Christ, that's simplistic to the point of idiocy. Look, a contract between a builder and a property owner is a "government granted monopoly" in your terms. Once the contract is signed, the property owner can't change his mind and buy his house from any other builder. Heavens, the builder has a monopoly! Eek! Where's the property owner's choice?
Well, duh, he had the choice before he signed the contract. He could interview various builders and decide to whom he wanted to commit.
Now let's look at those eeeeeevil medicine patents. Where is society's choice? Why, in the same place. Society has the choice about whether to buy, say, Johnson and Johnson's baby powder, providing wealth to J and J that they'll use in their research division to try to create new drugs. And once the drug is created, society has the choice of whether or not to buy it. After all, they got along for umpty thousand years before the drug existed -- clearly they can continue getting along without it, if they choose.
But people do not choose to do so. Instead, if it's a great drug, they buy it, and, yup, the drug maker reaps bazillions. And government makes sure that for a period of time (typically 5-7 years from when the drug hits the market), only one company can sell it, and so, yup, they can sell it for as much money as people will pay free of competitive pressures. The belief -- and history bears this out -- is that allowing people to reap for a time the full reward of their creativity encourages people to exert their creativity.
I'd also just like to point out the massive logical inconsistency between thinking the "government created monopoly" that is a system of patents is Bad, but an even more coercive government created monopoly that is government funding and direction of drug research is Good.
Of course I read it. I just don't agree with your summary of what it means.
And which is more "artificial," pray, a market in which patents exist or one in which the decisions about which drugs to manufacture and what their price will be is set by government? You've got the post-modernist crypto-socialist talk of "incentives", but you overlook the fact that every historical example in which government sets the policies for an industry always shows a drastic and often fatal destruction of the incentives people have for doing good work. You don't need logic to see this, just a good history book. Check out the history of Soviet science, or British health-care in the 1970s, or Canadian health-care today, et cetera and so forth ad nauseum. There's a damn good reason the best drug research is done in the country that has strong intellectual property protection and a relatively free market in health-care: the United States. It's not just a coincidence. It's not because of our wonderful education system (other countries have better educational systems, if it comes to that). You arrogant social engineers overlook that connection at your (and our) peril.
Of course you think it's "obvious" how to do the right thing. Everyone does. Everyone has great ideas on how to solve the world's problems if he were king. You do, I do, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot and Idi Amin did, and so does every crazy down in the asylum. There's no shortage of "obvious" ideas and persuasive logic about what the right thing is. What's a lot rarer is a willingness to allow historical fact to challenge what seems "obvious" to you. And, as I said, it would be monumental folly to overlook the fact that strong patent protection and a free market have always been associated with a vigorous culture of technological innovation. Is that just coincidence? Maybe, but considering what you're tinkering with, you'd better be damn sure it is before you go messing with it.
I hope you never see rough times with medical insurance, health, etc. such that you cannot afford the treatment you or a loved one may require.
If the average person can't afford the medical treatment he needs, there is no social system whatsoever that will change that. How could it? Social systems only redistribute wealth, they can't create it. If there isn't ennough money in the system to buy everyone the health care he wants, then no amount of tinkering or redistribution or magic "prize funds" will create it. In which case, the humane and reasonable purpose of a social system should be to distribute the limited amount of health care the average person can afford in the way that maximizes the overall good. And they obvious way to do that is to give it to those who want it most -- who are willing to spend the most for it. Which is what we have.
On the other hand, if the average person can afford all the health care he wants, then what's the point of playing accounting tricks with how he pays for it? You pay the government $x in taxes so that the government can then turn around and spend $x for your health care? And this makes sense.....why? Why not pay for your health care yourself, directly? At least then it will be you and not some government bureaucrat or insurance company employee who decides where that money gets spent.
I think all this talk of "prize funds" and related garbage is just the old socialist disease come back again in new clothes. It's the same old Stalinist story, let's control everything for the good of all, and stuff will work out wonderful, you'll see -- it's all in Karl's book, you know. Very persuasive logic, he has. I guess this dressing up of worn-out socialist canards in the new language of "prize funds" is an attempt to fool people who've been burned by socialist follies over and over again in the 20th century that this isn't really socialism. And, as usual, professors and students -- those dreamers most lacking in practical real-life experience -- are in the vanguard. Bah.
Here's his thesis, boiled down to a logic nutshell:
(1) Drug patents are Bad, because they allow discoverers of useful drugs (e.g. drugs against AIDS) to charge what they want, and what they want to charge exceeds the cost many sufferers (e.g. poor people living on $2/day) can pay.
(2) However, it is clearly impossible for poor people, living on $2/day, to pay enough for their drugs to convince smart young people to go into biomedical research and discover the drugs needed -- instead of, say, becoming corporate lawyers and economics professors.
(3) So...um...how about if we set up some kind of "prize fund" which will pay those smart young people to develop the drugs, which we'll then more or less give away to the billions who need them but can't afford to pay what it costs to develop them.
Ooookay. Now, where does the money to set up the prize fund come from? It can't come from the free choice of individuals, because he's just got done saying that leaving it up to the free choice of the market ends up being Evil (see point (1), above). That leaves money taken from people by force, e.g. taxes.
Note that he presents zero evidence that the amount of money you'd need to take from people in taxes to set up this magic "prize fund" is any smaller than the amount of money big pharma already takes from its customers. And why would it be? If it takes x billion per drug to recruit the necessary team of brilliant biochemists, able scientific managers, clever IT support gurus, venture capitalists, et cetera, when the money comes from drug sales, why would it be any less than x billion when the money comes from a big ol' government grant? People are just willing to work for much less when they're paid by tax money than when they're paid by income from sales? Ha ha.
So...in Professor's Stiglitz's new world, there's no obvious difference in how much money drug companies absorb. It just comes from different places. Rather than come from those who use the drugs, it comes from everybody, through their taxes. Hence all you Slashdot suckers^H^H^H^H^H^Hyoungsters will be paying higher taxes to subsidize the Viagra and Lipitor that oldsters like the good Professor and me are using. Well carry on, my good fellows. Long live the revolution! (Ever wonder why socialized medicine is highly popular among the sick and aged? No? Excellent!)
Synthesis, creativity, analytical problem solving, etc. are very difficult to evaluate and measure anyway.
Says who? I have no problem evaluating those qualities in my employees. I doubt you think you have any difficulty evaluating those qualities in your friends, or amongst potential employers. Do you ever sit there pondering over your buddies, wondering whether one of them hides unknown depths of synthesis, creativity, et cetera, and realizing that you have no solid opinion on the subject because, really, who can ever tell? Sheesh. How are you going to pick out a girl to marry, boss to work for, colleague to trust if you can't make judgments like this?
This is the kind of mystical crap the educational system often produces. Nice sentence, seems somehow ineffably true in a deeper sort of way, a lovely "there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy" statement about the inattainability of divine perfection.
But when you get right down to brass tacks, to practicality, it's feel-good philosophical academical bullshit. In fact it's easy to design a test that can distinguish people who know calculus or thermodynamics or how to install windows properly from those who don't. Any expert can do a decent job in an afternoon. And in fact these are, contra your (and the professoriate's) opinion, the important tasks in a real job. Your employer would certainly like you to be creative and clever and innovative, but what he absolutely needs you to be is reliable and competent. He'll have more problems with clever and creative (but unreliable and goofy) college graduates than with dull, methodical (but competent) workers. The latter are always useful, and you don't have to promote them. The former are a positive menace to the company if you give them too much responsibility.
What you can easily test doesn't matter at the college level.
Gracious, don't give yourself (or your college) airs. A college degree is not that big a deal. It's a fairly minor intellectual achievement, within reach of anyone with an average or better IQ. Indeed, failing to graduate from college (if you have the money to go) is what's unusual, like failing your driver's test. We're not talking insight into the mind of God that can hardly be put into words. In my scientific field I can think of about a dozen or so key skills I'd like someone with a bachelor's degree to have, and I could test them all in a few hours, easily. (That doesn't mean it wouldn't take the average person four years to acquire those skills. Like Olympic ice-skating, a skill can be obvious and easily testable but take enormous effort to master.)
One of the huge problems with the Indian educational system is that they treat certifications as the equivalent of knowledge and skills.
Says you. Or maybe the tests just suck.
Like most employers of highly-skilled people: you need to (1) hire great teachers (2) quickly fire bad teachers, and (3) trust them to teach. Most alternatives to this model are doomed to make any problems with (1) and (2) much worse by not even giving lip-service to (3).
Geez, this is gobbledegook. First of all, we're talking about how to define "good" and "bad." How do I define a "good" programmer? Why, by the fact that he writes programs that work well. How do I define a "good" teacher? Ideally, by the fact that he produces students who know their stuff. Ergo, we need to know whether students know their stuff or not. Assuming you're not some oddball existentialist who denies that this is knowable at all, then we're just down to defining what sort of test -- written, oral, practical, demonstration, whatever -- will establish whether the students know the field or not. I think you need to sort out your belief structure here. You can't simultaneously hold that competence in a field is objectively real and quantifiable -- in the sense that at least you can say A is more competent than B -- and at the same time deny that it's measurable even in principle. I mean, not unless you want your head to explode or like the White Queen you're used to believing six impossible things before breakfast.
I would hope that in a scientific/technical field that enough new knowledge was being developed that the faculty, let alone the freshman themselves, could not possibly know what those those freshman would need to know by the time they were seniors.
Goodness, in four short years? That's an unbelievable rate of progress. In most scientific or engineering fields, four years is barely enough to get a few decent measurements done or put together a good solid theory. It's about the life of a typical NSF grant, during which, if you make one solid advance you're golden. I think there are very few fields that have ever had such a revolution in four years that everything completely changes. Certainly it is not true of any scientific field with which I'm familiar. That's why we can do fine with printed textbooks that are revised only every five or six years, and which take a good 3-4 years to go from conception to production. In fact, for basic stuff we can often use classic textbooks. Lev Landau wrote some of the best textbooks ever in physics fifty years ago and they can be used today without changing a word.
Did you have any evidence that most employers of your graduates would have noticed your guarantee or even cared?
Yes.
But providing students with marketable technical knowledge is only one function of a university.
Yeah. But it's the important one. I don't much care how they fulfill their functions of providing physical recreational opportunities for students, or allowing them to safely explore their budding sexuality in the dormroom late at night.
Finally, you would do well to remember that students themselves pay a large (and growing) share of their education costs.
Balls. I've seen the budgets. At a large private research university tuition covers maybe 20-30% of the cost to run the show. In a public university it's just noise, enough to pay the gardeners, maybe. The bulk of education costs are paid by the Federal government in many different ways. To give you just one example, the university skims off 50% of each and every research grant in "overhead" that goes straight into the general budget. Your typical science or engineering professor has 0.2-5.0 megadollars in research grants coming in per year (or else he gets fired, if he lacks tenure), which means a typical department faculty of 15-30 provides the university with $5-20 million in tax-free income every year. The 50 or so students majoring in that deparment might provide as much as $500,000 at a private university after financial aid is deducted from tuition, far less at a public school. (Incidentally, another huge source of "income" to the university are graduate students: these poor lads and lasses work like dogs for salaries about one quarter of what they're worth on the open market. Since they do the bulk of the research work and much of the teaching for practically nothing -- or even literally nothing, if as is often the case their salaries come from a research grant anyway -- they're a gigantic net positive in the university budget.)
Mind you, if students (or rather more typically their parents) did pay the full cost of their education, I bet it would be a lot more focussed. You do see some of that effect in community colleges and vocational schools, where students are typically paying for the education themselves, not only in terms of tuition, but in terms of taking time off from a paying job. Education in that market tends to be very practical and results-oriented.
you should be more focused on the long-term needs of those students than the short-term needs of their first employers.
Uh...there is something of more long-term importance to the student than their ability to land (and prosper in) a high-paying, high-status job? Like what? Satisfaction with their overall role in life and society, pleasure in prosperous, well-adjusted grandchildren, finding and marrying their soul-mate? Hmm, ho
Don't let it be. People naturally trust the opinion of others they know well. You will, too, once you get there. Don't take it personally. Just try to develop the same skill yourself -- learn whose judgment to trust, and whose not to. Learn to spot the person -- potential or actual boss, potential or actual co-worker or subordinate -- whose judgment is fucked, and take defensive action. The real world is made up of people networked together in an invisible skein of opinion, trust, despite, irrational emotional attachment or repulsion, and (occasionally) brilliant insight. It's not a very logical or well-defined world, it doesn't follow any beautiful interlocking set of colorless logical principles. But it is what it is, and we all have to live there.
I won't argue that getting out of the American school system and into the real world can be a nasty cold shock. It sure was to me. But, honestly, the fault lies not with the real world -- that's by definition impossible -- but with the educational system, which had 12-16 years to get you thoroughly prepped for the race and didn't do so well. I mean, if you spent 10 years with a track coach and then clocked a 7:40 mile and got laughed out of the Olympic trials, would you blame the sport of running or your coach?
And if you read my original post, you'll see that we were talking about a specific program. No electrical engineer would be getting a degree in the program, unless it was an electrical engineering program, so he wouldn't be taking the test, right? Sheesh.
There would be hundreds of different tests that would all have to be individually maintained.
For what? For a single degree program? Don't be silly. There isn't that much variation in a single degree program. You might need three or four, tops. (And do I think it's a bad idea that if you get a degree in a field, you should at least be competent in most areas of the field, if especially good in only one? Yup. You never know what the future brings, and a degree of breadth to your education is to be strongly encouraged. With the whip of a general exam, if necessary.) Or do you mean across an entire university (i.e. across all of the topics in which society might need you trained)? In that case, so what? What's the problem? Do you have any idea how many different types of licenses and certifications there already are in this world, from the guy certified to build you a new shower meeting the local building code to the guy licensed to pilot a fishing trawler? Fact is, for most working stiffs, your professional life depends on a license and an exam of some sort or other. There's nothing really new about that. 'Bout all I'm saying new is that just maybe the university should incorporate some of that professionalism about standards into certain scientific and technical fields.
Any feedback system that went to the employers and asked them what they want would have to be strongly tempered to resist turning out students that don't know anything but the latest whizbang language from 4 years ago.
Oh, right. Because of course businessmen just all have their heads thoroughly up their asses and can't see further than the next quarter. The chairmen of GE or IBM got (and keeps) his job by paying attention to the latest fads in engineering, not by, you know, turning out products year after year that work, and for which millions of people are willing to part with their hard-earned cash. Clearly J. Random Tenured Professor has got a much clearer view of what works in the long run. Feh. This is exactly the kind of blind academical arrogance I met inside the asylum. It's no wonder the university degree is not worth what it used to be.
Name one standardized exam that provides a comprehensive assessment of everything that needs to be considered to "certify" college graduates as qualified and hireable employees in any field, scientific/technical or otherwise.
Need more? I'm sure I can find a round dozen with a few more minutes thinking.
Does it measure every area of knowledge...blah blah blah
In other words, is any test absolutely perfect? Of course not. Nothing is. But I believe we were talking about the real world, not Black 'n' White Land were anything not utterly perfect is ipso facto utter garbage. In our real world, "imperfect" exams do a damn good job sorting out competents from lookalike fools. A much better job than such feel-good fluffy stuff as recommendations from people who like you, or grades assigned according to some mysterious secret formula by someone of whom I've never heard.
How about we reverse the challenge? Why don't you find me a job in which people's lives are directly in your hands (like surgery, piloting, or critical care nursing), and which does not require a comprehensive exam before you start the job?
Here's what happens if you implement a do-or-die exit exam: learning of any important area of knowledge, skill, or ability that is not on the exam will get worse, because students will shift focus to learning (by rote memorization, if possible) all the things on the exam and they will ignore all the things that aren't.
Well let's hope so. See, either it's a good exam or it's not (in my case "good" would have been defined as "testing the skills employers really want.") If it's a bad exam, well, a poor or half-assed implementation doesn't prove an idea is shit. Otherwise Linux 0.1 would have been the death of Open Source Software, ha ha. But if it's a good exam, then students should not be spending time learning what's not on it, because that stuff isn't, in fact, "important." You just think it is, or wish it was. And a nice side-effect of the exam would be that it will dispel that illusion.
you'll see that overreliance on exit exams is at the top of most experts' lists of what has gotten the Indian educational system into this mess in the first place.
Sure. And lots of "experts" have theories about what makes the stock market go up and down, or how to boost employment without waking up inflation, or which team is going to win the Rose Bowl. Get back to me when there's factual measurable proof of this remarkable (and to my ear laughable) proposition.
graduating from an ABET accredited institute is about all you need for most employers.
If you say so. If you read some of my other posts, you'll note that I am an employer in the private sector. (I used to be on the faculty of a university, which is why I've seen this situation from both sides.) "Accreditation" doesn't do much for me. Like sausage-making, I know too much about what goes into the product. But no doubt you know better.
An "exit exam" would also prove very little, since it is merely a test, and there are plenty of people who can test much better than they study.
What an amazing load of fact-free gibberish. You sound very much like a graduate of the educational system I despise. Elegant and verbose speech practically free of verifiable factual content. Pray, what does it mean to "test" much better than you "study?" And why, exactly, can a test prove "very little?" If I ask you to do ten random line integrals and you do each perfectly, why may I not conclude you know calculus pretty well? If I ask you to specify the size and shape of a reactor for safely preparing ammonium nitrate from certain readily available stock chemicals, and you get it just right, why may I not conclude you know (certain aspects of) chemical engineering pretty well? If I ask you to tell me in four sentences or less why the compression ratio of a diesel engine is higher than an Otto-cycle gasoline engine, and you can, why exactly does that tell me "very little"?
This notion that a test is somehow better than using grades is really bad.
Yeah? Bad for whom? For teacher's pets who have been coasting on A's for effort and quacking the shibboleths (e.g. the NEA's "testing is baaaaad"), for teachers who have been coasting on reputation, for programs that would like to sink buckets of taxpayer dough into improving student self-esteem instead of student competence? You'd sure be right about that.
Look at all the complaints about using the SAT or ACT for a major acceptance requirement to college.
Mmm. And from whom do those complaints come? Why, from the patrons of "diversity" and affirmative action, from "everyone should be above average" enthusiasts who dislike judging people on the basis of their "mere" technical competence and would prefer to judge them by their purity of spirit, how hard they try, how nicely they play with others or some other such fluffy garbage. I can well imagine that these people don't like the pitiless cold clarity a quantitative test sheds on whether a student knows what the fuck he's talking about or is just a postmodern bullshitter.
Have you ever worked in the private sector?
Only for ten years or so, following my ten years in academia. And you?
If you couldn't find out the information, perhaps you are asking the wrong people.
Gosh, that must have been it. I must not have realized it was the janitor I was talking to and not the Graduate Affairs Office. Silly me. If only someone as clever as you had been there to help me out.
No doubt. But then you can contrast the 1886 Haymarket Riot, in which a protest turned bloody set back the 8-hour workday movement for years, if not decades, or the 1989 Tiananman Square protests, which led the Chicoms to clamp down on liberal freedom in the PRC, or the suppression of strikes and chaos in Berlin after the National Socialists took over in 1933, which convinced the wider German public that even if they had some funny ideas on Jews at least these people in brown shirts kept public order, made the trains run on time, et cetera...
I don't think guns have ever been a politically effective way to control a crowd.
That is such wishful thinking. Why do you suppose guns were invented and became so popular, if not because they allow the few to control the many?
Mainly because the political fallout that follows;
Only quite recently (20th century), and in unusually free, highly-empowered democratic states such as the United States or some European countries has there been any "political fallout" from the use of government suppression. You need a system where ballots are more powerful than bullets. These are rare.
by using lethal force you legitimatize whatever political cause you were trying to stop.
Again, it's an unusual system where moral superiority carries any serious weight.
Also depending on the crowd they might start firing back or overrun the outnumbered police.
Historically, that's the only serious counter-threat to real (not fancied) oppression from your own government. I'm sorry, but you don't stop a Stalin or a Pol Pot by threatening to bleed all over their nice shiny bayonets. You stop them by pointing out there are more of you than there are of them, and you're angry and dedicated enough to die for your freedom, if you can take with you a few of them that want to take your freedom away.
So...what did you do in your summers? Co-op work, internship, work in the field in which you hope to be employed? Did you work during the term, too, in the field in which you hope to be employed? Do you have at least 9 to 15 month-equivalents of real experience, and if not -- why not? What were you thinking?
As an employer, I can tell you that we're well aware of the deficiencies of education, especially in technical fields. We know it emphasizes ivory-tower theory, not practical solutions, and good listening to authority, not the cut-and-thrust compromise and jury-rig of the rambunctious real-world contest between those bastards in Marketing and us bastards in Development. We are also sadly aware of the grade and "AP class" inflation going on, we know very well an A doesn't mean stellar work anymore, and a B a significant cut above average. We know grades and taking "Honors" classes hardly mean a damn thing anymore.
So, yes, we do look for more concrete measures of competence. Something like experience and success in a similar job, a certain amount of dedication and willingness to learn, a lack of rigidity about what you will and won't dirty your hands doing (e.g. God help you if you routinely volunteer the fact during interviews that you refuse to do any selling).
If you didn't know this before, and so didn't spend your summers and after-school and between-school time enhancing your competitiveness, or, worse, didn't even realize you were in a competition with a million other hungry souls -- if you vaguely thought you were living in a socialist paradise where purity of soul guaranteed you your daily bread -- then I'm real sorry for the Big Lie your teachers amused themselves telling you, but there it is. The real world doesn't, in fact, give a damn about you, and will cheerfully let you starve to death unless in its eyes you have something quite valuable to offer. Fortunately, being young, if you were operating under any illusions you have time to make corrections.
Also...don't forget to give it some time. Very few people get a great job right out of school. Usually it takes a few years to find something nice, and many people have to work for a decade or more to find a position that really suits them. Don't give up, keep trying, it will come if you persist. (And don't forget to feed back your experience to those younger than yourself every chance you get, so the dippy delusions rampant in our Sesame Street educational system are somewhat less effective.)
This is no joke. I can tell you a story from the inside. Once I tried to interest my faculty colleagues at a Large University That Will Not Be Named Here in setting up an exit exam for our degree program. A big comprehensive bugger that would "certify" our graduates in a measureable way and in particular specific skills. (This is in a scientific/technical field, by the way, so such skills are easy to define.)
Before all of you who are still students gasp in horror, remember the long-term advantages this would provide: first, you know in detail exactly what you need to know as a senior to leave when you come in as a freshman. You can use that knowledge to study more efficiently during your four precious years. (Indeed, some bright student entrepreneur would no doubt think to correlate student exam performance with whether the student had professor X or Y, so you could surely use it to select your classes and teachers, too.) Second, your degree is far more valuable because it's backed up with specific, verifiable warranty in these grade-inflated days. Since every graduate has passed the exam, a firm or graduate school knows for sure and in detail what graduates of this particular program know. That's the kind of gold-plated guarantee of competence that makes employers feel all warm and fuzzy about you when you turn up for your job interview looking appallingly young, like you started shaving yesterday.
Third, and most importantly, it would give a way for employers to feed back to we faculty what they did and did not want their employees to know. We'd invite them to help design the exam, and they'd give us feedback from when they hired one of our graduates. In this way we'd learn exactly what skills were wanted out there in the Real World(TM), and we'd learn rapidly whether we were successfully teaching those skills.
What do you suppose happened? Do you think this proposal went anywhere? If you shook your head cynically, you are right. In fact, folks were a bit horrified by my suggestion that employers have some influence in the curriculum. Good grief, didn't I realize that knowledge flowed from us (the university) to them (mere tradesmen), not vice versa? Next I'd be saying the purpose of education was merely to make a man a more skilled worker deserving of a higher wage, and not to open his mind to the wonders of the Cosmos, enrich his soul, bring him closer to God, whatever...
I couldn't even find out what happened to our graduates -- who had hired them, what fields and types of positions they'd gone into. The data had never been collected, and no one was interested in doing so. Amazing. Blew my mind, I tell you. Any other business that spent so little effort finding out whether its "product" was meeting the needs of the market would tank. But luckily in modern America "education" is the new "good breeding" -- it can mean nothing at all in a practical, tangible sense, so long as it sets you apart in some ineffable way as a "quality" person.
A very interesting point, thank you. To be serious, the best material to protect against micrometeoroids and still be transparent is probably a verrry tricky question. Ideally you'd like some kind of microreactive armor, something that will absorb the kinetic energy and blow the tiny plasma cloud back outwards, protecting what's inside. Whether diamond is sensible or not I dunno: its ability to be cleaved by jewelers is perhaps less relevant than how it behaves under hypersonic shock (probably not particularly well, since the C-C bond network is very rigid), and when a small area of it is vaporized (probably better than average, since it conducts heat energy away rapidly, and because the disruption of each C-C bond will absorb a lot of energy).
It's hard to imagine anything that is very resistant to fracture and also transparent. The same qualities that give a material good tensile strength (namely, highly mobile bonding electrons) tend to make it opaque (since those mobile electrons can absord UV and visible light).
But we can always compensate by making it thicker, and just send nanobots out every few years to resurface the dome and fill in all the tiny pits caused by micrometeorites.
I think the problem is if "crowd control" is as simple as flipping a switch.
Er...but right now it's as simple as pulling a trigger.
Re:This is a good article
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Open Source Spying
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Anything would be better than the annoyance of having to be at an airport for two hours, ditch most carry-on items, and submit to ridiculous searches and checks.
Christ, yes. I say let's dump the entire security/screening circus for passengers, and instead put a big bin of.45s right next to the boarding gate, and any passenger who wants can pick one up for the flight, dump it in a similar bin when he gets off the plane at the other end. We'll put in some.38s for the grandmas, too.
I can't imagine anyone would even attempt to hijack a plane ever again.*
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* And just to pre-emptively answer any pussified whine that oh no some innocents might then be killed, or a plane depressurize from bullet holes once every half-century -- yup, all true, I admit it. Neanderthal that I am, I prefer to die like a man than stretch my throat like a sheep for the slaughterer's knife. And it's OK with me if folks who think otherwise continue to stand in line for the full cavity search before boarding Mommy Knows Best airlines.
We will never hear of their failures, because those are bad for politics and being secrets that are not subject to scrutiny, they never have to be revealed.
Hmmm...and so how is it you know enough about the many failures to be so cynical? Who revealed the deep dark secrets to you? Or when you say "we" do you really mean you stupid yobos, us, the great ignorant unwashed public, who aren't nearly as clever as youself and can't see the obvious?
Just like every person shot or bombed in Iraq is an 'insurgent' or 'terrorist' because the US has magic 'insurgent seeking munitions'.
I should think not. That would be logically impossible. But it seems you are hoping by the obvious falseness of this extreme to imply that the other extreme must be true: that none or very few of the people killed in Iraq by Americans are 'insurgents' or 'terrorists.' This is a deceptive form of argument sometimes called the Bifurcation or Black-and-White fallacy. In fact, clearly there are a range of possibilities for who's being killed by Americans in Iraq, from 0% bad guys to 100% bad guys. The fact that it's obviously not 100% bad guys -- because of the lack of those 'insurgent seeking munitions' -- doesn't really say a damn thing about what the real number is. It certainly doesn't say it's 0%, or near 0%. It could be 97% bad guys.
Most people believe the number is pretty high, say 90-95%, and they consider that a pretty acceptable real-life tough-situation performance, at least as compared to, say, the high-altitude bombing deployed by the Clinton Administration with European encouragement in Bosnia, or compared to the complete inaction observed in Rwanda during the 90s, and in Darfur right now, both of which techniques tend to turn in much crappier ratios of bad-guys-to-innocents killed. Nevertheless, I would certainly agree that folks might be terribly deluded, and it could be that the real number is 10-20%. It could be that 80% of the Iraqis killed by American troops are innocents on whom the crazed soldiers unload a few rounds by accident, or just to blow off steam. And it could be there exists a conspiracy to suppress this hideous truth involving the whole US Administration, most of Congress, and nearly all of the 140,000 ordinary men and women in uniform over there. Stranger things have happened. (Although not in my lifetime.)
[D]id you really think we were going to have cities under transparent domes?
Sure! Screw efficiency. As far as I'm concerned, the major reason to go to space -- an unbelievably extravagant thing to do anyway -- is for the glory and wonder. So that ordinary blokes can do double somersaults in the air, laughing madly, while standing under a blazing starry sky the likes of which only God and a handful of mortals have heretofore ever seen.
I say phooey on any glum whiny pussified harping on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Would a sane man buy a Ferarri and fail to spring for the leather seats because cloth is more efficient? Would he buy a gaming PC with the latest and greatest CPU/GPU combo and then use an old black-and-white TV for a monitor to save 0.5% of the total cost? Hell no!
I expect a big transparent dome...they can use CVD diamond or something to protect against the micrometeroids...and I expect 10-speaker super-duper-surround mind-blowing quadrophenic sound, too.
What's wrong with cultural ghettos? I mean, from the point of view of an iconoclast not typically living in one? I say they're a great way to avoid people I don't want to meet.
I mean, I like the idea that if, say, I go traveling in Normandy then everyone with a fairly shallow understanding of French history gleaned from a Let's Go guide will be standing in line to see Mt. San Michel, leaving the more subtle bits of the countryside relatively empty for me. And if I go to San Francisco, all the tourists will be choking the Haight or lining up to drive down Lombard Street, not taking up parking spots where I want to go.
You mean, like a site where people can get together and complain about how stupid, criminal and/or deluded everyone else is (including some of the other people on the site itself)? Sounds oddly familiar...
Perhaps opinions are more sharply divided when the books in question are fairly similar. Have you noticed that the fiercest arguments are between experts and over fine shades of meaning? Or between people who are lovers, or in the same family? It seems the more two people generally agree, the sharper are their disagreements over any remaining differences.
So I would not be surprised if people who generally like fantasy and sf are quite sharply divided over whether Tolkien or Pratchett is better. But show them a book by Martha Stewart on home decorating and their reaction will be pretty mild, either way, since it doesn't fall in their area of passion.
If so, this makes the tool much less useful, because it's based on the assumption that a person's taste in books smoothly and gradually changes from books he mosts likes to books he least likes. Probably real people don't have such smooth continuum of taste, it's probably much more jaggedy and chaotic.
One thing they probably need to do is figure out the local (time and space) variations in this rate. It's likely some areas of the Moon, and some times during its orbit, are more dangerous than others, because it's likely most of this dust is in a fairly close orbit around the Earth.
Once they know that, they know what advantages there may be in situating the base in one place versus another on the surface. In other words, the best way to avoid getting wet is not so much to have a great umbrella as to stay out of the rain in the first place. But they'll still need the titanium umbrella, nonetheless.
I dunno, I've always heard that changes in prices have a lot to do with inflation and deflation, so my impression is that the stock market is more of a lighter-than-air craft; in which case what we really need is data on its buoyancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Christ, that's simplistic to the point of idiocy. Look, a contract between a builder and a property owner is a "government granted monopoly" in your terms. Once the contract is signed, the property owner can't change his mind and buy his house from any other builder. Heavens, the builder has a monopoly! Eek! Where's the property owner's choice?
Well, duh, he had the choice before he signed the contract. He could interview various builders and decide to whom he wanted to commit.
Now let's look at those eeeeeevil medicine patents. Where is society's choice? Why, in the same place. Society has the choice about whether to buy, say, Johnson and Johnson's baby powder, providing wealth to J and J that they'll use in their research division to try to create new drugs. And once the drug is created, society has the choice of whether or not to buy it. After all, they got along for umpty thousand years before the drug existed -- clearly they can continue getting along without it, if they choose.
But people do not choose to do so. Instead, if it's a great drug, they buy it, and, yup, the drug maker reaps bazillions. And government makes sure that for a period of time (typically 5-7 years from when the drug hits the market), only one company can sell it, and so, yup, they can sell it for as much money as people will pay free of competitive pressures. The belief -- and history bears this out -- is that allowing people to reap for a time the full reward of their creativity encourages people to exert their creativity.
I'd also just like to point out the massive logical inconsistency between thinking the "government created monopoly" that is a system of patents is Bad, but an even more coercive government created monopoly that is government funding and direction of drug research is Good.
Of course I read it. I just don't agree with your summary of what it means.
And which is more "artificial," pray, a market in which patents exist or one in which the decisions about which drugs to manufacture and what their price will be is set by government? You've got the post-modernist crypto-socialist talk of "incentives", but you overlook the fact that every historical example in which government sets the policies for an industry always shows a drastic and often fatal destruction of the incentives people have for doing good work. You don't need logic to see this, just a good history book. Check out the history of Soviet science, or British health-care in the 1970s, or Canadian health-care today, et cetera and so forth ad nauseum. There's a damn good reason the best drug research is done in the country that has strong intellectual property protection and a relatively free market in health-care: the United States. It's not just a coincidence. It's not because of our wonderful education system (other countries have better educational systems, if it comes to that). You arrogant social engineers overlook that connection at your (and our) peril.
Of course you think it's "obvious" how to do the right thing. Everyone does. Everyone has great ideas on how to solve the world's problems if he were king. You do, I do, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot and Idi Amin did, and so does every crazy down in the asylum. There's no shortage of "obvious" ideas and persuasive logic about what the right thing is. What's a lot rarer is a willingness to allow historical fact to challenge what seems "obvious" to you. And, as I said, it would be monumental folly to overlook the fact that strong patent protection and a free market have always been associated with a vigorous culture of technological innovation. Is that just coincidence? Maybe, but considering what you're tinkering with, you'd better be damn sure it is before you go messing with it.
I hope you never see rough times with medical insurance, health, etc. such that you cannot afford the treatment you or a loved one may require.
If the average person can't afford the medical treatment he needs, there is no social system whatsoever that will change that. How could it? Social systems only redistribute wealth, they can't create it. If there isn't ennough money in the system to buy everyone the health care he wants, then no amount of tinkering or redistribution or magic "prize funds" will create it. In which case, the humane and reasonable purpose of a social system should be to distribute the limited amount of health care the average person can afford in the way that maximizes the overall good. And they obvious way to do that is to give it to those who want it most -- who are willing to spend the most for it. Which is what we have.
On the other hand, if the average person can afford all the health care he wants, then what's the point of playing accounting tricks with how he pays for it? You pay the government $x in taxes so that the government can then turn around and spend $x for your health care? And this makes sense.....why? Why not pay for your health care yourself, directly? At least then it will be you and not some government bureaucrat or insurance company employee who decides where that money gets spent.
I think all this talk of "prize funds" and related garbage is just the old socialist disease come back again in new clothes. It's the same old Stalinist story, let's control everything for the good of all, and stuff will work out wonderful, you'll see -- it's all in Karl's book, you know. Very persuasive logic, he has. I guess this dressing up of worn-out socialist canards in the new language of "prize funds" is an attempt to fool people who've been burned by socialist follies over and over again in the 20th century that this isn't really socialism. And, as usual, professors and students -- those dreamers most lacking in practical real-life experience -- are in the vanguard. Bah.
And Joe Stiglitz is a brilliant man.
Maybe, but TFA sure doesn't prove it.
Here's his thesis, boiled down to a logic nutshell:
(1) Drug patents are Bad, because they allow discoverers of useful drugs (e.g. drugs against AIDS) to charge what they want, and what they want to charge exceeds the cost many sufferers (e.g. poor people living on $2/day) can pay.
(2) However, it is clearly impossible for poor people, living on $2/day, to pay enough for their drugs to convince smart young people to go into biomedical research and discover the drugs needed -- instead of, say, becoming corporate lawyers and economics professors.
(3) So...um...how about if we set up some kind of "prize fund" which will pay those smart young people to develop the drugs, which we'll then more or less give away to the billions who need them but can't afford to pay what it costs to develop them.
Ooookay. Now, where does the money to set up the prize fund come from? It can't come from the free choice of individuals, because he's just got done saying that leaving it up to the free choice of the market ends up being Evil (see point (1), above). That leaves money taken from people by force, e.g. taxes.
Note that he presents zero evidence that the amount of money you'd need to take from people in taxes to set up this magic "prize fund" is any smaller than the amount of money big pharma already takes from its customers. And why would it be? If it takes x billion per drug to recruit the necessary team of brilliant biochemists, able scientific managers, clever IT support gurus, venture capitalists, et cetera, when the money comes from drug sales, why would it be any less than x billion when the money comes from a big ol' government grant? People are just willing to work for much less when they're paid by tax money than when they're paid by income from sales? Ha ha.
So...in Professor's Stiglitz's new world, there's no obvious difference in how much money drug companies absorb. It just comes from different places. Rather than come from those who use the drugs, it comes from everybody, through their taxes. Hence all you Slashdot suckers^H^H^H^H^H^Hyoungsters will be paying higher taxes to subsidize the Viagra and Lipitor that oldsters like the good Professor and me are using. Well carry on, my good fellows. Long live the revolution! (Ever wonder why socialized medicine is highly popular among the sick and aged? No? Excellent!)
Synthesis, creativity, analytical problem solving, etc. are very difficult to evaluate and measure anyway.
Says who? I have no problem evaluating those qualities in my employees. I doubt you think you have any difficulty evaluating those qualities in your friends, or amongst potential employers. Do you ever sit there pondering over your buddies, wondering whether one of them hides unknown depths of synthesis, creativity, et cetera, and realizing that you have no solid opinion on the subject because, really, who can ever tell? Sheesh. How are you going to pick out a girl to marry, boss to work for, colleague to trust if you can't make judgments like this?
This is the kind of mystical crap the educational system often produces. Nice sentence, seems somehow ineffably true in a deeper sort of way, a lovely "there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy" statement about the inattainability of divine perfection.
But when you get right down to brass tacks, to practicality, it's feel-good philosophical academical bullshit. In fact it's easy to design a test that can distinguish people who know calculus or thermodynamics or how to install windows properly from those who don't. Any expert can do a decent job in an afternoon. And in fact these are, contra your (and the professoriate's) opinion, the important tasks in a real job. Your employer would certainly like you to be creative and clever and innovative, but what he absolutely needs you to be is reliable and competent. He'll have more problems with clever and creative (but unreliable and goofy) college graduates than with dull, methodical (but competent) workers. The latter are always useful, and you don't have to promote them. The former are a positive menace to the company if you give them too much responsibility.
What you can easily test doesn't matter at the college level.
Gracious, don't give yourself (or your college) airs. A college degree is not that big a deal. It's a fairly minor intellectual achievement, within reach of anyone with an average or better IQ. Indeed, failing to graduate from college (if you have the money to go) is what's unusual, like failing your driver's test. We're not talking insight into the mind of God that can hardly be put into words. In my scientific field I can think of about a dozen or so key skills I'd like someone with a bachelor's degree to have, and I could test them all in a few hours, easily. (That doesn't mean it wouldn't take the average person four years to acquire those skills. Like Olympic ice-skating, a skill can be obvious and easily testable but take enormous effort to master.)
One of the huge problems with the Indian educational system is that they treat certifications as the equivalent of knowledge and skills.
Says you. Or maybe the tests just suck.
Like most employers of highly-skilled people: you need to (1) hire great teachers (2) quickly fire bad teachers, and (3) trust them to teach. Most alternatives to this model are doomed to make any problems with (1) and (2) much worse by not even giving lip-service to (3).
Geez, this is gobbledegook. First of all, we're talking about how to define "good" and "bad." How do I define a "good" programmer? Why, by the fact that he writes programs that work well. How do I define a "good" teacher? Ideally, by the fact that he produces students who know their stuff. Ergo, we need to know whether students know their stuff or not. Assuming you're not some oddball existentialist who denies that this is knowable at all, then we're just down to defining what sort of test -- written, oral, practical, demonstration, whatever -- will establish whether the students know the field or not. I think you need to sort out your belief structure here. You can't simultaneously hold that competence in a field is objectively real and quantifiable -- in the sense that at least you can say A is more competent than B -- and at the same time deny that it's measurable even in principle. I mean, not unless you want your head to explode or like the White Queen you're used to believing six impossible things before breakfast.
I would hope that in a scientific/technical field that enough new knowledge was being developed that the faculty, let alone the freshman themselves, could not possibly know what those those freshman would need to know by the time they were seniors.
Goodness, in four short years? That's an unbelievable rate of progress. In most scientific or engineering fields, four years is barely enough to get a few decent measurements done or put together a good solid theory. It's about the life of a typical NSF grant, during which, if you make one solid advance you're golden. I think there are very few fields that have ever had such a revolution in four years that everything completely changes. Certainly it is not true of any scientific field with which I'm familiar. That's why we can do fine with printed textbooks that are revised only every five or six years, and which take a good 3-4 years to go from conception to production. In fact, for basic stuff we can often use classic textbooks. Lev Landau wrote some of the best textbooks ever in physics fifty years ago and they can be used today without changing a word.
Did you have any evidence that most employers of your graduates would have noticed your guarantee or even cared?
Yes.
But providing students with marketable technical knowledge is only one function of a university.
Yeah. But it's the important one. I don't much care how they fulfill their functions of providing physical recreational opportunities for students, or allowing them to safely explore their budding sexuality in the dormroom late at night.
Finally, you would do well to remember that students themselves pay a large (and growing) share of their education costs.
Balls. I've seen the budgets. At a large private research university tuition covers maybe 20-30% of the cost to run the show. In a public university it's just noise, enough to pay the gardeners, maybe. The bulk of education costs are paid by the Federal government in many different ways. To give you just one example, the university skims off 50% of each and every research grant in "overhead" that goes straight into the general budget. Your typical science or engineering professor has 0.2-5.0 megadollars in research grants coming in per year (or else he gets fired, if he lacks tenure), which means a typical department faculty of 15-30 provides the university with $5-20 million in tax-free income every year. The 50 or so students majoring in that deparment might provide as much as $500,000 at a private university after financial aid is deducted from tuition, far less at a public school. (Incidentally, another huge source of "income" to the university are graduate students: these poor lads and lasses work like dogs for salaries about one quarter of what they're worth on the open market. Since they do the bulk of the research work and much of the teaching for practically nothing -- or even literally nothing, if as is often the case their salaries come from a research grant anyway -- they're a gigantic net positive in the university budget.)
Mind you, if students (or rather more typically their parents) did pay the full cost of their education, I bet it would be a lot more focussed. You do see some of that effect in community colleges and vocational schools, where students are typically paying for the education themselves, not only in terms of tuition, but in terms of taking time off from a paying job. Education in that market tends to be very practical and results-oriented.
you should be more focused on the long-term needs of those students than the short-term needs of their first employers.
Uh...there is something of more long-term importance to the student than their ability to land (and prosper in) a high-paying, high-status job? Like what? Satisfaction with their overall role in life and society, pleasure in prosperous, well-adjusted grandchildren, finding and marrying their soul-mate? Hmm, ho
Don't let it be. People naturally trust the opinion of others they know well. You will, too, once you get there. Don't take it personally. Just try to develop the same skill yourself -- learn whose judgment to trust, and whose not to. Learn to spot the person -- potential or actual boss, potential or actual co-worker or subordinate -- whose judgment is fucked, and take defensive action. The real world is made up of people networked together in an invisible skein of opinion, trust, despite, irrational emotional attachment or repulsion, and (occasionally) brilliant insight. It's not a very logical or well-defined world, it doesn't follow any beautiful interlocking set of colorless logical principles. But it is what it is, and we all have to live there.
I won't argue that getting out of the American school system and into the real world can be a nasty cold shock. It sure was to me. But, honestly, the fault lies not with the real world -- that's by definition impossible -- but with the educational system, which had 12-16 years to get you thoroughly prepped for the race and didn't do so well. I mean, if you spent 10 years with a track coach and then clocked a 7:40 mile and got laughed out of the Olympic trials, would you blame the sport of running or your coach?
And if you read my original post, you'll see that we were talking about a specific program. No electrical engineer would be getting a degree in the program, unless it was an electrical engineering program, so he wouldn't be taking the test, right? Sheesh.
There would be hundreds of different tests that would all have to be individually maintained.
For what? For a single degree program? Don't be silly. There isn't that much variation in a single degree program. You might need three or four, tops. (And do I think it's a bad idea that if you get a degree in a field, you should at least be competent in most areas of the field, if especially good in only one? Yup. You never know what the future brings, and a degree of breadth to your education is to be strongly encouraged. With the whip of a general exam, if necessary.) Or do you mean across an entire university (i.e. across all of the topics in which society might need you trained)? In that case, so what? What's the problem? Do you have any idea how many different types of licenses and certifications there already are in this world, from the guy certified to build you a new shower meeting the local building code to the guy licensed to pilot a fishing trawler? Fact is, for most working stiffs, your professional life depends on a license and an exam of some sort or other. There's nothing really new about that. 'Bout all I'm saying new is that just maybe the university should incorporate some of that professionalism about standards into certain scientific and technical fields.
Any feedback system that went to the employers and asked them what they want would have to be strongly tempered to resist turning out students that don't know anything but the latest whizbang language from 4 years ago.
Oh, right. Because of course businessmen just all have their heads thoroughly up their asses and can't see further than the next quarter. The chairmen of GE or IBM got (and keeps) his job by paying attention to the latest fads in engineering, not by, you know, turning out products year after year that work, and for which millions of people are willing to part with their hard-earned cash. Clearly J. Random Tenured Professor has got a much clearer view of what works in the long run. Feh. This is exactly the kind of blind academical arrogance I met inside the asylum. It's no wonder the university degree is not worth what it used to be.
Name one standardized exam that provides a comprehensive assessment of everything that needs to be considered to "certify" college graduates as qualified and hireable employees in any field, scientific/technical or otherwise.
Off the top of my head, how about:
(1) The ACS exams in chemistry.
(2) State RN license exams and board certification exams in medical specialties.
(3) The bar exam.
(4) The FAA exam for getting a license to fly an airplane on instruments.
(5) The CPA exams.
Need more? I'm sure I can find a round dozen with a few more minutes thinking.
Does it measure every area of knowledge...blah blah blah
In other words, is any test absolutely perfect? Of course not. Nothing is. But I believe we were talking about the real world, not Black 'n' White Land were anything not utterly perfect is ipso facto utter garbage. In our real world, "imperfect" exams do a damn good job sorting out competents from lookalike fools. A much better job than such feel-good fluffy stuff as recommendations from people who like you, or grades assigned according to some mysterious secret formula by someone of whom I've never heard.
How about we reverse the challenge? Why don't you find me a job in which people's lives are directly in your hands (like surgery, piloting, or critical care nursing), and which does not require a comprehensive exam before you start the job?
Here's what happens if you implement a do-or-die exit exam: learning of any important area of knowledge, skill, or ability that is not on the exam will get worse, because students will shift focus to learning (by rote memorization, if possible) all the things on the exam and they will ignore all the things that aren't.
Well let's hope so. See, either it's a good exam or it's not (in my case "good" would have been defined as "testing the skills employers really want.") If it's a bad exam, well, a poor or half-assed implementation doesn't prove an idea is shit. Otherwise Linux 0.1 would have been the death of Open Source Software, ha ha. But if it's a good exam, then students should not be spending time learning what's not on it, because that stuff isn't, in fact, "important." You just think it is, or wish it was. And a nice side-effect of the exam would be that it will dispel that illusion.
you'll see that overreliance on exit exams is at the top of most experts' lists of what has gotten the Indian educational system into this mess in the first place.
Sure. And lots of "experts" have theories about what makes the stock market go up and down, or how to boost employment without waking up inflation, or which team is going to win the Rose Bowl. Get back to me when there's factual measurable proof of this remarkable (and to my ear laughable) proposition.
graduating from an ABET accredited institute is about all you need for most employers.
If you say so. If you read some of my other posts, you'll note that I am an employer in the private sector. (I used to be on the faculty of a university, which is why I've seen this situation from both sides.) "Accreditation" doesn't do much for me. Like sausage-making, I know too much about what goes into the product. But no doubt you know better.
An "exit exam" would also prove very little, since it is merely a test, and there are plenty of people who can test much better than they study.
What an amazing load of fact-free gibberish. You sound very much like a graduate of the educational system I despise. Elegant and verbose speech practically free of verifiable factual content. Pray, what does it mean to "test" much better than you "study?" And why, exactly, can a test prove "very little?" If I ask you to do ten random line integrals and you do each perfectly, why may I not conclude you know calculus pretty well? If I ask you to specify the size and shape of a reactor for safely preparing ammonium nitrate from certain readily available stock chemicals, and you get it just right, why may I not conclude you know (certain aspects of) chemical engineering pretty well? If I ask you to tell me in four sentences or less why the compression ratio of a diesel engine is higher than an Otto-cycle gasoline engine, and you can, why exactly does that tell me "very little"?
This notion that a test is somehow better than using grades is really bad.
Yeah? Bad for whom? For teacher's pets who have been coasting on A's for effort and quacking the shibboleths (e.g. the NEA's "testing is baaaaad"), for teachers who have been coasting on reputation, for programs that would like to sink buckets of taxpayer dough into improving student self-esteem instead of student competence? You'd sure be right about that.
Look at all the complaints about using the SAT or ACT for a major acceptance requirement to college.
Mmm. And from whom do those complaints come? Why, from the patrons of "diversity" and affirmative action, from "everyone should be above average" enthusiasts who dislike judging people on the basis of their "mere" technical competence and would prefer to judge them by their purity of spirit, how hard they try, how nicely they play with others or some other such fluffy garbage. I can well imagine that these people don't like the pitiless cold clarity a quantitative test sheds on whether a student knows what the fuck he's talking about or is just a postmodern bullshitter.
Have you ever worked in the private sector?
Only for ten years or so, following my ten years in academia. And you?
If you couldn't find out the information, perhaps you are asking the wrong people.
Gosh, that must have been it. I must not have realized it was the janitor I was talking to and not the Graduate Affairs Office. Silly me. If only someone as clever as you had been there to help me out.
No doubt. But then you can contrast the 1886 Haymarket Riot, in which a protest turned bloody set back the 8-hour workday movement for years, if not decades, or the 1989 Tiananman Square protests, which led the Chicoms to clamp down on liberal freedom in the PRC, or the suppression of strikes and chaos in Berlin after the National Socialists took over in 1933, which convinced the wider German public that even if they had some funny ideas on Jews at least these people in brown shirts kept public order, made the trains run on time, et cetera...
I don't think guns have ever been a politically effective way to control a crowd.
That is such wishful thinking. Why do you suppose guns were invented and became so popular, if not because they allow the few to control the many?
Mainly because the political fallout that follows;
Only quite recently (20th century), and in unusually free, highly-empowered democratic states such as the United States or some European countries has there been any "political fallout" from the use of government suppression. You need a system where ballots are more powerful than bullets. These are rare.
by using lethal force you legitimatize whatever political cause you were trying to stop.
Again, it's an unusual system where moral superiority carries any serious weight.
Also depending on the crowd they might start firing back or overrun the outnumbered police.
Historically, that's the only serious counter-threat to real (not fancied) oppression from your own government. I'm sorry, but you don't stop a Stalin or a Pol Pot by threatening to bleed all over their nice shiny bayonets. You stop them by pointing out there are more of you than there are of them, and you're angry and dedicated enough to die for your freedom, if you can take with you a few of them that want to take your freedom away.
So...what did you do in your summers? Co-op work, internship, work in the field in which you hope to be employed? Did you work during the term, too, in the field in which you hope to be employed? Do you have at least 9 to 15 month-equivalents of real experience, and if not -- why not? What were you thinking?
As an employer, I can tell you that we're well aware of the deficiencies of education, especially in technical fields. We know it emphasizes ivory-tower theory, not practical solutions, and good listening to authority, not the cut-and-thrust compromise and jury-rig of the rambunctious real-world contest between those bastards in Marketing and us bastards in Development. We are also sadly aware of the grade and "AP class" inflation going on, we know very well an A doesn't mean stellar work anymore, and a B a significant cut above average. We know grades and taking "Honors" classes hardly mean a damn thing anymore.
So, yes, we do look for more concrete measures of competence. Something like experience and success in a similar job, a certain amount of dedication and willingness to learn, a lack of rigidity about what you will and won't dirty your hands doing (e.g. God help you if you routinely volunteer the fact during interviews that you refuse to do any selling).
If you didn't know this before, and so didn't spend your summers and after-school and between-school time enhancing your competitiveness, or, worse, didn't even realize you were in a competition with a million other hungry souls -- if you vaguely thought you were living in a socialist paradise where purity of soul guaranteed you your daily bread -- then I'm real sorry for the Big Lie your teachers amused themselves telling you, but there it is. The real world doesn't, in fact, give a damn about you, and will cheerfully let you starve to death unless in its eyes you have something quite valuable to offer. Fortunately, being young, if you were operating under any illusions you have time to make corrections.
Also...don't forget to give it some time. Very few people get a great job right out of school. Usually it takes a few years to find something nice, and many people have to work for a decade or more to find a position that really suits them. Don't give up, keep trying, it will come if you persist. (And don't forget to feed back your experience to those younger than yourself every chance you get, so the dippy delusions rampant in our Sesame Street educational system are somewhat less effective.)
This is no joke. I can tell you a story from the inside. Once I tried to interest my faculty colleagues at a Large University That Will Not Be Named Here in setting up an exit exam for our degree program. A big comprehensive bugger that would "certify" our graduates in a measureable way and in particular specific skills. (This is in a scientific/technical field, by the way, so such skills are easy to define.)
Before all of you who are still students gasp in horror, remember the long-term advantages this would provide: first, you know in detail exactly what you need to know as a senior to leave when you come in as a freshman. You can use that knowledge to study more efficiently during your four precious years. (Indeed, some bright student entrepreneur would no doubt think to correlate student exam performance with whether the student had professor X or Y, so you could surely use it to select your classes and teachers, too.) Second, your degree is far more valuable because it's backed up with specific, verifiable warranty in these grade-inflated days. Since every graduate has passed the exam, a firm or graduate school knows for sure and in detail what graduates of this particular program know. That's the kind of gold-plated guarantee of competence that makes employers feel all warm and fuzzy about you when you turn up for your job interview looking appallingly young, like you started shaving yesterday.
Third, and most importantly, it would give a way for employers to feed back to we faculty what they did and did not want their employees to know. We'd invite them to help design the exam, and they'd give us feedback from when they hired one of our graduates. In this way we'd learn exactly what skills were wanted out there in the Real World(TM), and we'd learn rapidly whether we were successfully teaching those skills.
What do you suppose happened? Do you think this proposal went anywhere? If you shook your head cynically, you are right. In fact, folks were a bit horrified by my suggestion that employers have some influence in the curriculum. Good grief, didn't I realize that knowledge flowed from us (the university) to them (mere tradesmen), not vice versa? Next I'd be saying the purpose of education was merely to make a man a more skilled worker deserving of a higher wage, and not to open his mind to the wonders of the Cosmos, enrich his soul, bring him closer to God, whatever...
I couldn't even find out what happened to our graduates -- who had hired them, what fields and types of positions they'd gone into. The data had never been collected, and no one was interested in doing so. Amazing. Blew my mind, I tell you. Any other business that spent so little effort finding out whether its "product" was meeting the needs of the market would tank. But luckily in modern America "education" is the new "good breeding" -- it can mean nothing at all in a practical, tangible sense, so long as it sets you apart in some ineffable way as a "quality" person.
A very interesting point, thank you. To be serious, the best material to protect against micrometeoroids and still be transparent is probably a verrry tricky question. Ideally you'd like some kind of microreactive armor, something that will absorb the kinetic energy and blow the tiny plasma cloud back outwards, protecting what's inside. Whether diamond is sensible or not I dunno: its ability to be cleaved by jewelers is perhaps less relevant than how it behaves under hypersonic shock (probably not particularly well, since the C-C bond network is very rigid), and when a small area of it is vaporized (probably better than average, since it conducts heat energy away rapidly, and because the disruption of each C-C bond will absorb a lot of energy).
It's hard to imagine anything that is very resistant to fracture and also transparent. The same qualities that give a material good tensile strength (namely, highly mobile bonding electrons) tend to make it opaque (since those mobile electrons can absord UV and visible light).
But we can always compensate by making it thicker, and just send nanobots out every few years to resurface the dome and fill in all the tiny pits caused by micrometeorites.
I think the problem is if "crowd control" is as simple as flipping a switch.
Er...but right now it's as simple as pulling a trigger.
Anything would be better than the annoyance of having to be at an airport for two hours, ditch most carry-on items, and submit to ridiculous searches and checks.
.45s right next to the boarding gate, and any passenger who wants can pick one up for the flight, dump it in a similar bin when he gets off the plane at the other end. We'll put in some .38s for the grandmas, too.
Christ, yes. I say let's dump the entire security/screening circus for passengers, and instead put a big bin of
I can't imagine anyone would even attempt to hijack a plane ever again.*
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* And just to pre-emptively answer any pussified whine that oh no some innocents might then be killed, or a plane depressurize from bullet holes once every half-century -- yup, all true, I admit it. Neanderthal that I am, I prefer to die like a man than stretch my throat like a sheep for the slaughterer's knife. And it's OK with me if folks who think otherwise continue to stand in line for the full cavity search before boarding Mommy Knows Best airlines.
We will never hear of their failures, because those are bad for politics and being secrets that are not subject to scrutiny, they never have to be revealed.
Hmmm...and so how is it you know enough about the many failures to be so cynical? Who revealed the deep dark secrets to you? Or when you say "we" do you really mean you stupid yobos, us, the great ignorant unwashed public, who aren't nearly as clever as youself and can't see the obvious?
Just like every person shot or bombed in Iraq is an 'insurgent' or 'terrorist' because the US has magic 'insurgent seeking munitions'.
I should think not. That would be logically impossible. But it seems you are hoping by the obvious falseness of this extreme to imply that the other extreme must be true: that none or very few of the people killed in Iraq by Americans are 'insurgents' or 'terrorists.' This is a deceptive form of argument sometimes called the Bifurcation or Black-and-White fallacy. In fact, clearly there are a range of possibilities for who's being killed by Americans in Iraq, from 0% bad guys to 100% bad guys. The fact that it's obviously not 100% bad guys -- because of the lack of those 'insurgent seeking munitions' -- doesn't really say a damn thing about what the real number is. It certainly doesn't say it's 0%, or near 0%. It could be 97% bad guys.
Most people believe the number is pretty high, say 90-95%, and they consider that a pretty acceptable real-life tough-situation performance, at least as compared to, say, the high-altitude bombing deployed by the Clinton Administration with European encouragement in Bosnia, or compared to the complete inaction observed in Rwanda during the 90s, and in Darfur right now, both of which techniques tend to turn in much crappier ratios of bad-guys-to-innocents killed. Nevertheless, I would certainly agree that folks might be terribly deluded, and it could be that the real number is 10-20%. It could be that 80% of the Iraqis killed by American troops are innocents on whom the crazed soldiers unload a few rounds by accident, or just to blow off steam. And it could be there exists a conspiracy to suppress this hideous truth involving the whole US Administration, most of Congress, and nearly all of the 140,000 ordinary men and women in uniform over there. Stranger things have happened. (Although not in my lifetime.)
[D]id you really think we were going to have cities under transparent domes?
Sure! Screw efficiency. As far as I'm concerned, the major reason to go to space -- an unbelievably extravagant thing to do anyway -- is for the glory and wonder. So that ordinary blokes can do double somersaults in the air, laughing madly, while standing under a blazing starry sky the likes of which only God and a handful of mortals have heretofore ever seen.
I say phooey on any glum whiny pussified harping on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Would a sane man buy a Ferarri and fail to spring for the leather seats because cloth is more efficient? Would he buy a gaming PC with the latest and greatest CPU/GPU combo and then use an old black-and-white TV for a monitor to save 0.5% of the total cost? Hell no!
I expect a big transparent dome...they can use CVD diamond or something to protect against the micrometeroids...and I expect 10-speaker super-duper-surround mind-blowing quadrophenic sound, too.
What's wrong with cultural ghettos? I mean, from the point of view of an iconoclast not typically living in one? I say they're a great way to avoid people I don't want to meet.
I mean, I like the idea that if, say, I go traveling in Normandy then everyone with a fairly shallow understanding of French history gleaned from a Let's Go guide will be standing in line to see Mt. San Michel, leaving the more subtle bits of the countryside relatively empty for me. And if I go to San Francisco, all the tourists will be choking the Haight or lining up to drive down Lombard Street, not taking up parking spots where I want to go.
You mean, like a site where people can get together and complain about how stupid, criminal and/or deluded everyone else is (including some of the other people on the site itself)? Sounds oddly familiar...
Perhaps opinions are more sharply divided when the books in question are fairly similar. Have you noticed that the fiercest arguments are between experts and over fine shades of meaning? Or between people who are lovers, or in the same family? It seems the more two people generally agree, the sharper are their disagreements over any remaining differences.
So I would not be surprised if people who generally like fantasy and sf are quite sharply divided over whether Tolkien or Pratchett is better. But show them a book by Martha Stewart on home decorating and their reaction will be pretty mild, either way, since it doesn't fall in their area of passion.
If so, this makes the tool much less useful, because it's based on the assumption that a person's taste in books smoothly and gradually changes from books he mosts likes to books he least likes. Probably real people don't have such smooth continuum of taste, it's probably much more jaggedy and chaotic.
One thing they probably need to do is figure out the local (time and space) variations in this rate. It's likely some areas of the Moon, and some times during its orbit, are more dangerous than others, because it's likely most of this dust is in a fairly close orbit around the Earth.
Once they know that, they know what advantages there may be in situating the base in one place versus another on the surface. In other words, the best way to avoid getting wet is not so much to have a great umbrella as to stay out of the rain in the first place. But they'll still need the titanium umbrella, nonetheless.
I dunno, I've always heard that changes in prices have a lot to do with inflation and deflation, so my impression is that the stock market is more of a lighter-than-air craft; in which case what we really need is data on its buoyancy.
Well...in fairness, you have to admit meteors often do seem to be going up, if the radiant is low and their track overhead.
Come to think of it, skyrockets go pretty fast on their way down, too.
The Russians launch over land all the time. But it's been said that there have been occasional problems with this.
Good point. Thanks!