I suspect this test detected an absence of virtuoso talent. Performers like DuPree, Heifetz, Menuhin and Stern could coax something from a Strad that isn't available from a lesser instrument. The other issue is the constraints that limited their playing time on each instrument. I suspect they would be able to tell the difference between the instruments after several days of practice on each instrument but such a test would be impractical.
Every double blind study I have seen of this nature supports the idea that beyond a certain not-that-hard-to-obtain level of quality in the instrument, both players and listeners cannot tell the difference between instruments. None of these things are magical you know - the ability to make quality musical instruments has not been "lost to the ancients".
With that said, I would not be at all surprised to find that listeners and players THINK that a particular instrument sounds better when they think that the instrument is a better instrument (that's why the $1000 optical digital cable makes your sound system sound so much better). That's why the double blind is needed in order to tell which instrument in fact sounds better.
If it takes a couple of days (or longer) to become familiar enough with an instrument to get the best out of it, that does present challenges in the blinding.
Surprisingly, the Canadian tax rate is not hugely different that the US one - though they are difficult to compare on equal footing since there are so many differences in the details:
The Copenhagen Consensus is group of economists that grapple with this question. Where do you allocate money to have the greatest impact on human suffering? http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/
Apparently micro-nutrients are dollar for dollar your best bet. At least as of a few years ago.. they had a new meeting in 2011.
Is there a double standard for how we as a society judge pay rates? What is the average take home pay for the private sector CEOs of companies in the same organizational size range? What is the range of payment between lowest paid and highest paid in the non-profit compared to the for-profit sectors?
With that said, you are perfectly within your rights to decide not to donate to an organization that you think is not doing what you want them to do with your money.
They largely do it because it works, unfortunately.
If you send then a note saying something like "take me off your list" or "do not send me anything more than one solicitation per year" it seems likely they would comply. Certainly the small local charities I have been involved in would be happy to not waste their fundraising resources on people unlikely to donate.
I just recently heard on Freakonomics that an effective tool in fund raising was to include a checkbox on your money request saying "don't contact me again" - it addresses the issue that dargaud has encountered and supposedly also makes the donor feel more in control, more likely to donate, and actually few people actually check the box.
... Then criminals would be able to do whatever they wanted all the time. You know, the reason that every society on earth going back to Ur has had a justice system?
Smaller tribal based societies justice systems were typically rather limited. Bow down to the people with power, don't make waves, blame the victim (usually those with little power). "Justice" is a luxury of being in a rich society with abundant resources.
Not that any of that invalidates your point that while there are many cases of the justice system being a negative force in society, there are also many cases where it acts as a positive force. It is nice to know that if someone starts pounding on my neighbour, the police and the courts are likely to be of some use and I don't have to round up a mob to take care of the problem myself.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of formal exams are terrible at demonstrating good student outcomes - really the only reason that they are so common in our educational system is that they are very easy to do (at least to do poorly), and they have the illusion of being an objective measurement of student achievements.
In any case, I highly agree with the overall thrust of the article in question - it is shameful that anyone who has graduated from a modern school system would perform poorly on this type of evaluation, and worse that they would state that the skills being tested (or at least trying to be tested) have little value in the "real world" encountered by most adults.
All of your ideas are perfectly valid, and tests CAN be made that way, but for the vast majority of testing done by individual instructors to their classes, they are not prepared so meticulously. Doing so requires a lot of research, field testing, and benchmarking. It is not simple work. Without all of that work, you can never be confident that what you think are the reasons people are picking those "wrong" answers (or even the "right" answers) are the actual reasons they are doing so.
Exams aren't supposed to benefit the learning process, they are supposed to test that the learning actually took place. They can benefit the teaching process, because analyzing the answers helps the teacher improve their methods.
Of course they are supposed to benefit the learning process! That is the whole point of the schooling system. If they are providing no educational benefit then why waste the time and effort doing them?
That's why good multiple choice tests have ringer answers to short circuit this kind of logic. REALLY good multiple choice tests have the incorrect answers being the *right* answer for different mistakes. If there is an answer that's correct for (47 * 75) - 25, you know you need to get that kid glasses.
That's why making multiple choice tests (and grading them) is so frigging difficult to do very well. To do it completely perfectly you need to be able to predict all possible incorrect interpretations and be sure that none of your "wrong" answers are "right" in a way that you would want to give points for.
Of course, before you go through all that effort (or any formal evaluation for that matter) you should probably figure out exactly why you want to do the testing in the first place. If the point is to use the evaluation to assist in the learning then maybe time would be better spent by having the students create tests for each other and then go over them together in groups, or something "radical" like that. It is not clear that formal grades and exam scores out of 100 give any real benefit to the learning process.
Here is an old article by Alfie Kohn about reasons to question the whole process of formal grading:
Why are we concerned with evaluating how well students are doing? The question of motive, as opposed to method, can lead us to rethink basic tenets of teaching and learning and to evaluate what students have done in a manner more consistent with our ultimate educational objectives. But not all approaches to the topic result in this sort of thoughtful reflection.....
Last I checked, gasoline-powered vehicles don't have an "unlimited" range either. It may be an order of magnitude farther before you have to fill up a gas car than you have to recharge an electric, or somesuch, but that's still far from "unlimited."
The point is that a gasoline-powered vehicle can be refilled in a short enough time that it doesn't really matter that the range on a single tank of gas is "only" 400km. If an "alternative" powered vehicle could be refilled in a similar amount of time (and if the infrastructure needed to support that refilling system was widespread) then it could also be considered to have "unlimited" range. Currently pure electric and hydrogen powered vehicles do not have the infrastructure (and for the electric the time-to-refill is generally thought of as being too great.)
It's almost as if religious folks -know- that they're wrong. Thus to preserve their wrongheadedness, it's requires to not even learn about the alternatives. (presumably, learning would risk realising that the alternative theories are correct.)
Learning about something, doesn't require *agreeing* with it. I've read both the Koran and the Bible, and spend hundreds of hours learning about both. I don't *agree* with it,but it's still useful to understand it and know about it.
But religious folks are frequently panicked about the idea that they might have to learn about something they themselves don't agree with. In my opinion, they're scared. And rightfully so. The thing about reality is that it does not go away, even if you don't believe in it.
Well, to be fair, controlling your environment to minimize "bad" influences is not in-and-of-itself a bad idea. If you are worried about drug use - you probably don't want to hang out at the local opium den. Spending all your social time playing pool at the local biker gang club maybe isn't such a great idea if you want to avoid getting drawn into a life of crime. One might argue that the non-religious who refuse to attend bible study classes do so because they are afraid of a similar epiphany.
From a child-rearing or self-growth perspective, this type of decision on what types of experiences to avoid or seek out is a difficult one. We want to encourage kids trying new foods for example, but perhaps not trying new drugs. Being a "good influence" on others in a social circle is positive, but being a "bad influence" on others happens too and it is not always easy to tell who is what in every situation.
If an experience is so great or important that it could cause me to abandon my family and lifestyle and money and health and safety maybe the person I am now does not want to find out about it for fear that the person I become once I know about it.
On one extreme we heap wide spread praise on Ghandi or other civil rights activists (though maybe not at the time) when this happens to them, but alcoholics, drug addicts, or "crazy nutjob religious cult members" get less positive press. Maybe we each have at least one type of possible cause/idea/thing that could perfectly fit with our personality to have this extreme outcome - if so it makes some sense to be careful about what ideas you explore.
In any case, back on the topic of theological implications of science - if you cannot create a religious tradition that is consistent with the human discoveries and understanding of the physical world, then clearly the problem is with you - you need to work harder.
Legislation by the judicial branch? Yes, it is unconstitutional.
The Constitution has been violated more than enough times by the court system.
Except for the part of the constitution that gives the power to interpret the constitution to the court system. Or do you feel that that portion of the constitution isn't valid?
I do agree with you that many interpretations of the details of the constitution do not agree with what I would interpret, but SOMEBODY has to have a say as to what the document means, and since nobody is likely to let me decide the hard questions, I can live with it being the SC justices.
Most pro-vaccine alarmists haven't read any of the excellent critiques out there. I have yet to meet a pro-vaccine person who really understands the debate. Most simply dismiss anything that doesn't confirm their biases. (And yes, the same is true with most anti-vaccine alarmists.)
Is ignorance really an issue? Nobody seems to care when ignorant people conform in their views. It's only when people don't conform that "ignorance" is suddenly a problem. Then the hysterical alarmist mantra begins... obviously appealing to our highest critical thinking centers.
Vaccinating is at least as dangerous as not vaccinating due to low disease rates, based on mainstream numbers. Check out the CDC's page on vaccination risks. Measles? Mumps? I have to vaccinate against that? I have to vaccinate against a disease that has only 2000 cases reported worldwide? I have to vaccinate a newborn against an STD? (Even my staunchly pro-vaccine doctor disagreed with that one!) Seriously people.
The CDC certainly does not say that people should not vaccinate due to vaccination risks. The reason various disease rates are so low, is due to the successful use of widespread vaccination. The recent outbreaks of measles and mumps in various places around the world in where vaccination rates had fallen gives some indication why health care systems need to be watchful.
As for vaccinations against human papillomavirus, getting the vaccine before being exposed obviously makes it more widely effective. I suspect that infant vaccination programs are more successful than at later ages - one tends to take small kids to the doctor's more regularly than older kids. Guessing when the "average" kid is first going to be sexually active wouldn't be very useful, since you would end up missing a bunch of "early bloomers" - so you probably want to be early enough to catch at least 95% of the kids - but are there any non-sexual-contact vectors that are common? If the vaccine has no increased risk or decreased effectiveness when administered to an infant, why wouldn't you want to vaccinate the newborn? Just because the virus can be transmitted by that dirty word "sex"?
The real answer is that dissidents need to start being more paranoid and more technically literate. A system that is used for personal entertainment should be kept physically separated from a system that is used to communicate with fellow dissidents.
Face it - against a determined powerful watcher even that is not enough:
Agent X: Drat, our target "Dissident-Man" is using a "throw-away" cell phone - we don't know who they are - and they never use it for personal things, so even if we continue to track it, it won't do any good!
Agent Y: Hey, did you notice in our records that it is almost always used by the same cell tower as the phone of "Pat Civilian"? Often just before or just after? Maybe we should have a "talk" with this "Pat"?
I take it you didn't take statistics from an elite school. Since 'elite' schools have tougher acceptance criteria, it only makes sense their students would perform better. To my knowledge, there has never been a true 'double blind' study, where students with similar grades and performance levels in high school were compared between community colleges and 'elite' schools. Please post one if there is one.
it seems as though you don't even have to be accepted - just being the type who would apply is a pretty good indicator of future performance:
Graduates of "elite" schools do go on to have more "successful" careers in terms of money and other measurements compared to other less "elite" institutions. However those graduates did not necessarily have that success because of the school - they might have had similar success had they gone elsewhere. The elite schools might be "creating" winners, or they might be "picking" winners.
How could we find out? Well, we could examine the "success" of people who were accepted to an elite school but went elsewhere and see how the compare to those who did attend the elite school. Fortunately, people have done such studies:
"A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion."
Basically, if you've got the chops to apply to these elite schools, you're very likely to be successful no matter where you go.
And for "talent" one should generally read "drive/motivation/work". But to continue on this idea of "it's not the school" that can lay claim to success, here are some thoughts.
Graduates of "elite" schools do go on to have more "successful" careers in terms of money and other measurements compared to other less "elite" institutions. However those graduates did not necessarily have that success because of the school - they might have had similar success had they gone elsewhere. The elite schools might be "creating" winners, or they might be "picking" winners.
How could we find out? Well, we could examine the "success" of people who were accepted to an elite school but went elsewhere and see how the compare to those who did attend the elite school. Fortunately, people have done such studies:
"A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion."
Basically, if you've got the chops to apply to these elite schools, you're very likely to be successful no matter where you go.
Oh, I am not saying that there is not a lot of business - rather I am claiming that it is not a whole lot easier than "legitimate" work, and that it doesn't pay a whole lot more either.
Then you've got a bunch of parts that were cut out and not so easy to fit back into the car afterward as was originally stated. But even without that, how many hours does it take to lug that stuff around, and find buyers for it and collect money from them, etc, etc. I suspect like much of the drug trade, most of the "workers" end up making not much better than minimum wage.
Planning and executing a "2 minute strip" has got to take more than a few hours, and disposing of the stuff/turning that into cash takes a bunch of time and effort too. Being and "independent businessman" takes a lot of work maintaining existing clients and finding new ones and competing with newcomers who undercut your prices - this is even more difficult when operating illegally. Few of these folk are not being supported by girlfriends or family members - fewer still have a stable enough income to purchase a home or other long-term financial expense.
Of course not. The point, though, is that Jesus' birthday is not meant to coincide with pagan holiday.
The linked Snopes article seems to claim otherwise when it says "The idea of celebrating the Nativity on December 25 was first suggested early in the fourth century CE, a clever move on the part of Church fathers who wished to eclipse the December 25 festivities of a rival pagan religion..."
On a per-viewer basis - TV creators get very little revenue. If they can find a way to get similar levels of income from non-broadcast TV distribution, then we will see more of this in the future. Maybe broadcast TV will end up just showing old re-runs of programming first released in some other format.
Boy, that's a lot of work though. One would think that if people applied this amount of initiative and ingenuity into something legal they could make almost as much money a similar amount of effort and much less risk.
I want every CD, every DVD, and every TV show available to me digitally. That's what we all want. It's not like they aren't already sitting in some digital format somewhere.
Quest had a cute commercial about this type of thing, way back in 1999: A tired man goes into a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere and asks about amenities. When he asks about entertainment, the girl responds "all rooms have every movie ever made in any language anytime, day or night." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ9qcp6Lcno
The technology exists, heck, a payment system probably could be worked out without too much technical difficulties. The political/legal rights issues are probably intractable.
How does the existence of lots of bad loans show that the government forced banks to make them? The vast majority of "problem" loans were not backed by any governmental insurance or anything like that (if they were the banks wouldn't have been in danger of failing, though the insurer might have been).
While I have seen analysts state that the lack of regulation and oversight greatly contributed to the various financial problems we have seen in the banking sector - yours is the first voice I have heard blaming the government forcing people to make risky loans.
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I suspect this test detected an absence of virtuoso talent. Performers like DuPree, Heifetz, Menuhin and Stern could coax something from a Strad that isn't available from a lesser instrument. The other issue is the constraints that limited their playing time on each instrument. I suspect they would be able to tell the difference between the instruments after several days of practice on each instrument but such a test would be impractical.
Every double blind study I have seen of this nature supports the idea that beyond a certain not-that-hard-to-obtain level of quality in the instrument, both players and listeners cannot tell the difference between instruments. None of these things are magical you know - the ability to make quality musical instruments has not been "lost to the ancients".
With that said, I would not be at all surprised to find that listeners and players THINK that a particular instrument sounds better when they think that the instrument is a better instrument (that's why the $1000 optical digital cable makes your sound system sound so much better). That's why the double blind is needed in order to tell which instrument in fact sounds better.
If it takes a couple of days (or longer) to become familiar enough with an instrument to get the best out of it, that does present challenges in the blinding.
Surprisingly, the Canadian tax rate is not hugely different that the US one - though they are difficult to compare on equal footing since there are so many differences in the details:
http://slumbuddy.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/comparison-of-us-and-canadian-tax-rates-for-2010/
I doubt many Canadians feel under-taxed, but they do seem to be getting much better value for their tax dollars than those south of the border.
The Copenhagen Consensus is group of economists that grapple with this question. Where do you allocate money to have the greatest impact on human suffering?
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/
Apparently micro-nutrients are dollar for dollar your best bet. At least as of a few years ago.. they had a new meeting in 2011.
Very interesting.
Is there a double standard for how we as a society judge pay rates? What is the average take home pay for the private sector CEOs of companies in the same organizational size range? What is the range of payment between lowest paid and highest paid in the non-profit compared to the for-profit sectors?
With that said, you are perfectly within your rights to decide not to donate to an organization that you think is not doing what you want them to do with your money.
They largely do it because it works, unfortunately.
If you send then a note saying something like "take me off your list" or "do not send me anything more than one solicitation per year" it seems likely they would comply. Certainly the small local charities I have been involved in would be happy to not waste their fundraising resources on people unlikely to donate.
I just recently heard on Freakonomics that an effective tool in fund raising was to include a checkbox on your money request saying "don't contact me again" - it addresses the issue that dargaud has encountered and supposedly also makes the donor feel more in control, more likely to donate, and actually few people actually check the box.
... Then criminals would be able to do whatever they wanted all the time. You know, the reason that every society on earth going back to Ur has had a justice system?
Smaller tribal based societies justice systems were typically rather limited. Bow down to the people with power, don't make waves, blame the victim (usually those with little power). "Justice" is a luxury of being in a rich society with abundant resources.
Not that any of that invalidates your point that while there are many cases of the justice system being a negative force in society, there are also many cases where it acts as a positive force. It is nice to know that if someone starts pounding on my neighbour, the police and the courts are likely to be of some use and I don't have to round up a mob to take care of the problem myself.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of formal exams are terrible at demonstrating good student outcomes - really the only reason that they are so common in our educational system is that they are very easy to do (at least to do poorly), and they have the illusion of being an objective measurement of student achievements.
In any case, I highly agree with the overall thrust of the article in question - it is shameful that anyone who has graduated from a modern school system would perform poorly on this type of evaluation, and worse that they would state that the skills being tested (or at least trying to be tested) have little value in the "real world" encountered by most adults.
Tests are better planned than you think.
Rarely, unfortunately.
All of your ideas are perfectly valid, and tests CAN be made that way, but for the vast majority of testing done by individual instructors to their classes, they are not prepared so meticulously. Doing so requires a lot of research, field testing, and benchmarking. It is not simple work. Without all of that work, you can never be confident that what you think are the reasons people are picking those "wrong" answers (or even the "right" answers) are the actual reasons they are doing so.
Exams aren't supposed to benefit the learning process, they are supposed to test that the learning actually took place. They can benefit the teaching process, because analyzing the answers helps the teacher improve their methods.
Of course they are supposed to benefit the learning process! That is the whole point of the schooling system. If they are providing no educational benefit then why waste the time and effort doing them?
That's why good multiple choice tests have ringer answers to short circuit this kind of logic. REALLY good multiple choice tests have the incorrect answers being the *right* answer for different mistakes. If there is an answer that's correct for (47 * 75) - 25, you know you need to get that kid glasses.
That's why making multiple choice tests (and grading them) is so frigging difficult to do very well. To do it completely perfectly you need to be able to predict all possible incorrect interpretations and be sure that none of your "wrong" answers are "right" in a way that you would want to give points for.
Of course, before you go through all that effort (or any formal evaluation for that matter) you should probably figure out exactly why you want to do the testing in the first place. If the point is to use the evaluation to assist in the learning then maybe time would be better spent by having the students create tests for each other and then go over them together in groups, or something "radical" like that. It is not clear that formal grades and exam scores out of 100 give any real benefit to the learning process.
Here is an old article by Alfie Kohn about reasons to question the whole process of formal grading:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/grading.htm
GRADING
The Issue Is Not How but Why
By Alfie Kohn
Why are we concerned with evaluating how well students are doing? The question of motive, as opposed to method, can lead us to rethink basic tenets of teaching and learning and to evaluate what students have done in a manner more consistent with our ultimate educational objectives. But not all approaches to the topic result in this sort of thoughtful reflection. ....
Last I checked, gasoline-powered vehicles don't have an "unlimited" range either. It may be an order of magnitude farther before you have to fill up a gas car than you have to recharge an electric, or somesuch, but that's still far from "unlimited."
The point is that a gasoline-powered vehicle can be refilled in a short enough time that it doesn't really matter that the range on a single tank of gas is "only" 400km. If an "alternative" powered vehicle could be refilled in a similar amount of time (and if the infrastructure needed to support that refilling system was widespread) then it could also be considered to have "unlimited" range. Currently pure electric and hydrogen powered vehicles do not have the infrastructure (and for the electric the time-to-refill is generally thought of as being too great.)
That's funny. Do they do that every day?
It's almost as if religious folks -know- that they're wrong. Thus to preserve their wrongheadedness, it's requires to not even learn about the alternatives. (presumably, learning would risk realising that the alternative theories are correct.)
Learning about something, doesn't require *agreeing* with it. I've read both the Koran and the Bible, and spend hundreds of hours learning about both. I don't *agree* with it,but it's still useful to understand it and know about it.
But religious folks are frequently panicked about the idea that they might have to learn about something they themselves don't agree with. In my opinion, they're scared. And rightfully so. The thing about reality is that it does not go away, even if you don't believe in it.
Well, to be fair, controlling your environment to minimize "bad" influences is not in-and-of-itself a bad idea. If you are worried about drug use - you probably don't want to hang out at the local opium den. Spending all your social time playing pool at the local biker gang club maybe isn't such a great idea if you want to avoid getting drawn into a life of crime. One might argue that the non-religious who refuse to attend bible study classes do so because they are afraid of a similar epiphany.
From a child-rearing or self-growth perspective, this type of decision on what types of experiences to avoid or seek out is a difficult one. We want to encourage kids trying new foods for example, but perhaps not trying new drugs. Being a "good influence" on others in a social circle is positive, but being a "bad influence" on others happens too and it is not always easy to tell who is what in every situation.
If an experience is so great or important that it could cause me to abandon my family and lifestyle and money and health and safety maybe the person I am now does not want to find out about it for fear that the person I become once I know about it.
On one extreme we heap wide spread praise on Ghandi or other civil rights activists (though maybe not at the time) when this happens to them, but alcoholics, drug addicts, or "crazy nutjob religious cult members" get less positive press. Maybe we each have at least one type of possible cause/idea/thing that could perfectly fit with our personality to have this extreme outcome - if so it makes some sense to be careful about what ideas you explore.
In any case, back on the topic of theological implications of science - if you cannot create a religious tradition that is consistent with the human discoveries and understanding of the physical world, then clearly the problem is with you - you need to work harder.
Legislation by the judicial branch? Yes, it is unconstitutional.
The Constitution has been violated more than enough times by the court system.
Except for the part of the constitution that gives the power to interpret the constitution to the court system. Or do you feel that that portion of the constitution isn't valid?
I do agree with you that many interpretations of the details of the constitution do not agree with what I would interpret, but SOMEBODY has to have a say as to what the document means, and since nobody is likely to let me decide the hard questions, I can live with it being the SC justices.
Most pro-vaccine alarmists haven't read any of the excellent critiques out there. I have yet to meet a pro-vaccine person who really understands the debate. Most simply dismiss anything that doesn't confirm their biases. (And yes, the same is true with most anti-vaccine alarmists.)
Is ignorance really an issue? Nobody seems to care when ignorant people conform in their views. It's only when people don't conform that "ignorance" is suddenly a problem. Then the hysterical alarmist mantra begins... obviously appealing to our highest critical thinking centers.
Vaccinating is at least as dangerous as not vaccinating due to low disease rates, based on mainstream numbers. Check out the CDC's page on vaccination risks. Measles? Mumps? I have to vaccinate against that? I have to vaccinate against a disease that has only 2000 cases reported worldwide? I have to vaccinate a newborn against an STD? (Even my staunchly pro-vaccine doctor disagreed with that one!) Seriously people.
The CDC certainly does not say that people should not vaccinate due to vaccination risks. The reason various disease rates are so low, is due to the successful use of widespread vaccination. The recent outbreaks of measles and mumps in various places around the world in where vaccination rates had fallen gives some indication why health care systems need to be watchful.
As for vaccinations against human papillomavirus, getting the vaccine before being exposed obviously makes it more widely effective. I suspect that infant vaccination programs are more successful than at later ages - one tends to take small kids to the doctor's more regularly than older kids. Guessing when the "average" kid is first going to be sexually active wouldn't be very useful, since you would end up missing a bunch of "early bloomers" - so you probably want to be early enough to catch at least 95% of the kids - but are there any non-sexual-contact vectors that are common? If the vaccine has no increased risk or decreased effectiveness when administered to an infant, why wouldn't you want to vaccinate the newborn? Just because the virus can be transmitted by that dirty word "sex"?
The real answer is that dissidents need to start being more paranoid and more technically literate. A system that is used for personal entertainment should be kept physically separated from a system that is used to communicate with fellow dissidents.
Face it - against a determined powerful watcher even that is not enough:
Agent X: Drat, our target "Dissident-Man" is using a "throw-away" cell phone - we don't know who they are - and they never use it for personal things, so even if we continue to track it, it won't do any good!
Agent Y: Hey, did you notice in our records that it is almost always used by the same cell tower as the phone of "Pat Civilian"? Often just before or just after? Maybe we should have a "talk" with this "Pat"?
que scary music:
dun-dun-dunnnnnnnnn
I take it you didn't take statistics from an elite school. Since 'elite' schools have tougher acceptance criteria, it only makes sense their students would perform better. To my knowledge, there has never been a true 'double blind' study, where students with similar grades and performance levels in high school were compared between community colleges and 'elite' schools. Please post one if there is one.
it seems as though you don't even have to be accepted - just being the type who would apply is a pretty good indicator of future performance:
Graduates of "elite" schools do go on to have more "successful" careers in terms of money and other measurements compared to other less "elite" institutions. However those graduates did not necessarily have that success because of the school - they might have had similar success had they gone elsewhere. The elite schools might be "creating" winners, or they might be "picking" winners.
How could we find out? Well, we could examine the "success" of people who were accepted to an elite school but went elsewhere and see how the compare to those who did attend the elite school. Fortunately, people have done such studies:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/ [nytimes.com]
"A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion."
Basically, if you've got the chops to apply to these elite schools, you're very likely to be successful no matter where you go.
And for "talent" one should generally read "drive/motivation/work". But to continue on this idea of "it's not the school" that can lay claim to success, here are some thoughts.
Graduates of "elite" schools do go on to have more "successful" careers in terms of money and other measurements compared to other less "elite" institutions. However those graduates did not necessarily have that success because of the school - they might have had similar success had they gone elsewhere. The elite schools might be "creating" winners, or they might be "picking" winners.
How could we find out? Well, we could examine the "success" of people who were accepted to an elite school but went elsewhere and see how the compare to those who did attend the elite school. Fortunately, people have done such studies:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/
"A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion."
Basically, if you've got the chops to apply to these elite schools, you're very likely to be successful no matter where you go.
Oh, I am not saying that there is not a lot of business - rather I am claiming that it is not a whole lot easier than "legitimate" work, and that it doesn't pay a whole lot more either.
Then you've got a bunch of parts that were cut out and not so easy to fit back into the car afterward as was originally stated. But even without that, how many hours does it take to lug that stuff around, and find buyers for it and collect money from them, etc, etc. I suspect like much of the drug trade, most of the "workers" end up making not much better than minimum wage.
Planning and executing a "2 minute strip" has got to take more than a few hours, and disposing of the stuff/turning that into cash takes a bunch of time and effort too. Being and "independent businessman" takes a lot of work maintaining existing clients and finding new ones and competing with newcomers who undercut your prices - this is even more difficult when operating illegally. Few of these folk are not being supported by girlfriends or family members - fewer still have a stable enough income to purchase a home or other long-term financial expense.
Of course not. The point, though, is that Jesus' birthday is not meant to coincide with pagan holiday.
The linked Snopes article seems to claim otherwise when it says "The idea of celebrating the Nativity on December 25 was first suggested early in the fourth century CE, a clever move on the part of Church fathers who wished to eclipse the December 25 festivities of a rival pagan religion..."
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/jesus.asp
When did Snopes start obfuscating so that it was difficult to copy text from their pages or is something screwy with my system?
On a per-viewer basis - TV creators get very little revenue. If they can find a way to get similar levels of income from non-broadcast TV distribution, then we will see more of this in the future. Maybe broadcast TV will end up just showing old re-runs of programming first released in some other format.
Boy, that's a lot of work though. One would think that if people applied this amount of initiative and ingenuity into something legal they could make almost as much money a similar amount of effort and much less risk.
I want every CD, every DVD, and every TV show available to me digitally. That's what we all want. It's not like they aren't already sitting in some digital format somewhere.
Quest had a cute commercial about this type of thing, way back in 1999:
A tired man goes into a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere and asks about amenities. When he asks about entertainment, the girl responds "all rooms have every movie ever made in any language anytime, day or night."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ9qcp6Lcno
The technology exists, heck, a payment system probably could be worked out without too much technical difficulties. The political/legal rights issues are probably intractable.
How does the existence of lots of bad loans show that the government forced banks to make them? The vast majority of "problem" loans were not backed by any governmental insurance or anything like that (if they were the banks wouldn't have been in danger of failing, though the insurer might have been).
While I have seen analysts state that the lack of regulation and oversight greatly contributed to the various financial problems we have seen in the banking sector - yours is the first voice I have heard blaming the government forcing people to make risky loans.