That is a powerful claim. You did not provide anywhere near enough evidence to back it up.
I don't have time to document the claim, but I did provide a reference for those who are interested (which in turn has footnotes to studies backing up the claims). There has been plenty of research on the subject spanning at least several decades.
Regarding garbage men and electricians, to flip the argument around, would you suggest that you could create a system that would take your average garbage man or electrician and use incentives to make him/her a great teacher, programmer, or (to the point of this topic) doctor? And as for not needing 40 million electricians, do we not have that many because of incentives to do other work or is it simply a result of supply and demand?
Kohn (author of Punished by Rewards does note that the detrimental effect of incentives is more pronounced for tasks that are complex or require creativity, but that even in assembly line work incentives have a mixed record. Here is a link from his site that gives an overview http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm/. He mostly writes about education, but Punished by Rewards covers a much broader scope (which is why I referenced it).
You're right about the salaries. However, incentives don't work and are more likely to cause problems over the long term by repressing intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation. Among other things, this promotes the easiest path to obtaining a goal rather than the best path, promotes competitiveness over teamwork, and effectively promotes cheating.
As my math prof used to say, "The best way to encourage cheating on a test is as follows: start with a very large class. Announce that there is a test today and it will be graded on a curve. Pass out the test. Say you will be back in 30 minutes to collect the test and leave the room."
(I'm now thinking he was a prophet predicting the current financial mess.) An excellent book on this subject is Punished by Rewards.
And, just yesterday, a doctor I know said he finally decided to retire (well past normal retirement age), not because his skills weren't up to par, but because the pressure of being right 100% of the time was too draining -- it's something that is impossible to do, but when you aren't, a person dies. That's what I want in a doctor, someone who cares... and that's not something you can build through incentives.
So many comments and nobody thinks this was satire? Not one single funny mod? I was laughing through the entire post and can't imagine the parent was serious. I could be wrong, but this reads like a geek version of an SNL skit.
Yes, but administrating a group of scientists and grad students is nor the same as running a cabinet level agency. That is especially so if he ends up being alone and politically isolated. This kind of thing takes different skills.
Because we all know, of course, that there are no politics in decision making at research facilities and educational institutions (or the research journals that help advance such careers).
Who are the same people who wrap every statement with tons of parentheses because they can't be bothered to memorize order of precedence.
I understand precedence perfectly well, but I use parentheses because too many programmers don't. It's not that unusual overhear someone complaining that a rather complex condition isn't working, at which point I butt in and ask if they're sure they have the precedence right, followed almost immediately by, "The what?" Then a quick tutorial, "'False' is 0, 'true' is 1, 'and' is multiplication, 'or' is addition (where overflow counts as 1). Follow standard algebraic precedence. Now that you understand, put parentheses around it to make it immediately clear to anyone."
Of course, there's nothing like learning APL very early on to make one very fond of parentheses.
Our dog has been fascinated with mirrors. We have a mirror in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. When we go up or down the stairs, he will first look at us from the bottom of the stairs and then often runs over to the mirror to watch us in the reflection. The reverse happens, too. If he catches sight of us in the mirror, he will sometimes run over to (or up) the stairs to meet us. If he can make the association between a reflection and the actual object, I have a hard time believing that he would not know the reflection of himself is in fact himself, regardless of what the standard mirror tests would say about dogs.
It kind of pissed her off, but I said, "Hey, that's what cell phones are for!" Didn't fly so well though.
...
It's also why I think that people in olden times had less trouble memorizing stuff like the Illiad than we do. (Another part was that it rhymed, and could be set to music, which also greatly help -- have you ever thought about how many thousands of song lyrics are stuck in your head?)
Swim, bike, run. The swimmers are the geeks of the athletic world because swimming efficiently requires good analytical skills. The same can be said for cycling, especially if you build or repair your own bike, learn to true wheels, calculate gear ratios, etc. Then there's the planning for each transition and how to distribute your effort throughout (or on a really long course, how to eat while you're on the go [mostly on the bike]). And you might be surprised how many really overweight people are out racing in triathlons. It's very inspiring, even though I've always been underweight to average. I also used to have an aversion to the outdoors. I liked swimming because it was indoors. We have a treadmill, exercise bike, and trainer (to use a real bike) in the basement. Now I can't stand working out indoors (even when it gets well below freezing out). There also seem to be disproportionate numbers of engineers and IT/IS types in triathlon. Ditto for bicycle commuters.
Well, if you really want answers either ask the EFF (they are a 501(c)(3) and are required to file with the IRS annually and could probably send you an annual report as well). Or go to http://www.guidestar.org/pqShowGsReport.do?gotoNext=/reports/partners/guidestar/showDpLink.jsp&npoId=561625 sign up (for free) and look at their filings. Plus you can search for many other charities that may interest you. Pay for an account and get more detail (if you really need it that badly).
As an aside, I notice they have no legal expenses.
Maybe Balmer just needs his long lost relative Rosalea (Balmer) Hostetler to take up the cause and direct the development. Note the sign in the window which seems to be apropos (even better if she just changed the first word on the t-shirt to "Windows").
Keep your pr0n, browser (firefox -profile), vlc, in a hidden TrueCrypt volume. Let them search like idiots. Give them the password to the bogus volume when they force you into it.
Wouldn't it be more entertaining to select various types of (legal) pr0n to have ready as examples of current documents so that you could choose whichever might seem to be most offensive to the current customs officer? Keep a file window around sorted by descending date and have a script that would run (appropriately enough) touch just before arrival at customs against your selected documents/images.
I bet most children could be nurtured to be gifted musicians with the right support.
Children using the Suzuki Method would be a good example not only for your point, but the topic at hand. I'm amazed at what my 5 year old daughter can play (now starting her second year) and she was actually fairly far behind the others who started at the same time. Within the last month or two, she's passed most of them, and it's largely been a matter of getting her to understand the work ethic involved. We hear the same from all of the other parents.
I never said truth was not a defense, just that it is not an absolute defense. So, let's look at a more complex example.
Joe has been questioned in cases regarding seventeen murders over the last five years, including his wife and two young children, for which he has not been formally charged. Friends and colleagues report that they have seen him giving himself injections regularly and on several occasions have noticed morphine in his possession. Despite many visits to treatment centers, this behavior has not diminished. "It's so unfortunate," said his sister after returning home from Johnston Regional Treatment Center, "He was bright and sociable with a promising future, but dealing with these murders have taken their toll. Now he keeps to himself and often seems dazed."
I could probably go on, but that should suffice. Now, let's say that Joe is a diabetic doctor whose medical expertise has been useful in several murder cases over the years. His wife and children were murdered (perhaps in retaliation) while he was at work. His sister works in a treatment center and Joe regularly car pools her since they live within a mile of each other and the hospital where he works is right next to Johnston Regional Treatment Center. A better writer could use insinuation to portray truth in false light far more elegantly than I.
Isn't truth an absolute defense to an accusation of libel ?
Absolutely not. As an example, says John with derisive inflection, "Of course, George Bush is qualified to be president. After all, he has a high school diploma." While it is true that he has a high school diploma, he also has an MBA from Harvard. Of course, you could make the case that it is false because he's not qualified to be president, but for this example let's give John the benefit of the doubt.
The whole concept sounds fraudulent to me: pretend to sell stock you don't have so as to artificially depress its value so that you can profit without actually investing. It defeats the Market's purpose of promoting investment and makes things unecessarilt unstable.
This is a fairly common opinion, but actually the opposite is true. Short selling improves market efficiency by providing a corrective action. There are other factors not mentioned in GP that make short selling less abusive and more dangerous to the short seller. For example, shares may only be shorted if you can obtain shares to borrow. Those borrowed shares must be in a margin account, in street name by the brokerage (you cannot borrow shares that an individual holds as certificates), and a given share cannot be loaned more than once. Furthermore, the lender may call back the shares at any time and force you to pay the current price (or find someone else who will loan you replacement shares--this is handled by the broker). These rules prevents cornering of the market where the person loaning the shares can "create" more virtual shares than actually exist and then force the borrowers to pay any outrageous price they want to set. A scaled back example of this occurs in a short squeeze where so many shares are short that something prompts a number of lenders to call there shares back (or shorts panic because of unexpectedly high earnings that force margin calls) and suddenly a flood of shorts start buying to prevent mounting losses and the stock price moves up sharply.
It's actually easier for longs to manipulate prices higher than for shorts to manipulate them lower. Shorts give the market a chance to return balance attempted manipulation on the long side. Moreover, learning to short really hones investing skills because you must learn to be much more thorough in your analysis lest you set yourself up for some nasty losses because you didn't fully appreciate a company's potential or how nasty a short squeeze might be if you short into a company that already has a large percentage of the float (or trading volume) already shorted.
...so if it's a trui-color cartridge, unless you're printing a lot of "skin tones", the yellow section will tend to still be mostly full when the other ones have run out, or at least "low".
So, what you're saying is that tri-color cartridges are best for printing lots of porn?
There are also a number of good, inexpensive programs. One of my favorites is ChronoSync. I have several USB drives that I can plug in depending on which critical data I want to back up (including everything if I use the external hard drive or mount a particular Linux SMB share). There's a product called Ascent that I found worth $35 because it had some nice bells and whistles that Garmin's Mac GPS software lacked. At a bit higher price point I like some of the Omni Group products, too. Apparently they wrote some or all of the Garmin software, which I suspect would be better if Garmin were not controlling the development. But all of the above I found only because I had a specific need and did searches -- something that will likely happen only if you are a serious user of the OS, not just playing with it for 30 days.
And, of course, as a Java developer, Eclipse runs on the Mac and is FOSS, so what more could I ask?
By the very definition of half-life, the most intense radioactive waste is the stuff that breaks down the fastest.
Which reminds me of something regarding nuclear fusion. Some time back, shortly before the Princeton University TFTR tokamak reactor was to go live, we were taking a tour of the reactor. The graduate student showing us around mentioned that in preparing to handle Tritium (half life of 12.3 years), the reactor had to maintain negative pressure and they had to account for an insanely small amount of all the Tritium (sorry, can't remember the figure) because with such a short half-life it was incredibly radioactive. Moreover, because hydrogen is so abundant in every living thing, it would be readily integrated and thus wreak havoc in living tissue.
There was also an interesting story about why the flywheels (used to store energy to light the reaction) were mounted underground, in thick reinforced concrete on vertical shafts... think about what happens if the shaft is horizontal and a piece breaks of in a 45-degree upward trajectory.
If they are taking credit card numbers, they are way out of compliance with PCI standards. Complain to Visa and MasterCard, see if you can find out who their PCI auditors are and complain to them. Since they're a public company, contact their SOX auditors and complain, too (my nit with SOX auditors is they seem to be great at finding "issues" that are inconsequential, so I have to wonder whether they're even capable of noticing such glaring problems as this).
Harry McCracken has been an editor at several publications for quite some time. I was a freelance writer in the mid-80s to early 90s and was regularly took assignments from him. I was once assigned to review a new software package that was in late beta and was concerned that the review would turn out negative, but I was still dealing with a beta version. I wanted to hold until the release version, but deadlines and schedules being what they are in the publishing business that wasn't an option. Harry said maintaining integrity was important, that I should point out the problems and we would note that it was still in beta (I actually liked the design, but the bugs made it too unreliable for serious work). While things can change in nearly two decades, this fits the character of Harry McCracken as I knew him.
Slashdot Mirror
However, incentives don't work
That is a powerful claim. You did not provide anywhere near enough evidence to back it up.
I don't have time to document the claim, but I did provide a reference for those who are interested (which in turn has footnotes to studies backing up the claims). There has been plenty of research on the subject spanning at least several decades.
Regarding garbage men and electricians, to flip the argument around, would you suggest that you could create a system that would take your average garbage man or electrician and use incentives to make him/her a great teacher, programmer, or (to the point of this topic) doctor? And as for not needing 40 million electricians, do we not have that many because of incentives to do other work or is it simply a result of supply and demand?
Kohn (author of Punished by Rewards does note that the detrimental effect of incentives is more pronounced for tasks that are complex or require creativity, but that even in assembly line work incentives have a mixed record. Here is a link from his site that gives an overview http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm/. He mostly writes about education, but Punished by Rewards covers a much broader scope (which is why I referenced it).
As my math prof used to say, "The best way to encourage cheating on a test is as follows: start with a very large class. Announce that there is a test today and it will be graded on a curve. Pass out the test. Say you will be back in 30 minutes to collect the test and leave the room."
(I'm now thinking he was a prophet predicting the current financial mess.) An excellent book on this subject is Punished by Rewards .
And, just yesterday, a doctor I know said he finally decided to retire (well past normal retirement age), not because his skills weren't up to par, but because the pressure of being right 100% of the time was too draining -- it's something that is impossible to do, but when you aren't, a person dies. That's what I want in a doctor, someone who cares... and that's not something you can build through incentives.
So many comments and nobody thinks this was satire? Not one single funny mod? I was laughing through the entire post and can't imagine the parent was serious. I could be wrong, but this reads like a geek version of an SNL skit.
Yes, but administrating a group of scientists and grad students is nor the same as running a cabinet level agency. That is especially so if he ends up being alone and politically isolated. This kind of thing takes different skills.
Because we all know, of course, that there are no politics in decision making at research facilities and educational institutions (or the research journals that help advance such careers).
Who are the same people who wrap every statement with tons of parentheses because they can't be bothered to memorize order of precedence.
I understand precedence perfectly well, but I use parentheses because too many programmers don't. It's not that unusual overhear someone complaining that a rather complex condition isn't working, at which point I butt in and ask if they're sure they have the precedence right, followed almost immediately by, "The what?" Then a quick tutorial, "'False' is 0, 'true' is 1, 'and' is multiplication, 'or' is addition (where overflow counts as 1). Follow standard algebraic precedence. Now that you understand, put parentheses around it to make it immediately clear to anyone."
Of course, there's nothing like learning APL very early on to make one very fond of parentheses.
Our dog has been fascinated with mirrors. We have a mirror in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. When we go up or down the stairs, he will first look at us from the bottom of the stairs and then often runs over to the mirror to watch us in the reflection. The reverse happens, too. If he catches sight of us in the mirror, he will sometimes run over to (or up) the stairs to meet us. If he can make the association between a reflection and the actual object, I have a hard time believing that he would not know the reflection of himself is in fact himself, regardless of what the standard mirror tests would say about dogs.
It kind of pissed her off, but I said, "Hey, that's what cell phones are for!" Didn't fly so well though.
...
It's also why I think that people in olden times had less trouble memorizing stuff like the Illiad than we do. (Another part was that it rhymed, and could be set to music, which also greatly help -- have you ever thought about how many thousands of song lyrics are stuck in your head?)
Interjections show excitement or emotion...
Swim, bike, run. The swimmers are the geeks of the athletic world because swimming efficiently requires good analytical skills. The same can be said for cycling, especially if you build or repair your own bike, learn to true wheels, calculate gear ratios, etc. Then there's the planning for each transition and how to distribute your effort throughout (or on a really long course, how to eat while you're on the go [mostly on the bike]). And you might be surprised how many really overweight people are out racing in triathlons. It's very inspiring, even though I've always been underweight to average. I also used to have an aversion to the outdoors. I liked swimming because it was indoors. We have a treadmill, exercise bike, and trainer (to use a real bike) in the basement. Now I can't stand working out indoors (even when it gets well below freezing out). There also seem to be disproportionate numbers of engineers and IT/IS types in triathlon. Ditto for bicycle commuters.
As an aside, I notice they have no legal expenses.
No, it's Colonel Angus.
Maybe Balmer just needs his long lost relative Rosalea (Balmer) Hostetler to take up the cause and direct the development. Note the sign in the window which seems to be apropos (even better if she just changed the first word on the t-shirt to "Windows").
Wouldn't it be more entertaining to select various types of (legal) pr0n to have ready as examples of current documents so that you could choose whichever might seem to be most offensive to the current customs officer? Keep a file window around sorted by descending date and have a script that would run (appropriately enough) touch just before arrival at customs against your selected documents/images.
Children using the Suzuki Method would be a good example not only for your point, but the topic at hand. I'm amazed at what my 5 year old daughter can play (now starting her second year) and she was actually fairly far behind the others who started at the same time. Within the last month or two, she's passed most of them, and it's largely been a matter of getting her to understand the work ethic involved. We hear the same from all of the other parents.
Joe has been questioned in cases regarding seventeen murders over the last five years, including his wife and two young children, for which he has not been formally charged. Friends and colleagues report that they have seen him giving himself injections regularly and on several occasions have noticed morphine in his possession. Despite many visits to treatment centers, this behavior has not diminished. "It's so unfortunate," said his sister after returning home from Johnston Regional Treatment Center, "He was bright and sociable with a promising future, but dealing with these murders have taken their toll. Now he keeps to himself and often seems dazed."
I could probably go on, but that should suffice. Now, let's say that Joe is a diabetic doctor whose medical expertise has been useful in several murder cases over the years. His wife and children were murdered (perhaps in retaliation) while he was at work. His sister works in a treatment center and Joe regularly car pools her since they live within a mile of each other and the hospital where he works is right next to Johnston Regional Treatment Center. A better writer could use insinuation to portray truth in false light far more elegantly than I.
Absolutely not. As an example, says John with derisive inflection, "Of course, George Bush is qualified to be president. After all, he has a high school diploma." While it is true that he has a high school diploma, he also has an MBA from Harvard. Of course, you could make the case that it is false because he's not qualified to be president, but for this example let's give John the benefit of the doubt.
No, he was Canned By Someone else.
This is a fairly common opinion, but actually the opposite is true. Short selling improves market efficiency by providing a corrective action. There are other factors not mentioned in GP that make short selling less abusive and more dangerous to the short seller. For example, shares may only be shorted if you can obtain shares to borrow. Those borrowed shares must be in a margin account, in street name by the brokerage (you cannot borrow shares that an individual holds as certificates), and a given share cannot be loaned more than once. Furthermore, the lender may call back the shares at any time and force you to pay the current price (or find someone else who will loan you replacement shares--this is handled by the broker). These rules prevents cornering of the market where the person loaning the shares can "create" more virtual shares than actually exist and then force the borrowers to pay any outrageous price they want to set. A scaled back example of this occurs in a short squeeze where so many shares are short that something prompts a number of lenders to call there shares back (or shorts panic because of unexpectedly high earnings that force margin calls) and suddenly a flood of shorts start buying to prevent mounting losses and the stock price moves up sharply.
It's actually easier for longs to manipulate prices higher than for shorts to manipulate them lower. Shorts give the market a chance to return balance attempted manipulation on the long side. Moreover, learning to short really hones investing skills because you must learn to be much more thorough in your analysis lest you set yourself up for some nasty losses because you didn't fully appreciate a company's potential or how nasty a short squeeze might be if you short into a company that already has a large percentage of the float (or trading volume) already shorted.
You mean like these http://www.rackable.com/solutions/dcpower.htm?
Great idea, because if it's portable we can make it start suing the *IAAs! That'll teach 'em.
So, what you're saying is that tri-color cartridges are best for printing lots of porn?
And, of course, as a Java developer, Eclipse runs on the Mac and is FOSS, so what more could I ask?
Which reminds me of something regarding nuclear fusion. Some time back, shortly before the Princeton University TFTR tokamak reactor was to go live, we were taking a tour of the reactor. The graduate student showing us around mentioned that in preparing to handle Tritium (half life of 12.3 years), the reactor had to maintain negative pressure and they had to account for an insanely small amount of all the Tritium (sorry, can't remember the figure) because with such a short half-life it was incredibly radioactive. Moreover, because hydrogen is so abundant in every living thing, it would be readily integrated and thus wreak havoc in living tissue.
There was also an interesting story about why the flywheels (used to store energy to light the reaction) were mounted underground, in thick reinforced concrete on vertical shafts... think about what happens if the shaft is horizontal and a piece breaks of in a 45-degree upward trajectory.
Just in time for a born again Christian to be reincarnated in a born again universe?
If they are taking credit card numbers, they are way out of compliance with PCI standards. Complain to Visa and MasterCard, see if you can find out who their PCI auditors are and complain to them. Since they're a public company, contact their SOX auditors and complain, too (my nit with SOX auditors is they seem to be great at finding "issues" that are inconsequential, so I have to wonder whether they're even capable of noticing such glaring problems as this).
Harry McCracken has been an editor at several publications for quite some time. I was a freelance writer in the mid-80s to early 90s and was regularly took assignments from him. I was once assigned to review a new software package that was in late beta and was concerned that the review would turn out negative, but I was still dealing with a beta version. I wanted to hold until the release version, but deadlines and schedules being what they are in the publishing business that wasn't an option. Harry said maintaining integrity was important, that I should point out the problems and we would note that it was still in beta (I actually liked the design, but the bugs made it too unreliable for serious work). While things can change in nearly two decades, this fits the character of Harry McCracken as I knew him.