Perhaps there were no ill health effects from Three Mile Island. The language of the study is a little odd, though;
In the relative risk modeling, there was a significant effect for all lymphatic and hematopoietic tissue in males in relation to natural background exposure (p = 0.04). However, no trend was noted. We found a significant linear trend for female breast cancer risk in relation to increasing levels of TMI-related likely -exposure (p = 0.02). Although such a relationship has been noted in other investigations, emissions from the TMI incident were significantly lower than in other documented studies. Therefore, it is unlikely that this observed increase is related to radiation exposure on the day of the accident.
Thanks for the heads up regarding no significant radioactivity from the shuttle.
In addition to having a mediocre grasp of psychology, this guy has a less than mediocre grasp of the effects of radiation on life.
i.e. If it's just the sun and its solar radiation, if I happen to live in Denver instead of living in Washington, and have five times the background radiation, that's all right, because nobody's doing that.
There are a few probelms with this. First of all, low level gamma rays and alpha particles aren't tremendously harmful to humans since our bodies have time to repair. Background levels of radiation have actually been shown to increase the longevity of rodents slightly (I don't know the mecheanism.)It's cases like three mile island where there's more intense radiation released over a breif period of time where the damage is greater than the human body can repair.
Also, the fact that the incident at Three Mile Island was covered up makes people edgier. If people arn't given full information, it's not surprising that they're going to be suspicious/paranoid. And the gov. is notorious for censoring data related to radioactive disasters. It's like how they told people "Don't touch remains from the shuttle" after the recent disaster with Columbia but didn't warn them that it was because they could have been contaminated by radioactivity.
Furthermore, his notion that 'there are no dead bodies' is a bit odd. Chernobyl had plenty, but it's hard to attribute deaths directly to radiation even if radiation is a contributing factor and even if its presence is known. Kidnof like how lawn pesticides cause cancer, but aren't typically listed as a 'cause of death' on the coroner's report.
Likewise, he says that nuclear power plants can't explode. They may not explode like a nuclear weapon does, but the runaway nuclear reaction at Chernobyl was enough to literally blow the top of the reactor a few feet up. When the several ton concrete slab crashed down into the main core, it sent up a dust cloud that could be detected around the world.
Furthermore, his logic sounds similar to the logic of those in charge of the shuttle program shortly before the destruction of challenger. Cracks in the turbothruster fans 1/3rd of what it would take to break the fan does not equate to a 'saftey factor' of any kind. If your machines are operating outside your expected paramaters, that means you did somthing wrong and if you continue, worse things will happen.
Finally, we have no effective means of dealing with nuclear waste except for leaving it alone for hundreds of generations and hoping that noone and nothing disturbs it. The ethical diellema of leaving these problems for future generations while enjoying the benefits in our own age are real enough.
Nuclear power is a good idea, but this guy seems to be doing more to try and pacify people and insult the opposition than to address the actual issues.
Did you ever notice how psycologists usually have screwed up kids? Maybe we should take some time to examine their 'psychopathologies.'
I saw that show too. It seemed amazingly accurate, considering how off many of those shows can be. I remember it had those remote car unlockers too, with the horns and the flashing lights and the unlocking and the remoteness and all that.
Well, yeah. I wasn't saying that external motivation was never important. I was defending my original point; i.e. the importance of instilling internal motivation for success and why simply paying kids to learn is not a good strategy. It's too direct a reward and focuses the child on external motivation to the _exclusion_ of internal motivation. There have been psychological studies done where increasing external, tangible rewards to high levels, then removing it kills internal motivation.
If that's true, then what's a "work ethic" and why do capitalist societies seem to think it's so important.
A huge amount of Management Theory (and it's shadow twin, sociology) talks about motivation/extraction of labor.
What it boils down to is; if you pay someone to do work, you're not guarenteed that they'll do a good job of it if they aren't monitored and punished/rewarded based on performance. This monitoring is costly and often difficult to enforce. So you favor methods of management which get people to critique and improve their own work rather than trying to force them through the processes via an adversarial layer of management. And you promote those who internalize these attitudes to higher paying management positions.
The same applies to schoolwork. If you really want to teach the kids, you need to get them to learn even when they're not being materially rewarded.
Scientists announced recently that the rock found on Mars, nicknamed "Bounce," was of a breed of rock similar to the pet rocks popular in the sixties.
Pet rocks are the primitive ancestors of modern pseudo-pets such as tamagotchi and Aibo.
This has led some scientists to suggest that the curious human habit of creating emotional attachments to purposeless inanimate objects may actually be extraterrestrial in origin.
Math is like oat bran. The reason that it's good for you is that it tastes bad.
Seriously, though, why do we even teach geometrical proofs. It seems like teacher teach math 'for its own sake' rather than teaching it like a useful language which can aid in work and communication (with a computer).
Ask a kid to solve a complex problem. Let them think about it. Then teach them the math. And make sure to review periodically, because as someone mentioned, if you miss one step suddenly you're screwed and can't go on. I don't know any other subject quite so rigid in that way.
I never really thought of myself as bad at maths (though I have an entirely legitamate hatred for geometric proofs, which seem useless). I'm good at logic games like chess and so forth. But I always had a hell of a time with the mathmatical notation. If you write somthing out in sentence form with a picture or two, I can understand the concept. But when folks start into using greek letters, I get lost. Math texts rarely seem to make enough effort to teach and reinforce this vocabulary.
Thanks for the call to action! Too often we're given news here without clear instructions on how we can act politically to help solve the problem. I'm sure the extra link will help boost reader response. If polititians are 'slashdotted', it really could earn this form a small bit of political power. Especially considering how rarely the public voices their concerns on most technical issues. It's this feeling of liscense on the part of legislators which leads them to do whatever lobbyists tell them to.
... Slashdot is normally the home of the outliers on the political curve. You have a lot of libertarians. There are some very conservative folks, in the economic sense. You also have folks who are better defined as anarchist. i.e. they believe in questioning any unfair power structure and working to dismantle it if they consider it unjustified or dangerous.
Besides, the government doesn't want to do anything which would destroy Microsoft since it's an American corporation exporting overseas, and important to our economy. Even the most hostile against microsoft only wanted to change their tactics, not destroy them.
There's a lot of talk about supply and demand of goods, but little about the effects of supply and demand on labor.
Offshoring isn't just about reducing the cost of labor by going where it's cheaper. Many companies deliberatly have excess productive capacity now, spread across several countries. So if one country's or one plant's labor market begins to rise in cost, or irritating environmental regulations come into play, the company can shift to a different market. The effect is that the supply of labor is constantly greater than the demand, and past tactics such as striking or minimum wage laws are no longer effective in reducing a fall in wages.
In countries like China, there is a tremendous gap between rich and poor and the tools that have been used to narrow that gap in the United States are being actively fought against through things like offshoring and the WTO which seek to limit the soveriegnty of nations.
The problem with a huge gap between rich and poor is twofold, outside of the obvious material issues;
First, the gap gives a huge advantage to wealthy individuals in representing their political interests. Freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns the press.
Second, an educated populace is required for a truly representative democracy. A democracy where people don't know what they're voting for serves no purpose. The long term effect of this new competition is to discourage schooling funded by public money and by disinterested parties.Educating janitors so they have a high school education makes sense in a democracy, but not in a competitive free market. Intense competition gives an advantage to those societies which don't give kids too much more education than is required for them to do their jobs.
Pearl herself has had fits and starts, as a second-generation prototype suffering from the natural turnover in the project
Guy #1: what happened? Guy#2: she hit a bump in the rug and turned over Guy #1: naturally
Considering this thing doesn't manipulate it's environment or leave the house, why does it have to be mobile? Just put video cameras up around the residence and have it hooked into a central monitoring system.
Basically the article says the thing doesn't do anything interesting yet and won't for 10 years. What's the story?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps there were no ill health effects from Three Mile Island. The language of the study is a little odd, though;
In the relative risk modeling, there was a significant effect for all lymphatic and hematopoietic tissue in males in relation to natural background exposure (p = 0.04). However, no trend was noted. We found a significant linear trend for female breast cancer risk in relation to increasing levels of TMI-related likely -exposure (p = 0.02). Although such a relationship has been noted in other investigations, emissions from the TMI incident were significantly lower than in other documented studies. Therefore, it is unlikely that this observed increase is related to radiation exposure on the day of the accident.
Thanks for the heads up regarding no significant radioactivity from the shuttle.
I agree, but it seems like the article is about better documentation rather than actual suggestions for software.
Anything that helps with the particulars of hardware configuration would help me.
In addition to having a mediocre grasp of psychology, this guy has a less than mediocre grasp of the effects of radiation on life.
i.e.
If it's just the sun and its solar radiation, if I happen to live in Denver instead of living in Washington, and have five times the background radiation, that's all right, because nobody's doing that.
There are a few probelms with this. First of all, low level gamma rays and alpha particles aren't tremendously harmful to humans since our bodies have time to repair. Background levels of radiation have actually been shown to increase the longevity of rodents slightly (I don't know the mecheanism.)It's cases like three mile island where there's more intense radiation released over a breif period of time where the damage is greater than the human body can repair.
Also, the fact that the incident at Three Mile Island was covered up makes people edgier.
If people arn't given full information, it's not surprising that they're going to be suspicious/paranoid. And the gov. is notorious for censoring data related to radioactive disasters. It's like how they told people "Don't touch remains from the shuttle" after the recent disaster with Columbia but didn't warn them that it was because they could have been contaminated by radioactivity.
Furthermore, his notion that 'there are no dead bodies' is a bit odd. Chernobyl had plenty, but it's hard to attribute deaths directly to radiation even if radiation is a contributing factor and even if its presence is known. Kidnof like how lawn pesticides cause cancer, but aren't typically listed as a 'cause of death' on the coroner's report.
Likewise, he says that nuclear power plants can't explode. They may not explode like a nuclear weapon does, but the runaway nuclear reaction at Chernobyl was enough to literally blow the top of the reactor a few feet up. When the several ton concrete slab crashed down into the main core, it sent up a dust cloud that could be detected around the world.
Furthermore, his logic sounds similar to the logic of those in charge of the shuttle program shortly before the destruction of challenger. Cracks in the turbothruster fans 1/3rd of what it would take to break the fan does not equate to a 'saftey factor' of any kind. If your machines are operating outside your expected paramaters, that means you did somthing wrong and if you continue, worse things will happen.
Finally, we have no effective means of dealing with nuclear waste except for leaving it alone for hundreds of generations and hoping that noone and nothing disturbs it. The ethical diellema of leaving these problems for future generations while enjoying the benefits in our own age are real enough.
Nuclear power is a good idea, but this guy seems to be doing more to try and pacify people and insult the opposition than to address the actual issues.
Did you ever notice how psycologists usually have screwed up kids? Maybe we should take some time to examine their 'psychopathologies.'
Sierra club was a pretty solid organization, but I heard some environmentalists were kindof trying to hijack it.
Personally, I just stick to volunteering at my local arboretum.
I saw that show too. It seemed amazingly accurate, considering how off many of those shows can be. I remember it had those remote car unlockers too, with the horns and the flashing lights and the unlocking and the remoteness and all that.
Me, I hate people with no senses of humor. Especially when they're too lazy to look things up. And post anonymously. And use acronyms.
c k. htm
but it was 1975 apparently.
Pet Rocks were a 1975 fad originated in California by salesman, Gary Dahl.
http://www.virtualpet.com/vp/farm/petrock/petro
Well, yeah. I wasn't saying that external motivation was never important. I was defending my original point; i.e. the importance of instilling internal motivation for success and why simply paying kids to learn is not a good strategy. It's too direct a reward and focuses the child on external motivation to the _exclusion_ of internal motivation. There have been psychological studies done where increasing external, tangible rewards to high levels, then removing it kills internal motivation.
If that's true, then what's a "work ethic" and why do capitalist societies seem to think it's so important.
A huge amount of Management Theory (and it's shadow twin, sociology) talks about motivation/extraction of labor.
What it boils down to is; if you pay someone to do work, you're not guarenteed that they'll do a good job of it if they aren't monitored and punished/rewarded based on performance. This monitoring is costly and often difficult to enforce. So you favor methods of management which get people to critique and improve their own work rather than trying to force them through the processes via an adversarial layer of management. And you promote those who internalize these attitudes to higher paying management positions.
The same applies to schoolwork. If you really want to teach the kids, you need to get them to learn even when they're not being materially rewarded.
Scientists announced recently that the rock found on Mars, nicknamed "Bounce," was of a breed of rock similar to the pet rocks popular in the sixties.
Pet rocks are the primitive ancestors of modern pseudo-pets such as tamagotchi and Aibo.
This has led some scientists to suggest that the curious human habit of creating emotional attachments to purposeless inanimate objects may actually be extraterrestrial in origin.
Math is like oat bran. The reason that it's good for you is that it tastes bad.
Seriously, though, why do we even teach geometrical proofs. It seems like teacher teach math 'for its own sake' rather than teaching it like a useful language which can aid in work and communication (with a computer).
Ask a kid to solve a complex problem. Let them think about it. Then teach them the math. And make sure to review periodically, because as someone mentioned, if you miss one step suddenly you're screwed and can't go on. I don't know any other subject quite so rigid in that way.
Because this kind of reinforcement is an external motivator and internal motivators are better (and cheaper). Of course, right now we've got didley
I agree with this completly.
I never really thought of myself as bad at maths (though I have an entirely legitamate hatred for geometric proofs, which seem useless). I'm good at logic games like chess and so forth. But I always had a hell of a time with the mathmatical notation. If you write somthing out in sentence form with a picture or two, I can understand the concept. But when folks start into using greek letters, I get lost. Math texts rarely seem to make enough effort to teach and reinforce this vocabulary.
To whomever submitted this;
Thanks for the call to action! Too often we're given news here without clear instructions on how we can act politically to help solve the problem. I'm sure the extra link will help boost reader response. If polititians are 'slashdotted', it really could earn this form a small bit of political power. Especially considering how rarely the public voices their concerns on most technical issues. It's this feeling of liscense on the part of legislators which leads them to do whatever lobbyists tell them to.
Don't let the other responder fool you. It's yeast extract and salty alright. And it tastes just like you think yeast extract would taste like.
... Slashdot is normally the home of the outliers on the political curve. You have a lot of libertarians. There are some very conservative folks, in the economic sense. You also have folks who are better defined as anarchist. i.e. they believe in questioning any unfair power structure and working to dismantle it if they consider it unjustified or dangerous.
Besides, the government doesn't want to do anything which would destroy Microsoft since it's an American corporation exporting overseas, and important to our economy. Even the most hostile against microsoft only wanted to change their tactics, not destroy them.
... he got the car. But the question remains... how the hell is he planning to integrate it into windows.
Hm? I'm confused. Are you sure you meant to reply to my post?
I didn't win again. *sigh*
Who do I have to censor to get one of these things...?!
Think I'll go to the mall today and harrass kids with political t-shirts.
The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of Anonymous Cowards and Cowboy Neil. - Thomas Jefferson
I like GURPS. Much more flexible than D&D, though a bit more complex.
Not everybody wants to play the role of a whiny, neurotic, tortured Gothic denizen of the night.
No, you go to Slashdot for that.
Of course, that's not really fair of me.
You're probably not gothic.
There's a lot of talk about supply and demand of goods, but little about the effects of supply and demand on labor.
Offshoring isn't just about reducing the cost of labor by going where it's cheaper. Many companies deliberatly have excess productive capacity now, spread across several countries. So if one country's or one plant's labor market begins to rise in cost, or irritating environmental regulations come into play, the company can shift to a different market. The effect is that the supply of labor is constantly greater than the demand, and past tactics such as striking or minimum wage laws are no longer effective in reducing a fall in wages.
In countries like China, there is a tremendous gap between rich and poor and the tools that have been used to narrow that gap in the United States are being actively fought against through things like offshoring and the WTO which seek to limit the soveriegnty of nations.
The problem with a huge gap between rich and poor is twofold, outside of the obvious material issues;
First, the gap gives a huge advantage to wealthy individuals in representing their political interests. Freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns the press.
Second, an educated populace is required for a truly representative democracy. A democracy where people don't know what they're voting for serves no purpose. The long term effect of this new competition is to discourage schooling funded by public money and by disinterested parties.Educating janitors so they have a high school education makes sense in a democracy, but not in a competitive free market. Intense competition gives an advantage to those societies which don't give kids too much more education than is required for them to do their jobs.
Can you find one of Mickey Mouse before he was invented? I really want to piss off Disney for extending the copyright to keep their damn rodent.
It's retractable electroshock probe.
Didn't you watch star wars?
Pearl herself has had fits and starts, as a second-generation prototype suffering from the natural turnover in the project
Guy #1: what happened?
Guy#2: she hit a bump in the rug and turned over
Guy #1: naturally
Considering this thing doesn't manipulate it's environment or leave the house, why does it have to be mobile? Just put video cameras up around the residence and have it hooked into a central monitoring system.
Basically the article says the thing doesn't do anything interesting yet and won't for 10 years. What's the story?