Obviously, I meant evolution as an explanation of prehistory. Few people deny the small steps that can be shown in a lab, but every few months we see research come out that challenges natural-selection evolution as we understand it as the sole explanation of our existence.
I think you misunderstand the research "coming out every few months".
Steves seem to think this whole "evolution thing" is a pretty useful scientific concept:
"Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to "intelligent design," to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation's public schools."
The way a society treats its least powerful and valued members, its enemies, and its critics is a measure of that society's strength and fitness.
Why do it's enemies matter?
Because they are a useful metric. The lowest level or respect a society shows for anyone, in my opinion, can be a good measure of how just, honorable, fair, etc. that society is overall. You don't get many "points" for treating your kings well - everyone does that. Treating your enemies well takes some serious effort.
And these people are treated badly because they are criminals, not because they are the least powerful or least valued.
Criminals, in general, are not valued highly by a society. In some sense, they are "enemies" of the society. I think it degrades us all when we treat them as less than human, even (or especially) if we feel that they have behaved in a less-than-human manner. Fortunately back in 1948 we all agreed to the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", so these types of abuse are purely theoretical at this point, no?
Article 5 - No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
As an aside, I heard an interview with a military doctor serving in Afghanistan who spoke about their policy of treating the wounded of the enemy Taliban. He said that personally he would be more than happy to leave them dying on the field, but that he recognized the tremendous PR value of actually fixing them up. He claimed that the Taliban were actually leaving their wounded by the side of the road on occasion because they realized they would get better treatment than could be offered by their own side. The doctor wondered how long the Taliban could maintain the idea that the west were a bunch of evil devils while implicitly stating that they gave their enemies as good treatment as they did their allies.
The way a society treats its least powerful and valued members, its enemies, and its critics is a measure of that society's strength and fitness. Unfortunately while "western" nations might score better on this type of scale than many other nations, we still have a lot of room for improvement.
Before you can guarantee an increase in these potential drug abuse effect, first you need to show that there would be an increase in the use of these now legally available drugs. I don't know how one can go about establishing exactly what the population would do with wider availability of the "harder" drugs. Certainly there are arguments that easy legal access to pot would lead to increases in the use of harder drugs (though it doesn't seem to have done so for the Dutch), but there are arguments that also sound pretty good in the exact opposite direction.
I suspect that if we limited the possibility of gross profits on the distribution and manufacture side of things, and limited the advertising and stuff like that, the societal costs would be no greater than the costs associated with alcohol. Heck, I'm all for placing stricter limits on profits and advertising for tobacco and alcohol for that matter.
You've convinced me. The increased costs for in-flight aircraft fire retardants is certainly a greater economic drag on the entire planet's economy than the destruction of the ozone layer. We should never have tricked the whole world into restricting them. What were we thinking?
Increased costs and red-tape are a significant problem around the world, but I think you've possibly picked the worst example in CFC to illustrate your point. I would be willing to bet that the estimated costs to society of completely eliminating all forms of in-flight fire fighting would be significantly less than the costs that would have been born by everyone if the ban had not been agreed upon. The fact that a dispensation for halon was enacted seems more like a vindication of the regulatory process rather than a condemnation.
Apple's profit margin could partially be a factor of their manufacturing process and their overall costs for returns and repairs - it is possible to make something a little better than your competition and then charge a bit more than your competition, and then have a profit margin a LOT more than your competition.
Clearly Apple tries to position themselves as a "premium" brand, and has many have pointed out a lot of that positioning is psychological rather than actual differences in the product. But there are some significant differences in customer satisfaction at the end of the day. Consumer Reports is not by any measure particular fans of Apple products, but their reader surveys do seem to indicate that their customers are highly satisfied with the whole "Apple Experience" from purchasing, through using, and trouble support. How much this "experience" is worth from a financial point of view of course is very subjective. In any case they seem to have managed to convince a lot of people to buy their stuff - so at least some people don't think it is too overpriced.
Those people would have otherwise died a week later from something else. Generally, people who die from flu are old and/or weak. But you knew this, didn't you ?
Of course many of "those people" are kids under five (according to the graphic by age group on https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Influenza ), and for pandemics there are big peaks for the 15-40 age group, on par with the "old foggey" levels. But you knew this, didn't you ?
Yes, it is true that the old and infirm are particularly hit by flu deaths, but the majority of those who die do not have a life expectancy measured in weeks independent of their flu infection. If you have information to the contrary, I would be interested in seeing it.
This does not take into account the financial costs associated with flu independent of deaths. Society spends a lot on flu health care and in lost productivity. When significant numbers of strong healthy wage earners visit their doctor to take care of themselves, their kids, or their parents, that adds up to a lot of lost working hours and increased doctor costs.
It's quite simple: people change once they're married.
Dude, people's characters don't change much past about eight years old.
That's probably largely true, however the act of "official marriage" often produces a change in behaviour and interpretation that can come as a surprise to both parties. Strangely enough, it is not uncommon to treat your roomate/lover different than your spouse. Relationships that are based on a couple deciding to live together can be very different from a couple promising each other to be together. The dynamics of the two foundations being different can lead to both different behaviour, and different feelings associated with identical behaviours. In one case person A might take out the garbage more regularly. In another case person B might feel stronger when the other fails to take out the garbage.
For a couple that does not live together before marriage - it is obvious that things are going to be vastly different after marriage (and with that co-habitation). For couples that do live together before marriage, while there are likely a lot of areas where they have useful knowledge about each others' lifestyles, there is a potential complication of thinking that there will be no or few changes in their relationship after marriage. This can be compounded by lack of communication in either case, and lack of clarity of self knowledge.
You cannot develop talent. Talent is innate to a person and is something you are born with.
What NFL players have is a tremendous amount of skill.
My 10 year old just returned from school with a quote from one of his teachers. Something to the effect of "Talent is the ability to practice." or maybe it was "Talent is the desire to practice". In any case, the success seems to come from the practice rather than inborn ability.
None of the research I have seen supports the idea of "innate talent" in any field - from chess to coding to violin abilities, if you put in a few thousand hours of good practice you will become highly skilled, and without those thousands of hours you won't be. Pick a field and apply 3 hours of day towards it and in ten years you should be pretty darn good.
In any case, yeah, those NFL players are pretty darn skilled. And a damn sight more driven than myself.
Is the cost to our society smaller to let the "weak and frail" die so that only "the strong" breed? We would get even a "better" result to close down the whole medical industry with that type of logic.
And don't get me started with prescription glasses....
Lying on FB could in fact be "illegal", or at least open one up to legal liability.
In general one cannot publish or disseminate defamation of others without potential legal repercussions for example. In many regions (including the USA) publishing truthful statements is protected - so the truthfulness of what one posts on FB does have legal authority.
I would tend to disagree - you don't generally blame the doctor for letting you know that the infection is so bad that the foot has to be removed. Heck, in this case, the "doctor" didn't even perform the amputation. Ethically speaking, I think the "informant" is in the clear. The negative consequences of the spread of the information should be blamed on the actors who took the undesirable action in the first place, rather than someone who told you about it.
You are correct, SF cannot be forced via the GPL to remove the sources if they have them and want to post them (absent any other arrangement between the parties).
Distributing anything under GPL obliges the distributor to make the source available for at least three years.
But for the copyright holder, there is nobody else with standing to enforce that obligation. When the copyright holder distributes something under the GPL, the GPL only applies to FURTHER distributors. The GPL is a license for the downstream, and if the copyright holder stops distributing things, nobody downstream has any ability to compel the copyright holder to any further action. The GPL gives you the recipient of GPL code rights to use and distribute that code, but it does not oblige the author of that code to do anything.
Of course as has been stated, if any GPL code from some other author is being used, then they are not the copyright holder for the complete work, and the GPL does apply to them and can be enforced by the author of the original code.
There is nothing requiring them to continue to make available any of their own code that they had previously released GPLed. Thus while there is nothing preventing someone to fork the old GPL version, if nobody has a copy of the source, there is no way practically to do so.
Really good point, only slightly let down by the fact that the Vikings came from Scandinavia, not Iceland.
Vikings may of come from Scandinavia, but one of the places they settled was Iceland. There is little evidence that there was anyone else there. Once settled in Iceland, did they lose the right to the "Vikings" brand? Did they sell it to Minnesota?
I'm not up on modern military tactics, but having a huge army out in the field without any plan of attack or leadership running the logistics of troop movement and stuff like that can make for a very unpleasant situation in the immediate vicinity, but probably not much trouble for anyone a few hundred miles away.
Why are manufacturing jobs a good thing? I never understood this. There is value in overpaying human beings do work that can be automated?
Only if you have an economic system that does not spread the wealth gains from automation to a large enough fraction of the population. If everything was automated with today's systems, we would have +50% unemployment and a pretty restless group of hungry and angry people - the the best recipe for utopia unfortunately.
Too bad there was not some form of regulation or taxation in place since the turn of the century so that half of every increase in efficiency and productivity translated into decreased workload and increased pay for the workers with the other half going towards increased profits for the owners. Perhaps we would only have "advanced" to the technological level of the 1960s by now, but we could have something like a ten hour work-week. Unfortunately I can't think of any such system that wouldn't be very easy to cheat or game and without worldwide buy-in it wouldn't work well either.
Generally these sorts of "clicker" activities are not designed for testing (though of course they could be used for that purpose). Rather they are an attempt to engage to audience in some participatory activities that from an educational standpoint are hoping to encourage the participant to be in a more "active learning" mode rather than the "passive learning" mode that is common in a lecture situation.
Generally speaking, humans learn more efficiently when they actively participate in activities that incorporate newly desired knowledge into their existing frameworks. Thus the popularity among educators of "project based learning", "workshop" models of instruction and other hands-on types of programs. These types of programs however tend to scale linearly - twice as many students require twice as many instructors and other resources. A lecture format however scales fairly nicely - adding more students is as easy as adding more seats - instructor costs are constant since lecturing to 5 students is "no different" than lecturing to 5 thousand (for some values of "no different").
People who do learn a lot in a lecture do seem to be more actively involved in the lecture compared to those who learn less. They think about what is being discussed, they ask questions of the instructor, or their classmates, or just themselves about the material. They anticipate the future direction of the lecture and consider the implications of the material. All of these activities seem to correlate with increased retention and understanding. Thus the desire among instructors to assist more students in a lecture class to get into and remain in this more active mental mode. Specifically including these types of internal mental processes in the actual lecture material is one way ("With this new idea we just discussed, you might think that things would work like blah, but actually they work like bleck"). What seems to be even more effective is to encourage introspection ("What do you think will happen in this situation? Why?") and encourage collaboration ("What do the people around you think? Why?") It is difficult however to get students in a large group to all participate in these activities, so getting them to have some personal emotional investment in the outcome of the activities can be used as well ("Raise your hand if you think blah. How about bleck?")
Using a clicker type of device is thought to be even more effective to encourage student participation and "buy-in" compared to raising hands or voting ABC cards. Clickers can allow for completely anonymous reporting, or alternatively individual tracking of individual responses. It can allow presentation in graphical or numerical format in real-time of the student responses which might have an impact on students learning (hopefully positive, possibly negative). They certainly can give people doing research on learning and teaching some insight into how the students respond to different things.
As an aside, there does seem to be some research indicating that not all multiple-guess exams are crap from the point of view of evaluating student ability in comparison to evaluating them based on "work it out" problems. See for example the "previous projects" links at the UIUC Physics Education Research page: http://research.physics.illinois.edu/per/Research.html
Of course there is also the question of what we want our graduates of various programs to be able to do well. In most cases we do not expect our graduates to be answering exam questions in their final career activities, so there are legitimate questions about the value of almost any type of exam format.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, I meant evolution as an explanation of prehistory. Few people deny the small steps that can be shown in a lab, but every few months we see research come out that challenges natural-selection evolution as we understand it as the sole explanation of our existence.
I think you misunderstand the research "coming out every few months".
Steves seem to think this whole "evolution thing" is a pretty useful scientific concept:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Project_Steve
"Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to "intelligent design," to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation's public schools."
Why do it's enemies matter?
Because they are a useful metric. The lowest level or respect a society shows for anyone, in my opinion, can be a good measure of how just, honorable, fair, etc. that society is overall. You don't get many "points" for treating your kings well - everyone does that. Treating your enemies well takes some serious effort.
And these people are treated badly because they are criminals, not because they are the least powerful or least valued.
Criminals, in general, are not valued highly by a society. In some sense, they are "enemies" of the society. I think it degrades us all when we treat them as less than human, even (or especially) if we feel that they have behaved in a less-than-human manner. Fortunately back in 1948 we all agreed to the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", so these types of abuse are purely theoretical at this point, no?
Article 5 - No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
As an aside, I heard an interview with a military doctor serving in Afghanistan who spoke about their policy of treating the wounded of the enemy Taliban. He said that personally he would be more than happy to leave them dying on the field, but that he recognized the tremendous PR value of actually fixing them up. He claimed that the Taliban were actually leaving their wounded by the side of the road on occasion because they realized they would get better treatment than could be offered by their own side. The doctor wondered how long the Taliban could maintain the idea that the west were a bunch of evil devils while implicitly stating that they gave their enemies as good treatment as they did their allies.
How big of an issue does it need to be to be considered a big enough problem?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_States
The way a society treats its least powerful and valued members, its enemies, and its critics is a measure of that society's strength and fitness. Unfortunately while "western" nations might score better on this type of scale than many other nations, we still have a lot of room for improvement.
Before you can guarantee an increase in these potential drug abuse effect, first you need to show that there would be an increase in the use of these now legally available drugs. I don't know how one can go about establishing exactly what the population would do with wider availability of the "harder" drugs. Certainly there are arguments that easy legal access to pot would lead to increases in the use of harder drugs (though it doesn't seem to have done so for the Dutch), but there are arguments that also sound pretty good in the exact opposite direction.
I suspect that if we limited the possibility of gross profits on the distribution and manufacture side of things, and limited the advertising and stuff like that, the societal costs would be no greater than the costs associated with alcohol. Heck, I'm all for placing stricter limits on profits and advertising for tobacco and alcohol for that matter.
You've convinced me. The increased costs for in-flight aircraft fire retardants is certainly a greater economic drag on the entire planet's economy than the destruction of the ozone layer. We should never have tricked the whole world into restricting them. What were we thinking?
Increased costs and red-tape are a significant problem around the world, but I think you've possibly picked the worst example in CFC to illustrate your point. I would be willing to bet that the estimated costs to society of completely eliminating all forms of in-flight fire fighting would be significantly less than the costs that would have been born by everyone if the ban had not been agreed upon. The fact that a dispensation for halon was enacted seems more like a vindication of the regulatory process rather than a condemnation.
Apple's profit margin could partially be a factor of their manufacturing process and their overall costs for returns and repairs - it is possible to make something a little better than your competition and then charge a bit more than your competition, and then have a profit margin a LOT more than your competition.
Clearly Apple tries to position themselves as a "premium" brand, and has many have pointed out a lot of that positioning is psychological rather than actual differences in the product. But there are some significant differences in customer satisfaction at the end of the day. Consumer Reports is not by any measure particular fans of Apple products, but their reader surveys do seem to indicate that their customers are highly satisfied with the whole "Apple Experience" from purchasing, through using, and trouble support. How much this "experience" is worth from a financial point of view of course is very subjective. In any case they seem to have managed to convince a lot of people to buy their stuff - so at least some people don't think it is too overpriced.
Those people would have otherwise died a week later from something else. Generally, people who die from flu are old and/or weak. But you knew this, didn't you ?
Of course many of "those people" are kids under five (according to the graphic by age group on https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Influenza ), and for pandemics there are big peaks for the 15-40 age group, on par with the "old foggey" levels. But you knew this, didn't you ?
Yes, it is true that the old and infirm are particularly hit by flu deaths, but the majority of those who die do not have a life expectancy measured in weeks independent of their flu infection. If you have information to the contrary, I would be interested in seeing it.
According to http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/f/flu/deaths.htm the average life years lost from Flu: 9.5 years for pneumonia/influenza; 10.9 for pneumonia/influenza in North Carolina.
This does not take into account the financial costs associated with flu independent of deaths. Society spends a lot on flu health care and in lost productivity. When significant numbers of strong healthy wage earners visit their doctor to take care of themselves, their kids, or their parents, that adds up to a lot of lost working hours and increased doctor costs.
It's quite simple: people change once they're married.
Dude, people's characters don't change much past about eight years old.
That's probably largely true, however the act of "official marriage" often produces a change in behaviour and interpretation that can come as a surprise to both parties. Strangely enough, it is not uncommon to treat your roomate/lover different than your spouse. Relationships that are based on a couple deciding to live together can be very different from a couple promising each other to be together. The dynamics of the two foundations being different can lead to both different behaviour, and different feelings associated with identical behaviours. In one case person A might take out the garbage more regularly. In another case person B might feel stronger when the other fails to take out the garbage.
For a couple that does not live together before marriage - it is obvious that things are going to be vastly different after marriage (and with that co-habitation). For couples that do live together before marriage, while there are likely a lot of areas where they have useful knowledge about each others' lifestyles, there is a potential complication of thinking that there will be no or few changes in their relationship after marriage. This can be compounded by lack of communication in either case, and lack of clarity of self knowledge.
You cannot develop talent. Talent is innate to a person and is something you are born with.
What NFL players have is a tremendous amount of skill.
My 10 year old just returned from school with a quote from one of his teachers. Something to the effect of "Talent is the ability to practice." or maybe it was "Talent is the desire to practice". In any case, the success seems to come from the practice rather than inborn ability.
None of the research I have seen supports the idea of "innate talent" in any field - from chess to coding to violin abilities, if you put in a few thousand hours of good practice you will become highly skilled, and without those thousands of hours you won't be. Pick a field and apply 3 hours of day towards it and in ten years you should be pretty darn good.
In any case, yeah, those NFL players are pretty darn skilled. And a damn sight more driven than myself.
Is the cost to our society smaller to let the "weak and frail" die so that only "the strong" breed? We would get even a "better" result to close down the whole medical industry with that type of logic.
And don't get me started with prescription glasses....
Lying on FB could in fact be "illegal", or at least open one up to legal liability.
In general one cannot publish or disseminate defamation of others without potential legal repercussions for example. In many regions (including the USA) publishing truthful statements is protected - so the truthfulness of what one posts on FB does have legal authority.
I would tend to disagree - you don't generally blame the doctor for letting you know that the infection is so bad that the foot has to be removed. Heck, in this case, the "doctor" didn't even perform the amputation. Ethically speaking, I think the "informant" is in the clear. The negative consequences of the spread of the information should be blamed on the actors who took the undesirable action in the first place, rather than someone who told you about it.
Um, no. Did anyone say they were? Or are you trying to say that lying is, in general, something that is only bad when it is done under oath?
...and the term PC wasn't associated with Windows.
You mean the Pocket Computer from Radio Shack? A friend of mine had a PC1 that was so cool! I think he had a printer for it too!
http://oldcomputers.net/trs80pc1.html
http://www.lenna.org/ (linked from the hilarious http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/lenpeg.html LenPEG image compression page) has a photo presumably from her 1997 attendance at the 50th Anniversary IS&T conference in Boston.
You are correct, SF cannot be forced via the GPL to remove the sources if they have them and want to post them (absent any other arrangement between the parties).
Distributing anything under GPL obliges the distributor to make the source available for at least three years.
But for the copyright holder, there is nobody else with standing to enforce that obligation. When the copyright holder distributes something under the GPL, the GPL only applies to FURTHER distributors. The GPL is a license for the downstream, and if the copyright holder stops distributing things, nobody downstream has any ability to compel the copyright holder to any further action. The GPL gives you the recipient of GPL code rights to use and distribute that code, but it does not oblige the author of that code to do anything.
Of course as has been stated, if any GPL code from some other author is being used, then they are not the copyright holder for the complete work, and the GPL does apply to them and can be enforced by the author of the original code.
my thought exactly
10-4 good buddy
There is nothing requiring them to continue to make available any of their own code that they had previously released GPLed. Thus while there is nothing preventing someone to fork the old GPL version, if nobody has a copy of the source, there is no way practically to do so.
Really good point, only slightly let down by the fact that the Vikings came from Scandinavia, not Iceland.
Vikings may of come from Scandinavia, but one of the places they settled was Iceland. There is little evidence that there was anyone else there. Once settled in Iceland, did they lose the right to the "Vikings" brand? Did they sell it to Minnesota?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iceland
But, man, is it going to be a pain to switch to IPv8 at that point!
I'm not up on modern military tactics, but having a huge army out in the field without any plan of attack or leadership running the logistics of troop movement and stuff like that can make for a very unpleasant situation in the immediate vicinity, but probably not much trouble for anyone a few hundred miles away.
Why are manufacturing jobs a good thing? I never understood this. There is value in overpaying human beings do work that can be automated?
Only if you have an economic system that does not spread the wealth gains from automation to a large enough fraction of the population. If everything was automated with today's systems, we would have +50% unemployment and a pretty restless group of hungry and angry people - the the best recipe for utopia unfortunately.
Too bad there was not some form of regulation or taxation in place since the turn of the century so that half of every increase in efficiency and productivity translated into decreased workload and increased pay for the workers with the other half going towards increased profits for the owners. Perhaps we would only have "advanced" to the technological level of the 1960s by now, but we could have something like a ten hour work-week. Unfortunately I can't think of any such system that wouldn't be very easy to cheat or game and without worldwide buy-in it wouldn't work well either.
Generally these sorts of "clicker" activities are not designed for testing (though of course they could be used for that purpose). Rather they are an attempt to engage to audience in some participatory activities that from an educational standpoint are hoping to encourage the participant to be in a more "active learning" mode rather than the "passive learning" mode that is common in a lecture situation.
Generally speaking, humans learn more efficiently when they actively participate in activities that incorporate newly desired knowledge into their existing frameworks. Thus the popularity among educators of "project based learning", "workshop" models of instruction and other hands-on types of programs. These types of programs however tend to scale linearly - twice as many students require twice as many instructors and other resources. A lecture format however scales fairly nicely - adding more students is as easy as adding more seats - instructor costs are constant since lecturing to 5 students is "no different" than lecturing to 5 thousand (for some values of "no different").
People who do learn a lot in a lecture do seem to be more actively involved in the lecture compared to those who learn less. They think about what is being discussed, they ask questions of the instructor, or their classmates, or just themselves about the material. They anticipate the future direction of the lecture and consider the implications of the material. All of these activities seem to correlate with increased retention and understanding. Thus the desire among instructors to assist more students in a lecture class to get into and remain in this more active mental mode. Specifically including these types of internal mental processes in the actual lecture material is one way ("With this new idea we just discussed, you might think that things would work like blah, but actually they work like bleck"). What seems to be even more effective is to encourage introspection ("What do you think will happen in this situation? Why?") and encourage collaboration ("What do the people around you think? Why?") It is difficult however to get students in a large group to all participate in these activities, so getting them to have some personal emotional investment in the outcome of the activities can be used as well ("Raise your hand if you think blah. How about bleck?")
Using a clicker type of device is thought to be even more effective to encourage student participation and "buy-in" compared to raising hands or voting ABC cards. Clickers can allow for completely anonymous reporting, or alternatively individual tracking of individual responses. It can allow presentation in graphical or numerical format in real-time of the student responses which might have an impact on students learning (hopefully positive, possibly negative). They certainly can give people doing research on learning and teaching some insight into how the students respond to different things.
Since at least the 1990s, Mazur (among others) has been a strong proponent of this in physics education: http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/research/detailspage.php?ed=1&rowid=8
As an aside, there does seem to be some research indicating that not all multiple-guess exams are crap from the point of view of evaluating student ability in comparison to evaluating them based on "work it out" problems. See for example the "previous projects" links at the UIUC Physics Education Research page: http://research.physics.illinois.edu/per/Research.html
Of course there is also the question of what we want our graduates of various programs to be able to do well. In most cases we do not expect our graduates to be answering exam questions in their final career activities, so there are legitimate questions about the value of almost any type of exam format.