The problem probably wont be the mortality rate, it will be the morbidity rate.
Sure the number of people who die from the bacon lung wont be that different from seasonal flu, but the number of people who are simultaneously unable to work is a major problem for a pandemic. If half the medical professionals in a country are off sick at the same time it can be catastrophic.
I'm not particularly worried about the virus changing into something with a higher mortality rate. I worry a little in the same way I worry about asteroids smashing into the Earth. Not super likely but it is something to have in mind. I am worried what will happen to the economy if a third of the population has to take a week or two off work.
This is collusion. This kind of meeting itself should be illegal under anti-trust laws. If the law was sensible these people would be arrested and sent to jail for even arranging to meet like this.
Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation I get the decay time for something the mass of the Earth (6 x 10^24 kg) at 5 x 10^50 years. The universe is only billions (10^9) of years old so this is considerably longer than the age of the universe.
A black hole the mass of a carbon atom on the other hand (3 x 10^-26 kg) I get 2 x 10^-93 s. What meaning can be attributed to this result is unclear since this is far shorter than the Planck time.
In short a Earth sized black hole is going to be around for a long time. However even a black hole the size of a flea would evaporate near instantly unless something exists to stabilise it. The reason for this rapid variation in time scales is because the lifetime of a black hole goes as the cube of the mass, which is a very fast varying function.
Well clearly they do have a concept of "the cost of lost opportunity" since they are running the thing over winter. CERN has a deal with a French power provider in which they are provided with power at reduced rates for most of the year, except for 22 days in winter. During this time the rate is very high. These are the days they are planning to run it anyway. Why did they make this deal?
In this case, the deal has cost money, which is unfortunate. Making the deal was still the right choice. Most of the time these kind of agreements save cash.
Your suggestion that it have it's own power plant is truly asinine. Why buy cheap commercial power when you can build your own plant for twice the price. These are particle physicists, they know particle physics, not power plant operation.
In answer to your question about citations and areas where latex is ahead, I study particle physics and the day I use word to write a document I give a care about the formatting of is the day they wrench latex from my cold dead hands.
Look it is very simple and wholly consistent with a libertarian perspective.
The government created this monopoly by intervening in the market with copyright. This was done because it was believed (and I feel rightly so, although you may not) that copyright provided a net societal gain. Now it has to deal with the side effects.
This is government intervention to fix more government intervention. I believe that society is a complex beast and that the free market requires maintenance by government. Most sane people do, even if it is only at the level of providing guys with gun to stop people killing each other over contracts. This is all that is happening here.
If you are a libertarian then your complaint aught to be with the market distortion of copyright creating natural monopolies, not with government breaking up those monopolies.
The day I have a business, a house, and three cars to protect instead of a flat and a bicycle is the day flat taxing will sound fair to me. The rich benefit disproportionately from the benefits of taxation and should therefore pay a larger share.
The day that the X cents on the dollar sales tax on the pasta I buy represents the same fraction of my income as it does to an individual on one hundred times my income is the day a flat tax sounds fair to me.
The day that the last dollar I earn a week has the same subjective value to me as the last dollar Bill Gates earns has to him is the day a flat tax sounds fair to me. Taking 1% more from the super wealthy is not the same as taking 1% more from the very poor, even if it looks the same on paper.
Progressive taxation isn't just about redistribution of wealth, it is about a fair tax system that tries to match the value of the tax taken and the benefits an individual receives to the amount they pay.
Just because flat sounds fair using simplistic "everyone pays the same fraction of their income (or wealth)" reasoning doesn't mean it is. If you want to be actually 'fair' then you need to consider the consequences of a policy, not merely if it feels right on paper.
I found it to be just the opposite. The episode where Riker joins a Klingon ship as first officer for instance. I viewed that episodes central theme as a very right of centre 'When in Rome' message. Riker doesn't try to export or maintain Federation culture and ideals for his stay (at one point he brutally beats another officer for merely questioning the wisdom of his presence).
The entire episode seemed to have the message that to succeed in a foreign culture it is necessary to embrace it.
In many ways the The Next Generation Klingons represent a glorification of the best ideals of the right. The are big on both personal responsibility, discipline and a strong absolute morality.
If anything I would say that the Klingon of The Next Generation represent an idealised form of conservatism. This is maintained in stark contrast the the idealised left that the Federation represents, and most interestingly these two distinct political ideologies are able to get along by embracing the best of each other when they have to work together.
This also allows the series to examine the worst aspects of these two extremes. Klingon justice is harsh, and often arbitrary, while the Federation allows it's mortal enemies respite on more than one occasion.
Viewed from this perspective the reason the Klingons have an alien culture and alien ideals is because the shows viewers are overwhelmingly liberal. The right might just as well be aliens to many on the left. So they are given an alien culture and religion (one based as you suggest largely on Eastern culture since that would be the most alien to a Western viewer).
Just my interpretation, I'm sure it isn't what the writers of the show intended but that was the message I took home.
F=ma works fine for special relativity. Heck it works fine for general relativity if you are careful enough. What do you think the Lorentz force law is?
F=ma only breaks down at the quantum level. Even then there is a version of F=ma, it is just a relationship between expectation values.
F=ma works just fine for balloons losing mass too. You just have to remember that the m is not a constant. Heck I've solved problems involving rockets which are precisely the situation you describe.
Ignoring quantum effects F=ma is as far as we know perfectly congruent with experiment, one just has to be very careful how one defines the vectors F and a, since you might be dealing with a curved space or something that is not Euclidean.
Dyson is wrong on some things. He has put his name to statements like "The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years", which are frankly false.
On the other hand one has to keep in mind his background, hard science. Climate models are in many ways deficient. They fail to predict some very basic climate phenomena. They vary wildly in certain other predictions. They contain quantities that are very poorly known or borderline unmeasurable that rather than being predicted from the physics are just read from past data.
The big problem I see Professor Dyson has with current work in climatology is with the extremists most of whom are not scientists. People who don't understand where climate research is at present and make extravagant claims. He is wrong, but he is only a little wrong, if you catch my meaning.
The way I see it, current climate research looks something like this. The best models predict that there is a very high probability (I've heard statistics of the made up on the spot variety on the order of 90%) that over the next fifty years there will be catastrophic climate change if nothing is done. My numbers are out of date and we are probably even more certain now. The problem is at the moment there is a 100% chance that we have catastrophic famines, diseases and the like. Because of his background Dyson is more likely to want to fix the problems we definitely have and which are already catastrophic than those problems we almost certainly have and which will almost certainly be catastrophic.
I think he is wrong. On the other hand Dyson has a point about considerations of other disasters. Consider the truly lack lustre response of the world to the AIDS crisis. If sea levels rose by 20 cm (give it anywhere between 10 to 100 years and they probably will) we would have on the order of three quarters of a million homeless in Nigeria. Sounds very bad (and it is). But at present that country has on the order of two and a half million people with AIDS. I picked Nigeria because it is a country that will be severely affected by climate change.
The point is that on net climate change will be a global disaster (probably much worse than AIDS), causing wars, famines, flooding and potentially a new ice age. However, it is hard to estimate these things, and I can forgive Dyson for wanting to fix the problems we have, rather than the problems we almost certainly will have. His dissent is of the usual kind on gets in the sciences, and the only thing I can fault him with is allowing himself to be used as a pawn by people with an agenda. A crime some on the correct side of the debate commit with aplomb.
I'd also like to take issue with your suggestion that there is a strong sentiment among slashdotters that climate change is bunk. I've posted on the topic before and ignoring the usual cranks and anonymous cowards my postings are well received. I think climate change is real, that something needs to be done about it and that that something will be expensive. I don't think we can rely on future technologies to get us out of the bind we are putting ourselves in. I agree with carbon emission targets.
I just hate it when people on both sides misrepresent the debate or talk in crazy absolutes and resort to insults, especially when they are directed at eminent scientists such as Professor Dyson, who while in my opinion wrong (and bias by a career dealing with the certainties of physics) have a valid contribution to make to the debate. I don't think you are in any way guilty of such an offense, but many on this forum are.
Yes and Stalin said "Death solves everything, no man, no problem".
Ghandhi was right, but only in the context of dealing with the British, at that point in history. If instead of fighting what was by the standards of the day a progressive, modern, secular state India was trying to obtain independence from say the Roman Empire or the Russian Empire then the death toll in Ghandi's day would have made the harsh, unjust, racist and cruel British reaction to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 look like a picnic with cake and ice cream.
You cant apply a non-violent philosophy like Ghandi's when you are dealing with ideologies like Fascism, Soviet style Communism or Islamism. It just doesn't work.
So here is how this is going to work at the moment. Mainstream bigotry in the West atheist can fight in a non-violent way. We can show moderate Christians and Muslims and Hindus in the US and the UK and other parts of the West that their bigotry and hatred when translated into law hurts people who are just like them. Just as Ghandi advocated.
But the extremists are a different matter. The Islamists and Christian fundamentalists are going to be a problem, and they aren't going to go away if we play nicely. We need to bring the full power of the state to bear against these people. Otherwise they will keep flying planes into buildings, they will keep bombing abortion clinics.
If we don't get off our backsides and do something to protect our liberties from these people then Ghandis quote will read something like
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they round you up in camps and gas you and you die"
Sure the Islamic world doesn't stand a chance against the West in a straight up fight, but they can give our own fundamentalists the tool and legitimacy to undermine our freedoms to the point where thirty, forty, fifty years down the road extremists on the right have all the power. Heck look at the United States, the Republican party is right on the border of a mild variant of Fascism and many of it's members wouldn't look out of place in something like the BNP or Front National!
In some areas we are winning, but we have to fight! We cant just hold faith in some mystical unstoppable march of progress because the forces arrayed against us are immense. Islamism is a gift to non-believers, if we can just tie (and rightly so) the theocratic ideas of the Islamists to those of the religious right then we can bring the full power of the state to bear against both of these groups and annihilate them once and for all. If we don't then they will wrest control of the state from ourselves and our moderate religious brethren and use it to destroy us.
Publishing is expensive. Peer review is expensive. If you want to have high quality widely distributed science you need both. However, as a scientist myself I don't think this on it's own is a good argument against open access.
Bottom line is we need a new way to do publish science, and such a system is evolving. There are a number of journals that are online only, or release copies of work for free (for example JHEP). The current system is only really viable for the big name journals (and many of these are frankly sacrificing the quality of the work they accept to move more copies). This new way probably wont look that different from the old way, but will probably be a similar model to the one JHEP uses now.
Of course things are easier sciences like physics or maths than they are in biology which is why things move faster. For a start, in biology (especially biotech) there is a real push to keep things that might be profitable secret as long as possible. In addition scripts in biological sciences are often provided with no mark up conveying the authors intent. It is much easier to adjust for publication a latex file already marked up for you than it is to deal with a word file (which is why many journals in physics basically insist you hand over a tex file). This and other factors adds to the expense, which makes a more closed process more desirable.
Bottom line is the scientific publishing industry is going to have to change. The scientists all want it to change. They want it to be cheaper to access because they want people to read their work (and cite it!). They want it online because paper copies are a pain in the backside and harder to obtain. And they are by and large both supplier and customer. If journals both big and small don't start moving towards a lower cost, more open system then the internet and new technologies will allow someone else to.
As a rule every generation has been superior to the previous. I'm from generation X and if I was asked objectively generation Y are superior to my generation in many ways.
About the only generation to buck this trend are the waste of space baby boomers who have saddled my generation and the next with a bucket of debt. One half of these idiots gave us the likes of Nixon, and the other sat on their asses listening to hippy crap and thinking that pot will solve all the worlds problems.
Now they are approaching retirement age, having broken the bank. Rather than admit that they sold us up the river they are begging the next generations to carry on their ponzi scheme like their woeful mismanagement of the world in some way entitles them to a long and labour free retirement.
If you ask me it isn't generations X and Y who think the world owes them a living, it's the baby boomers.
I have to disagree with you on a number of points. Dawkins is not (by and large) intolerant of other viewpoints, unless those viewpoints are truly absurd. He is very careful to show respect to the carefully constructed philosophical arguments which make things like deism a perfectly valid perspective. His 'disrespect' is directed to people who use these arguments to justify belief in virgin births and resurrections.
People of religious faith are so used to a disproportionate level of respect that they become greatly offended when someone talks about their beliefs in the same way we talk about other patently absurd concepts. Dawkins does not have a deep seated faith in a lack of faith. He goes out of his way to point out that he is a teapot atheist (just like pretty much everyone else). What he then goes on to say is that everyone is a teapot atheist, except that some people (especially in the Abrahamic world) are teapot atheists to every god except one, and this is crazy!
The real problem with religions like Christianity and Islam is that the fundamentalist fanatics are by and large correct in their interpretation and everyone else is rationalising. If you objectively read the Bible for instance it is hard to accept that the God of the Bible is the same God that the Church of England or the Catholic Church believes in. It is much easier to believe it is the God of the extreme evangelicals. This is hardly surprising since the doctrines of the latter emphasise biblical supremacy, while the former do not.
This is where the conflict with evolution comes into play. Reasonable, sensible decent beliefs like those held by many atheists, episcopalians and catholics basically require one to ignore large tracts of the bible. The point being made by people like Dawkins is that these people are engaged in a grand cherry picking exercise. I like that bit of my faith, but not that bit. I want to love my neighbour as myself, but I think genocide is wrong. The golden rule rocks, but stoning children not so much. I think referring to other ethnicities as 'dogs' is offensive, but feeding the poor is good. These people are basically doing the same thing atheists do! The only real difference is they draw a disproportionate portion of their morality from a single source.
The real problem with Dawkins is that he is not an effective mediator. He has successfully galvanised a community of atheists into speaking their mind, but has had little impact convincing anyone else. This is not necessarily a bad thing, atheists are the last minority you can discriminate against with aplomb and for a long time were lost in the wilderness. We needed galvanising. However, what do we do with this new movement? How do we convert our new found voice and confidence into actual changes that protect atheists in the same way that blacks, gays and women have done so in the past?
The Dawkins approach wont achieve much advancement for atheists. The problem is now one of style. Dawkins bluff approach wont change other peoples minds. Religion might not deserve respect, but the system is to big for a comparatively small movement like atheism to attack from the outside. It has to be attacked from the inside, and that means giving the religious respect even if they might not deserve it. It means ignoring for the time being the hypocrisy of religion, ignoring the fact that the crazy people are right when they say they their version of a particular religion is the one true interpretation, ignoring that most religious people are rationalising their beliefs. We must engage with them constructively.
I wanted to pick up on what you said about multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has been a immense disaster. We don't need multiculturalism, we need a tolerant monoculture. You want to worship God X, thats cool. You want to tell others they should worship God X, no problem. You want to force your daughter to marry someone at 16, not cool. And if your religion tells you to do it, then your religion sucks too. If your culture says that women should
While amusing the situations you describe are rather less clear cut than your (albeit funny) post suggests. I'll take one example, Agincourt.
Agincourt was a crowd control nightmare for the French made worse by the disproportionate number of heavily armoured french troops. The reason the English didn't have so many heavy troops was in part that archers were cheaper. Some accounts suggest the French had trouble moving (or even lifting their weapons) in the poor, near boggy conditions. A longbowman on the other hand, is lightly armoured, and does not need to close on you to use his weapon.
The French knights viewed war as their vocation. The English archers on the other hand viewed war as their profession. The English were a more professional force, a more disciplined force. It turned out that 'breeding' was no replacement for hours of practice each day.
Leadership played a important role as well. While the Henry V of Shakespeare never existed, the real Henry V had the loyalty and trust of his men. He had led them through France, and they had done rather well financially out of it. Less valiant but still effective was his instruction to his men (now effectively trapped) that they would not be ransomed themselves if captured, and that they had best fight for their lives. It is rarely wise to fight an army that is prepared to fight to the death. Henry was also highly pragmatic, executing valuable prisoners when he feared they might rearm themselves. Amusingly while the French chroniclers didn't seem to have much of a problem with this, it was probably rather unpopular with Henry's own army.
The list of factors that affect the outcome of a battle are numerous. And English grand strategy (of that time or any other) probably isn't best summarised by "shoot the enemy a lot", any more than the strategy of the Byzantine Empire is best summarised by "assassinate, assassinate, assassinate". Of course there is a nugget of truth to any funny summary of grand strategy. We can probably trace modern doctrines such as overwhelming fire-power and air superiority right back through to notions similar to the English focus on archers during the time of Henry V or the notions of naval superiority that arose in the post Elizabethan England (and later Britian).
As with most conflicts, one is looking at a long list of factors, and strategy and tactics vary depending on circumstances.
The entries on that page relate to responses to creationists. The mistake there is mirroring their incorrect language in an effort to both answer and appear to answer the question.
The problem there was that scientists think like the anti-politician. Say I phrased a question in which I talked about excess cash when it was clear from the context that I meant marginal revenue. If you were a scientists arguing with me you might consciously use the same term, especially if it was near synonymous with the actual term one should use.
The problem is creationists are dictating the debate. The frame all the questions and because they are willing to lie, cheat and generally be dishonest they control the discussion.
Creationists are at war with rational thought. If we are going to beat them with have to stop caring what they think and how they feel and start caring about how to utterly crush them. We should frame the debate our way. We have been arguing with these people with an ever increasing set of facts on our side for generations now. We aren't going to convince them, our objective should be to minimise their influence.
Scientists are fighting this war like they are negotiating with rational and sensible people. Not monsters who consciously choose lies and deception. Creationists are part of a traitorous movement who are using creationism as 'the thin end of the wedge' their term. They are trying to force religion into every aspect of public life. They are traitors and their ring leaders deserve the same treatment we give domestic spies who collude with enemy governments.
No rational individual should ever allow a creationist to serve in a position of power if they can prevent it. The debate should be framed in terms of should we be allowing creationists to abuse their children by brainwashing them in the same nasty ideology they were abused into believing by their parents. The debate shouldn't be on the facts any more, it should be on what fraction of the detractors of evolution belong in mental hospitals and what fraction belong in the judicial system.
Thats right, welcome to the 21st century where multinationals go out of their way to regionalise and decomoditise what they sell, while globalising and comoditising what you sell.
You'll be competing with Indian and Chineese workers as far as labour goes (with generic requirements), but don't worry you will still be paying western prices for goods and services, all of which will lock you in to a specific vendor.
Mercantilism, it's back baby, except this time instead of governments, it's corporations!
"Whether writing is distributed online or in paper form, the author still has to afford to eat and should be able to receive remuneration for their efforts."
In a market economy you receive what you can get others to pay you for your labour. If you want we could increase government spending on art, but I will bet you a chicken dinner the proportion of government money spent on science fiction will be tiny compared with the popularity of science fiction. If writers are having a hard time getting paid then they need to find a way to make their work more desirable as a commodity.
"It may also be due to video games, and that does not bode well for the video game generation who spending their time moving a figure around the screen, and who lack the intellectual and brain development that comes from reading."
I'm not sure how engaging in the complex problem solving routines of many games compares to turning oneself into a glorified version of 'cin', but I will take my chances with the video games. Most people only read crappy pulp fiction which teaches them precisely bugger all and most people play video games that involve walking around shooting alien monsters. Neither are very valuable activities.
Novels that do offer intellectual advancement have their analogues in video games. The in depth experience of other cultures provided by many novels can be found in many video games. There is an excellent game called Spice Trade that teaches one about the high point of the Islamic Empire. Civilisation offer one a glimpse at other cultures and requires careful strategic thinking to win (especially against human opponents). Heck interactive fiction has all of the advantages of books and few of the disadvantages and has advanced well beyond anything done with 'create your own adventure' style books.
Books are a slow, inefficient and uninteresting medium. The only reason there aren't masterpieces on a par with the great literary works is because the human hours needed to prepare a great video game is far greater than the human time needed to create a great book and the length of time we have been creating video games is less than the length of time we have been writing.
You then go on to make the laughable suggestion that newspapers and the MSM do an excellent job informing the public with their fantastic journalism. I don't know where to start with this suggestion. Sure domestic Western blogs suck at reporting about war zones. So do the MSM.
I watched the news and read newspapers during the last conflict in Gaza. I learned absolutely nothing other than bullet points. There was no attempt to put the conflict in context. There was no attempt to talk about the issues involved. All we got was a day to day of what got bombed when and where. And even that contained none of the subtle nuances of context. Just interviews with highly opinionated propaganda mouth pieces and short 20 second interviews with experts who have to dumb down their years of education to a clever sound bite. If we are relying on the MSM to provide us with an informed population. Heck you can learn more from ConfMEPS or Peacemaker in 20 minutes than you could spending a whole day reading the MSM.
Your suggestion of online subscriptions makes sense. Embrace technology to increase profitability. Your other idea for newspapers is basically to form a cartel. If newspapers want to be relevant they need to deal with the fact that the internet generation wants everything yesterday. This generation wont put up with their crap pretending that their self important prose is a substitute for actual facts. A big chunk of this generation also couldn't care less about human interest stories, and can now go elsewhere for it's news if that is all that is available.
If newspapers want to survive they need to cater to this new generations needs. Their news stories need to be in depth, of a high quality and most importantly short and succinct. I could condense the first 20 pages of almost any ne
The problem with their reasoning is that it is based on the equation
P(Bad thing)=P(Experts right)P(Bad Thing given experts right)+P(Experts wrong)P(Bad Thing given experts wrong)
They then give crazy estimates for the last two quantities and point out that if you use their crazy estimates then the second term dwarfs the first.
The problem with their reasoning is that they take the odds of a paper being retracted as P(Experts wrong) (one in one thousand). They then pull from nowhere the value P(Bad Thing given experts wrong) as one in ten thousand.
The problem is that a paper might be withdraw because it is two orders of magnitude out. It might be that the quantity estimated is five orders of magnitude smaller. Even if the physicists are wrong, the odds that they are 6 orders of magnitude wrong is very small indeed. This is where they trip up.
What they should actually do is estimate the odds that physicists estimate of us all being killed is between P and P+dP (dP some suitably small probability interval) wrong. They then should sum up the probability we all die times those odds.
Rather than do that calculation they have bundled the whole long sum into two numbers, those in the final term. One of these is highly unrepresentative. Physicists could easily be over estimating the probability that the LHC kills us all, so many of those 'expert wrong' cases actually have the effect of lowering the probability we all die.
Many of the 'expert wrong' cases could also just be a couple of orders of magnitude higher. If the the experts are right 999 times out of 1000 the times when they are wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude are not significant in the above calculation (((1/1000)*100)1).
So that is the crux of the matter. The P(LHC kills us all given experts wrong) is waaaay too high. Their estimate basically requires not only physicists be wrong, but for some bizarre unexplained reason there is a cluster of cases where they are wrong and it is highly likely the LHC will kill everyone.
Frankly the "estimate the probability of the LHC wiping us out" question is really just a think of a big number and calculate the reciprocal contest. The estimates are already highly conservative because it is hard to overstate how very unlikely it is that the LHC will kill everyone.
As a further point, the midrange, the value that is halfway between the max and min is 50. So as it turns out 20% of people in this set scored below the midrange as well.
The midrange sucks as a measure of central tendency (as this data set shows).
And so the legend of torso boy continues... He may only be.4 of a boy, but he's 110% heroic, in this weeks episode... Sorry that made me chuckle.
You are probably right, although in the context of test scores I'm not convinced. My stats are right even if my knowledge of what people are thinking when they say stuff sucks.
The median is the middle value when the values are ordered. In this instance it is the value 100 as we have five values and the third (middle) value is (0, 100,) 100. Here I interpret below as less than, hence there is only one element of this set less than 100, zero. Hence only 20% of students are below the median.
The mode is the most common value, in this instance also 100.
Consider the following set. (0, 100, 100, 100, 100). There are three primary measures of average. When most people say average, they mean the mean. In this case the mean is 80. The mode and median are both 100. In each case if these were test scores, only 20% of students scored below average.
The problem with H1B program is that it can be used as a threat against employees.
Many H1B's are well treated by their company who respects them for doing a good job. The problem is that the H1B program can be abused. The fact that it can be abused is enough to act as a threat to other worker because they are effectively competing with indentured servants.
Not that all H1B's are treated like indentured servants, far from it. But the fact is that American's are competing against people whose employer can effectively deport them at a moments notice.
So why would anyone want to be a H1B? One factor is obviously that many employers treat their H1Bs well. Second is the improvement in standard of living offered by coming to the US. Finally there is the fact that we converted from USD to their home currency, their surplus wages are effectively anywhere from two to five times as much. Lets say you manage to scrape together $500 per month in surplus income. If you could send your family the equivilant of $2,500 home every month wouldn't you do it?
This is yet another example of a big problem with globalisation, we are only globalising labour. And we are only globalising that to the lowest standard. Health and safety regulations are meaningless if everyone in that business just closes up shop and moves abroad where there are no health and safety regulations.
Likewise, it is pointless to try to compete with someone whose last $500 per month is in effect $2,500.
The real problem we have to address is, why do cost of living and the cost of doing business vary from country to country.
So, why does the cost of living vary with location. If there was one world market, with one set of rules and regulations for everybody and no market failures, one would expect that the only factor that would affect PPP is geography. Cities would still be more expensive places to live than rural areas. Islands would still be more expensive compared with plains.
I cant cite a source for this, but I strongly suspect the current variation in things like purchasing power parity and cost of living are not explained purely by geography. Other factors I would have thought come into play are things like tax rates, regulation and the degree to which it is enforced, regional culture, length of work day, power of labour unions, cost of government (taxes), efficiency of government and so on.
The task of equalising the standard of living across the globe is one I haven't a clue how to address. A good start would be the abolishing of all tariffs. Bilateral agreements with as many countries that will sign up agreeing to slowly reduce all tariffs to zero over some number of years. That would certainly be a good start. It wont be without cost to the West, but it would be a darn site more effective than the aid we send..
I do know how we can fix the problem of American companies side stepping legislation by hiring foreign workers.
As I said at the start, most H1Bs employers are good employers. Most H1Bs are highly skilled (heck thats why they are in the US). Give them a green card. Increase the limits on immigration to something sensible.
Then require that a company which operates in the US must operate with the laws of the state they are founded in abroad. Don't meet health and safety standard in your factory in India? Here is a big fine. Employ child labour in China, here's another big fine. That way Americans are competing on a more level playing field.
Sure the playing field still isn't level because the purchasing power of the dollar is so much higher in other countries, but at least the deck isn't completely stacked against American workers.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem probably wont be the mortality rate, it will be the morbidity rate.
Sure the number of people who die from the bacon lung wont be that different from seasonal flu, but the number of people who are simultaneously unable to work is a major problem for a pandemic. If half the medical professionals in a country are off sick at the same time it can be catastrophic.
I'm not particularly worried about the virus changing into something with a higher mortality rate. I worry a little in the same way I worry about asteroids smashing into the Earth. Not super likely but it is something to have in mind. I am worried what will happen to the economy if a third of the population has to take a week or two off work.
This is collusion. This kind of meeting itself should be illegal under anti-trust laws. If the law was sensible these people would be arrested and sent to jail for even arranging to meet like this.
Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation I get the decay time for something the mass of the Earth (6 x 10^24 kg) at 5 x 10^50 years. The universe is only billions (10^9) of years old so this is considerably longer than the age of the universe.
A black hole the mass of a carbon atom on the other hand (3 x 10^-26 kg) I get 2 x 10^-93 s. What meaning can be attributed to this result is unclear since this is far shorter than the Planck time.
In short a Earth sized black hole is going to be around for a long time. However even a black hole the size of a flea would evaporate near instantly unless something exists to stabilise it. The reason for this rapid variation in time scales is because the lifetime of a black hole goes as the cube of the mass, which is a very fast varying function.
Well clearly they do have a concept of "the cost of lost opportunity" since they are running the thing over winter. CERN has a deal with a French power provider in which they are provided with power at reduced rates for most of the year, except for 22 days in winter. During this time the rate is very high. These are the days they are planning to run it anyway. Why did they make this deal?
Big experiments often require lots of scheduled maintenance for upgrades, repairs, fixing annoying design bugs that stop something from working properly. These can take time. It makes sense to schedule these during the period of time when the thing costs the most to operate. That is why experiments that draw large amounts of power will shut down sometimes during winter. They made this deal with Ãlectricité de France because it would save money in most scenarios.
In this case, the deal has cost money, which is unfortunate. Making the deal was still the right choice. Most of the time these kind of agreements save cash.
Your suggestion that it have it's own power plant is truly asinine. Why buy cheap commercial power when you can build your own plant for twice the price. These are particle physicists, they know particle physics, not power plant operation.
In answer to your question about citations and areas where latex is ahead, I study particle physics and the day I use word to write a document I give a care about the formatting of is the day they wrench latex from my cold dead hands.
Look it is very simple and wholly consistent with a libertarian perspective.
The government created this monopoly by intervening in the market with copyright. This was done because it was believed (and I feel rightly so, although you may not) that copyright provided a net societal gain. Now it has to deal with the side effects.
This is government intervention to fix more government intervention. I believe that society is a complex beast and that the free market requires maintenance by government. Most sane people do, even if it is only at the level of providing guys with gun to stop people killing each other over contracts. This is all that is happening here.
If you are a libertarian then your complaint aught to be with the market distortion of copyright creating natural monopolies, not with government breaking up those monopolies.
The day I have a business, a house, and three cars to protect instead of a flat and a bicycle is the day flat taxing will sound fair to me. The rich benefit disproportionately from the benefits of taxation and should therefore pay a larger share.
The day that the X cents on the dollar sales tax on the pasta I buy represents the same fraction of my income as it does to an individual on one hundred times my income is the day a flat tax sounds fair to me.
The day that the last dollar I earn a week has the same subjective value to me as the last dollar Bill Gates earns has to him is the day a flat tax sounds fair to me. Taking 1% more from the super wealthy is not the same as taking 1% more from the very poor, even if it looks the same on paper.
Progressive taxation isn't just about redistribution of wealth, it is about a fair tax system that tries to match the value of the tax taken and the benefits an individual receives to the amount they pay.
Just because flat sounds fair using simplistic "everyone pays the same fraction of their income (or wealth)" reasoning doesn't mean it is. If you want to be actually 'fair' then you need to consider the consequences of a policy, not merely if it feels right on paper.
I found it to be just the opposite. The episode where Riker joins a Klingon ship as first officer for instance. I viewed that episodes central theme as a very right of centre 'When in Rome' message. Riker doesn't try to export or maintain Federation culture and ideals for his stay (at one point he brutally beats another officer for merely questioning the wisdom of his presence).
The entire episode seemed to have the message that to succeed in a foreign culture it is necessary to embrace it.
In many ways the The Next Generation Klingons represent a glorification of the best ideals of the right. The are big on both personal responsibility, discipline and a strong absolute morality.
If anything I would say that the Klingon of The Next Generation represent an idealised form of conservatism. This is maintained in stark contrast the the idealised left that the Federation represents, and most interestingly these two distinct political ideologies are able to get along by embracing the best of each other when they have to work together.
This also allows the series to examine the worst aspects of these two extremes. Klingon justice is harsh, and often arbitrary, while the Federation allows it's mortal enemies respite on more than one occasion.
Viewed from this perspective the reason the Klingons have an alien culture and alien ideals is because the shows viewers are overwhelmingly liberal. The right might just as well be aliens to many on the left. So they are given an alien culture and religion (one based as you suggest largely on Eastern culture since that would be the most alien to a Western viewer).
Just my interpretation, I'm sure it isn't what the writers of the show intended but that was the message I took home.
F=ma works fine for special relativity. Heck it works fine for general relativity if you are careful enough. What do you think the Lorentz force law is?
F=ma only breaks down at the quantum level. Even then there is a version of F=ma, it is just a relationship between expectation values.
F=ma works just fine for balloons losing mass too. You just have to remember that the m is not a constant. Heck I've solved problems involving rockets which are precisely the situation you describe.
Ignoring quantum effects F=ma is as far as we know perfectly congruent with experiment, one just has to be very careful how one defines the vectors F and a, since you might be dealing with a curved space or something that is not Euclidean.
Dyson is wrong on some things. He has put his name to statements like "The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years", which are frankly false.
On the other hand one has to keep in mind his background, hard science. Climate models are in many ways deficient. They fail to predict some very basic climate phenomena. They vary wildly in certain other predictions. They contain quantities that are very poorly known or borderline unmeasurable that rather than being predicted from the physics are just read from past data.
The big problem I see Professor Dyson has with current work in climatology is with the extremists most of whom are not scientists. People who don't understand where climate research is at present and make extravagant claims. He is wrong, but he is only a little wrong, if you catch my meaning.
The way I see it, current climate research looks something like this. The best models predict that there is a very high probability (I've heard statistics of the made up on the spot variety on the order of 90%) that over the next fifty years there will be catastrophic climate change if nothing is done. My numbers are out of date and we are probably even more certain now. The problem is at the moment there is a 100% chance that we have catastrophic famines, diseases and the like. Because of his background Dyson is more likely to want to fix the problems we definitely have and which are already catastrophic than those problems we almost certainly have and which will almost certainly be catastrophic.
I think he is wrong. On the other hand Dyson has a point about considerations of other disasters. Consider the truly lack lustre response of the world to the AIDS crisis. If sea levels rose by 20 cm (give it anywhere between 10 to 100 years and they probably will) we would have on the order of three quarters of a million homeless in Nigeria. Sounds very bad (and it is). But at present that country has on the order of two and a half million people with AIDS. I picked Nigeria because it is a country that will be severely affected by climate change.
The point is that on net climate change will be a global disaster (probably much worse than AIDS), causing wars, famines, flooding and potentially a new ice age. However, it is hard to estimate these things, and I can forgive Dyson for wanting to fix the problems we have, rather than the problems we almost certainly will have. His dissent is of the usual kind on gets in the sciences, and the only thing I can fault him with is allowing himself to be used as a pawn by people with an agenda. A crime some on the correct side of the debate commit with aplomb.
I'd also like to take issue with your suggestion that there is a strong sentiment among slashdotters that climate change is bunk. I've posted on the topic before and ignoring the usual cranks and anonymous cowards my postings are well received. I think climate change is real, that something needs to be done about it and that that something will be expensive. I don't think we can rely on future technologies to get us out of the bind we are putting ourselves in. I agree with carbon emission targets.
I just hate it when people on both sides misrepresent the debate or talk in crazy absolutes and resort to insults, especially when they are directed at eminent scientists such as Professor Dyson, who while in my opinion wrong (and bias by a career dealing with the certainties of physics) have a valid contribution to make to the debate. I don't think you are in any way guilty of such an offense, but many on this forum are.
Yes and Stalin said "Death solves everything, no man, no problem".
Ghandhi was right, but only in the context of dealing with the British, at that point in history. If instead of fighting what was by the standards of the day a progressive, modern, secular state India was trying to obtain independence from say the Roman Empire or the Russian Empire then the death toll in Ghandi's day would have made the harsh, unjust, racist and cruel British reaction to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 look like a picnic with cake and ice cream.
You cant apply a non-violent philosophy like Ghandi's when you are dealing with ideologies like Fascism, Soviet style Communism or Islamism. It just doesn't work.
So here is how this is going to work at the moment. Mainstream bigotry in the West atheist can fight in a non-violent way. We can show moderate Christians and Muslims and Hindus in the US and the UK and other parts of the West that their bigotry and hatred when translated into law hurts people who are just like them. Just as Ghandi advocated.
But the extremists are a different matter. The Islamists and Christian fundamentalists are going to be a problem, and they aren't going to go away if we play nicely. We need to bring the full power of the state to bear against these people. Otherwise they will keep flying planes into buildings, they will keep bombing abortion clinics.
If we don't get off our backsides and do something to protect our liberties from these people then Ghandis quote will read something like
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they round you up in camps and gas you and you die"
Sure the Islamic world doesn't stand a chance against the West in a straight up fight, but they can give our own fundamentalists the tool and legitimacy to undermine our freedoms to the point where thirty, forty, fifty years down the road extremists on the right have all the power. Heck look at the United States, the Republican party is right on the border of a mild variant of Fascism and many of it's members wouldn't look out of place in something like the BNP or Front National!
In some areas we are winning, but we have to fight! We cant just hold faith in some mystical unstoppable march of progress because the forces arrayed against us are immense. Islamism is a gift to non-believers, if we can just tie (and rightly so) the theocratic ideas of the Islamists to those of the religious right then we can bring the full power of the state to bear against both of these groups and annihilate them once and for all. If we don't then they will wrest control of the state from ourselves and our moderate religious brethren and use it to destroy us.
Publishing is expensive. Peer review is expensive. If you want to have high quality widely distributed science you need both. However, as a scientist myself I don't think this on it's own is a good argument against open access.
Bottom line is we need a new way to do publish science, and such a system is evolving. There are a number of journals that are online only, or release copies of work for free (for example JHEP). The current system is only really viable for the big name journals (and many of these are frankly sacrificing the quality of the work they accept to move more copies). This new way probably wont look that different from the old way, but will probably be a similar model to the one JHEP uses now.
Of course things are easier sciences like physics or maths than they are in biology which is why things move faster. For a start, in biology (especially biotech) there is a real push to keep things that might be profitable secret as long as possible. In addition scripts in biological sciences are often provided with no mark up conveying the authors intent. It is much easier to adjust for publication a latex file already marked up for you than it is to deal with a word file (which is why many journals in physics basically insist you hand over a tex file). This and other factors adds to the expense, which makes a more closed process more desirable.
Bottom line is the scientific publishing industry is going to have to change. The scientists all want it to change. They want it to be cheaper to access because they want people to read their work (and cite it!). They want it online because paper copies are a pain in the backside and harder to obtain. And they are by and large both supplier and customer. If journals both big and small don't start moving towards a lower cost, more open system then the internet and new technologies will allow someone else to.
As a rule every generation has been superior to the previous. I'm from generation X and if I was asked objectively generation Y are superior to my generation in many ways.
About the only generation to buck this trend are the waste of space baby boomers who have saddled my generation and the next with a bucket of debt. One half of these idiots gave us the likes of Nixon, and the other sat on their asses listening to hippy crap and thinking that pot will solve all the worlds problems.
Now they are approaching retirement age, having broken the bank. Rather than admit that they sold us up the river they are begging the next generations to carry on their ponzi scheme like their woeful mismanagement of the world in some way entitles them to a long and labour free retirement.
If you ask me it isn't generations X and Y who think the world owes them a living, it's the baby boomers.
I have to disagree with you on a number of points. Dawkins is not (by and large) intolerant of other viewpoints, unless those viewpoints are truly absurd. He is very careful to show respect to the carefully constructed philosophical arguments which make things like deism a perfectly valid perspective. His 'disrespect' is directed to people who use these arguments to justify belief in virgin births and resurrections.
People of religious faith are so used to a disproportionate level of respect that they become greatly offended when someone talks about their beliefs in the same way we talk about other patently absurd concepts. Dawkins does not have a deep seated faith in a lack of faith. He goes out of his way to point out that he is a teapot atheist (just like pretty much everyone else). What he then goes on to say is that everyone is a teapot atheist, except that some people (especially in the Abrahamic world) are teapot atheists to every god except one, and this is crazy!
The real problem with religions like Christianity and Islam is that the fundamentalist fanatics are by and large correct in their interpretation and everyone else is rationalising. If you objectively read the Bible for instance it is hard to accept that the God of the Bible is the same God that the Church of England or the Catholic Church believes in. It is much easier to believe it is the God of the extreme evangelicals. This is hardly surprising since the doctrines of the latter emphasise biblical supremacy, while the former do not.
This is where the conflict with evolution comes into play. Reasonable, sensible decent beliefs like those held by many atheists, episcopalians and catholics basically require one to ignore large tracts of the bible. The point being made by people like Dawkins is that these people are engaged in a grand cherry picking exercise. I like that bit of my faith, but not that bit. I want to love my neighbour as myself, but I think genocide is wrong. The golden rule rocks, but stoning children not so much. I think referring to other ethnicities as 'dogs' is offensive, but feeding the poor is good. These people are basically doing the same thing atheists do! The only real difference is they draw a disproportionate portion of their morality from a single source.
The real problem with Dawkins is that he is not an effective mediator. He has successfully galvanised a community of atheists into speaking their mind, but has had little impact convincing anyone else. This is not necessarily a bad thing, atheists are the last minority you can discriminate against with aplomb and for a long time were lost in the wilderness. We needed galvanising. However, what do we do with this new movement? How do we convert our new found voice and confidence into actual changes that protect atheists in the same way that blacks, gays and women have done so in the past?
The Dawkins approach wont achieve much advancement for atheists. The problem is now one of style. Dawkins bluff approach wont change other peoples minds. Religion might not deserve respect, but the system is to big for a comparatively small movement like atheism to attack from the outside. It has to be attacked from the inside, and that means giving the religious respect even if they might not deserve it. It means ignoring for the time being the hypocrisy of religion, ignoring the fact that the crazy people are right when they say they their version of a particular religion is the one true interpretation, ignoring that most religious people are rationalising their beliefs. We must engage with them constructively.
I wanted to pick up on what you said about multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has been a immense disaster. We don't need multiculturalism, we need a tolerant monoculture. You want to worship God X, thats cool. You want to tell others they should worship God X, no problem. You want to force your daughter to marry someone at 16, not cool. And if your religion tells you to do it, then your religion sucks too. If your culture says that women should
While amusing the situations you describe are rather less clear cut than your (albeit funny) post suggests. I'll take one example, Agincourt.
Agincourt was a crowd control nightmare for the French made worse by the disproportionate number of heavily armoured french troops. The reason the English didn't have so many heavy troops was in part that archers were cheaper. Some accounts suggest the French had trouble moving (or even lifting their weapons) in the poor, near boggy conditions. A longbowman on the other hand, is lightly armoured, and does not need to close on you to use his weapon.
The French knights viewed war as their vocation. The English archers on the other hand viewed war as their profession. The English were a more professional force, a more disciplined force. It turned out that 'breeding' was no replacement for hours of practice each day.
Leadership played a important role as well. While the Henry V of Shakespeare never existed, the real Henry V had the loyalty and trust of his men. He had led them through France, and they had done rather well financially out of it. Less valiant but still effective was his instruction to his men (now effectively trapped) that they would not be ransomed themselves if captured, and that they had best fight for their lives. It is rarely wise to fight an army that is prepared to fight to the death. Henry was also highly pragmatic, executing valuable prisoners when he feared they might rearm themselves. Amusingly while the French chroniclers didn't seem to have much of a problem with this, it was probably rather unpopular with Henry's own army.
The list of factors that affect the outcome of a battle are numerous. And English grand strategy (of that time or any other) probably isn't best summarised by "shoot the enemy a lot", any more than the strategy of the Byzantine Empire is best summarised by "assassinate, assassinate, assassinate". Of course there is a nugget of truth to any funny summary of grand strategy. We can probably trace modern doctrines such as overwhelming fire-power and air superiority right back through to notions similar to the English focus on archers during the time of Henry V or the notions of naval superiority that arose in the post Elizabethan England (and later Britian).
As with most conflicts, one is looking at a long list of factors, and strategy and tactics vary depending on circumstances.
The entries on that page relate to responses to creationists. The mistake there is mirroring their incorrect language in an effort to both answer and appear to answer the question.
The problem there was that scientists think like the anti-politician. Say I phrased a question in which I talked about excess cash when it was clear from the context that I meant marginal revenue. If you were a scientists arguing with me you might consciously use the same term, especially if it was near synonymous with the actual term one should use.
The problem is creationists are dictating the debate. The frame all the questions and because they are willing to lie, cheat and generally be dishonest they control the discussion.
Creationists are at war with rational thought. If we are going to beat them with have to stop caring what they think and how they feel and start caring about how to utterly crush them. We should frame the debate our way. We have been arguing with these people with an ever increasing set of facts on our side for generations now. We aren't going to convince them, our objective should be to minimise their influence.
Scientists are fighting this war like they are negotiating with rational and sensible people. Not monsters who consciously choose lies and deception. Creationists are part of a traitorous movement who are using creationism as 'the thin end of the wedge' their term. They are trying to force religion into every aspect of public life. They are traitors and their ring leaders deserve the same treatment we give domestic spies who collude with enemy governments.
No rational individual should ever allow a creationist to serve in a position of power if they can prevent it. The debate should be framed in terms of should we be allowing creationists to abuse their children by brainwashing them in the same nasty ideology they were abused into believing by their parents. The debate shouldn't be on the facts any more, it should be on what fraction of the detractors of evolution belong in mental hospitals and what fraction belong in the judicial system.
Thats right, welcome to the 21st century where multinationals go out of their way to regionalise and decomoditise what they sell, while globalising and comoditising what you sell.
You'll be competing with Indian and Chineese workers as far as labour goes (with generic requirements), but don't worry you will still be paying western prices for goods and services, all of which will lock you in to a specific vendor.
Mercantilism, it's back baby, except this time instead of governments, it's corporations!
Your entire post made me chuckle.
"Whether writing is distributed online or in paper form, the author still has to afford to eat and should be able to receive remuneration for their efforts."
In a market economy you receive what you can get others to pay you for your labour. If you want we could increase government spending on art, but I will bet you a chicken dinner the proportion of government money spent on science fiction will be tiny compared with the popularity of science fiction. If writers are having a hard time getting paid then they need to find a way to make their work more desirable as a commodity.
"It may also be due to video games, and that does not bode well for the video game generation who spending their time moving a figure around the screen, and who lack the intellectual and brain development that comes from reading."
I'm not sure how engaging in the complex problem solving routines of many games compares to turning oneself into a glorified version of 'cin', but I will take my chances with the video games. Most people only read crappy pulp fiction which teaches them precisely bugger all and most people play video games that involve walking around shooting alien monsters. Neither are very valuable activities.
Novels that do offer intellectual advancement have their analogues in video games. The in depth experience of other cultures provided by many novels can be found in many video games. There is an excellent game called Spice Trade that teaches one about the high point of the Islamic Empire. Civilisation offer one a glimpse at other cultures and requires careful strategic thinking to win (especially against human opponents). Heck interactive fiction has all of the advantages of books and few of the disadvantages and has advanced well beyond anything done with 'create your own adventure' style books.
Books are a slow, inefficient and uninteresting medium. The only reason there aren't masterpieces on a par with the great literary works is because the human hours needed to prepare a great video game is far greater than the human time needed to create a great book and the length of time we have been creating video games is less than the length of time we have been writing.
You then go on to make the laughable suggestion that newspapers and the MSM do an excellent job informing the public with their fantastic journalism. I don't know where to start with this suggestion. Sure domestic Western blogs suck at reporting about war zones. So do the MSM.
I watched the news and read newspapers during the last conflict in Gaza. I learned absolutely nothing other than bullet points. There was no attempt to put the conflict in context. There was no attempt to talk about the issues involved. All we got was a day to day of what got bombed when and where. And even that contained none of the subtle nuances of context. Just interviews with highly opinionated propaganda mouth pieces and short 20 second interviews with experts who have to dumb down their years of education to a clever sound bite. If we are relying on the MSM to provide us with an informed population. Heck you can learn more from ConfMEPS or Peacemaker in 20 minutes than you could spending a whole day reading the MSM.
Your suggestion of online subscriptions makes sense. Embrace technology to increase profitability. Your other idea for newspapers is basically to form a cartel. If newspapers want to be relevant they need to deal with the fact that the internet generation wants everything yesterday. This generation wont put up with their crap pretending that their self important prose is a substitute for actual facts. A big chunk of this generation also couldn't care less about human interest stories, and can now go elsewhere for it's news if that is all that is available.
If newspapers want to survive they need to cater to this new generations needs. Their news stories need to be in depth, of a high quality and most importantly short and succinct. I could condense the first 20 pages of almost any ne
The problem with their reasoning is that it is based on the equation
P(Bad thing)=P(Experts right)P(Bad Thing given experts right)+P(Experts wrong)P(Bad Thing given experts wrong)
They then give crazy estimates for the last two quantities and point out that if you use their crazy estimates then the second term dwarfs the first.
The problem with their reasoning is that they take the odds of a paper being retracted as P(Experts wrong) (one in one thousand). They then pull from nowhere the value P(Bad Thing given experts wrong) as one in ten thousand.
The problem is that a paper might be withdraw because it is two orders of magnitude out. It might be that the quantity estimated is five orders of magnitude smaller. Even if the physicists are wrong, the odds that they are 6 orders of magnitude wrong is very small indeed. This is where they trip up.
What they should actually do is estimate the odds that physicists estimate of us all being killed is between P and P+dP (dP some suitably small probability interval) wrong. They then should sum up the probability we all die times those odds.
Rather than do that calculation they have bundled the whole long sum into two numbers, those in the final term. One of these is highly unrepresentative. Physicists could easily be over estimating the probability that the LHC kills us all, so many of those 'expert wrong' cases actually have the effect of lowering the probability we all die.
Many of the 'expert wrong' cases could also just be a couple of orders of magnitude higher. If the the experts are right 999 times out of 1000 the times when they are wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude are not significant in the above calculation (((1/1000)*100)1).
So that is the crux of the matter. The P(LHC kills us all given experts wrong) is waaaay too high. Their estimate basically requires not only physicists be wrong, but for some bizarre unexplained reason there is a cluster of cases where they are wrong and it is highly likely the LHC will kill everyone.
Frankly the "estimate the probability of the LHC wiping us out" question is really just a think of a big number and calculate the reciprocal contest. The estimates are already highly conservative because it is hard to overstate how very unlikely it is that the LHC will kill everyone.
As a further point, the midrange, the value that is halfway between the max and min is 50. So as it turns out 20% of people in this set scored below the midrange as well.
The midrange sucks as a measure of central tendency (as this data set shows).
And so the legend of torso boy continues... He may only be .4 of a boy, but he's 110% heroic, in this weeks episode... Sorry that made me chuckle.
You are probably right, although in the context of test scores I'm not convinced. My stats are right even if my knowledge of what people are thinking when they say stuff sucks.
I'm afraid not...
The median is the middle value when the values are ordered. In this instance it is the value 100 as we have five values and the third (middle) value is (0, 100,) 100. Here I interpret below as less than, hence there is only one element of this set less than 100, zero. Hence only 20% of students are below the median.
The mode is the most common value, in this instance also 100.
Not sure exactly what your last comment is about.
Consider the following set. (0, 100, 100, 100, 100). There are three primary measures of average. When most people say average, they mean the mean. In this case the mean is 80. The mode and median are both 100. In each case if these were test scores, only 20% of students scored below average.
The problem with H1B program is that it can be used as a threat against employees.
Many H1B's are well treated by their company who respects them for doing a good job. The problem is that the H1B program can be abused. The fact that it can be abused is enough to act as a threat to other worker because they are effectively competing with indentured servants.
Not that all H1B's are treated like indentured servants, far from it. But the fact is that American's are competing against people whose employer can effectively deport them at a moments notice.
So why would anyone want to be a H1B? One factor is obviously that many employers treat their H1Bs well. Second is the improvement in standard of living offered by coming to the US. Finally there is the fact that we converted from USD to their home currency, their surplus wages are effectively anywhere from two to five times as much. Lets say you manage to scrape together $500 per month in surplus income. If you could send your family the equivilant of $2,500 home every month wouldn't you do it?
This is yet another example of a big problem with globalisation, we are only globalising labour. And we are only globalising that to the lowest standard. Health and safety regulations are meaningless if everyone in that business just closes up shop and moves abroad where there are no health and safety regulations.
Likewise, it is pointless to try to compete with someone whose last $500 per month is in effect $2,500.
The real problem we have to address is, why do cost of living and the cost of doing business vary from country to country.
So, why does the cost of living vary with location. If there was one world market, with one set of rules and regulations for everybody and no market failures, one would expect that the only factor that would affect PPP is geography. Cities would still be more expensive places to live than rural areas. Islands would still be more expensive compared with plains.
I cant cite a source for this, but I strongly suspect the current variation in things like purchasing power parity and cost of living are not explained purely by geography. Other factors I would have thought come into play are things like tax rates, regulation and the degree to which it is enforced, regional culture, length of work day, power of labour unions, cost of government (taxes), efficiency of government and so on.
The task of equalising the standard of living across the globe is one I haven't a clue how to address. A good start would be the abolishing of all tariffs. Bilateral agreements with as many countries that will sign up agreeing to slowly reduce all tariffs to zero over some number of years. That would certainly be a good start. It wont be without cost to the West, but it would be a darn site more effective than the aid we send..
I do know how we can fix the problem of American companies side stepping legislation by hiring foreign workers.
As I said at the start, most H1Bs employers are good employers. Most H1Bs are highly skilled (heck thats why they are in the US). Give them a green card. Increase the limits on immigration to something sensible.
Then require that a company which operates in the US must operate with the laws of the state they are founded in abroad. Don't meet health and safety standard in your factory in India? Here is a big fine. Employ child labour in China, here's another big fine. That way Americans are competing on a more level playing field.
Sure the playing field still isn't level because the purchasing power of the dollar is so much higher in other countries, but at least the deck isn't completely stacked against American workers.
Comparing vital research that save lives to the Holocaust. You disgust me.