User: Phil Steinmeyer

Odd bit from the article...

On: Indian College Students Face Bleak Prospects

Rote memorization is rife at Indian colleges because students continue to be judged almost solely by exam results. There is scant incentive to widen their horizons -- to read books, found clubs or stage plays. That is not good news for Indian companies, which are hiring these days.

This makes no sense at all. Either the companies value extra-curricular activities, in which case it is easy to hire graduates who have these in their background, or they only value exam results, in which case they can hire graduates who focused mainly on that. But to say that they value trait A, but ignore it and hire only on trait B (when A is fairly easy to see on a resume or ask about in an interview) just doesn't seem right. Seems like sloppy writing to me.

Re:Journalism?

On: BBC Wants Evidence of Climate Science Bias

My basic tenant is if they can't predict the weather next week (which they still can't do very accurately) why should I believe they can predict the weather 20 years from now?

An inability to successfully make short term forecasts does not necessarily mean that long term forecasts are impossible. I can say with about a 60-70% probability that it will be warmer where I live 10 days from now than it was today (cold day today), but with 99%+ probability that it will be warmer in 6 months (summertime). Ask me whether the Dow Jones average will be higher or lower in 30 days, and it's nearly a coin flip. But 20 years from now, it's probably 95-99% likely to be higher (long term stock market growth outweighs short term fluctuations). In any trendline with high volatility and relatively low per-period mean changes, in the short term the volatility will override the long term trend, but you can still make reasonably accurate long term predictions.