There have been "vertical search engines" that only search within particular fields for a very long time now -- everything from cars to plumbing. Not sure how newsworthy it is that there are also ones for Christian and Muslim theology. Rather useful if you're looking up material to help you write a sermon, bible study, or for use in your own bible reading. There are also religious bookshops, selling religious books. So what a surprise that if there's a lot of written material around, someone's made a search engine for it. In other shocking news, there is a search engine exclusively for knitting. Clearly its users must only believe in woollen dinosaurs!
More generally, there are preferred reference frames. They're called inertial frames.
Preferred by whom. That is a rhetorical question. Not every definition of "centre" or even "preferred centre" actually cares about astronomers. From a philosophical perspective, it is perfectly reasonable to describe yourself as the centre of the universe -- because you yourself can observe the universe directly from no other point (you can of course observe it indirectly from other points, but your direct observation -- your eyes and ears -- remain firmly attached to your own head). Accordingly, the self-centric universe is a model of the universe that you probably use cognitively every day in one way or another. And yes it can theoretically be modelled mathematically.
When pressed on the details of their beliefs, I think that only a few people will actually say that yes, they truly believe in transubstantiation (after that term is defined for them, after all I've talked with a lot of people who claim to be catholic who have no idea what that mean
I suspect you don't truly know what it means. I suspect you think it means that the bread physically transforms, whereas it turns out the original Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation does not claim that. It claims, if you read a translation of the original doctrine, that the bread retains the aspect (ie, physical properties) of bread, but is transformed in essence (ie, spiritual properties) as Christ. The confusion comes from a change in common language idioms -- a modern reader would see "essence" and assume atoms (ie, that the doctrine claims the physics of the bread changes), whereas a religious spiritual writer would regard matter as mere aspect and things of eternal significance (the spiritual nature) as being "essence".
I'm not Catholic, but I did have to stop making fun of that doctrine when I found out it was my misunderstanding of the Catholic doctrine that was the issue, not their doctrine misunderstanding physics after all.
The original intent of this ID is create something akin to the social security number in the US.
I'll tell you two important reasons for this 1. Make resource allocation more efficient.
For example, there is a concept of basic items like rice, wheat etc... being sold subsidized to poor people.
That mechanism is very inefficient and red tape laden presently.The ID is supposed to streamline it .
2. Currently there is no concept credit history in India other than a credit card.
There is no way a dealer would sell you a TV on credit unless you bring somebody known the dealer along with you.
Imagine US without SSN. That is what it is now in India. very inefficient.
My goodness -- it'd be like... Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and all those other countries that don't use a social security identifier as a de facto single compulsory ID for everything else in your life apart from just social security. How horrifying!
In a related topic, the UK's proposed national ID has been scrapped even before it has become compulsory, with the government scrapping it saying they want 'to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.' When you've got a government saying that national IDs are a substantial erosion of civil liberties, it's worth listening to
Of the two "important reasons" for an SSN you mention, neither is valid.
The first does not require your social security number to be used by anyone other than (shock) social security themselves. It doesn't even need to be a universal number across both tax and benefits (and given that tax law and benefits law might sometimes consider income differently, or in ways that are open to case-law interpretation, it seems like a good idea not to link the databases too closely). In India, one of the controversial aspects of the biometric ID is that it will include your caste -- seemingly inviting caste-based discrimination. Again, a case where there's an advantage to deciding not to keep information on file.
The second doesn't require a social security number at all. Australia, Britain, and many other countries have reasonable credit history checking methods that do not require revealing your tax, social services, or other government identifiers.
I suspect India is actually more interested in the biometrics than in the individual ID. The problem they face is that they have a very large rural population who don't interact with official government documentation very often -- and do not have birth certificates, driving licenses, passports, and other documents that are used as proof of identity in more urban/developed countries. A biometric ID would give them one, and one that doesn't matter if the ID card itself gets lost on the farm.
We are who we pretend to be. Our interactions with others define the kind of person we are. The "real you" that no one ever sees is an idealized fantasy...
But probably neither you nor I nor anybody else in this Slashdot thread has ever had an interaction with Shatner. Claiming that our non-interactions-just-reading-about-him-in-the-media is "the real Shatner" would be absurd. Do you think Barack Obama's interactions with family and friends are the long prosaic speeches you see on television? That the Wiggles sing and dance in yellow jumpsuits as they do their shopping at the supermarket? Do you think the stage-managed appearances of actors on Oprah is "the real them"? That the Cillit Bang guy really shouts all the time when he's cleaning his own kitchen? Shatner's pretty up-front that when he's in front of a camera, a reporter, a public appearance, or groups of people he doesn't know, he treats it like being on stage. Are you surprised? He's just telling you what should be obvious to you already, unless you've been completely taken in by the media/PR business. I dare say his family and friends probably do see quite a different persona than you do.
It's a victory for everyone except users. Google's PR people can now tell investors and customers "Look how great we are on privacy: in FY2010, we gave $8.5 million to support privacy education, and unlike other companies we've never had to pay a dime of compensation to our users for privacy breaches" making the lost lawsuit sound like benevolence. The law-firm that brought the class action can now say "we've successfully pursued actions against large companies including Google,..." So the only people who lose out and get nothing are the victims who've had their private information leaked.
18 months is waaaaaaaaaay to early to introduce stuff like that.
Let the toddler be a toddler. All that baby Einstein-esque crap has been proven to be nothing but trouble for your child's NORMAL development.
One trick is that the appropriate input device is you. Part of the issue with TV is apparently that it takes away from time interacting with the parents. Baby Einstein programs on a PC would still have that issue. On the other hand, your toddler asking you for "orange buses" and you looking up pictures of them on Google Images for him is pretty much just a very convenient never-ending picture book. (Still wouldn't spend more than twenty minutes or so in any day doing that, and only a couple of times a week, though.)
Whats old is new again, they really should bring back the oral exam. Not only does it make for a great name for porn movies, it actually is probably the easiest way to accurately asses the students understanding of the material and prevents cheating(for the most part). Best of all, it doesn't take 3 hours per student.
Unless you videorecord them all (and I'm not sure how many examining professors would like to themselves be recorded as they mark every student every year), it's a bit harder to deal with appeals processes. And these days universities do have to have appeals processes.
Many, but not most, young kids fresh out of school "get it". They are worth hiring. Many, but not most, old timers with decades of experience don't "get it", and by that point they probably never will.
Yes, finally we have the scientific explanation for why young programmers believe they are superior to older programmers! Clearly the old-timers have just run out of snake-oil!
That's an outright twisting of the truth. People agree that the material is human material, but so are my toenail clippings. Those aren't human, and that's the same debate here with blastocysts. So you're vastly overstating the case.
Nope, my statement was scientifically precisely accurate. Human embryos are 100% human. They're certainly not bovine, feline, or ursine... (Feel free to chat with any biologist if you are unsure about that). And as also stated, human embryos are also certainly a human organism at a particular stage of development. (Didn't you even do biology and get told where you came from? This isn't radical stuff, mate!) As I've said before, the question is whether they there is an arbitrary point of development a human embryo must reach before it qualifies as a 'person'. That debate usually gets tied up with independent viability, level of cognitive development, ability to feel pain, or all sorts of other much harder-to-pin-down notions. It might help if you were a little more careful with your language, and remembered two things: (1) "human" is usually an adjective, and (2) laws and ethics usually talk about "person"s not "human"s.
Nope, you also have to show harm. That's why the guy suing over "under God" in the pledge wasn't allowed to pursue his suit on behalf of his daughter, remember?
Once again, if you can show that your competitors are in breach of a law and you are not, it's very easy to file a lawsuit. By the very nature of being competitors they are harming you (taking market share from you), and because they are not incurring costs that you are in order to comply with the law, their illegal actions are causing you harm.
Perhaps Oracle should concentrate more on making their software reliable, and less on lawsuits.
From what I recall Digital VMS didn't have that problem, and even had no problems migrating an always on system over different processors, and keeping the cluster running over more than 15 years. One second and Oracle crashes.
It's a pity which of those companies survived.
Speaking empirically (and somewhat cheekily), isn't the lesson from your example that Digital should have concentrated less on making their software reliable, and more on lawsuits, in order to survive then?
There's a world of difference between ethics like these ("is testing on an abstract maybe-human wrong") and ethical cases where real harm that would not have otherwise occurred against real people will result
I think you're telegraphing your view on that "maybe". That you think it's actually a "no". (After all, if you thought it was a "yes" there would be no difference at all between "harming real humans" and... harming real humans.*) The bad news I have for you is that university ethics committees really are required to take more than just your own ethical viewpoint into account, and more than just the viewpoints of the project's own researchers. Yup, even if you say "but, but... I don't like them... they smell and some of them even vote Republican..." ethics committees still have to consider their views, especially when they are backed by legislation (eg the US legislation banning Federal funding of research that destroys embryos).
* In fact, the ethical argument is slightly different. Scientifically everyone is in absolute agreement that those embryos are 100% human, and certainly are a human organism. It's whether there's an arbitrary stage of development that a human embryo must reach before it qualifies for ethical and legal protection as a person (a much vaguer term) that's the ethical debate.
If "their ethics are different from mine in a way that gives them an advantage" is sufficient reason to sue, I should be able to sue a lot of people.
I believe the lawsuit (see a few posts up in the thread) actually specifies the exact law they claim the other researchers are breaching. If you can name the exact law you claim your competitors are breaching, then yes you most certainly can go sue them...
Wait, what? They're being done harm by competing with this research? So... embryonic cells are that much superior? (Sounds like we should make sure this is as legal as can be pronto!) But they can't evidently use them themselves?
So it's an awful lot easier to do research if you can ignore all the ethical considerations. A researcher who diligently takes into account and works around ethical issues is at a disadvantage compared to one who does not. It's not a great reason for legalising things though -- so that researchers can be lazier. Pharmaceutical research companies would also love it if they didn't have to do so much safety testing and diligence before they did a trial on some human victims, erm I mean subjects, but economic efficiency is not the only thing we should look for in policy.
This seems like an unsurprising result given that a lot of medical students already use simulations in their training (everything from haptic simulators for laproscopic surgery, to mannekins that can be hooked up to medical equipment and have an operation performed on them, to role-play scenariors with actors playing the patients). Indeed there are plenty of companies selling video-based simulation equipment, and whole medical conferences on medical simulation for training.
In other news, 98% of golfers thought it might be helpful to practice their putting.
I am surprised that it wasn't 100% that people would say a computer game can have educational value.
The difference is probably in how you interpret the word, rather than your opinion of the product -- for example, nobody would doubt that airline's high-tech cockpit simulators are useful for training their pilots, but not everybody would consider them a "game". Same goes for patient simulators.
Rebates, in addition to social and economic safety net policies, make consumption tax systems as progressive as Congress wants and does so more efficiently than any other system of taxation.
Actually no. Do you think Warren Buffet automatically buys more donuts than Larry Ellison each year because he has a higher income? Sales taxes hit a point at which people's spending on taxable goods does not rise proportionally with income. They are also a perverse incentive: as sales taxes rise, the wealthy are encouraged to reduce their US spending. Whereas an income tax, earning an extra dollar still provides $0.60 advantage, under sales tax spending a dollar provides $1.23 punishment. The poor still have to spend because most of their spending (food, shelter, clothing) is forced. But the wealthy have much more discretionary spending, and so they can reduce theirs. And that kills the economy, as the members of the economy that have money are incentivised to reduce their US spending, either by moving it overseas (spend more time abroad) or by buying up assets instead of goods (leading to asset price inflation, and reduced employment).
A famously broken model. There's an old saying: if you are an ordinary person who buys a football club's shirt as a souvenir, you pay 23% extra in sales tax; if you are a billionaire who buys a football club as a souvenir, you don't. But unlike today, that discriminatory sales tax the whole basis of "fairtax"'s proposed tax system -- the billionaire never needs to worry about corporation tax, CGT, or anything else ever taking a dime from his pocket. Meanwhile, there is already a long history of people pushing purchases through companies (turning them into fringe benefits) to avoid paying tax, and "fairtax.org"s proposals are even more open to that kind of rorting. Personal cars are taxed at increased rates; but company cars are 100% tax-free. Guess what happens to the number of companies providing their employees company cars "for business reasons"? And as everybody floods through the loopholes, the tax base moves to punishing only those who companies give the least tax-avoidance help to: ie, the poor, the unemployed, and the retired.
Yes, because that wasn't a mistake. It was an indication that I went through 12 years of primary and secondary education, 4 years of undergraduate work, and 6 years on a Masters and a Ph.D. and was never once told the difference between "Your" and "You're." Until you came along and enlightened me just now, I was ignorant and lost. A lot of people would have just assumed that it was a mistake--but not you. You, and only you, realized that I needed the grammatical guidance of a kind scholar like yourself. You stepped forward, ignoring the citics who would dismiss you as a smug grammar Nazi, and said "No, I will not allow him to remain ignorant!"
Thank you, sir! Thank you!
Grandparent poster, there's only one possible reply to this. Go on, you've got to say it...
Of course, you're assuming that the answers to those questions must be non-material.
Technically I'm saying that if you choose to use a material-only methodology, you presuppose the assumption that the answers to those questions must be material/mechanistic. And if you decide you will brook no alternatives if your experiment fails, but just keep claiming "maybe we'll find a mechanistic explanation tomorrow", then that becomes an unfalsifiable claim. "We will eventually find an explanation" is not a scientific theory but a philosophical position. "Does explanation X work" is a scientific theory. (I can't believe I've had to repeat myself so many times... maybe it's just an unfalsifiable claim that you'll get it eventually...)
As it happens there are some good reasons to suspect first hand experience might not be material, I'll not risk confusing you further...
Sometimes a problem doesn't actually exist. I strongly suspect that a lot of these questions a problematic because we're looking at them wrong.
And that's entirely up to you, but it's a philosophical position not a scientific theory.
Similarly for "actual existence" versus "mathematical existence" - it's not clear to me that they are both actual types of "existence" per se. In what sense can it be said that the "Mandelbrot Set" exists?
Very easily. If Slashdot supported mathematical notation I could even write the set theory notation for it for you.
Your discomfort at the idea, though, does illustrate that even you do think this universe has a special quality that is different from other mathematical universes -- such that this universe can be "real" and others "fictional".
You have, unfortunately, completely missed the point I'm trying to make.
If you look back over the history of the conversation you will see that no, you were trying to rebut my point but completely missed it.
We have a choice - a forced choice. We can assume that things can in fact be understood and explained, or that they can't.
No we're not forced in that choice. Most scientists (I can point you to the UCLA and Boulder studies if necessary) assume there are some things that can be explained mechanistically and some things that can't.
Sure, "there are searches for rational explanations that we can never know whether they'll ever reach a conclusion". So what? We can either keep trying, or give up. The latter offers certainty, I guess... but it's awfully bleak certainty, no?
Are you trying the Chewbacca defense or something? Because none of that changes whether "we might find an answer tomorrow" is falsifiable or not, which was the topic you so strenuously objected to to start this whole long thread off.
You did not read the links, in particular this one: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html. People have been giving up and asserting "this or that will never have a scientific explanation" for a long time... and someone else comes along and figures it out. We have a history of several thousand years showing that people are very frequently - quite possibly always - wrong when they claim "this can't be explained scientifically". Just saying "I don't see how that could be explained" is not a good case.t.
You're arguing a straw man, because that's not the case anybody has been making. The case is that "we might find an explanation tomorrow" is unfalsifiable because there is always another tomorrow. Induction is used to generate hypotheses, not to test them. I don't think you even realise what falsifiability means. You have to ask yourself "what hypothetical experimental result could convince me this theory is incorrect"; if the answer is "none", then it is unfalsifiable and unscientific. Hence why absolute materialism is also an unscientific philosophy. The search does not stop until a satisfactory explanation is found, so no falsifying (ie, unsuccessful) experiment can ever conclude.
(And -- see below -- if something is found that cannot be addressed with an experimental material explanation, it gets categorised out of the evidence.)
Existence is another thing that we don't have answers for... yet. So?
So, the way we have constructed the rules (yes we -- science is an entirely artificial process) actually means we can't experimentally answer those questions. It's our own categorisation rules not a technological limitation that prevents us from designing an appropriate experiment. Particularly, the rule requiring third-party repeatable material experiments prevent us from answering questions that involve the non-material (the quality of this universe's actual existence versus other mathematical universes only mathematical existence) or by definition cannot be observed in a third-party manner (first-hand-observer experience). Hence why there is a difference between physics and meta-physics. The fudge that absolute materialists try is to "redefine" existence as only that which science can address -- "metaphysics is unscientific, therefore we'll use some rhetoric to label it 'unscientific' to believe that metaphysics exists" . It's not a solution, it's just wishing away the problem.
Roger Zelazny put it poetically, in his novel "Lord Of Light": "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."
Scientists don't take much notice of novels or poets. We do take note of mathematicians, and you might like to look up Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem. There are things that are mathematically true that we can never prove, so the idea of things that theoretically can't be proven is not foreign to us. And there are searches for rational explanations that we can never know whether they'll ever reach a conclusion.
Not necessarily. One can note that the list of things that have a "rational scientific explanation" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping track - the total has never gone down. Nothing's ever moved from the "has a rational scientific explanation" column to the "explained only supernaturally" column.
That's a furphy. By that note, someone could notice that "the number of girls I have slept with" also monotonically increases, and therefore claim that someday he's going to have slept with every girl in the world. And if a girl is saying no today, well she could always say yes tomorrow... In any case, there are theoretical bounds to the limits of what can be discovered experimentally and what science can fruitfully discuss.
Then there's the philosophical problem with the 'unknowable'. How can we, in practice, distinguish between something that doesn't have a "rational scientific explanation" and something that can't have one?
Actually that can be very clearly categorised. There are theoretically discoverable limits on knowledge, and with just a very little bit of thought (about what is and isn't acceptable scientific evidence) you can find any number of philosophical questions science cannot satisfactorily answer. Does the colour red look the same to you as it does to me? is one of the more famous examples of the mind-brain problem -- scientifically we can get as far as the electrochemistry in the brain but not to the (first-hand) experience. Absolute rational materialists usually try to duck the issue by insisting vehemently that the experience doesn't exist. Similarly, the difference between mathematical and actual existence ("why does this universe actually exist in a sense that any other set of equations I scribble on paper does not").
In practice, there ends up being no real difference between "absolute rational materialism" and just plain "rational materialism"... Either way, there's no point in accepting supernatural explanations. All you can say is, "we don't have a good account of that yet."
Not quite true. The scientific papers produced in either case don't change (and certainly I've never had a journal reviewer come back and say "the paper's fine, but I just wanted to check you've not got any religious beliefs") . But there is a very big in practice difference in how you interact in society. Absolute rational materialists spend their days angsting over all those religious people and fretting that someone might say "God" in class; more practical scientists just care that some good science gets taught (not that other subjects don't get taught).
If a kid has greater metaphysical questions, that's what his environment OUTSIDE of school is for.
That's the model the US has taken, and it's resulted in these decades-long rows in the community and in the courts. Outside the US, where we don't try to partition children into their in-school persona versus their out-of-school persona, it's not been a problem and science and RE teachers all just get on with their jobs pretty happily.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been "vertical search engines" that only search within particular fields for a very long time now -- everything from cars to plumbing. Not sure how newsworthy it is that there are also ones for Christian and Muslim theology. Rather useful if you're looking up material to help you write a sermon, bible study, or for use in your own bible reading. There are also religious bookshops, selling religious books. So what a surprise that if there's a lot of written material around, someone's made a search engine for it. In other shocking news, there is a search engine exclusively for knitting. Clearly its users must only believe in woollen dinosaurs!
More generally, there are preferred reference frames. They're called inertial frames.
Preferred by whom. That is a rhetorical question. Not every definition of "centre" or even "preferred centre" actually cares about astronomers. From a philosophical perspective, it is perfectly reasonable to describe yourself as the centre of the universe -- because you yourself can observe the universe directly from no other point (you can of course observe it indirectly from other points, but your direct observation -- your eyes and ears -- remain firmly attached to your own head). Accordingly, the self-centric universe is a model of the universe that you probably use cognitively every day in one way or another. And yes it can theoretically be modelled mathematically.
When pressed on the details of their beliefs, I think that only a few people will actually say that yes, they truly believe in transubstantiation (after that
term is defined for them, after all I've talked with a lot of people who claim to be catholic who have no idea what that mean
I suspect you don't truly know what it means. I suspect you think it means that the bread physically transforms, whereas it turns out the original Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation does not claim that. It claims, if you read a translation of the original doctrine, that the bread retains the aspect (ie, physical properties) of bread, but is transformed in essence (ie, spiritual properties) as Christ. The confusion comes from a change in common language idioms -- a modern reader would see "essence" and assume atoms (ie, that the doctrine claims the physics of the bread changes), whereas a religious spiritual writer would regard matter as mere aspect and things of eternal significance (the spiritual nature) as being "essence".
I'm not Catholic, but I did have to stop making fun of that doctrine when I found out it was my misunderstanding of the Catholic doctrine that was the issue, not their doctrine misunderstanding physics after all.
The original intent of this ID is create something akin to the social security number in the US.
I'll tell you two important reasons for this
1. Make resource allocation more efficient.
For example, there is a concept of basic items like rice, wheat etc... being sold subsidized to poor people.
That mechanism is very inefficient and red tape laden presently.The ID is supposed to streamline it .
2. Currently there is no concept credit history in India other than a credit card.
There is no way a dealer would sell you a TV on credit unless you bring somebody known the dealer along with you.
Imagine US without SSN. That is what it is now in India. very inefficient.
My goodness -- it'd be like ... Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and all those other countries that don't use a social security identifier as a de facto single compulsory ID for everything else in your life apart from just social security. How horrifying!
In a related topic, the UK's proposed national ID has been scrapped even before it has become compulsory, with the government scrapping it saying they want 'to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.' When you've got a government saying that national IDs are a substantial erosion of civil liberties, it's worth listening to
Of the two "important reasons" for an SSN you mention, neither is valid.
The first does not require your social security number to be used by anyone other than (shock) social security themselves. It doesn't even need to be a universal number across both tax and benefits (and given that tax law and benefits law might sometimes consider income differently, or in ways that are open to case-law interpretation, it seems like a good idea not to link the databases too closely). In India, one of the controversial aspects of the biometric ID is that it will include your caste -- seemingly inviting caste-based discrimination. Again, a case where there's an advantage to deciding not to keep information on file.
The second doesn't require a social security number at all. Australia, Britain, and many other countries have reasonable credit history checking methods that do not require revealing your tax, social services, or other government identifiers.
I suspect India is actually more interested in the biometrics than in the individual ID. The problem they face is that they have a very large rural population who don't interact with official government documentation very often -- and do not have birth certificates, driving licenses, passports, and other documents that are used as proof of identity in more urban/developed countries. A biometric ID would give them one, and one that doesn't matter if the ID card itself gets lost on the farm.
We are who we pretend to be. Our interactions with others define the kind of person we are. The "real you" that no one ever sees is an idealized fantasy...
But probably neither you nor I nor anybody else in this Slashdot thread has ever had an interaction with Shatner. Claiming that our non-interactions-just-reading-about-him-in-the-media is "the real Shatner" would be absurd. Do you think Barack Obama's interactions with family and friends are the long prosaic speeches you see on television? That the Wiggles sing and dance in yellow jumpsuits as they do their shopping at the supermarket? Do you think the stage-managed appearances of actors on Oprah is "the real them"? That the Cillit Bang guy really shouts all the time when he's cleaning his own kitchen? Shatner's pretty up-front that when he's in front of a camera, a reporter, a public appearance, or groups of people he doesn't know, he treats it like being on stage. Are you surprised? He's just telling you what should be obvious to you already, unless you've been completely taken in by the media/PR business. I dare say his family and friends probably do see quite a different persona than you do.
This is another great victory for lawyers. =b
It's a victory for everyone except users. Google's PR people can now tell investors and customers "Look how great we are on privacy: in FY2010, we gave $8.5 million to support privacy education, and unlike other companies we've never had to pay a dime of compensation to our users for privacy breaches" making the lost lawsuit sound like benevolence. The law-firm that brought the class action can now say "we've successfully pursued actions against large companies including Google, ..." So the only people who lose out and get nothing are the victims who've had their private information leaked.
18 months is waaaaaaaaaay to early to introduce stuff like that. Let the toddler be a toddler. All that baby Einstein-esque crap has been proven to be nothing but trouble for your child's NORMAL development.
One trick is that the appropriate input device is you. Part of the issue with TV is apparently that it takes away from time interacting with the parents. Baby Einstein programs on a PC would still have that issue. On the other hand, your toddler asking you for "orange buses" and you looking up pictures of them on Google Images for him is pretty much just a very convenient never-ending picture book. (Still wouldn't spend more than twenty minutes or so in any day doing that, and only a couple of times a week, though.)
Whats old is new again, they really should bring back the oral exam. Not only does it make for a great name for porn movies, it actually is probably the easiest way to accurately asses the students understanding of the material and prevents cheating(for the most part). Best of all, it doesn't take 3 hours per student.
Unless you videorecord them all (and I'm not sure how many examining professors would like to themselves be recorded as they mark every student every year), it's a bit harder to deal with appeals processes. And these days universities do have to have appeals processes.
Many, but not most, young kids fresh out of school "get it". They are worth hiring. Many, but not most, old timers with decades of experience don't "get it", and by that point they probably never will.
Yes, finally we have the scientific explanation for why young programmers believe they are superior to older programmers! Clearly the old-timers have just run out of snake-oil!
That's an outright twisting of the truth. People agree that the material is human material, but so are my toenail clippings. Those aren't human, and that's the same debate here with blastocysts. So you're vastly overstating the case.
Nope, my statement was scientifically precisely accurate. Human embryos are 100% human. They're certainly not bovine, feline, or ursine... (Feel free to chat with any biologist if you are unsure about that). And as also stated, human embryos are also certainly a human organism at a particular stage of development. (Didn't you even do biology and get told where you came from? This isn't radical stuff, mate!) As I've said before, the question is whether they there is an arbitrary point of development a human embryo must reach before it qualifies as a 'person'. That debate usually gets tied up with independent viability, level of cognitive development, ability to feel pain, or all sorts of other much harder-to-pin-down notions. It might help if you were a little more careful with your language, and remembered two things: (1) "human" is usually an adjective, and (2) laws and ethics usually talk about "person"s not "human"s.
Nope, you also have to show harm. That's why the guy suing over "under God" in the pledge wasn't allowed to pursue his suit on behalf of his daughter, remember?
Once again, if you can show that your competitors are in breach of a law and you are not, it's very easy to file a lawsuit. By the very nature of being competitors they are harming you (taking market share from you), and because they are not incurring costs that you are in order to comply with the law, their illegal actions are causing you harm.
Perhaps Oracle should concentrate more on making their software reliable, and less on lawsuits.
From what I recall Digital VMS didn't have that problem, and even had no problems migrating an always on system over different processors, and keeping the cluster running over more than 15 years. One second and Oracle crashes.
It's a pity which of those companies survived.
Speaking empirically (and somewhat cheekily), isn't the lesson from your example that Digital should have concentrated less on making their software reliable, and more on lawsuits, in order to survive then?
There's a world of difference between ethics like these ("is testing on an abstract maybe-human wrong") and ethical cases where real harm that would not have otherwise occurred against real people will result
I think you're telegraphing your view on that "maybe". That you think it's actually a "no". (After all, if you thought it was a "yes" there would be no difference at all between "harming real humans" and ... harming real humans.*) The bad news I have for you is that university ethics committees really are required to take more than just your own ethical viewpoint into account, and more than just the viewpoints of the project's own researchers. Yup, even if you say "but, but ... I don't like them... they smell and some of them even vote Republican..." ethics committees still have to consider their views, especially when they are backed by legislation (eg the US legislation banning Federal funding of research that destroys embryos).
* In fact, the ethical argument is slightly different. Scientifically everyone is in absolute agreement that those embryos are 100% human, and certainly are a human organism. It's whether there's an arbitrary stage of development that a human embryo must reach before it qualifies for ethical and legal protection as a person (a much vaguer term) that's the ethical debate.
If "their ethics are different from mine in a way that gives them an advantage" is sufficient reason to sue, I should be able to sue a lot of people.
I believe the lawsuit (see a few posts up in the thread) actually specifies the exact law they claim the other researchers are breaching. If you can name the exact law you claim your competitors are breaching, then yes you most certainly can go sue them...
Wait, what? They're being done harm by competing with this research? So... embryonic cells are that much superior? (Sounds like we should make sure this is as legal as can be pronto!) But they can't evidently use them themselves?
So it's an awful lot easier to do research if you can ignore all the ethical considerations. A researcher who diligently takes into account and works around ethical issues is at a disadvantage compared to one who does not. It's not a great reason for legalising things though -- so that researchers can be lazier. Pharmaceutical research companies would also love it if they didn't have to do so much safety testing and diligence before they did a trial on some human victims, erm I mean subjects, but economic efficiency is not the only thing we should look for in policy.
Is anything so simple and trivial that it can be done in basic HTML suddenly news when you can add the words "on the iPhone"?
But the iPhone let them add a few extra features over just plain HTML. If you hold don't hold the iPhone exactly right, you get eaten by a grue.
This seems like an unsurprising result given that a lot of medical students already use simulations in their training (everything from haptic simulators for laproscopic surgery, to mannekins that can be hooked up to medical equipment and have an operation performed on them, to role-play scenariors with actors playing the patients). Indeed there are plenty of companies selling video-based simulation equipment, and whole medical conferences on medical simulation for training.
In other news, 98% of golfers thought it might be helpful to practice their putting.
I am surprised that it wasn't 100% that people would say a computer game can have educational value.
The difference is probably in how you interpret the word, rather than your opinion of the product -- for example, nobody would doubt that airline's high-tech cockpit simulators are useful for training their pilots, but not everybody would consider them a "game". Same goes for patient simulators.
Rebates, in addition to social and economic safety net policies, make consumption tax systems as progressive as Congress wants and does so more efficiently than any other system of taxation.
Actually no. Do you think Warren Buffet automatically buys more donuts than Larry Ellison each year because he has a higher income? Sales taxes hit a point at which people's spending on taxable goods does not rise proportionally with income. They are also a perverse incentive: as sales taxes rise, the wealthy are encouraged to reduce their US spending. Whereas an income tax, earning an extra dollar still provides $0.60 advantage, under sales tax spending a dollar provides $1.23 punishment. The poor still have to spend because most of their spending (food, shelter, clothing) is forced. But the wealthy have much more discretionary spending, and so they can reduce theirs. And that kills the economy, as the members of the economy that have money are incentivised to reduce their US spending, either by moving it overseas (spend more time abroad) or by buying up assets instead of goods (leading to asset price inflation, and reduced employment).
www.fairtax.org.
A famously broken model. There's an old saying: if you are an ordinary person who buys a football club's shirt as a souvenir, you pay 23% extra in sales tax; if you are a billionaire who buys a football club as a souvenir, you don't. But unlike today, that discriminatory sales tax the whole basis of "fairtax"'s proposed tax system -- the billionaire never needs to worry about corporation tax, CGT, or anything else ever taking a dime from his pocket. Meanwhile, there is already a long history of people pushing purchases through companies (turning them into fringe benefits) to avoid paying tax, and "fairtax.org"s proposals are even more open to that kind of rorting. Personal cars are taxed at increased rates; but company cars are 100% tax-free. Guess what happens to the number of companies providing their employees company cars "for business reasons"? And as everybody floods through the loopholes, the tax base moves to punishing only those who companies give the least tax-avoidance help to: ie, the poor, the unemployed, and the retired.
Yes, because that wasn't a mistake. It was an indication that I went through 12 years of primary and secondary education, 4 years of undergraduate work, and 6 years on a Masters and a Ph.D. and was never once told the difference between "Your" and "You're." Until you came along and enlightened me just now, I was ignorant and lost. A lot of people would have just assumed that it was a mistake--but not you. You, and only you, realized that I needed the grammatical guidance of a kind scholar like yourself. You stepped forward, ignoring the citics who would dismiss you as a smug grammar Nazi, and said "No, I will not allow him to remain ignorant!"
Thank you, sir! Thank you!
Grandparent poster, there's only one possible reply to this. Go on, you've got to say it...
"Your welcome."
Of course, you're assuming that the answers to those questions must be non-material.
Technically I'm saying that if you choose to use a material-only methodology, you presuppose the assumption that the answers to those questions must be material/mechanistic. And if you decide you will brook no alternatives if your experiment fails, but just keep claiming "maybe we'll find a mechanistic explanation tomorrow", then that becomes an unfalsifiable claim. "We will eventually find an explanation" is not a scientific theory but a philosophical position. "Does explanation X work" is a scientific theory. (I can't believe I've had to repeat myself so many times ... maybe it's just an unfalsifiable claim that you'll get it eventually...)
As it happens there are some good reasons to suspect first hand experience might not be material, I'll not risk confusing you further...
Sometimes a problem doesn't actually exist. I strongly suspect that a lot of these questions a problematic because we're looking at them wrong.
And that's entirely up to you, but it's a philosophical position not a scientific theory.
Similarly for "actual existence" versus "mathematical existence" - it's not clear to me that they are both actual types of "existence" per se. In what sense can it be said that the "Mandelbrot Set" exists?
Very easily. If Slashdot supported mathematical notation I could even write the set theory notation for it for you.
Your discomfort at the idea, though, does illustrate that even you do think this universe has a special quality that is different from other mathematical universes -- such that this universe can be "real" and others "fictional".
You have, unfortunately, completely missed the point I'm trying to make.
If you look back over the history of the conversation you will see that no, you were trying to rebut my point but completely missed it.
We have a choice - a forced choice. We can assume that things can in fact be understood and explained, or that they can't.
No we're not forced in that choice. Most scientists (I can point you to the UCLA and Boulder studies if necessary) assume there are some things that can be explained mechanistically and some things that can't.
Sure, "there are searches for rational explanations that we can never know whether they'll ever reach a conclusion". So what? We can either keep trying, or give up. The latter offers certainty, I guess... but it's awfully bleak certainty, no?
Are you trying the Chewbacca defense or something? Because none of that changes whether "we might find an answer tomorrow" is falsifiable or not, which was the topic you so strenuously objected to to start this whole long thread off.
You did not read the links, in particular this one: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html. People have been giving up and asserting "this or that will never have a scientific explanation" for a long time... and someone else comes along and figures it out. We have a history of several thousand years showing that people are very frequently - quite possibly always - wrong when they claim "this can't be explained scientifically". Just saying "I don't see how that could be explained" is not a good case.t.
You're arguing a straw man, because that's not the case anybody has been making. The case is that "we might find an explanation tomorrow" is unfalsifiable because there is always another tomorrow. Induction is used to generate hypotheses, not to test them. I don't think you even realise what falsifiability means. You have to ask yourself "what hypothetical experimental result could convince me this theory is incorrect"; if the answer is "none", then it is unfalsifiable and unscientific. Hence why absolute materialism is also an unscientific philosophy. The search does not stop until a satisfactory explanation is found, so no falsifying (ie, unsuccessful) experiment can ever conclude. (And -- see below -- if something is found that cannot be addressed with an experimental material explanation, it gets categorised out of the evidence.)
Existence is another thing that we don't have answers for... yet. So?
So, the way we have constructed the rules (yes we -- science is an entirely artificial process) actually means we can't experimentally answer those questions. It's our own categorisation rules not a technological limitation that prevents us from designing an appropriate experiment. Particularly, the rule requiring third-party repeatable material experiments prevent us from answering questions that involve the non-material (the quality of this universe's actual existence versus other mathematical universes only mathematical existence) or by definition cannot be observed in a third-party manner (first-hand-observer experience). Hence why there is a difference between physics and meta-physics. The fudge that absolute materialists try is to "redefine" existence as only that which science can address -- "metaphysics is unscientific, therefore we'll use some rhetoric to label it 'unscientific' to believe that metaphysics exists" . It's not a solution, it's just wishing away the problem.
Roger Zelazny put it poetically, in his novel "Lord Of Light": "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."
Scientists don't take much notice of novels or poets. We do take note of mathematicians, and you might like to look up Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem. There are things that are mathematically true that we can never prove, so the idea of things that theoretically can't be proven is not foreign to us. And there are searches for rational explanations that we can never know whether they'll ever reach a conclusion.
Not necessarily. One can note that the list of things that have a "rational scientific explanation" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping track - the total has never gone down. Nothing's ever moved from the "has a rational scientific explanation" column to the "explained only supernaturally" column.
That's a furphy. By that note, someone could notice that "the number of girls I have slept with" also monotonically increases, and therefore claim that someday he's going to have slept with every girl in the world. And if a girl is saying no today, well she could always say yes tomorrow... In any case, there are theoretical bounds to the limits of what can be discovered experimentally and what science can fruitfully discuss.
Then there's the philosophical problem with the 'unknowable'. How can we, in practice, distinguish between something that doesn't have a "rational scientific explanation" and something that can't have one?
Actually that can be very clearly categorised. There are theoretically discoverable limits on knowledge, and with just a very little bit of thought (about what is and isn't acceptable scientific evidence) you can find any number of philosophical questions science cannot satisfactorily answer. Does the colour red look the same to you as it does to me? is one of the more famous examples of the mind-brain problem -- scientifically we can get as far as the electrochemistry in the brain but not to the (first-hand) experience. Absolute rational materialists usually try to duck the issue by insisting vehemently that the experience doesn't exist. Similarly, the difference between mathematical and actual existence ("why does this universe actually exist in a sense that any other set of equations I scribble on paper does not").
In practice, there ends up being no real difference between "absolute rational materialism" and just plain "rational materialism"... Either way, there's no point in accepting supernatural explanations. All you can say is, "we don't have a good account of that yet."
Not quite true. The scientific papers produced in either case don't change (and certainly I've never had a journal reviewer come back and say "the paper's fine, but I just wanted to check you've not got any religious beliefs") . But there is a very big in practice difference in how you interact in society. Absolute rational materialists spend their days angsting over all those religious people and fretting that someone might say "God" in class; more practical scientists just care that some good science gets taught (not that other subjects don't get taught).
Agree, freedom of religion is also freedom from religion.
Just waiting for someone to shout "Please, everybody, shut up -- you are denying my freedom from speech!"
If a kid has greater metaphysical questions, that's what his environment OUTSIDE of school is for.
That's the model the US has taken, and it's resulted in these decades-long rows in the community and in the courts. Outside the US, where we don't try to partition children into their in-school persona versus their out-of-school persona, it's not been a problem and science and RE teachers all just get on with their jobs pretty happily.