No I get the theory - I just need to be convinced that it works in practice. I think you need to think about what I just said. It was not that it is more difficult to count the cards but that wild variations are much less likely to happen with a multi card deck dealt part way than a single deck dealt to the bottom. The mathematics btw, are not very complex at all - it's very simple to do the simulations (I ran them on my old Coco for a single card deck in high school)
I don't doubt for a minute that there are be small statistical advantages given a particular set of remaining cards. I just don't think that frequency of variations that are large enough to matter is high enough to make a decent profit at it especially given limited budgets relative to the casino and limits on the bet sizes. I am willing to be convinced otherwise if someone shows me some non-anectdotal hard data. But I also find it hard to believe that the billion dollar casinos are stupid enough not to do the (very easy) math and implement easy solutions (bigger deck - slightly modified odds) if it really did cost them money. Finally, if card counting can't be banned in Canada - then why do those casinos keep having BJ tables and where are all the Canadian BJ millionaires
You are right about the second point though - I was thinking back to the old days when hole cards were dealt face down. To discourage cheating - I forgot that a lot of casinos deal all cards face up now.
What is the evidence that card counters win anything. I've heard about card counting since the 60's, the latest incarnation being from the recent Wired novella er.. article. Certainly with a single deck which was used back before Sinatra, there were favorable combinations which is why casinos use multiple decks and only deal to a certain point before reshuffling to minimize the odds of a grossly favorable or unfavorable deck
So unless someone can point me to a simulation done with an 8 deck shoe reshuffled at the halfway point that shows the odds fluctuations with perfect play (someone must have done this) I think I will believe what the casino people say privately about counters. It's not that they win that they are banned, but that they clog up the tables with their minimum bets while counting (they need to take up the entire table).
And of course, it is in their best interests to make the public believe that there is a way to beat the system...
To be fair, it is not unusual to ask about funding of other projects i.e. in the context of a grant applications to see if the candidate is already funded for similar research or whether there is a more needy applicant. Sources of funding for the findings are also usually provided along with the references in most scientific papers. This stuff is in the public records anyway. But what is unusual is asking for info re funding from other than federal, state, and private sources (what's left - Aunt Mamie's pron site...?) Maybe it was just excessive lawyerese but the tone of the rest of the letter sounded like an Inquisition...
Yes that is the key phrase. If it was your research relating to this study or even your research relating to climate study that may be justifiable. The way it is worded, since he is a scientist - that means every source of income that he has...
Well, they could look up whether NSF/NIH funded them - that is a matter of public record. There is no need to ask for it. What the letter says is:
List all financial support relating to your research, including but not limited to private, state and federal assistance...
They asking for all funding sources, not just public and private which, IANAL, but to my eyes *does* include personal financial information (i.e. that which is not available publically). Furthermore they seem to want information regarding all research, not just climate research or the particular study in question. Let's not mince words and niceties, the letter is meant to intimidate, nothing more, nothing less...
Unlike nearly all the posters here - I actually own something with a transmeta chip in it. My Sharp MM20 laptop is just over 2 pounds and gets 8-9 hours on the battery (real life usage - not just spec sheet) and costs much less than the closest Intel-based competitor by Sony.
Don't know how the chip itself "specs" but I would recommend the actual end product to anyone who doesn't want to lug a brick and an AC adaptor around all day...
Back in the 80's when I was a summer student, all the clinicians and oncologists seem to know empirically that this was the case - that most of the growth was occurring at the tumor surface and that the center of the tumours were necrotic. This was a major problem not only in delivering drugs to the core but it also made the interior cells relatively immune to the chemotherapies and radiotherapies which mostly (back them) relied on the fact that tumour cells were dividing for their effectiveness.
The MBE model seems to fit what cancer biologists already believe - or did back then since I haven't kept up for many years, so I really don't see the practical import since their suggested therapy doesn't seem that different from what is being or has been tried...
From what I read in the article, they were just able to simulate something resembling real tumours using a linear growth model. But then the article itself says in the discussion that no one has ever observed non-linear exponential growth in real tumors anyways so people (with the possible exception of other modelers) have obviously taken this into account. Not clear to me whether any of the results from their model are novel nor are their assertions about the nutrient dependence of tumor growth convincing without some real experiments.
As a computational biologist, I'm not knocking the usefulness of these types of mathematical approaches - and what they seem to have is a nice and maybe even a correct tumorigensis model, but let's keep it real - this is far from a cure for cancer...
I disagree and precisely for the reason you state. Ph.D. students *do* exactly as you said - think in a very narrow area and take all the "peripheral" areas as axiomatic. Trouble is, there are thousands of other people who are doing the same thing and flooding the journals with me-too papers which while important, isn't going to result in breakthroughs. Thinking out of the box requires that you question these "peripheral" axioms that define the box. Trouble is that most of these axioms are correct and the box has gotten much much bigger especially as science becomes more multi-disciplinary. Learning that these some of these axioms may be incorrect and identifying the weak ones requires experience and trial and error.
I'm not saying that the PhD's of today are worse than those of before (the contrary is probably true) but that the competent Ph.D. level of knowing a narrow area as well as anyone and being able to come up with original ideas in that focussed region is not close to being enough nowadays...
Not surprising at all. The number of scientists is so much larger than before and the literature is so expansive that nearly all obvious things are or have been tried by somebody at sometime. Typically, it takes many years of trial and error (mostly error) before a young turk realizes this and starts to be able to narrow down the approaches that might actually work.
Perhaps even more important, is the amount of technology that is required before cutting-edge research can be done. With the possible exception of algorithm research (even then clusters help), this technology is not available to the general public. The young scientist will only have access to this technology in his/her "training" phase (which in biology is usually most of the 20's) while under the supervision of a more established scientist (who would get most of the credit should a breakthrough occur...). Even after starting up a new lab - it takes a few years to get everything in place and funding set up before you can try out those new ideas etc...
The writer is talking about poseurs and pseudo-intellectuals. You know - the ones you can't *avoid* hearing at parties... These people know that they are not *that* smart and try to protect their image of intelligence by defending every statement. While they believe that they have successfully pulled this off (as in the article...) what they have really done is convinced practically everyone around that they have no clue.
In contrast, the majority of *really* smart people don't really care if they're wrong occasionally since they *know* that they are smart and being wrong once in a while is no biggie and they'll learn something so that they will be right (again) the next time...
Many years at Newsweek, WSJ - won awards for being able to convey complex ideas in everyday language. And this person seems to have risen to the top of her field without a true understanding of what she is writing about. I don't mean the details where a few errors are understandable, but the actual underpinnings and ideas. This article is proof in point. Yes there are obvious questions and bad science but someone who understands science would pick examples that repeated previous studies, or were based on bad data, or badly interpreted data rather than experiments which confirms "common" sense.
To be fair, maybe she does understand all of this but had a deadline to meet for the next issue. In any case, this is very poor science reporting even for a mainstream publication like the WSJ...
The latter subject inspired his latest work, a fully checked formal proof of the famous Four Colour Theorem, using the Coq proof assistant developed at INRIA
Well according to the above quote from the Microsoft page - the software that actually did the proof came from a publically funded research institute not Microsoft - who merely applied it to the 4-colour problem. Both researchers appear to work at INRIA (French national institute of research in computer science) and one of them is associated with Microsoft.
http://stemcells.nih.gov/index.asp
It has a very good executive summary on stem cells and some good references. A good introductory text book on developmental biology will also be helpful for understanding the basics. I don't know of one offhand since it's been a while but you should be able to google and find what introductory courses use these days.
You are using very bad case studies. The better examples are what happened to ruby and pearl markets after techniques for making artificial and indistinguishable ones flooded the market. Rubies were once more expensive than diamonds and a wealthy dowager sold her Manhattan property in the 20's for a string of pearls.
Yeah - the price will drop - a lot - in spite of the marketing techniques that you mention...
You make some very good points except there are a lot more science experts here than you might think. I think most of them are lurkers who don't post much. One reason has already been mentioned. Scientists don't really like to comment on things unless they have RTFA and the background and thought about it which is a bit of work even if the topic is in your field of expertise. Secondly, some of the issues brought up are really very complex and it takes a lot of effort to try to give enough background so that the comment makes sense to the non-expert. A third reason is one that you touch upon - the amount of noise - i.e. why would anyone make the effort if they are going to be shouted down?
But, the reason to read/. is not really for science news - you can read Nature or Science for that - but for the unfiltered noise itself. This is one of the best places to get opinions of a large population of fairly intelligent non-experts on current topics of science. While there are a few zealots, I find the/. community as whole to be very receptive to science. They help identify areas where scientists need to spend more time and energy communicating ideas and countering FUD.
The funding is going to be like NIH funding, providing peer-reviewed grants for scientists, mostly from academia since the pharmaceuticals do very little of this type of research. If research money did not come from public or charitable funds, it would not be done since the short term profitability of trying to find a cure for Parkinson's or diabetes is rather dubious
The anger and frustration you seem to have about the drug industry should not be directed at the (relatively scant) tax dollars for basic research but towards the way that the drug research is structured downstream of the initial discoveries that encourage the wastefulness that you describe.
The reason I read Slashdot is the diversity of ideas, like yours which I find here. I feel an obligation to reciprocate by posting and moderating and also because it's fun to discuss things.
If the system became a pay system, this would drive away many occasional posters and would reduce the value to me of reading the posts and I would no longer find it worthwhile to participate. It's not about the money, nor even about the fact that someone is profiting from my "content", but the fact that it becomes less interesting. So after a while, all the regular posters leave too because they become bored.
In the old days, I have seen many a BBS die this way (unless they had warez of course) when the sysop mistakenly thought they were there for his board and the services that he provided, when in fact, we were all there for the people who called his board.
At first I thought it was an April fool's joke when I saw "National Microbial Laboratory Canada" which does not exist - "Health Canada National Microbiology Laboratory" does exist though. But, unfortunately, it's just another example of poor reporting and maybe some CYA politics.
The article implies that because this is an old virus, people born after 1968, the last time it was in a vaccine, have no immunity to it. What she was probably told was that it was unlikely that anyone born after 1968 would be immune to it which is quite different. Influenza vaccines are (somewhat) effective because although the viruses mutate rapidly, they are related and exposure to a related virus can confer resistance. If the reporter had done a Google like I did http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/pandemics/flu3.htm, she would have found that the same family of flu resurfaced in 1978 and a member of this family was included in vaccines after that.
Finally, according to the article, this kit has been floating around for a year with that sample and most countries only require level 2 facilities to handle it. Scientists value their lives as much as the next guy - so it's apparent that noone thought much of the risk. Makes me wonder whether the viruses were even infective. The recommendation for the virus in the kit to be destroyed only came about when the Canadian lab found it in another sample - meaning someone got sloppy and everyone went into CYA mode. Anyway, it probably is a good idea not to have that virus in the kit, if only to avoid articles like this - which was probably the thinking at WHO, rather than this being a real risk.
Let's see... according to Frulla - the children are right about recycling, smoking and experts on the Internet.
BUT
She and her generation know more about the morality of downloading music.
Non sequitur - Norman coordinate...
Yeah, the kids have got it right. When they take charge things like the DCMA will seem as incomprehensible as forcing darker-skinned people to sit at the back of the bus. I can imagine Frulla, Hatch et al sitting in their nursing homes saying - "we didn't know any better - that's just the way everyone thought back then..."
The evolution of sexual reproduction is what is brought into question *not* evolution. A major impetus for the evolution of sexual reproduction is the advantage of getting a good copy of a gene to replace a damaged one when you exchange DNA by sex. The prospect of RNA backup copies makes this a bit more complicated since there would be less need for sex to repair the DNA. This is discussed a bit in the article - and they imply that the RNA backup system (if it exists) may be prevalent in organisms that primarily reproduce asexually and thus have a greater need for such a repair system.
It doesn't invalidate anything and does not bring evolution into question. And, FYI, scientists are always at the drawing board - as working on theories as they "evolve" to reflect new data.
Isn't it amazing how less we know, the less we know?:-)
We don't know how well those students without computers would have done with computers. The proper experiment is to take a group of students and *randomly* divide them into a group that uses computers and a group that doesn't and see how the two groups do. If you do the experiment post-hoc and let them self-select which group they want to be in then the results are difficult to interpret since the selection process influences the results (i.e. bad students may be more likely to want a computer to game with)
A lot of bogus pseudoscience would not exist if people understood the difference between the two types of experiments...
Your typical newspaper consists mostly of the same wire stories available to everyone. The content on the business and sports pages are available elsewhere with less cheerleading and more objectivity. Entertainment news, reviews and even comics are available online. The best columnists are now bloggers. That leaves local news and local advertisements which for larger cities are also available online.
There is still a market for cheap dead tree editions to go with ones coffee or bathroom break but there is no hope for charging for online editions. Heck, many people (myself included) find it too much of a bother to even register to read a newspaper. Why waste your time when the information is just a Google search away...?
Slashdot Mirror
No I get the theory - I just need to be convinced that it works in practice. I think you need to think about what I just said. It was not that it is more difficult to count the cards but that wild variations are much less likely to happen with a multi card deck dealt part way than a single deck dealt to the bottom. The mathematics btw, are not very complex at all - it's very simple to do the simulations (I ran them on my old Coco for a single card deck in high school)
I don't doubt for a minute that there are be small statistical advantages given a particular set of remaining cards. I just don't think that frequency of variations that are large enough to matter is high enough to make a decent profit at it especially given limited budgets relative to the casino and limits on the bet sizes. I am willing to be convinced otherwise if someone shows me some non-anectdotal hard data. But I also find it hard to believe that the billion dollar casinos are stupid enough not to do the (very easy) math and implement easy solutions (bigger deck - slightly modified odds) if it really did cost them money. Finally, if card counting can't be banned in Canada - then why do those casinos keep having BJ tables and where are all the Canadian BJ millionaires
You are right about the second point though - I was thinking back to the old days when hole cards were dealt face down. To discourage cheating - I forgot that a lot of casinos deal all cards face up now.
What is the evidence that card counters win anything. I've heard about card counting since the 60's, the latest incarnation being from the recent Wired novella er.. article. Certainly with a single deck which was used back before Sinatra, there were favorable combinations which is why casinos use multiple decks and only deal to a certain point before reshuffling to minimize the odds of a grossly favorable or unfavorable deck
So unless someone can point me to a simulation done with an 8 deck shoe reshuffled at the halfway point that shows the odds fluctuations with perfect play (someone must have done this) I think I will believe what the casino people say privately about counters. It's not that they win that they are banned, but that they clog up the tables with their minimum bets while counting (they need to take up the entire table).
And of course, it is in their best interests to make the public believe that there is a way to beat the system...
To be fair, it is not unusual to ask about funding of other projects i.e. in the context of a grant applications to see if the candidate is already funded for similar research or whether there is a more needy applicant. Sources of funding for the findings are also usually provided along with the references in most scientific papers. This stuff is in the public records anyway. But what is unusual is asking for info re funding from other than federal, state, and private sources (what's left - Aunt Mamie's pron site...?) Maybe it was just excessive lawyerese but the tone of the rest of the letter sounded like an Inquisition...
Yes that is the key phrase. If it was your research relating to this study or even your research relating to climate study that may be justifiable. The way it is worded, since he is a scientist - that means every source of income that he has...
Well, they could look up whether NSF/NIH funded them - that is a matter of public record. There is no need to ask for it. What the letter says is:
List all financial support relating to your research, including but not limited to private, state and federal assistance...
They asking for all funding sources, not just public and private which, IANAL, but to my eyes *does* include personal financial information (i.e. that which is not available publically). Furthermore they seem to want information regarding all research, not just climate research or the particular study in question. Let's not mince words and niceties, the letter is meant to intimidate, nothing more, nothing less...
Unlike nearly all the posters here - I actually own something with a transmeta chip in it. My Sharp MM20 laptop is just over 2 pounds and gets 8-9 hours on the battery (real life usage - not just spec sheet) and costs much less than the closest Intel-based competitor by Sony.
Don't know how the chip itself "specs" but I would recommend the actual end product to anyone who doesn't want to lug a brick and an AC adaptor around all day...
Back in the 80's when I was a summer student, all the clinicians and oncologists seem to know empirically that this was the case - that most of the growth was occurring at the tumor surface and that the center of the tumours were necrotic. This was a major problem not only in delivering drugs to the core but it also made the interior cells relatively immune to the chemotherapies and radiotherapies which mostly (back them) relied on the fact that tumour cells were dividing for their effectiveness.
The MBE model seems to fit what cancer biologists already believe - or did back then since I haven't kept up for many years, so I really don't see the practical import since their suggested therapy doesn't seem that different from what is being or has been tried...
From what I read in the article, they were just able to simulate something resembling real tumours using a linear growth model. But then the article itself says in the discussion that no one has ever observed non-linear exponential growth in real tumors anyways so people (with the possible exception of other modelers) have obviously taken this into account. Not clear to me whether any of the results from their model are novel nor are their assertions about the nutrient dependence of tumor growth convincing without some real experiments.
As a computational biologist, I'm not knocking the usefulness of these types of mathematical approaches - and what they seem to have is a nice and maybe even a correct tumorigensis model, but let's keep it real - this is far from a cure for cancer...
I disagree and precisely for the reason you state. Ph.D. students *do* exactly as you said - think in a very narrow area and take all the "peripheral" areas as axiomatic. Trouble is, there are thousands of other people who are doing the same thing and flooding the journals with me-too papers which while important, isn't going to result in breakthroughs. Thinking out of the box requires that you question these "peripheral" axioms that define the box. Trouble is that most of these axioms are correct and the box has gotten much much bigger especially as science becomes more multi-disciplinary. Learning that these some of these axioms may be incorrect and identifying the weak ones requires experience and trial and error.
I'm not saying that the PhD's of today are worse than those of before (the contrary is probably true) but that the competent Ph.D. level of knowing a narrow area as well as anyone and being able to come up with original ideas in that focussed region is not close to being enough nowadays...
Not surprising at all. The number of scientists is so much larger than before and the literature is so expansive that nearly all obvious things are or have been tried by somebody at sometime. Typically, it takes many years of trial and error (mostly error) before a young turk realizes this and starts to be able to narrow down the approaches that might actually work.
Perhaps even more important, is the amount of technology that is required before cutting-edge research can be done. With the possible exception of algorithm research (even then clusters help), this technology is not available to the general public. The young scientist will only have access to this technology in his/her "training" phase (which in biology is usually most of the 20's) while under the supervision of a more established scientist (who would get most of the credit should a breakthrough occur...). Even after starting up a new lab - it takes a few years to get everything in place and funding set up before you can try out those new ideas etc...
The writer is talking about poseurs and pseudo-intellectuals. You know - the ones you can't *avoid* hearing at parties... These people know that they are not *that* smart and try to protect their image of intelligence by defending every statement. While they believe that they have successfully pulled this off (as in the article...) what they have really done is convinced practically everyone around that they have no clue.
In contrast, the majority of *really* smart people don't really care if they're wrong occasionally since they *know* that they are smart and being wrong once in a while is no biggie and they'll learn something so that they will be right (again) the next time...
Many years at Newsweek, WSJ - won awards for being able to convey complex ideas in everyday language. And this person seems to have risen to the top of her field without a true understanding of what she is writing about. I don't mean the details where a few errors are understandable, but the actual underpinnings and ideas. This article is proof in point. Yes there are obvious questions and bad science but someone who understands science would pick examples that repeated previous studies, or were based on bad data, or badly interpreted data rather than experiments which confirms "common" sense.
To be fair, maybe she does understand all of this but had a deadline to meet for the next issue. In any case, this is very poor science reporting even for a mainstream publication like the WSJ...
How many graduate students actually get to do groundbreaking research?
Quite a few actually - but you are right - if it is groundbreaking research you can be sure the supervisor's name will be all over it...
The latter subject inspired his latest work, a fully checked formal proof of the famous Four Colour Theorem, using the Coq proof assistant developed at INRIA
Well according to the above quote from the Microsoft page - the software that actually did the proof came from a publically funded research institute not Microsoft - who merely applied it to the 4-colour problem. Both researchers appear to work at INRIA (French national institute of research in computer science) and one of them is associated with Microsoft.
Just the facts ma'am - just the facts...
Intentionally left off I think, because it is similar in so many ways to Aguirre Wrath of God. But that's just me...
http://stemcells.nih.gov/index.asp It has a very good executive summary on stem cells and some good references. A good introductory text book on developmental biology will also be helpful for understanding the basics. I don't know of one offhand since it's been a while but you should be able to google and find what introductory courses use these days.
You are using very bad case studies. The better examples are what happened to ruby and pearl markets after techniques for making artificial and indistinguishable ones flooded the market. Rubies were once more expensive than diamonds and a wealthy dowager sold her Manhattan property in the 20's for a string of pearls.
Yeah - the price will drop - a lot - in spite of the marketing techniques that you mention...
You make some very good points except there are a lot more science experts here than you might think. I think most of them are lurkers who don't post much. One reason has already been mentioned. Scientists don't really like to comment on things unless they have RTFA and the background and thought about it which is a bit of work even if the topic is in your field of expertise. Secondly, some of the issues brought up are really very complex and it takes a lot of effort to try to give enough background so that the comment makes sense to the non-expert. A third reason is one that you touch upon - the amount of noise - i.e. why would anyone make the effort if they are going to be shouted down?
/. is not really for science news - you can read Nature or Science for that - but for the unfiltered noise itself. This is one of the best places to get opinions of a large population of fairly intelligent non-experts on current topics of science. While there are a few zealots, I find the /. community as whole to be very receptive to science. They help identify areas where scientists need to spend more time and energy communicating ideas and countering FUD.
But, the reason to read
The funding is going to be like NIH funding, providing peer-reviewed grants for scientists, mostly from academia since the pharmaceuticals do very little of this type of research. If research money did not come from public or charitable funds, it would not be done since the short term profitability of trying to find a cure for Parkinson's or diabetes is rather dubious
The anger and frustration you seem to have about the drug industry should not be directed at the (relatively scant) tax dollars for basic research but towards the way that the drug research is structured downstream of the initial discoveries that encourage the wastefulness that you describe.
The reason I read Slashdot is the diversity of ideas, like yours which I find here. I feel an obligation to reciprocate by posting and moderating and also because it's fun to discuss things.
If the system became a pay system, this would drive away many occasional posters and would reduce the value to me of reading the posts and I would no longer find it worthwhile to participate. It's not about the money, nor even about the fact that someone is profiting from my "content", but the fact that it becomes less interesting. So after a while, all the regular posters leave too because they become bored.
In the old days, I have seen many a BBS die this way (unless they had warez of course) when the sysop mistakenly thought they were there for his board and the services that he provided, when in fact, we were all there for the people who called his board.
At first I thought it was an April fool's joke when I saw "National Microbial Laboratory Canada" which does not exist - "Health Canada National Microbiology Laboratory" does exist though. But, unfortunately, it's just another example of poor reporting and maybe some CYA politics.
The article implies that because this is an old virus, people born after 1968, the last time it was in a vaccine, have no immunity to it. What she was probably told was that it was unlikely that anyone born after 1968 would be immune to it which is quite different. Influenza vaccines are (somewhat) effective because although the viruses mutate rapidly, they are related and exposure to a related virus can confer resistance. If the reporter had done a Google like I did http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/pandemics/flu3.htm, she would have found that the same family of flu resurfaced in 1978 and a member of this family was included in vaccines after that.
Finally, according to the article, this kit has been floating around for a year with that sample and most countries only require level 2 facilities to handle it. Scientists value their lives as much as the next guy - so it's apparent that noone thought much of the risk. Makes me wonder whether the viruses were even infective. The recommendation for the virus in the kit to be destroyed only came about when the Canadian lab found it in another sample - meaning someone got sloppy and everyone went into CYA mode. Anyway, it probably is a good idea not to have that virus in the kit, if only to avoid articles like this - which was probably the thinking at WHO, rather than this being a real risk.
Let's see... according to Frulla - the children are right about recycling, smoking and experts on the Internet.
BUT
She and her generation know more about the morality of downloading music.
Non sequitur - Norman coordinate...
Yeah, the kids have got it right. When they take charge things like the DCMA will seem as incomprehensible as forcing darker-skinned people to sit at the back of the bus. I can imagine Frulla, Hatch et al sitting in their nursing homes saying - "we didn't know any better - that's just the way everyone thought back then..."
The evolution of sexual reproduction is what is brought into question *not* evolution. A major impetus for the evolution of sexual reproduction is the advantage of getting a good copy of a gene to replace a damaged one when you exchange DNA by sex. The prospect of RNA backup copies makes this a bit more complicated since there would be less need for sex to repair the DNA. This is discussed a bit in the article - and they imply that the RNA backup system (if it exists) may be prevalent in organisms that primarily reproduce asexually and thus have a greater need for such a repair system.
:-)
It doesn't invalidate anything and does not bring evolution into question. And, FYI, scientists are always at the drawing board - as working on theories as they "evolve" to reflect new data.
Isn't it amazing how less we know, the less we know?
is what the conclusion should be.
We don't know how well those students without computers would have done with computers. The proper experiment is to take a group of students and *randomly* divide them into a group that uses computers and a group that doesn't and see how the two groups do. If you do the experiment post-hoc and let them self-select which group they want to be in then the results are difficult to interpret since the selection process influences the results (i.e. bad students may be more likely to want a computer to game with)
A lot of bogus pseudoscience would not exist if people understood the difference between the two types of experiments...
Your typical newspaper consists mostly of the same wire stories available to everyone. The content on the business and sports pages are available elsewhere with less cheerleading and more objectivity. Entertainment news, reviews and even comics are available online. The best columnists are now bloggers. That leaves local news and local advertisements which for larger cities are also available online.
There is still a market for cheap dead tree editions to go with ones coffee or bathroom break but there is no hope for charging for online editions. Heck, many people (myself included) find it too much of a bother to even register to read a newspaper. Why waste your time when the information is just a Google search away...?