Let's face it, FaceBook can't provide every shred of information about me. Sure they know who my friends are, but Google will be able to layer on top of that things from the location of my cellphone (android), my search history (google.com), what books and movies I've bought (google play), websites I've visited (adwords), and even the contents of my e-mail (gmail) and files (Google drive). Since my primary goal is to only see relevant ads I'm going with Google+ and I assume advertisers will push me in that direction anyway once they realize how effective Google ads can be.
The solution is not to allow my genes to be patented but to have the government fund basic research on what genes do and let the private sector slug it out. Many companies can then produce tests that are cheaper, faster, and better. That way they would compete on price and quality, not on being first to gain a monopoly position.
We have lots of public infrastructure, like roads, that companies like UPS and FedEx share. It keeps costs low. Imagine if UPS could get exclusive access to Interstate 80 while FedEx got I-75. Not an efficient system if your goal is serving society even it FedEx and UPS funded their individual highways.
The computers that they are messing with (stuxnet) control centrifuges in enrichment facilities, not in a reactor and flame messes with nothing - it is just an intelligence gathering device as far as I can tell. . Reactors can melt down, enrichment plants don't. You may have a release of radioactivity as a result but when they test their first bomb that radioactivity would be released anyway.
Also, nothing prevents you from "doing" creative things with your kids outside of school. If you want to teach your kids cool creative things - spend some time with them doing just that, don't try to delegate parenting to public education systems... slackers.
My kids are in school from 9 to 4 after which I need to feed them, teach them a foreign language while they are still young enough to pick up the accent easily, and provide extra-curricular activities like piano piano and chess, and make sure they get some exercise. Bedtime is 8:30. If you want me to have time to do science with my kids then you need to fund the schools well enough that they can do a decent job on things like music, gym, and foreign language in elementary schools and reallocate the time they waste preparing for and taking standardized tests so they have time to do those things effectively.
because most diseases seem to be caused by multiple rare mutations.
From a recent NY Times article
Though the cost of decoding an individual’s genome is fast approaching a mere $1,000, the difficulty of interpreting its mutations now seems much greater than before, raising doubts as to how soon genome sequencing will become a routine medical test. But Dr. Pritchard said personal genomics may soon be valuable in specific situations, like pediatric cases, cancer and the genetics of response to drugs.
Having the government stop funding based on publication rates won't fix the problem. As long as Universities retain and promote based on publications scientists will do what is good career wise.
What happens is that a scientist spends years and millions of dollars gathering data to answer question X. Lets say for example, can I increase the IQ of people by having them play WoW while doing multiplication problems. He finds that the answer is not what he had hoped. Nobody will publish his paper, but he has a family to support so he tries to "salvage" the data by looking at subsets. After testing the data against 100 different hypotheses he finds that he it supports the idea that teenage girls can increase their IQ that way, which is shocking and publishable. Of course, it is just an artifact of testing enough hypotheses against the data. He goes ahead and publishes. Unlikely that anyone will bother to replicate the study but now he can pay the mortgage and send Jr. to college.
To really make things better you need to require publication of negative results and score science based on methodology rather than just on whether results are surprising. If every researcher who was funded had a guarantee of result publication included in their grant whether the was positive or negative and the research was peer reviewed and was publicly scored not for how unexpected the result was but for how well the science was conducted that might solve the problem.
Not quite so straightforward an argument. They sued Zuckerberg without an NDA. They got a big settlement and who knows if they would have pulled it off without him.
The first applications will be price dependent. If the superconductor is really expensive (and I suspect it will be at least initially) then you need high value applications that use relatively little material (like MRI machines). While long distance electrical lines to wind farms in Kansas and solar power plants in the desert would be cool they probably won't be cost effective. Similarly, motors in cars: probably not tremendously cost effective, but I'd bet electrically powered military drones will use them in their motors.
Management clearly had nothing to do with the decline of the U.S. auto industry? Saying the problems that the auto industry has is the all the fault of unions is a bit like blaming Sarah Palin for the woes of the Republican party. She may have played a role, but I doubt she did the whole thing herself.
Unlike the American Bar Association http://www.americanbar.org/aba.html (whose Meta description tag begins "The American Bar Association provides law school accreditation,..") the AMA doesn't get to decide how many medical schools open or how many spots they have and even if they did that is not what limits the supply of doctors. Medical schools are making more doctors, but training doctors also requires residency slots which are created by individual hospitals, so increasing the output of medical schools is not enough.
According to the survey, the number of medical school enrollees grew from 16,488 in 2002 to 18,390 in 2009 to 20,281 in 2014, a 23% increase. That is augmented by a faster percentage growth in osteopathic student enrollment, from 3,079 in 2002 to 5,104 in 2009 to 6,271 in 2014, a 103% increase from 2001.
By 2018, the report says, medical school enrollment "is on track to reach the 30% targeted increase by 2018."
Increasing the number of doctors would require that hospitals create and the government fund more residency slots. Not likely in the fight over budget deficits in the short term, despite the long term good it would do for the country.
If you have a dedicated group of users that will volunteer like the people here are/., great. If you have prestige, deep pockets, and interns to moderate like the New York Times you can moderate yourself. However, I have a small site where I very occasionally post about small business valuation http://freevaluationsonline.com/blog and I had to shut off comments because I can't wade through 1,000s of spam bot comments and trolls to get a few real comments.
The authors complain that democracy never selects the best leader, but that is an impossibly high bar. People are imperfect. We never do anything perfectly and so why should selecting leaders be any better? The question is does democracy result in a better selection of leaders than the alternative imperfect systems set up by imperfect humans. The answer to that is usually, but not always, that it does.
I know that bad guys can't access servers that big companies and governments have secured against trojans and viruses so I have nothing to worry about when all my money is digital. Certainly the North Korean's hackers will leave us alone if it is digital.
Drinking wine instead of beer is correlated with living longer. I want to live longer, so I'll switch from wine to beer. The problem with that is that I've picked the wrong correlation. Wine drinkers are on average richer than beer drinkers and the rich live longer (maybe they get better nutrition and medical care). Staying with beer and using the money I save to pay for better health insurance may be a better strategy.
and put my child in an inner city school because they have an immersion program for a foreign language. This gives him a chance to learn while his brain is still primed to acquire language. Sure, I pay a price - they sent him home once with pages xeroxed from a book because they didn't have enough money for books for all of the kids (with a note asking me not to let him color on the pages because they couldn't really afford copies either) but he is ahead of where either of his two older brothers were at the same age (in an affluent suburban district). There is more about my choice here: http://moderatelyliberal.blogspot.com/2011/12/school-choice.html
In general the education establishment pays little attention to what they know works. There is plenty of evidence that later starts for high school, teaching language earlier, abolishing DARE, and feeding kids healthy, less processed foods would help and be inexpensive. Unfortunately the schools are aught in culture wars and battles over union rights.
a chance of being labeled a terrorist and being indefinitely detained in Guantanamo without trial or having my wife know all about my porn habit? I guess I'll take my chances with homeland security.
A related story on NPR today points out that as a patient you don't have access to the data collected in and about your own body. The story focuses on one man's attempt to see his own data. He's looking for someone with technical skills to help him get at the data. Seems to me that somebody on/. should be able to help. http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/jan/20/who-owns-data-inside-your-body/
The idea that complex things can not be measured is constantly thrown up by professionals who don't want to be measured unfairly or just don't want to be measured at all. However, doctors, teachers, and programmers can all have their output evaluated. I know that there is more to evaluating a doctor than survival rate and how often he remembers to wash hands between patients, but I know that hospitals that try to measure and improve doctors performance do a better job of helping patients.
Reviews by peers and management are a good place to start. Yes, that can devolve into a popularity contest or a blame game but good management can guard against that. When I ran a software company we'd have meeting where we reviewed and discussed sections of code as a learning tool as a small part of our QA process. The end result was better code and a more educated, engaged programming staff. When you combine subjective measures like these with easily quantifiable measures you can get a good idea of how competent a programmer is.
The real point is that 85% of scientist believe that science and religion are in conflict. Most scientists realize that even the most fundamentalist zealots concede gravity and maybe even heliocentrism.
The library's book collection is selected with care. Who will curate the collection of people? Nobody. Hence, it will be filled with self serving people looking for business leads from investment advisers to divorce lawyers and people who have little expertise but are convinced they know a lot about something. Can you imagine the uproar the first time a librarian tells someone that they are not qualified to discuss some subject?
When I owned a small hosting and software company and we were attacked the FBI could not have cared less. Their attitude was that it was highly unlikely they'd catch the culprits. Unfortunately, in my experience, you need to be a big business to get any attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's face it, FaceBook can't provide every shred of information about me. Sure they know who my friends are, but Google will be able to layer on top of that things from the location of my cellphone (android), my search history (google.com), what books and movies I've bought (google play), websites I've visited (adwords), and even the contents of my e-mail (gmail) and files (Google drive). Since my primary goal is to only see relevant ads I'm going with Google+ and I assume advertisers will push me in that direction anyway once they realize how effective Google ads can be.
The solution is not to allow my genes to be patented but to have the government fund basic research on what genes do and let the private sector slug it out. Many companies can then produce tests that are cheaper, faster, and better. That way they would compete on price and quality, not on being first to gain a monopoly position. We have lots of public infrastructure, like roads, that companies like UPS and FedEx share. It keeps costs low. Imagine if UPS could get exclusive access to Interstate 80 while FedEx got I-75. Not an efficient system if your goal is serving society even it FedEx and UPS funded their individual highways.
The computers that they are messing with (stuxnet) control centrifuges in enrichment facilities, not in a reactor and flame messes with nothing - it is just an intelligence gathering device as far as I can tell. . Reactors can melt down, enrichment plants don't. You may have a release of radioactivity as a result but when they test their first bomb that radioactivity would be released anyway.
It was open sourced and is available at http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu/ I plan to use it with my kids this summer.
Also, nothing prevents you from "doing" creative things with your kids outside of school. If you want to teach your kids cool creative things - spend some time with them doing just that, don't try to delegate parenting to public education systems... slackers.
My kids are in school from 9 to 4 after which I need to feed them, teach them a foreign language while they are still young enough to pick up the accent easily, and provide extra-curricular activities like piano piano and chess, and make sure they get some exercise. Bedtime is 8:30. If you want me to have time to do science with my kids then you need to fund the schools well enough that they can do a decent job on things like music, gym, and foreign language in elementary schools and reallocate the time they waste preparing for and taking standardized tests so they have time to do those things effectively.
From a recent NY Times article
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/science/many-rare-mutations-may-underpin-diseases.html
Having the government stop funding based on publication rates won't fix the problem. As long as Universities retain and promote based on publications scientists will do what is good career wise. What happens is that a scientist spends years and millions of dollars gathering data to answer question X. Lets say for example, can I increase the IQ of people by having them play WoW while doing multiplication problems. He finds that the answer is not what he had hoped. Nobody will publish his paper, but he has a family to support so he tries to "salvage" the data by looking at subsets. After testing the data against 100 different hypotheses he finds that he it supports the idea that teenage girls can increase their IQ that way, which is shocking and publishable. Of course, it is just an artifact of testing enough hypotheses against the data. He goes ahead and publishes. Unlikely that anyone will bother to replicate the study but now he can pay the mortgage and send Jr. to college. To really make things better you need to require publication of negative results and score science based on methodology rather than just on whether results are surprising. If every researcher who was funded had a guarantee of result publication included in their grant whether the was positive or negative and the research was peer reviewed and was publicly scored not for how unexpected the result was but for how well the science was conducted that might solve the problem.
Not quite so straightforward an argument. They sued Zuckerberg without an NDA. They got a big settlement and who knows if they would have pulled it off without him.
The first applications will be price dependent. If the superconductor is really expensive (and I suspect it will be at least initially) then you need high value applications that use relatively little material (like MRI machines). While long distance electrical lines to wind farms in Kansas and solar power plants in the desert would be cool they probably won't be cost effective. Similarly, motors in cars: probably not tremendously cost effective, but I'd bet electrically powered military drones will use them in their motors.
I beg to differ: http://teachthecontroversy.com/ Even Gallileo recanted.
Management clearly had nothing to do with the decline of the U.S. auto industry? Saying the problems that the auto industry has is the all the fault of unions is a bit like blaming Sarah Palin for the woes of the Republican party. She may have played a role, but I doubt she did the whole thing herself.
According to the survey, the number of medical school enrollees grew from 16,488 in 2002 to 18,390 in 2009 to 20,281 in 2014, a 23% increase. That is augmented by a faster percentage growth in osteopathic student enrollment, from 3,079 in 2002 to 5,104 in 2009 to 6,271 in 2014, a 103% increase from 2001. By 2018, the report says, medical school enrollment "is on track to reach the 30% targeted increase by 2018."
http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/PHY-250808/Increasing-US-Medical-School-Spots-Wont-Increase-Physician-Supply#%23
Increasing the number of doctors would require that hospitals create and the government fund more residency slots. Not likely in the fight over budget deficits in the short term, despite the long term good it would do for the country.
If you have a dedicated group of users that will volunteer like the people here are /., great. If you have prestige, deep pockets, and interns to moderate like the New York Times you can moderate yourself. However, I have a small site where I very occasionally post about small business valuation http://freevaluationsonline.com/blog and I had to shut off comments because I can't wade through 1,000s of spam bot comments and trolls to get a few real comments.
The authors complain that democracy never selects the best leader, but that is an impossibly high bar. People are imperfect. We never do anything perfectly and so why should selecting leaders be any better? The question is does democracy result in a better selection of leaders than the alternative imperfect systems set up by imperfect humans. The answer to that is usually, but not always, that it does.
I know that bad guys can't access servers that big companies and governments have secured against trojans and viruses so I have nothing to worry about when all my money is digital. Certainly the North Korean's hackers will leave us alone if it is digital.
Drinking wine instead of beer is correlated with living longer. I want to live longer, so I'll switch from wine to beer. The problem with that is that I've picked the wrong correlation. Wine drinkers are on average richer than beer drinkers and the rich live longer (maybe they get better nutrition and medical care). Staying with beer and using the money I save to pay for better health insurance may be a better strategy.
and put my child in an inner city school because they have an immersion program for a foreign language. This gives him a chance to learn while his brain is still primed to acquire language. Sure, I pay a price - they sent him home once with pages xeroxed from a book because they didn't have enough money for books for all of the kids (with a note asking me not to let him color on the pages because they couldn't really afford copies either) but he is ahead of where either of his two older brothers were at the same age (in an affluent suburban district). There is more about my choice here: http://moderatelyliberal.blogspot.com/2011/12/school-choice.html In general the education establishment pays little attention to what they know works. There is plenty of evidence that later starts for high school, teaching language earlier, abolishing DARE, and feeding kids healthy, less processed foods would help and be inexpensive. Unfortunately the schools are aught in culture wars and battles over union rights.
a chance of being labeled a terrorist and being indefinitely detained in Guantanamo without trial or having my wife know all about my porn habit? I guess I'll take my chances with homeland security.
A related story on NPR today points out that as a patient you don't have access to the data collected in and about your own body. The story focuses on one man's attempt to see his own data. He's looking for someone with technical skills to help him get at the data. Seems to me that somebody on /. should be able to help. http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/jan/20/who-owns-data-inside-your-body/
The idea that complex things can not be measured is constantly thrown up by professionals who don't want to be measured unfairly or just don't want to be measured at all. However, doctors, teachers, and programmers can all have their output evaluated. I know that there is more to evaluating a doctor than survival rate and how often he remembers to wash hands between patients, but I know that hospitals that try to measure and improve doctors performance do a better job of helping patients. Reviews by peers and management are a good place to start. Yes, that can devolve into a popularity contest or a blame game but good management can guard against that. When I ran a software company we'd have meeting where we reviewed and discussed sections of code as a learning tool as a small part of our QA process. The end result was better code and a more educated, engaged programming staff. When you combine subjective measures like these with easily quantifiable measures you can get a good idea of how competent a programmer is.
The real point is that 85% of scientist believe that science and religion are in conflict. Most scientists realize that even the most fundamentalist zealots concede gravity and maybe even heliocentrism.
There have been examples of transmission of disease during the Haj. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016344539090577U Christian missionaries have spread disease among native populations around the world.
The library's book collection is selected with care. Who will curate the collection of people? Nobody. Hence, it will be filled with self serving people looking for business leads from investment advisers to divorce lawyers and people who have little expertise but are convinced they know a lot about something. Can you imagine the uproar the first time a librarian tells someone that they are not qualified to discuss some subject?
It's a Japanese company so the level of compensation for executives is not as obscene as here in the U.S. http://cbr.sagepub.com/content/35/3/68.abstract. I fact they make about 1/3 of what executives here do http://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1355&context=harvard_olin&sei-redir=1http://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1355&context=harvard_olin&sei-redir=1#search="japanese+executive+compensation+vs+us"
When I owned a small hosting and software company and we were attacked the FBI could not have cared less. Their attitude was that it was highly unlikely they'd catch the culprits. Unfortunately, in my experience, you need to be a big business to get any attention.