You're concentrating on the benefits of lecturing but not fairly balancing the costs. If you're doing a good job for your students, then you're spending a huge number of hours designing and reciting lectures. One of the things that is highly beneficial for research is for researchers to expand their knowledge into quite different fields, e.g. a physicist studying sociology for a change. Such expansion of knowledge would likely be of greater benefit than reviewing and explaining what you already know to some students who can get it explained from somewhere else. There are also lots of journal articles and other writings in your own field that would be useful to read and would expand your mind, but nobody has time to read all the good ones. Researchers in every field could benefit greatly from increased mastery of the tools of their field such as a physicist studying more computer science, math, or electrical engineering. Questions from students and discussion with professors can be stimulating and educational, but I didn't suggest that communication stop, I just suggest that lectures are an inefficient way to facilitate such communication. Sure lecturing and teaching has considerable benefits, but those benefits are small compared to the alternatives.
I think the professor's knowledge would be strengthened more by studying deeper or more broadly or by research, rather than designing or delivering lectures. And professors could be made available to answer questions at any given time that students are watching the videos as well. Many questions should not distract and waste the time of many other students anyway. If the question is a good question, it should be included in the FAQ or incorporated into the video lecture. Why do you need a live lecturer to get through your education?
Some say that meeting people is a main benefit of college. That is surely a major benefit. But isn't there plenty of less expensive ways that don't waste the lives of talented professors and the money of poor students and parents? Clubs, internet forums, professional societies, etc.
I suspect one of the main purposes of regularly scheduled classes is just to get people to do the learning that they might otherwise never get around to. An externally imposed discipline. I haven't thought of any obvious alternative solution to that, but maybe with some kind of formal structure and time limits, it wouldn't be too big a problem.
So why do we have all these highly intelligent expensive professors wasting their time standing in front of hundreds of students in a lecture hall reciting their teaching script like a human video projector? Let the best lecturers in the country make videos and let the students send in questions and assemble a frequently asked questions list and then put those professors to work doing research for the benefit of humanity.
I'm not suggesting the Russians would be stupid enough to assassinate when the US wouldn't, it's just that an un-redacted release of these secret US documents probably wouldn't reveal many, if any Russian confidential informants.
Russia killing wikileakers for releasing these sorts of things may be an effective deterrent to future wikileakers releasing Russian secrets because there is less need to stick your neck out to expose Russia since their tyranny is fairly open. On the other hand, leaking the bad deeds of the US could contribute significantly to convincing or enlightening those who support the US or its leaders.
The US better not kill Assange because then future leaks probably wouldn't be redacted and past leaks would probably be re-released unredacted. The names of confidential informants would be released directly into the open. Future leaks would still happen because this stuff wasn't leaked by Wikileaks, it was leaked by the army guy that stole them. He could have just emailed the documents to a thousand random email addresses and every newspaper in the world, including our enemies. He could have posted a torrent link on Slashdot and had it downloaded 10,000 times before the gov noticed it, by people here that have the expertise to distribute it reliably. Wikileaks is just publicizing and making convenient what would be out there anyway. The guy who actually leaked these things couldn't possibly have redacted them himself, and he couldn't have asked for help from the govt. So governments should encourage leaks to go through Wikileaks.
I don't know if Russia will kill him. He might be making himself hard to find.
I can't say that Muslims in general want to use force to take over the world. Some Muslims surely do, particularly terrorists, but most Muslims might only advocate for a voluntary conversion of the world.
The British knew the Irish were not going to take over all of Great Britain, whereas the Muslims have expressed their intent to make the whole world an Islamic republic. They will do it by force if they can.
Even just putting the terrorist to work at a low wage job and taking the excess income would probably make a terrorist life worth at least tens of thousands over a lifetime. The pantie bomber was the son of a wealthy person. The pantie bomber could have contributed many thousands more by working his dad for money than the small amount of money spent on his attack.
Besides, it's not quite correct to equate lives to any dollar amount. To paraphrase General Patton: You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.
A lot of tyrannical governments seem to think the effort to limit speech is worth the trouble. They apparently disagree with you and think that it does do something.
No, the terrorists really do want to enslave us. They support laws prohibiting criticism of their religion, for example. That's anti-freedom and anti-truth.
You wouldn't be allowed to publicly make comments like that if your government was enslaving you.
publiclurker wrote:
Except we are the ones doing the enslaving, assuming that their governments don't just roll over so that your corporate bosses can take advantage of them.
It cost the terrorists way more than $4200 to pull this off. Many of them died trying to pull off attacks like this. Same with the 9/11 attacks. Many of them paid for the attacks with their lives, either killed or captured.
On the other hand, at least some of the trillions we've spent are an inevitable part of defending ourselves in a world where there are always people trying to enslave you.
LMI claims to have introduced the Bod Pod body fat measurement pod in 1994. You sit inside the egg shaped bod pod while a loudspeaker increases and decreases the volume of the pod. The change in pressure inside the pod as the volume of the pod is changed, determines the airspace remaining inside the pod after your body fills the pod up part way. The less airspace left inside the pod, the faster the pressure will rise as the loudspeaker pushes into the pod. The airspace remaining in the pod minus the volume of the pod gives the volume of your body. A scale determines your weight. Your weight and volume determine your density, and that is used to estimate your body fat. Fudge factors have to be used to account for the varying characteristics of the air in your lungs and the layer of warm air near your skin and especially trapped between your clothes or bathing suit or hair. This system is less trouble than the traditional method of determining body density by weighing a person while under water. See bodpod.com
Last time I checked, even if you didn't install ntpd, Ubuntu would use ntpdate to set your clock at every boot from the ubuntu ntp server. Setting your clock to a GPS receiver using the serial NMEA data gives pathetic accuracy. For good accuracy your GPS should have a pulse per second output. The problem is that even if your $40 GPS has a pulse per second pin on the circuit board, it won't have any way to get it into your system. You can get much better accuracy from the ntp pool servers than from the NMEA output of a GPS. Using stratum 2 pool servers carefully selected for stability appears to give me accuracy within 2 milliseconds. The large majority of the pool servers drift up and down several milliseconds over time. Even if you take whatever mediocre pool servers you're offered, you'll probably stay within 10 milliseconds.
I'm surprised they needed this given that Ubuntu already contacts the Ubuntu Network Time Protocol server and the security updates server regularly. Though I suppose both might have been redirected to local servers in some cases.
In many fields of science you can just go check the results in your own lab. But in climate science, that is often impractical. And even when it is practical, there may be nobody interested in going to do it. Oil companies and climate skeptics probably won't bother to go out and get tree rings because they're not worried about global warming. If climate scientists want people to listen, then they have to have credibility. We don't have to prove them wrong. They have to prove their case. The default if they don't prove their case is that we will just continue using the cheapest energy available as we have been doing. I suspect that as more and more people find out about Mike's Nature trick, and climate science's defense of it, there will be less and less support for spending a lot of money on global warming. Mike's Nature trick will continue to destroy climate science until climate science disclaims it.
To spite my pointed and repeated challenge for you to disclaim or defend Mike's Nature trick, you still will not. Your refusal only hurts the credibility of your side. It makes it look like you know there is no defense.
I can't come up with evidence to prove anything about the medieval warm period. It might well have been cooler than today. But this isn't just nitpicking. If the climate science community can't recognize bad science in this instance, then their judgment can't be trusted. Can you fairly evaluate good science? It doesn't look good if you dodge the question. Do you think it's good science to cover up data that would cast serious doubt on the conclusion? Would it be OK for an oil company to hide a divergence like Mann did?
How can you think it is fair to leave the divergence out of the graph when it casts great doubt on the reliability of the proxy? If an oil company put out a study and covered up the unreliability of their proxy, would you consider that acceptable?
The credibility of the hundreds of other climatologists is hurt because they won't condemn the bad scientific methods. If they won't disclaim the known bad science, then what are they hiding that we don't know about yet?
If the oil industry tried to use a "statistical technique" like the the trick used to "hide the decline", climate scientists would scream bloody murder. You can't cover up the data that destroys the credibility of your method and call that honest science. I don't need any evidence of this since they've admitted what they did. It's not a matter of evidence, its a matter of judgment about whether that was legitimate science or not. There appear to have been several "investigations" that barely, if at all, address "Mike's Nature trick".
If the medieval warm period was as warm as today then that would suggest that the current warming is either largely natural, or even if it is caused by humans, it won't hurt anything more than what was hurt back then (i.e. not extinct polar bears or mass extinctions or tipping points to catastrophe)
I don't have to have a lot of expertise on climate to know that hiding the decline is not acceptable science. If those thousands of scientists defend that practice, then I see no reason to trust their recommendation to spend trillions to reduce co2 output. I understand science and have tremendous respect for it, but it looks like climate scientists may be environmentalists that have left behind science and shifted to advocacy.
That's a tricky survey question. Even many skeptics would say humans are making a significant (i.e. non-negligible) contribution to global warming. But that still leaves the big questions: Are humans the primary cause? Has it warmed up as much as they say it has or just some insignificant amount? Has it been warmer in the past anyway? and Will the environment be better off when it's warmer?
Slashdot Mirror
IPv6 will give almost everybody practically static addresses, the ultimate undeleteable cookie. So the EU regulation will be futile very soon.
You're concentrating on the benefits of lecturing but not fairly balancing the costs. If you're doing a good job for your students, then you're spending a huge number of hours designing and reciting lectures. One of the things that is highly beneficial for research is for researchers to expand their knowledge into quite different fields, e.g. a physicist studying sociology for a change. Such expansion of knowledge would likely be of greater benefit than reviewing and explaining what you already know to some students who can get it explained from somewhere else. There are also lots of journal articles and other writings in your own field that would be useful to read and would expand your mind, but nobody has time to read all the good ones. Researchers in every field could benefit greatly from increased mastery of the tools of their field such as a physicist studying more computer science, math, or electrical engineering. Questions from students and discussion with professors can be stimulating and educational, but I didn't suggest that communication stop, I just suggest that lectures are an inefficient way to facilitate such communication. Sure lecturing and teaching has considerable benefits, but those benefits are small compared to the alternatives.
I think the professor's knowledge would be strengthened more by studying deeper or more broadly or by research, rather than designing or delivering lectures. And professors could be made available to answer questions at any given time that students are watching the videos as well. Many questions should not distract and waste the time of many other students anyway. If the question is a good question, it should be included in the FAQ or incorporated into the video lecture. Why do you need a live lecturer to get through your education?
Some say that meeting people is a main benefit of college. That is surely a major benefit. But isn't there plenty of less expensive ways that don't waste the lives of talented professors and the money of poor students and parents? Clubs, internet forums, professional societies, etc.
I suspect one of the main purposes of regularly scheduled classes is just to get people to do the learning that they might otherwise never get around to. An externally imposed discipline. I haven't thought of any obvious alternative solution to that, but maybe with some kind of formal structure and time limits, it wouldn't be too big a problem.
So why do we have all these highly intelligent expensive professors wasting their time standing in front of hundreds of students in a lecture hall reciting their teaching script like a human video projector? Let the best lecturers in the country make videos and let the students send in questions and assemble a frequently asked questions list and then put those professors to work doing research for the benefit of humanity.
Sun just couldn't compete with Linux and Intel. Open sourcing wasn't the problem. It probably helped, just not enough.
I'm not suggesting the Russians would be stupid enough to assassinate when the US wouldn't, it's just that an un-redacted release of these secret US documents probably wouldn't reveal many, if any Russian confidential informants.
Russia killing wikileakers for releasing these sorts of things may be an effective deterrent to future wikileakers releasing Russian secrets because there is less need to stick your neck out to expose Russia since their tyranny is fairly open. On the other hand, leaking the bad deeds of the US could contribute significantly to convincing or enlightening those who support the US or its leaders.
The US better not kill Assange because then future leaks probably wouldn't be redacted and past leaks would probably be re-released unredacted. The names of confidential informants would be released directly into the open. Future leaks would still happen because this stuff wasn't leaked by Wikileaks, it was leaked by the army guy that stole them. He could have just emailed the documents to a thousand random email addresses and every newspaper in the world, including our enemies. He could have posted a torrent link on Slashdot and had it downloaded 10,000 times before the gov noticed it, by people here that have the expertise to distribute it reliably. Wikileaks is just publicizing and making convenient what would be out there anyway. The guy who actually leaked these things couldn't possibly have redacted them himself, and he couldn't have asked for help from the govt. So governments should encourage leaks to go through Wikileaks.
I don't know if Russia will kill him. He might be making himself hard to find.
I can't say that Muslims in general want to use force to take over the world. Some Muslims surely do, particularly terrorists, but most Muslims might only advocate for a voluntary conversion of the world.
The British knew the Irish were not going to take over all of Great Britain, whereas the Muslims have expressed their intent to make the whole world an Islamic republic. They will do it by force if they can.
Even just putting the terrorist to work at a low wage job and taking the excess income would probably make a terrorist life worth at least tens of thousands over a lifetime. The pantie bomber was the son of a wealthy person. The pantie bomber could have contributed many thousands more by working his dad for money than the small amount of money spent on his attack.
Besides, it's not quite correct to equate lives to any dollar amount. To paraphrase General Patton: You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.
A lot of tyrannical governments seem to think the effort to limit speech is worth the trouble. They apparently disagree with you and think that it does do something.
That was probably Saudi Arabia surrendering rather than the US. That and/or the US was probably planning to pull out of there anyway.
No, the terrorists really do want to enslave us. They support laws prohibiting criticism of their religion, for example. That's anti-freedom and anti-truth.
You wouldn't be allowed to publicly make comments like that if your government was enslaving you.
publiclurker wrote:
It cost the terrorists way more than $4200 to pull this off. Many of them died trying to pull off attacks like this. Same with the 9/11 attacks. Many of them paid for the attacks with their lives, either killed or captured.
On the other hand, at least some of the trillions we've spent are an inevitable part of defending ourselves in a world where there are always people trying to enslave you.
LMI claims to have introduced the Bod Pod body fat measurement pod in 1994. You sit inside the egg shaped bod pod while a loudspeaker increases and decreases the volume of the pod. The change in pressure inside the pod as the volume of the pod is changed, determines the airspace remaining inside the pod after your body fills the pod up part way. The less airspace left inside the pod, the faster the pressure will rise as the loudspeaker pushes into the pod. The airspace remaining in the pod minus the volume of the pod gives the volume of your body. A scale determines your weight. Your weight and volume determine your density, and that is used to estimate your body fat. Fudge factors have to be used to account for the varying characteristics of the air in your lungs and the layer of warm air near your skin and especially trapped between your clothes or bathing suit or hair. This system is less trouble than the traditional method of determining body density by weighing a person while under water. See bodpod.com
Last time I checked, even if you didn't install ntpd, Ubuntu would use ntpdate to set your clock at every boot from the ubuntu ntp server. Setting your clock to a GPS receiver using the serial NMEA data gives pathetic accuracy. For good accuracy your GPS should have a pulse per second output. The problem is that even if your $40 GPS has a pulse per second pin on the circuit board, it won't have any way to get it into your system. You can get much better accuracy from the ntp pool servers than from the NMEA output of a GPS. Using stratum 2 pool servers carefully selected for stability appears to give me accuracy within 2 milliseconds. The large majority of the pool servers drift up and down several milliseconds over time. Even if you take whatever mediocre pool servers you're offered, you'll probably stay within 10 milliseconds.
I'm surprised they needed this given that Ubuntu already contacts the Ubuntu Network Time Protocol server and the security updates server regularly. Though I suppose both might have been redirected to local servers in some cases.
In many fields of science you can just go check the results in your own lab. But in climate science, that is often impractical. And even when it is practical, there may be nobody interested in going to do it. Oil companies and climate skeptics probably won't bother to go out and get tree rings because they're not worried about global warming. If climate scientists want people to listen, then they have to have credibility. We don't have to prove them wrong. They have to prove their case. The default if they don't prove their case is that we will just continue using the cheapest energy available as we have been doing. I suspect that as more and more people find out about Mike's Nature trick, and climate science's defense of it, there will be less and less support for spending a lot of money on global warming. Mike's Nature trick will continue to destroy climate science until climate science disclaims it.
To spite my pointed and repeated challenge for you to disclaim or defend Mike's Nature trick, you still will not. Your refusal only hurts the credibility of your side. It makes it look like you know there is no defense.
I can't come up with evidence to prove anything about the medieval warm period. It might well have been cooler than today. But this isn't just nitpicking. If the climate science community can't recognize bad science in this instance, then their judgment can't be trusted. Can you fairly evaluate good science? It doesn't look good if you dodge the question. Do you think it's good science to cover up data that would cast serious doubt on the conclusion? Would it be OK for an oil company to hide a divergence like Mann did?
How can you think it is fair to leave the divergence out of the graph when it casts great doubt on the reliability of the proxy? If an oil company put out a study and covered up the unreliability of their proxy, would you consider that acceptable?
The credibility of the hundreds of other climatologists is hurt because they won't condemn the bad scientific methods. If they won't disclaim the known bad science, then what are they hiding that we don't know about yet?
If the oil industry tried to use a "statistical technique" like the the trick used to "hide the decline", climate scientists would scream bloody murder. You can't cover up the data that destroys the credibility of your method and call that honest science. I don't need any evidence of this since they've admitted what they did. It's not a matter of evidence, its a matter of judgment about whether that was legitimate science or not. There appear to have been several "investigations" that barely, if at all, address "Mike's Nature trick".
If the medieval warm period was as warm as today then that would suggest that the current warming is either largely natural, or even if it is caused by humans, it won't hurt anything more than what was hurt back then (i.e. not extinct polar bears or mass extinctions or tipping points to catastrophe)
I don't have to have a lot of expertise on climate to know that hiding the decline is not acceptable science. If those thousands of scientists defend that practice, then I see no reason to trust their recommendation to spend trillions to reduce co2 output. I understand science and have tremendous respect for it, but it looks like climate scientists may be environmentalists that have left behind science and shifted to advocacy.
That's a tricky survey question. Even many skeptics would say humans are making a significant (i.e. non-negligible) contribution to global warming. But that still leaves the big questions: Are humans the primary cause? Has it warmed up as much as they say it has or just some insignificant amount? Has it been warmer in the past anyway? and Will the environment be better off when it's warmer?