The biggest tragedy (to me) about Africa is that the people there are left hanging between the two systems - hunter gatherer and civilized. They cannot go back, because due to our "humanitarian help" their numbers are too high.
Go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Do you have any evidence for this? There are very few genuine hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa (Hadza, San, a few pygmy groups, and maybe a handful more). Colonization may've pushed some into an agriculturalist mode of production, but the powerful African kingdoms were doing that well before any European had ambitions of exploiting Africans. And since this story of agriculturalists pushing hunter-gatherers onto marginal land fits with the experience of every other geographic location, I have no reason to think that Africa would be unique and that European colonization is a particularly good explanation for this trend.
BTW, after seeing all the posts online about how many people hate the iPad even before it came out should have predicted it wouldn't sell at all - even though it seems to have sold pretty well so far. I guess their theory didn't predict that their theory failed. Oh wait, now that I've posted this it does predict it.
Did you get a representative sample? Or are you just voicing the opinion of a small group of tech blogs?
everything degrades in quality over time, and that's just the way it is, and always will be
Everything good will likely degrade in quality over time. Regression to the mean, combined with the fact that creators of these works have lives. Their attention and dedication can fade because they have other things that they care about (different projects, families, etc). I am upset when an author mails one in, but I try hard to compare the work they produced to the alternatives that I would've considered. Usually, even then, the author that I read for legacy's sake comes out ahead.
There have been reports which say that places like Atlanta are still paying for the olympics.
I was under the impression that Atlanta was one of the success stories of economic growth resulting from hosting an Olympics. This story indicates that there were net economic benefits from hosting the Olympics, but you are generally right, the economic benefits from hosting the Olympics are questionable in general. As others have mentioned, Montreal only recently finished paying off the Olympic stadium they constructed for the 1976 games. The Birds Nest stadium that the Chinese were so proud of is scheduled to host 1 event in 2009, but using Beijing as an example is dubious since it seemed clear from the beginning that the Chinese intended to host a hugely wasteful Olympics for ego purposes.
I am quite confident that both disciplines have gaping holes in their respective theoretical frameworks. I do not see how this entails that an amateur with little to no experience in the field ought to be taken remotely seriously.
Because Slashdot houses people who are clever enough to poke obvious holes in research but either lack the mathematical skills, the energy or the disposition to determine whether their vague objection is meaningful? My personal theory has long been that tech folk are underused cognitively, so they do not gain an adequate "respect" for the difficulties inherent in other fields (this may also due to the type of personality that is attracted to tech-like work). Scan through any Slashdot thread on psychology and/or economics and you'll find droves of people who seem to think that those respective disciplines have overlooked some minor issue. The arrogance is helpful in the sense that you can see through the various falsehoods that are considered true in those disciplines, but it also can contribute to the type of sloppy thinking that you have a problem with.
The next best thing was to give a placebo such that the control group would be confident in their new-found immunity to HIV, at least as much as the experimental group. Otherwise the control would use more condoms because they're not on the experimental vaccine.
This page and this page indicate that the study was double-blind. If it was, then I do not see how your worry is reasonable. If both groups were unaware of whether they received the treatment or not, then I do not see how one group that happened to be the control group would reliably act differently than the experimental group. Am I missing something? Or are you claiming that once people believe they have the vaccine, that they will have more unprotected sex and thus increase their risk of contracting HIV?
Then look at effect sizes if you're worried about gaming statistical significance due to sample size. If you're worried about the file drawer problem, then you're welcome to Google around to see if there are any other trials involving the two drugs used (vCP1521 and AIDSVAX B/E). A search of the US gubment's page on clinical trials reveals none. Also realize, that the big journals require that a study that seeks to be published was registered beforehand, and I cannot imagine that an AIDS vaccine study will be taken seriously if it isn't published in one of the major journals. Though there are issues with this process, it does allow for a systematic review of publication bias rather than a vague reference that is meant to undermine the legitimacy of research.
The advantage that Amazon has over physical book stores is that it can hold practically unlimited number of books. So only now, without the physical constrain, we can practically use top 10% instead.
I am pretty sure a minor but important point made in The Long Tail was that not only did you have to combine massive inventory with a good recommendation system to have a widely successful business. The recommendation system is key since people will tend to regress toward the hits without outside influence.
I'd be much more convinced by your argument if you could show that:
a) since legal terms are much older than comp-related terms, that comp-related terms will not seem as disjointed from their common usage 100, 200, 300 years from now and
b) that the legal terms were intentional chosen to ensure that the lay-public could not easily enter the legal realm (so something like how the King James Bible was intentionally written in an antiquated form of English to lend an aura of legitimacy and superiority (along with the intention to avoid words or idioms that may rapidly change in meaning)).
Otherwise, the confusing jargon of the legal realm is just an accidental consequence of the English language changing while legal terms continued to have a stable meaning. It seems confusing to us now, the terms would've been more intuitive to those who initially adopted them. Other areas of knowledge run in to this problem and the reason behind the confusion, in my estimate, tends to be that the public's usage of words shifts based on usage which may not reflect what the word should strictly mean (e.g. "metaphysics" to philosophers vs. "metaphysics" to the lay-public, "irony" to pedants vs. "irony" to the lay-public). One possibly fruitful test-case for your claim would be the word choice of various cultures that recently adopted a Western-style legal system, where previously little formalized legal system existed. If their word choice is intentionally arcane, then it does seem likely that there is a general trend toward obfuscating the law, whereas if they pick words that make sense to the lay-public, then the appearance of malice in the law's word choice may be an accidental consequence of language's evolution.
Because recording objective features (height and weight) provide a better way of operationalizing the concept of "overweight" than sending undergrads and grad students out to just look at people.
I would like to know if you have hard data on the irrelevancy of BMI at the middle. I suspect at the population level these effects are minor. Most people don't have dense bones. Most people who have BMIs of 27.5 are not build like Lebron James. Sure, BMI isn't the best measure of abdominal fat, which is seems to play a larger role in negative health outcomes than other forms of fat. But that doesn't seem relevant for a broad health measure like BMI. Doctors who take BMI to be the be all and end all of health measures do not understand what they are talking about (like the person elsewhere in the thread who mentioned that their doc told them to lose some weight to achieve a better BMI even though their body fat percentage was ~19; though, 19% isn't particularly lean either). That's on the doctor, not the measure.
Is the failure rate nearly bad enough to justify the costs of a) flying non-paying people on every single flight and b) hiring more mechanics since after every successful fix some number of mechanics would be busy flying on the plane that they fixed for a couple of hours? I highly doubt it.
Others have responded with similar ideas, but I definitely recommend making a batch of food say over the weekend (or your day off), refrigerating it, then doling it out as the week goes along for lunch/dinner/whatever. I usually make something with a good mix of carbs and protein, so stuff like pasta salads, lasagnas, vegetarian chilies, etc. I recommend the website Recipezaar.com as you can filter ingredients, which is handy if you just happen to have certain ingredients in the pantry. But this solution can a) cut costs, b) cut sodium, c) increase your cooking skills, and d) possibly make more delicious meals.
So, I think its pretty safe to say that no, videogames DON'T lead to an increase in violence in kids or adults. We've had nothing but more and more games out there, and more and more gamers, but we are not seeing an upswing in violence, we see a continual downswing.
The fact that there is a downward trend in violence generally does not mean that something isn't causing an increase in violence (over what the level of violence would be without that facet that may or may not be causing an increase). It'd be very tricky to ultimately determine if violent video games cause an increase in violence, but the steady downward trend in violence generally is not good evidence either way.
Have a look at Roman history, where blood sport was very popular. You had real fights often to the death for the amusement of the masses.
I am under the impression that Romans did not consider the slaves that were fighting to be full humans. As such, those supposed non-humans fighting to the death would not be a directly comparable morally to our views on fighting to the death. A better argument would be the general shock most industrialized people have to non-human fights to the death (dogs, cocks, etc etc). The fact that we react in horror to fights to the death to creatures we consider non-human is direct evidence that we have different views than those of the Romans.
Their Bird's eye view on their maps is quite nice (no clue how much of the country they have covered, but it works for Chapel Hill, NC). The way it lets you zoom out of the Street view clone is nice when I am scoping the route to a new place; the zoomed out view makes it easier to become familiar with the general area (example).
First of all, China has a variety of climates. The cradles of their civilization, places like Zhengzhou and Yangcheng, seem to have moderate climates (I can't easily find historical data, so the links are not as conclusive as they could be). They aren't warm places, but they certainly aren't cold either.
And with the few giant donations from one or two individuals, the school could artificially say that the average donation was way higher than typical, while hiding the fact that it was offset by just one or two massive donations.
As a humanities major, I may be off on the math, but if you increased the number of $1 donations, then you would need increasingly large donations to increase the average since the $1 donations would drag it down (assuming they are using "average" to mean "mean" and not "median", and also you'd need a relatively small graduating class size). So the only shady thing that has been done is the $1 donations, but they should be congratulated for the increase in donations at the high end.
I have read articles in New Scientist by a scientist discussing how to debate with creationists, in a limited time frame, when they ask short pithy questions which require long answers to refute. It is a widely recognised problem which, to date, hasn't found a satisfactory solution.
Massimo Pigliucci made a similar point on one of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcasts; I believe it is this one. Basically, each side is allotted X minutes. The creationist, since they seem to be disinterested in actual research before formulating a question, will bring up Y number of objections to evolution. The advocate for evolution must then rebut each point if they want to be viewed as competent by the audience. As you pointed out, explaining why some creationist objection is worthless takes a bit of time because the real world is complicated. Explaining why the human eye is not an example of a miracle takes a while. So Pigliucci and the like have steadfastly refused to debate creationists since they thought that the creationists were being unfair.
The only solution that I have seen offered is that you need to be very discriminating in who you debate with. You need to pick people who have a history of a) playing fair and b) being genuinely insightful. This same process needs to occur in people's personal lives as well. We all have some friends where it is blatantly obvious that they are more concerned with defending their idea than approaching the truth. This requires a level of trust that can be rare, since you have to be willing to possibly a) be extremely wrong about something and b) say something that some would find offensive (regardless of whether the idea is right or wrong). These friends (and debaters) need a level of intellectual honesty that is rarely found, and which I think philosophy can help people achieve. They need to be able to take quite seriously the pros and cons of all their views, and any complex idea will have pros and cons. We all have many beliefs that we cannot sufficiently justify (What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty by John Brockman has columns by leading intellectuals discussing what they believe to be true but do not have adequate evidence for). We need to understand what those ideas are and be comfortable with challenges, but as I mentioned before, this requires a level of intellectual honesty that is rare.
Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine. Personally, I'd prefer it in a simple website with a good database attached, especially for the social sciences where there are interesting negative results that may come as an afterthought (birth order effects, finger digit ratios before they became popular in the past ~10 years, etc in psychology); that may or may not be the case for other fields.
Just to let you know, heritability estimates for conscientiousness are between 0.18-0.49 (Michelle Luciano, Mark A. Wainwright, Margaret J. Wright, Nicholas G. Martin, The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 40, Issue 6, April 2006, Pages 1189-1199, ISSN 0191-8869, DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2005.10.013).
Slashdot Mirror
The Mineral Miracle? Or a Massive Information Operation?.
Go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Do you have any evidence for this? There are very few genuine hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa (Hadza, San, a few pygmy groups, and maybe a handful more). Colonization may've pushed some into an agriculturalist mode of production, but the powerful African kingdoms were doing that well before any European had ambitions of exploiting Africans. And since this story of agriculturalists pushing hunter-gatherers onto marginal land fits with the experience of every other geographic location, I have no reason to think that Africa would be unique and that European colonization is a particularly good explanation for this trend.
Did you get a representative sample? Or are you just voicing the opinion of a small group of tech blogs?
Less crime and less punishment by Mark Kleiman is of interest here.
Everything good will likely degrade in quality over time. Regression to the mean, combined with the fact that creators of these works have lives. Their attention and dedication can fade because they have other things that they care about (different projects, families, etc). I am upset when an author mails one in, but I try hard to compare the work they produced to the alternatives that I would've considered. Usually, even then, the author that I read for legacy's sake comes out ahead.
I was under the impression that Atlanta was one of the success stories of economic growth resulting from hosting an Olympics. This story indicates that there were net economic benefits from hosting the Olympics, but you are generally right, the economic benefits from hosting the Olympics are questionable in general. As others have mentioned, Montreal only recently finished paying off the Olympic stadium they constructed for the 1976 games. The Birds Nest stadium that the Chinese were so proud of is scheduled to host 1 event in 2009, but using Beijing as an example is dubious since it seemed clear from the beginning that the Chinese intended to host a hugely wasteful Olympics for ego purposes.
I am quite confident that both disciplines have gaping holes in their respective theoretical frameworks. I do not see how this entails that an amateur with little to no experience in the field ought to be taken remotely seriously.
Because Slashdot houses people who are clever enough to poke obvious holes in research but either lack the mathematical skills, the energy or the disposition to determine whether their vague objection is meaningful? My personal theory has long been that tech folk are underused cognitively, so they do not gain an adequate "respect" for the difficulties inherent in other fields (this may also due to the type of personality that is attracted to tech-like work). Scan through any Slashdot thread on psychology and/or economics and you'll find droves of people who seem to think that those respective disciplines have overlooked some minor issue. The arrogance is helpful in the sense that you can see through the various falsehoods that are considered true in those disciplines, but it also can contribute to the type of sloppy thinking that you have a problem with.
This page and this page indicate that the study was double-blind. If it was, then I do not see how your worry is reasonable. If both groups were unaware of whether they received the treatment or not, then I do not see how one group that happened to be the control group would reliably act differently than the experimental group. Am I missing something? Or are you claiming that once people believe they have the vaccine, that they will have more unprotected sex and thus increase their risk of contracting HIV?
Then look at effect sizes if you're worried about gaming statistical significance due to sample size. If you're worried about the file drawer problem, then you're welcome to Google around to see if there are any other trials involving the two drugs used (vCP1521 and AIDSVAX B/E). A search of the US gubment's page on clinical trials reveals none. Also realize, that the big journals require that a study that seeks to be published was registered beforehand, and I cannot imagine that an AIDS vaccine study will be taken seriously if it isn't published in one of the major journals. Though there are issues with this process, it does allow for a systematic review of publication bias rather than a vague reference that is meant to undermine the legitimacy of research.
I am pretty sure a minor but important point made in The Long Tail was that not only did you have to combine massive inventory with a good recommendation system to have a widely successful business. The recommendation system is key since people will tend to regress toward the hits without outside influence.
You may be interested in Jon Entine's Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It.
I'd be much more convinced by your argument if you could show that:
a) since legal terms are much older than comp-related terms, that comp-related terms will not seem as disjointed from their common usage 100, 200, 300 years from now and
b) that the legal terms were intentional chosen to ensure that the lay-public could not easily enter the legal realm (so something like how the King James Bible was intentionally written in an antiquated form of English to lend an aura of legitimacy and superiority (along with the intention to avoid words or idioms that may rapidly change in meaning)).
Otherwise, the confusing jargon of the legal realm is just an accidental consequence of the English language changing while legal terms continued to have a stable meaning. It seems confusing to us now, the terms would've been more intuitive to those who initially adopted them. Other areas of knowledge run in to this problem and the reason behind the confusion, in my estimate, tends to be that the public's usage of words shifts based on usage which may not reflect what the word should strictly mean (e.g. "metaphysics" to philosophers vs. "metaphysics" to the lay-public, "irony" to pedants vs. "irony" to the lay-public). One possibly fruitful test-case for your claim would be the word choice of various cultures that recently adopted a Western-style legal system, where previously little formalized legal system existed. If their word choice is intentionally arcane, then it does seem likely that there is a general trend toward obfuscating the law, whereas if they pick words that make sense to the lay-public, then the appearance of malice in the law's word choice may be an accidental consequence of language's evolution.
Because recording objective features (height and weight) provide a better way of operationalizing the concept of "overweight" than sending undergrads and grad students out to just look at people.
I would like to know if you have hard data on the irrelevancy of BMI at the middle. I suspect at the population level these effects are minor. Most people don't have dense bones. Most people who have BMIs of 27.5 are not build like Lebron James. Sure, BMI isn't the best measure of abdominal fat, which is seems to play a larger role in negative health outcomes than other forms of fat. But that doesn't seem relevant for a broad health measure like BMI. Doctors who take BMI to be the be all and end all of health measures do not understand what they are talking about (like the person elsewhere in the thread who mentioned that their doc told them to lose some weight to achieve a better BMI even though their body fat percentage was ~19; though, 19% isn't particularly lean either). That's on the doctor, not the measure.
Is the failure rate nearly bad enough to justify the costs of a) flying non-paying people on every single flight and b) hiring more mechanics since after every successful fix some number of mechanics would be busy flying on the plane that they fixed for a couple of hours? I highly doubt it.
They bred tameness into the foxes, much different than curly tails.
Others have responded with similar ideas, but I definitely recommend making a batch of food say over the weekend (or your day off), refrigerating it, then doling it out as the week goes along for lunch/dinner/whatever. I usually make something with a good mix of carbs and protein, so stuff like pasta salads, lasagnas, vegetarian chilies, etc. I recommend the website Recipezaar.com as you can filter ingredients, which is handy if you just happen to have certain ingredients in the pantry. But this solution can a) cut costs, b) cut sodium, c) increase your cooking skills, and d) possibly make more delicious meals.
The fact that there is a downward trend in violence generally does not mean that something isn't causing an increase in violence (over what the level of violence would be without that facet that may or may not be causing an increase). It'd be very tricky to ultimately determine if violent video games cause an increase in violence, but the steady downward trend in violence generally is not good evidence either way.
I am under the impression that Romans did not consider the slaves that were fighting to be full humans. As such, those supposed non-humans fighting to the death would not be a directly comparable morally to our views on fighting to the death. A better argument would be the general shock most industrialized people have to non-human fights to the death (dogs, cocks, etc etc). The fact that we react in horror to fights to the death to creatures we consider non-human is direct evidence that we have different views than those of the Romans.
Their Bird's eye view on their maps is quite nice (no clue how much of the country they have covered, but it works for Chapel Hill, NC). The way it lets you zoom out of the Street view clone is nice when I am scoping the route to a new place; the zoomed out view makes it easier to become familiar with the general area (example).
First of all, China has a variety of climates. The cradles of their civilization, places like Zhengzhou and Yangcheng, seem to have moderate climates (I can't easily find historical data, so the links are not as conclusive as they could be). They aren't warm places, but they certainly aren't cold either.
As a humanities major, I may be off on the math, but if you increased the number of $1 donations, then you would need increasingly large donations to increase the average since the $1 donations would drag it down (assuming they are using "average" to mean "mean" and not "median", and also you'd need a relatively small graduating class size). So the only shady thing that has been done is the $1 donations, but they should be congratulated for the increase in donations at the high end.
Massimo Pigliucci made a similar point on one of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcasts; I believe it is this one. Basically, each side is allotted X minutes. The creationist, since they seem to be disinterested in actual research before formulating a question, will bring up Y number of objections to evolution. The advocate for evolution must then rebut each point if they want to be viewed as competent by the audience. As you pointed out, explaining why some creationist objection is worthless takes a bit of time because the real world is complicated. Explaining why the human eye is not an example of a miracle takes a while. So Pigliucci and the like have steadfastly refused to debate creationists since they thought that the creationists were being unfair.
The only solution that I have seen offered is that you need to be very discriminating in who you debate with. You need to pick people who have a history of a) playing fair and b) being genuinely insightful. This same process needs to occur in people's personal lives as well. We all have some friends where it is blatantly obvious that they are more concerned with defending their idea than approaching the truth. This requires a level of trust that can be rare, since you have to be willing to possibly a) be extremely wrong about something and b) say something that some would find offensive (regardless of whether the idea is right or wrong). These friends (and debaters) need a level of intellectual honesty that is rarely found, and which I think philosophy can help people achieve. They need to be able to take quite seriously the pros and cons of all their views, and any complex idea will have pros and cons. We all have many beliefs that we cannot sufficiently justify (What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty by John Brockman has columns by leading intellectuals discussing what they believe to be true but do not have adequate evidence for). We need to understand what those ideas are and be comfortable with challenges, but as I mentioned before, this requires a level of intellectual honesty that is rare.
Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine. Personally, I'd prefer it in a simple website with a good database attached, especially for the social sciences where there are interesting negative results that may come as an afterthought (birth order effects, finger digit ratios before they became popular in the past ~10 years, etc in psychology); that may or may not be the case for other fields.
Here's actual data on the political views of the academy by department.
Just to let you know, heritability estimates for conscientiousness are between 0.18-0.49 (Michelle Luciano, Mark A. Wainwright, Margaret J. Wright, Nicholas G. Martin, The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 40, Issue 6, April 2006, Pages 1189-1199, ISSN 0191-8869, DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2005.10.013).