Ghana were not the host nation this year, south africa is...
Presumably, that's intended as a response to this bit:
Note that since Ghana is #32, going to top 31 ranks excluding the host nation, plus the host nation regardless of rank, would have exactly the same effect this year.
I would have thought, from the focus on regions in GP, that it would be clear that the meaning was that the effect on the regional makeup, where Africa is taken as one region would be the same (as compared to the current system) in a top-32 arrangement (in which Ghana would be present, as #32) as in a top-31 [of FIFA ranked teams excluding the host] plus host nation arrangment (where Ghana would not be present, but South Africa, as the host, would, despite being farther down the FIFA rankings.)
Further, several people with the same general preference realize it with multiple monitors, so that maximizing one (or possibly even more) apps isn't inconsistent with having multiple apps visible at the same time.
Um, yes, it is inconsistent. At present, I have three visible web browser windows, four visible terminal windows, an e-mail client and two rows of icons across my two displays. To realize that with maximized windows, you'd need 9 monitors.
Um, no, it is not inconsistent. "[M]aximizing one (or possibly even more) apps" is not the same as "maximizing all apps".
Once a line length exceeds a certain distance, it becomes hard to move your focus directly to the next line of text. You have to scan the line in reverse, or re-read the start of the lines. This doesn't change whether the text is on paper or on screen.
Sure, but the trade-offs with other inefficiencies do change in between print and on-screen viewing. For one thing, your monitor size is fixed in both dimensions, so the choice to maximize or use a narrower display has consequences in how much text you can read before you are forced to do some physical manipulation; that can be a greater inconvenience than that associated with line breaks, especially if you are doing something else with the keyboard/mouse alongside reviewing the text (as might be the case with certain tasks in a two-monitor setup.)
Certainly, maximizing a browser window on a widescreen monitor might often be undesirable, but the characterization that doing so is always "failing" made upthread is clearly wrong.
Anyhow, I have never understood the need people have to maximize applications. I much prefer being able to work with multiple apps at the same time, cutting and pasting between them without any of them disappearing from view.
Some people, suprisingly enough, have different preferences and work-patterns than you. Further, several people with the same general preference realize it with multiple monitors, so that maximizing one (or possibly even more) apps isn't inconsistent with having multiple apps visible at the same time.
Except for the fact that the 'American Union' is actually one country.
It is one soveriegn state, but that's not necessarily the same as "one country" in the sense of a "nation" which can have a FIFA "national team". I know this, because the so-called American Union -- the United States of America -- as a soveriegn state has 4 FIFA "national" teams already, including the following "nations":
United States of America Puerto Rico U.S. Virgin Islands American Samoa
(This isn't as many as the UK, which has, I think, 9.)
No, Great Britain is an island, with three "national" teams in FIFA.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an internationally recognized soveriegn state (one common use of the word "country"), with, if I'm not missing any, 9 FIFA teams (four in EUFA, including the three from the island of Great Britain, and five in CONCACAF.)
But the process is very heavily weighted for European countries.
Actually, Europe is underrepresented and Asia (and, to a lesser extent -- one team per region -- Oceania and North/Central America) overrepresented in the 32-slots in the finals compared to the number of teams each region has in the top 32 in the FIFA rankings (this year, South America and Africa were numerically right on -- the South American teams in the final were exactly those in the top 32 in the rankings, as were the African countries except that the host country isn't in the top 32 and Egypt, which didn't make the finals, is.)
So, given that as long as you don't use rankings directly you are going to get slight variations from qualifying the top teams (justifying the one team overrepresentation in Oceania and North/Central America), and given that a slight favor to Asia in the interest of expanding interest in the region is probably intended (justifying the greater overrepresentation of Asia), I think the distribution of slots is sensible, but in any case it certainly doesn't favor Europe.
Because of the way qualifying is done in regional groups, you usually get some low ranking teams qualifying... If qualifying was entirely based on ability you'd typically only see european and south american teams at the finals.
Given the 32-team format for the finals, and assuming that "ability" is defined such that "Qualifying entirely based on ability" means "the top 32-ranked teams qualify to the finals", that's not particularly true.
Had that occurred this year, for instance, the differences in qualification from the actual cup would have been (+ = country that would qualify by rank but not in actual Cup, - = country that would not qualify by rank that is in actual Cup):
Japan - Korea DPR - Korea Republic - South Africa - Honduras - New Zealand - Denmark - Slovakia - Croatia + Russia + Egypt + Greece + Norway + Ukraine + Israel + Romania + Turkey +
There is a shift to Europe and the parts of West Asia bordering it (e.g., Turkey, Israel) and away from East Asia, but South American participation doesn't increase, and African participation doesn't decrease. You end up with 11/32 not from Europe or South America, instead of 14/32 with the existing Cup this year. Its a big shift away from East Asia, since that whole region would be gone, but its not much more in the way of European/South American dominance than already exists.
(Note that since Ghana is #32, going to top 31 ranks excluding the host nation, plus the host nation regardless of rank, would have exactly the same effect this year.)
Except for the ones that are landscaped, also for a reason.
Also, on-screen viewing is a different medium than print, and the degree to which what is optimal for the latter is also optimal for the former is quite limited.
it's hard to see how a double-blind study could even be designed in this area
Well, half of the double-blind part is trivial: the seedlings aren't going to know whether they are in the experimental group or the control group.
The other half isn't entirely impractical. Plant seeds in a number of sites with similar background RF levels, and mount visually-identical "transmitter devices" at each site. The people collecting growth data at the sites will not be informed which transmitter devices are actually transmitters adding significantly to the RF background, and which are not.
(Alternatively, you could pick sites with different RF backgrounds, and use active transmitters of different power levels at all sites so that, in combination with the background, you have groups of "baseline" and "high" background sites for the same effect.)
FTFA: "Finally, it's possible—likely, even—that the correlation between Toxo infection and World Cup success is a coincidence, or that it reflects some other common trait among successful soccer nations. Maybe it helps to have raw meat in your diet, and Toxo is just a side effect?"
Lots of diseases and parasites that flourish in the less-developed countries have been wiped out (or nearly so) in more-developed countries.
True, though this isn't particularly one of them, since it hasn't been "essentially wiped out" in more developed countries.
There are more less-developed countries in FIFA than there are developed countries.
So?
So the correlation should probably hold true for malaria and other parasites, as well as for things like education and poverty.
I'm not sure how you make the leap of logic here. Virtually every country in the world is in FIFA, but the ones that tend to win the most World Cups aren't particularly the least developed. In order from most to least, the countries that have won the World Cup at least once are: Brazil (5), Italy (4), Germany (3), Argentina (2) and Uruguay (2), England (1) and France (1)
All of them are in the top half in terms of GDP/capita in the world, and the ones in Europe are in the top 15% or so (varies by which ranking you look at; Italy falls a little out of that range in some.)
The US is top tier in FIFA rankings compared to China, India, Russia, the Islamic World.
Russia (#11) is ranked higher than the US (#14)
"the Islamic World" doesn't have a team, but one predominantly-Islamic country (Egypt) is ranked above the US (Egypt; #12).
OF course, FIFA rankings and FIFA World Cup qualifications aren't all that tightly linked; many of the countries (including Asian countries) that qualify for the WC do so over higher-ranked countries (North Korea, ranked #105, being a prime example this year.)
Except the point is that the much-ballyhooed-by-TEH-WORLD(tm) "World Cup" is just as inaccurate as the evil, evil, evil, rude, evil, evil, backwards, evil, not-at-all-like-Europe, evil, evil, hated, evil, evil, GAAAARGH WHY DO THEY NOT JUST DIE LIKE I HATE THEM TO, evil, evil, and just not nice United States's "World Series" (which is from the evil United States, meaning it is evil).
Except that its not.
The FIFA World Cup process includes teams from pretty much the whole world (there are few nations that don't aren't FIFA members, but not many.) Sure, most teams don't last past the the qualifiers, but that doesn't mean they aren't part of the process.
OTOH, the MLB "World" Series, even including the MLB regular season as a "qualifying" process, includes teams from two countries.
I wonder how many/.ers could balance a simple checkbook if they had to.
I suspect most could, though some of us would probably get distracted and build a home finance tracking software package that included checkbook balancing as one supported function if given the task "balance a simple checkbook".
But why make it a felony? You almost sound enthused about this arbitrary legal threat.
Felonies can only be created by legislation (for federal law, this means an act of Congress.) The Coast Guard didn't decide to impose a safety zone, and separately decide what class of offense to make violations and what penalties to make available for violations. Instead, the Ports and Waterways Safety Act, which provides the authority under which the Coast Guard has established the perimeter, sets out the civil penalty for violations and the criminal penalty for willful violations.
(Also, the perimeter is 20 meters, not 65 feet as widely reported. 65 feet is the greatest integer number of feet which is less than 20 meters, so its a convenient approximation for people who can't deal with fractions or metric measures, but it isn't the actual perimeter.)
Yes, I think its probably a bigger social problem that science reporters, as a class, aren't particularly proficient about communicating scientific results accurately to the masses than that scientists aren't.
Its also a big problem that schools aren't particularly effective at teaching people to interpret information well (including, but not limited to, science reporting.)
Difference between morality and ethics
on
Plagiarism Inc.
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Can someone please tell me the difference between morality and ethics?
There isn't a well-defined one, but there is a common, somewhat fuzzy, distinction often made with "ethical" wrong as the subset of "wrong" that deals ith behavior that fails an obligation to some particular other person (excluding any God or similar divine entity) without license, and "moral" wrong as the subset of "wrong" that deals with behavior that is wrong independent of any obligation to any other person (except, again, any God or similar divine entity.)
Under this model, fraud is often characterized as unethical, while recreational drug use is often characterized as immoral. (Both, obviously, presuming they are seen as wrong at all, and in general terms; its possible even under this general framework to construct an argument that either of those examples falls into the opposite category in some or all cases.)
Apparently the villagers fear they will be associated with the devil since according to the Bible, everyone having the 'mark of the beast' will go to hell. These people are not afraid of punishment.
Wait, do they fear they will be sent to hell, or are they not afraid of punishment?
There is also at least one passage in the New Testament that decries homosexual relationships
The most popularly cited ones in that regard are matters where the interpretation is far from clear; of the two main types I've seen cited, one consists of what is explicitly in the source material specific condemnation of the keeping of catamites -- generalizing from that to a condemnation of homosexual relationship is a fairly gigantic leap -- and the other is inclusion of homosexual behavior in a set of behaviors that, taken together, are said to mark out a group of people that are being condemned (but aren't pointed to as the things that they are condemned for, just a set of things that together calls attention to them as being part of that group), and which is arguably a condemnation of a existing social group in which that set of traits would have been familiar to the contemporary reader.
So what are the major difference between the two parties?
The Democrats are an incoherent party dedicated to trying to assemble a minimum winning coalition from, essentially, the left half of the US political spectrum.
The Republicans are an incoherent party dedicated to trying to assemble a minimum winning coalition from, essentially, the right half of the US political spectrum.
This is the natural, stable state of a political system when you have the kind of electoral system the US has, which tends strongly to an essentially two-party system in the long term, though over the short term you can occasionally have more than two competitive parties, and its possible to have regional situations that are more durable where the two competitive parties in a region aren't the same as on the national scene. (The Farmer-Labor Party, before it merged with the Democratic Party, is a historical example of the regional effect; the current situation in the UK is something of an illustration of the potential short-term deviation, as the US has a system which tends to two-party dominance for much the same reason as the US system, though not quite as strongly.)
Its also perhaps worth noting that the governments in developed democracies with systems like this tend to be among the worst of those in developed democracies, when measured by opinion of the government held by the citizenry.
With all these lobbyists in Washington, I have always wondered who takes care of the ordinary citizen's interests in that city.
There is no such thing as "the ordinary citizen" except as a mental construct.
There are lots of actual citizens, with distinct interests, which are represented in Washington to the extent that the people with those interests have expended resources effectively to have them represented.
Naturally, that tends to mean that they are represented in no small part in proportion to the degree to which interests are held by people that have resources to start with.
There's not really much you can do about that, fundamentally (if, over time, you equalize the distribution of resources more, you might reduce the negative effects, but that's difficult because the effects are self-reinforcing in a way which makes that difficult to acheive even if you could develop a plan that would work but for the political difficulty of implementing it.) "Political power" and "wealth" are, after all, essentially different names for the same thing -- the fungible capacity to get other people to serve your interests.
The only legal issue is whether they are using that separate e-mail account properly for political business, or whether they are improperly using it to conduct official government business, which would be a violation of the law for circumventing the archiving and disclosure laws.
Which becomes even trickier when you take into account that the people with whom they communicate on official government business and on political business are not necessarily non-overlapping groups of people, and don't necessarily have any concern themselves for separating "political" and "government" business.
With their huge majorities in both houses of Congress, the Democrats can do anything they damn well please if only they could get all their fellow Democrats onto the party bus.
To take almost any substantive action in the Senate requires sufficient votes to invoke cloture against a filibuster, i.e., 60 votes.
There are 58 members of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate (56 of whom are actually Democrats, 2 of whom are independents who caucus with the Democrats.) Depending on the sense in which the word "Democrats" (specifically, whether you refer to the party proper or the caucus) is used, that puts them either 2 or 4 votes shy of being able to take substantive action in the Senate without Republican support, even if every single Democrat is in favor.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably, that's intended as a response to this bit:
I would have thought, from the focus on regions in GP, that it would be clear that the meaning was that the effect on the regional makeup, where Africa is taken as one region would be the same (as compared to the current system) in a top-32 arrangement (in which Ghana would be present, as #32) as in a top-31 [of FIFA ranked teams excluding the host] plus host nation arrangment (where Ghana would not be present, but South Africa, as the host, would, despite being farther down the FIFA rankings.)
Um, no, it is not inconsistent. "[M]aximizing one (or possibly even more) apps" is not the same as "maximizing all apps".
Sure, but the trade-offs with other inefficiencies do change in between print and on-screen viewing. For one thing, your monitor size is fixed in both dimensions, so the choice to maximize or use a narrower display has consequences in how much text you can read before you are forced to do some physical manipulation; that can be a greater inconvenience than that associated with line breaks, especially if you are doing something else with the keyboard/mouse alongside reviewing the text (as might be the case with certain tasks in a two-monitor setup.)
Certainly, maximizing a browser window on a widescreen monitor might often be undesirable, but the characterization that doing so is always "failing" made upthread is clearly wrong.
Some people, suprisingly enough, have different preferences and work-patterns than you. Further, several people with the same general preference realize it with multiple monitors, so that maximizing one (or possibly even more) apps isn't inconsistent with having multiple apps visible at the same time.
It is one soveriegn state, but that's not necessarily the same as "one country" in the sense of a "nation" which can have a FIFA "national team". I know this, because the so-called American Union -- the United States of America -- as a soveriegn state has 4 FIFA "national" teams already, including the following "nations":
United States of America
Puerto Rico
U.S. Virgin Islands
American Samoa
(This isn't as many as the UK, which has, I think, 9.)
No, Great Britain is an island, with three "national" teams in FIFA.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an internationally recognized soveriegn state (one common use of the word "country"), with, if I'm not missing any, 9 FIFA teams (four in EUFA, including the three from the island of Great Britain, and five in CONCACAF.)
Actually, Europe is underrepresented and Asia (and, to a lesser extent -- one team per region -- Oceania and North/Central America) overrepresented in the 32-slots in the finals compared to the number of teams each region has in the top 32 in the FIFA rankings (this year, South America and Africa were numerically right on -- the South American teams in the final were exactly those in the top 32 in the rankings, as were the African countries except that the host country isn't in the top 32 and Egypt, which didn't make the finals, is.)
So, given that as long as you don't use rankings directly you are going to get slight variations from qualifying the top teams (justifying the one team overrepresentation in Oceania and North/Central America), and given that a slight favor to Asia in the interest of expanding interest in the region is probably intended (justifying the greater overrepresentation of Asia), I think the distribution of slots is sensible, but in any case it certainly doesn't favor Europe.
Given the 32-team format for the finals, and assuming that "ability" is defined such that "Qualifying entirely based on ability" means "the top 32-ranked teams qualify to the finals", that's not particularly true.
Had that occurred this year, for instance, the differences in qualification from the actual cup would have been (+ = country that would qualify by rank but not in actual Cup, - = country that would not qualify by rank that is in actual Cup):
Japan -
Korea DPR -
Korea Republic -
South Africa -
Honduras -
New Zealand -
Denmark -
Slovakia -
Croatia +
Russia +
Egypt +
Greece +
Norway +
Ukraine +
Israel +
Romania +
Turkey +
There is a shift to Europe and the parts of West Asia bordering it (e.g., Turkey, Israel) and away from East Asia, but South American participation doesn't increase, and African participation doesn't decrease. You end up with 11/32 not from Europe or South America, instead of 14/32 with the existing Cup this year. Its a big shift away from East Asia, since that whole region would be gone, but its not much more in the way of European/South American dominance than already exists.
(Note that since Ghana is #32, going to top 31 ranks excluding the host nation, plus the host nation regardless of rank, would have exactly the same effect this year.)
Except for the ones that are landscaped, also for a reason.
Also, on-screen viewing is a different medium than print, and the degree to which what is optimal for the latter is also optimal for the former is quite limited.
Well, half of the double-blind part is trivial: the seedlings aren't going to know whether they are in the experimental group or the control group.
The other half isn't entirely impractical. Plant seeds in a number of sites with similar background RF levels, and mount visually-identical "transmitter devices" at each site. The people collecting growth data at the sites will not be informed which transmitter devices are actually transmitters adding significantly to the RF background, and which are not.
(Alternatively, you could pick sites with different RF backgrounds, and use active transmitters of different power levels at all sites so that, in combination with the background, you have groups of "baseline" and "high" background sites for the same effect.)
FTFA: "Finally, it's possible—likely, even—that the correlation between Toxo infection and World Cup success is a coincidence, or that it reflects some other common trait among successful soccer nations. Maybe it helps to have raw meat in your diet, and Toxo is just a side effect?"
True, though this isn't particularly one of them, since it hasn't been "essentially wiped out" in more developed countries.
So?
I'm not sure how you make the leap of logic here. Virtually every country in the world is in FIFA, but the ones that tend to win the most World Cups aren't particularly the least developed. In order from most to least, the countries that have won the World Cup at least once are:
Brazil (5),
Italy (4),
Germany (3),
Argentina (2) and Uruguay (2),
England (1) and France (1)
All of them are in the top half in terms of GDP/capita in the world, and the ones in Europe are in the top 15% or so (varies by which ranking you look at; Italy falls a little out of that range in some.)
Russia (#11) is ranked higher than the US (#14)
"the Islamic World" doesn't have a team, but one predominantly-Islamic country (Egypt) is ranked above the US (Egypt; #12).
OF course, FIFA rankings and FIFA World Cup qualifications aren't all that tightly linked; many of the countries (including Asian countries) that qualify for the WC do so over higher-ranked countries (North Korea, ranked #105, being a prime example this year.)
Except that its not.
The FIFA World Cup process includes teams from pretty much the whole world (there are few nations that don't aren't FIFA members, but not many.) Sure, most teams don't last past the
the qualifiers, but that doesn't mean they aren't part of the process.
OTOH, the MLB "World" Series, even including the MLB regular season as a "qualifying" process, includes teams from two countries.
So, no, the two aren't even approximately equal.
I suspect most could, though some of us would probably get distracted and build a home finance tracking software package that included checkbook balancing as one supported function if given the task "balance a simple checkbook".
Felonies can only be created by legislation (for federal law, this means an act of Congress.) The Coast Guard didn't decide to impose a safety zone, and separately decide what class of offense to make violations and what penalties to make available for violations. Instead, the Ports and Waterways Safety Act, which provides the authority under which the Coast Guard has established the perimeter, sets out the civil penalty for violations and the criminal penalty for willful violations.
(Also, the perimeter is 20 meters, not 65 feet as widely reported. 65 feet is the greatest integer number of feet which is less than 20 meters, so its a convenient approximation for people who can't deal with fractions or metric measures, but it isn't the actual perimeter.)
Or even if it does, hence the "ROM" in CD-ROM.
Yes, I think its probably a bigger social problem that science reporters, as a class, aren't particularly proficient about communicating scientific results accurately to the masses than that scientists aren't.
Its also a big problem that schools aren't particularly effective at teaching people to interpret information well (including, but not limited to, science reporting.)
There isn't a well-defined one, but there is a common, somewhat fuzzy, distinction often made with "ethical" wrong as the subset of "wrong" that deals ith behavior that fails an obligation to some particular other person (excluding any God or similar divine entity) without license, and "moral" wrong as the subset of "wrong" that deals with behavior that is wrong independent of any obligation to any other person (except, again, any God or similar divine entity.)
Under this model, fraud is often characterized as unethical, while recreational drug use is often characterized as immoral. (Both, obviously, presuming they are seen as wrong at all, and in general terms; its possible even under this general framework to construct an argument that either of those examples falls into the opposite category in some or all cases.)
Wait, do they fear they will be sent to hell, or are they not afraid of punishment?
The most popularly cited ones in that regard are matters where the interpretation is far from clear; of the two main types I've seen cited, one consists of what is explicitly in the source material specific condemnation of the keeping of catamites -- generalizing from that to a condemnation of homosexual relationship is a fairly gigantic leap -- and the other is inclusion of homosexual behavior in a set of behaviors that, taken together, are said to mark out a group of people that are being condemned (but aren't pointed to as the things that they are condemned for, just a set of things that together calls attention to them as being part of that group), and which is arguably a condemnation of a existing social group in which that set of traits would have been familiar to the contemporary reader.
There is no one agreed "Christian moral agenda".
The Democrats are an incoherent party dedicated to trying to assemble a minimum winning coalition from, essentially, the left half of the US political spectrum.
The Republicans are an incoherent party dedicated to trying to assemble a minimum winning coalition from, essentially, the right half of the US political spectrum.
This is the natural, stable state of a political system when you have the kind of electoral system the US has, which tends strongly to an essentially two-party system in the long term, though over the short term you can occasionally have more than two competitive parties, and its possible to have regional situations that are more durable where the two competitive parties in a region aren't the same as on the national scene. (The Farmer-Labor Party, before it merged with the Democratic Party, is a historical example of the regional effect; the current situation in the UK is something of an illustration of the potential short-term deviation, as the US has a system which tends to two-party dominance for much the same reason as the US system, though not quite as strongly.)
Its also perhaps worth noting that the governments in developed democracies with systems like this tend to be among the worst of those in developed democracies, when measured by opinion of the government held by the citizenry.
There is no such thing as "the ordinary citizen" except as a mental construct.
There are lots of actual citizens, with distinct interests, which are represented in Washington to the extent that the people with those interests have expended resources effectively to have them represented.
Naturally, that tends to mean that they are represented in no small part in proportion to the degree to which interests are held by people that have resources to start with.
There's not really much you can do about that, fundamentally (if, over time, you equalize the distribution of resources more, you might reduce the negative effects, but that's difficult because the effects are self-reinforcing in a way which makes that difficult to acheive even if you could develop a plan that would work but for the political difficulty of implementing it.) "Political power" and "wealth" are, after all, essentially different names for the same thing -- the fungible capacity to get other people to serve your interests.
Which becomes even trickier when you take into account that the people with whom they communicate on official government business and on political business are not necessarily non-overlapping groups of people, and don't necessarily have any concern themselves for separating "political" and "government" business.
To take almost any substantive action in the Senate requires sufficient votes to invoke cloture against a filibuster, i.e., 60 votes.
There are 58 members of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate (56 of whom are actually Democrats, 2 of whom are independents who caucus with the Democrats.) Depending on the sense in which the word "Democrats" (specifically, whether you refer to the party proper or the caucus) is used, that puts them either 2 or 4 votes shy of being able to take substantive action in the Senate without Republican support, even if every single Democrat is in favor.