that of Sweden. There's simply enough local different news sources that no moratorium or paywall could contain it.
I was really trying to make the argument specifically for specifying a monetary amount. Of course there's an opportunity cost of sorts. But unless one of the alternative activities are directly about making money with your time there's no way you can put a monetary amount on it. What's the monetary opportunity cost of building a hybrid in your garage as opposed to, say, sit and watch a Star Trek rerun; or clip your toenails? And thus you can't really lump this opportunity cost in with the monetary costs of doing something; the units are different.
Problem is, whether sustainable or not, daily news (as opposed to in-depth analysis or investigative journalism) is fungible. You can get it from anywhere, and it's all much the same. If 90% of papers go behind a paywall, most people will simply migrate to those 10% that did not - and incidentally probably provide them with enough readers for them to be sustainable.
And those news sites can be anywhere in the world. Der Spiegel runs a very good international English-language website. BBC and other national broadcasters (who all have an income stream independent of advertising) also have very good news sites.
WSJ is not a good model since it's not a newspaper. It manages to sell subscriptions because a) it has a well-heeled readership that doesn't mind paying; and most importantly b) they aren't selling news, but exactly that in-depth analysis that is unique to them (along with editorials divorced from reality on planet Earth, but you can always skip that part).
Whether the current situation is sustainable or not is irrelevant to whether this idea will work. And chances are, it won't, except for the publications that stay away and pick up readership from those that do.
Time is only worth money if you actually would have used it to make money otherwise. Say, if you had to take unpaid time off work to do this. Chances are, the cost of the time is zero.
transfer or attempt to transfer a human embryo into a non-human womb
This has got to be one of the stupidest thing I've ever read. The one thing that would quickly decrease the risks of pregnancy to absolutely zero is an artificial womb!
Easily solved! The law specifically forbids the use of a nonhuman "womb". Just call your artificial device a "Woomba" and you'll be in the clear!
In Swedish you do say "fourteenth of march" ("fjortonde mars"), making 14/3 a natural way of expressing the date. I believe a number of other European languages use the same order.
We do sometimes use the order you describe of year-month-day, but only in forms and such when you actually express the whole thing, with year, leading zeros and all: 09-03-14 for 14th march, 2009 is fine, but 3-14 is not.
Actually, this has probably not so much to do with the US itself, and more with the countries many of you immigrants come from.
I'm Swedish, and for various reasons a disproportionate number of Swedes tend to move abroad; not just academics and other highly skilled people, but "ordinary" people too. There is very little debate about it, and no screaming about "brain drain". The reason is that the vast majority eventually return. It may take three, or five, or ten years, but most come back and bringing with them more skills and experience, making it a net win for the country.
Similarly, as large countries like China and India become places where a middle-class life is attainable and normal, so will more people return home eventually where they would have settled abroad permanently before. It's not that the US has become less attractive, but that people's own home countries have become more so.
The US can and should adapt to this in two ways: first, recognize that a temporary immigrant is still valuable for the country even if they leave after some years. Second, encourage more of their own citizens to likewise move abroad for some period in order to build their skills and benefit in the same way that other countries do. While Swedes are disproportionately likely to live abroad, US citizens seem anecdotally disproportionately unlikely to do so. You seem to have a whole slew of arbitrary barriers, like the double income taxation when living abroad, that conspire to keep normal people from relocating for a few years.
That the Internet can't ever replace newspapers and proper reporting. [...] I remember one comment was "How many bloggers are embedded in Falujah?"
There are of course differing opinions on what kinds of reporting, if any, can be replaced by "the Internet", depending on what you mean by "reporting" and "the Internet", but that's beside the point. You could argue that being "embedded in Falujah" is perhaps a rather skewed position from which to report, compared to civilian bloggers in the area, but that is again beside the point.
The point is, if not enough people pay for the newspaper and "proper reporting", through ad placements and through subscriptions, then there won't be anybody "embedded in Falujah", regardless of whether or not you think it's important, and whether or not "the Internet" or bloggers can pick up the slack.
Yes, the newspaper industry can fail without any other medium continuing the same work. We'll get only as much investigative journalism and long-term reporting (which I assume are the parts you'd miss) as we're collectively willing to pay for, and that amount might be small indeed.
On the other hand, while newspapers are having a serious crisis in the US right now, it's nowhere near as dire in most other parts of the world. The local newspaper industry seems to be hurting from financial issues - heavy debt, failing owners - as much as anything to do with the actual business itself.
"Erm, yes. In fact, half the population are below average. But it's OK; the other half are above average."
Erm, no. Half the population are below the mean, and half above. The average only equals the mean if you have an unskewed Gaussian distribution (and for various reasons you'll not expect the distribution to be unskewed in this case).
In fact, if you relax the criteria further you could have everybody exactly average, or everybody except one above (or below) average: Let's say everybody in the field is exactly equally good - they'd all be average. Now let's say one person is worse than everybody else. The average will be pulled down just a little, and while that one person will be below average, everybody else will be above. If that one person was better than average you'd have everyone but him below average.
The thing is, I don't understand the logic of using JS for high-level tasks and Vala (basically glorified C) for low-level stuff. The thing is, JS is a very small, austere language. The whole advantage of having a high-level language is lost when you use something as bare-bones as JS. JS is also much, much slower than Perl and Python, so you'd end up having to do only a very small percentage of your programming in JS, and the rest in Vala, in order to get decent performance.
The idea is this I think, more or less: Vala feels a fair bit like Java and C# - the syntax borrows heavily from C# for instance - but is completely statically compiled to C. So, unlike Java or C#, it doesn't need a separate runtime installed, you just get a normal, self-contained binary. JS is a lot more lightweight than the Python/Perl/Ruby trio, and the interpreter is even small enough to easily be embedded into the binary if needed. It means you can write a self-contained "traditional" binary using both a modern language and dynamic scripting with no need for extra runtime stuff.
Sounds like a good enough idea that it's well worth pursuing at least.
"Now that it is worldwide, they need to look at getting away from new TLD's and going to country code domains(example,.us or.cn). That way each country can establish its own standards for what is and is not allowed."
Must have been a very comfortable rock, to be sleeping under for so long. ^_^
Sorry - but seriously, that's exactly the system we already have today. Most companies, especially local companies only doing business in their home country (and that is the vast majority of businesses after all) already register only under their country domain, and most country domains already have their own country-specific regulations for their use.
"tlds largely are useless, anything other than.gov or.edu is a mess"
You mean that.com and -org are a mess. Most tld's are not a mess at all. Country tld's are usually much better managed than those free-for-all domains, with some actual enforcement of who may register what kind of domain.
Quite the opposite. The authorities were on the ball, gathered info and told the parties they'd likely be filing a formal complaint. The result: the putative monopoly was broken up almost before it began, with no damage to the marketplace and no long, hugely expensive trial and appeals that would have sucked money and energy from the state and the corporate parties alike. And the way they did it, if Google and Yahoo really thought they would win such a process they were still free to go ahead and face the consequences.
Sounds like the state did a pretty good job in this case.
"Next time you need kidney dialysis you won't need to question his genius. "
Why? He's not the inventor. Nils Alwall made the first useful, effective dialysis machine, based on earlier experimental work from Kolff and others. Other people improved it further since then. Kamen apparently made a more portable version is all. You want to thank anybody, thank those who actually made dialysis possible.
Stirling engines can be fairly efficient if you have the (space and weight) budget to make them big and heavy. For cars they're certainly not a very good idea.
But the main point of Stirling engines isn't efficiency but the fact that they are not only fuel-agnostic; unlike combustion engines or steam engines they don't need any kind of combustion or medium phase-change to operate. Anything that can generate a temperature differential will do. They're also quiet and very reliable (few moving parts).
That makes them well suited for things like backup generators, where you can store them for years on end, then run them on whatever fuel you can get hold of. They're used in submarines too, due to their silent operation and no need for actual combustion to generate enough heat. You could set up a Stirling engine to run on the waste heat from other processes. And they're reversible, so they're used as coolers for certain temperature ranges (overkill for a normal freezer but if you want much colder it's one way to go). Heat pumps are essentially Stirling engines.
Shameless plug ahead: a blog post of mine on Stirling engines here: Stirling Engine
The lightbulbs are mostly near the ceiling, so the heat (the hot air created, actually) mostly just gathers there and leaks out instead of being generated near the floor where it would actually do you some good before rising.
Efficient, sure, but how's that helping when the heat is not where you ant it to be?
Slashdot Mirror
You got a better idea? Maybe governments or domain registrars would sign certs?
Governments are the entities signing off on other forms of identification. So why not this?
2% - one in 50 - committing fraud to get ahead (or simply to keep their job) in a very competitive, volatile career environment. Sounds like it's in the right ballpark, and probably comparable to other professions. Some people are so career and status driven, and so unconcerned with the effects of their actions on other people, that they will break rules and cut corners no matter what the field.
I do question the other figures though, simply because "questionable research conduct" is such a very nebulous kind of categorization. You can delimit it in very different ways, all perfectly reasonable. You could even effectively decide which number you want then define the term in such a way that you reach it (a practice that would most likely be included in the term). Notably, the author excludes plagiarism, even though that is a serious offense in research for good reason, and one that I'd expect most surveys to include, not drop.
Also, the numbers for incidents by colleagues is rather pointless, since there is no indication of how many those colleagues are. If each participant has had a minimum total of eight colleagues altogether in their career up until this point, then the 14% rate fits very well with the self-reported 2% above. But of course, the participants do not know how many incidents they missed, and the number of times the mistakenly thought fraud was taking place is unknown. I would be very hesitant in trying to read anything at all into the numbers about witnessed incidents.
"And why can't one take religious seriously and not be a violent extremist, or even a bigot?"
I don't know. Why?
Either:
1) up and coming browser makers see speed as an easy differentiating factor and target their browser for it; or
2) Newer products tend to be faster since they have the older ones to compare to. And newer products also are "up and coming" and thus have lower uptake than "old and entrenched" ones. or;
3) the public puts very little value on browser speed. Those spending their resources optimizing for it rather than other features get few users as a result.
I'm willing to entertain the notion that yes, it would be extremely fast if you got it running on modern hardware. It wouldn't do much of course, but what little it did would probably be faster than any current browser.
True to some degree, but depending on what you mean by "local", and what you mean by "news".
I used to live in Lund, Sweden, which has about 100k people, and close to two larger cities. If by "news" you mean anything of any import happening in the town then every regional newspaper and television channel website will tend to cover it. Same thing for public announcements, street planning, city hall debates and anything like that; that is in addition easily found on the city web site, the political parties' sites and similar places regardless of whether a newspaper will carry it.
But if by "news" you mean the small, local "Drunk cat rescued from tree; bottle lost" or irate letters to the editor about nefarious neighbors willfully spreading leaves over their lawn then no, there's not many sources for that. There's good reason for that; I would never even notice if that disappeared.
On the other hand, right now I live in Osaka, Japan. The "local" news market is about as big as that of Sweden. There's simply enough local different news sources that no moratorium or paywall could contain it.
I was really trying to make the argument specifically for specifying a monetary amount. Of course there's an opportunity cost of sorts. But unless one of the alternative activities are directly about making money with your time there's no way you can put a monetary amount on it. What's the monetary opportunity cost of building a hybrid in your garage as opposed to, say, sit and watch a Star Trek rerun; or clip your toenails? And thus you can't really lump this opportunity cost in with the monetary costs of doing something; the units are different.
Problem is, whether sustainable or not, daily news (as opposed to in-depth analysis or investigative journalism) is fungible. You can get it from anywhere, and it's all much the same. If 90% of papers go behind a paywall, most people will simply migrate to those 10% that did not - and incidentally probably provide them with enough readers for them to be sustainable.
And those news sites can be anywhere in the world. Der Spiegel runs a very good international English-language website. BBC and other national broadcasters (who all have an income stream independent of advertising) also have very good news sites.
WSJ is not a good model since it's not a newspaper. It manages to sell subscriptions because a) it has a well-heeled readership that doesn't mind paying; and most importantly b) they aren't selling news, but exactly that in-depth analysis that is unique to them (along with editorials divorced from reality on planet Earth, but you can always skip that part).
Whether the current situation is sustainable or not is irrelevant to whether this idea will work. And chances are, it won't, except for the publications that stay away and pick up readership from those that do.
Time is only worth money if you actually would have used it to make money otherwise. Say, if you had to take unpaid time off work to do this. Chances are, the cost of the time is zero.
Easily solved! The law specifically forbids the use of a nonhuman "womb". Just call your artificial device a "Woomba" and you'll be in the clear!
And maybe if they stopped calling these times "economic" all money would disappear!
Sorry.
In Swedish you do say "fourteenth of march" ("fjortonde mars"), making 14/3 a natural way of expressing the date. I believe a number of other European languages use the same order.
We do sometimes use the order you describe of year-month-day, but only in forms and such when you actually express the whole thing, with year, leading zeros and all: 09-03-14 for 14th march, 2009 is fine, but 3-14 is not.
22/7 is quite a holiday I hear
Well - more or less.
Actually, this has probably not so much to do with the US itself, and more with the countries many of you immigrants come from.
I'm Swedish, and for various reasons a disproportionate number of Swedes tend to move abroad; not just academics and other highly skilled people, but "ordinary" people too. There is very little debate about it, and no screaming about "brain drain". The reason is that the vast majority eventually return. It may take three, or five, or ten years, but most come back and bringing with them more skills and experience, making it a net win for the country.
Similarly, as large countries like China and India become places where a middle-class life is attainable and normal, so will more people return home eventually where they would have settled abroad permanently before. It's not that the US has become less attractive, but that people's own home countries have become more so.
The US can and should adapt to this in two ways: first, recognize that a temporary immigrant is still valuable for the country even if they leave after some years. Second, encourage more of their own citizens to likewise move abroad for some period in order to build their skills and benefit in the same way that other countries do. While Swedes are disproportionately likely to live abroad, US citizens seem anecdotally disproportionately unlikely to do so. You seem to have a whole slew of arbitrary barriers, like the double income taxation when living abroad, that conspire to keep normal people from relocating for a few years.
That the Internet can't ever replace newspapers and proper reporting. [...] I remember one comment was "How many bloggers are embedded in Falujah?"
There are of course differing opinions on what kinds of reporting, if any, can be replaced by "the Internet", depending on what you mean by "reporting" and "the Internet", but that's beside the point. You could argue that being "embedded in Falujah" is perhaps a rather skewed position from which to report, compared to civilian bloggers in the area, but that is again beside the point.
The point is, if not enough people pay for the newspaper and "proper reporting", through ad placements and through subscriptions, then there won't be anybody "embedded in Falujah", regardless of whether or not you think it's important, and whether or not "the Internet" or bloggers can pick up the slack.
Yes, the newspaper industry can fail without any other medium continuing the same work. We'll get only as much investigative journalism and long-term reporting (which I assume are the parts you'd miss) as we're collectively willing to pay for, and that amount might be small indeed.
On the other hand, while newspapers are having a serious crisis in the US right now, it's nowhere near as dire in most other parts of the world. The local newspaper industry seems to be hurting from financial issues - heavy debt, failing owners - as much as anything to do with the actual business itself.
And what I meant was the "median", not the "mean". You try translating terminology from Swedish in your head as you write :/
"Erm, yes. In fact, half the population are below average. But it's OK; the other half are above average."
Erm, no. Half the population are below the mean, and half above. The average only equals the mean if you have an unskewed Gaussian distribution (and for various reasons you'll not expect the distribution to be unskewed in this case).
In fact, if you relax the criteria further you could have everybody exactly average, or everybody except one above (or below) average: Let's say everybody in the field is exactly equally good - they'd all be average. Now let's say one person is worse than everybody else. The average will be pulled down just a little, and while that one person will be below average, everybody else will be above. If that one person was better than average you'd have everyone but him below average.
The thing is, I don't understand the logic of using JS for high-level tasks and Vala (basically glorified C) for low-level stuff. The thing is, JS is a very small, austere language. The whole advantage of having a high-level language is lost when you use something as bare-bones as JS. JS is also much, much slower than Perl and Python, so you'd end up having to do only a very small percentage of your programming in JS, and the rest in Vala, in order to get decent performance.
The idea is this I think, more or less: Vala feels a fair bit like Java and C# - the syntax borrows heavily from C# for instance - but is completely statically compiled to C. So, unlike Java or C#, it doesn't need a separate runtime installed, you just get a normal, self-contained binary. JS is a lot more lightweight than the Python/Perl/Ruby trio, and the interpreter is even small enough to easily be embedded into the binary if needed. It means you can write a self-contained "traditional" binary using both a modern language and dynamic scripting with no need for extra runtime stuff.
Sounds like a good enough idea that it's well worth pursuing at least.
"Now that it is worldwide, they need to look at getting away from new TLD's and going to country code domains(example, .us or .cn). That way each country can establish its own standards for what is and is not allowed."
Must have been a very comfortable rock, to be sleeping under for so long. ^_^
Sorry - but seriously, that's exactly the system we already have today. Most companies, especially local companies only doing business in their home country (and that is the vast majority of businesses after all) already register only under their country domain, and most country domains already have their own country-specific regulations for their use.
"tlds largely are useless, anything other than .gov or .edu is a mess"
You mean that .com and -org are a mess. Most tld's are not a mess at all. Country tld's are usually much better managed than those free-for-all domains, with some actual enforcement of who may register what kind of domain.
Quite the opposite. The authorities were on the ball, gathered info and told the parties they'd likely be filing a formal complaint. The result: the putative monopoly was broken up almost before it began, with no damage to the marketplace and no long, hugely expensive trial and appeals that would have sucked money and energy from the state and the corporate parties alike. And the way they did it, if Google and Yahoo really thought they would win such a process they were still free to go ahead and face the consequences.
Sounds like the state did a pretty good job in this case.
"...a finite number of hawkings will cross the event horizon, while an equal number of anti-hawkings will stay inside."
And they'll be easily distinguishable as the anti-Hawkings are all evil and have goatees.
"Next time you need kidney dialysis you won't need to question his genius. "
Why? He's not the inventor. Nils Alwall made the first useful, effective dialysis machine, based on earlier experimental work from Kolff and others. Other people improved it further since then. Kamen apparently made a more portable version is all. You want to thank anybody, thank those who actually made dialysis possible.
Stirling engines can be fairly efficient if you have the (space and weight) budget to make them big and heavy. For cars they're certainly not a very good idea.
But the main point of Stirling engines isn't efficiency but the fact that they are not only fuel-agnostic; unlike combustion engines or steam engines they don't need any kind of combustion or medium phase-change to operate. Anything that can generate a temperature differential will do. They're also quiet and very reliable (few moving parts).
That makes them well suited for things like backup generators, where you can store them for years on end, then run them on whatever fuel you can get hold of. They're used in submarines too, due to their silent operation and no need for actual combustion to generate enough heat. You could set up a Stirling engine to run on the waste heat from other processes. And they're reversible, so they're used as coolers for certain temperature ranges (overkill for a normal freezer but if you want much colder it's one way to go). Heat pumps are essentially Stirling engines.
Shameless plug ahead: a blog post of mine on Stirling engines here: Stirling Engine
The lightbulbs are mostly near the ceiling, so the heat (the hot air created, actually) mostly just gathers there and leaks out instead of being generated near the floor where it would actually do you some good before rising.
Efficient, sure, but how's that helping when the heat is not where you ant it to be?