I'm a member of several professional associations, including IEEE and the ACM. These societies have codes of ethics, which mandate things like respecting data privacy, accepting and cooperating with professional review, honoring contracts, respecting the rights of system stakeholders, providing honest estimates of project costs, disclosing conflicts of interest etc.

It's mostly stuff that almost goes without saying, so I have say I don't think much about these codes. But I sure would be pissed if one of these organizations was involved in helping the government violate its own code of ethics.

APA has a code of ethics for its members. Getting information out of an unwilling subject technically violates several principles the APA expects its own membership to abide by. For example the code of ethics requires APA members to safeguard the rights of anyone they're involved with professionally, and in particular those in situations where the subject's autonomy is limited. This would clearly forbid an APA member to be involved in the development of *any* coercive method, even if that method falls short of the legal definition of "torture".

Now arguably APAs code of ethics is too restrictive; arguably psychologists should be able to develop coercive methods so long as those methods are in the interest of society and do not rise to a reasonable standard of "torture". But until the APA rewrites its code of ethics it should refrain from any action which arguably might violate that code. To do otherwise, particularly secretly is morally repugnant for a dues-supported membership organization. It may even be malfeasance, since a non-profit is supposedly bound by the purpose for which it is chartered in its spending decisions.

American Psychological Association (2012) style citations please.

References:
American Psychological Association. (2012). APA style guide to electronic references.

Well, you shouldn't. It's usually the press that blows a single study way out of proportion, because they have no understanding of how science works. Science *always* generates contradictory results early on as it gets the kinks worked out of a hypothesis. This is not some kind of failure of science, it's the way science is supposed to work. A critical follow-up attempt to check on some study's results is *of course* much less likely to reach significance, because of researcher bias either way.

The gold standard for judging the state of science isn't a study, it's a review paper. This is a peer-reviewed paper, written by someone working in the field, summarizing the state of published evidence on some question in that field. These are supposed to be both comprehensive and extremely conservative in their findings.

Science is continually producing a streams of contradictory evidence. You should either pay very little attention to some new scientific idea, or be prepared to follow along in great detail over several years. But even forty years ago, when my local newspaper used to publish a whole section of science news one day a week (!!!) you could pretty much count on most of the media ridiculously overreacting to a juicy sounding bit of scientific controversy. What can you expect of today's emasculated and dumbed down reporting?

Imagine the media response if there were a study that came out that purported to show that smoking e-cigarettes was beneficial to health. It would be a media circus, but only the start of a long process in the scientific community. So rather than lighting up your e-cigarette, you should wait for the critiques and counter-studies to pile on, and then for a few review papers to come out after the dust settles. Most new ideas in science, like most new businesses, fail after a year or two.

Ebook edition of job-hunting bible "What Color is Your Parachute": $9.99.
McGraw Hill High School Equivalency Study Guide ebook: $17.89.
Typical study guide for trade test (plumbing, electrical, etc): $30-$60.
Microsoft Office for Dummies: $13.99

Cheap Chinese 7" Android Tablet that can run ebook reading software: $35.

For comparison, how much a family of four spends on food in a year: $7800 - $15600/yr.
Cost of a 2 br apartment in a crummy big city neighborhood:$13000/yr.

So, what's clear here is the cost of an ebook reader is tiny relative to other things a poor family needs, but that the cost of the books very quickly outstrips the cost of even a rather nice ebook reader like a Kindle.

Computers are cheap, especially if you don't need the latest and most powerful. You can get a functioning Android tablet that can work as an ebook reader for under $40. It won't be a *nice* tablet, but compared to the cost being shut out of the digital economy $40 is a reasonable investment for even a poor person. Otherwise how are you going to look for jobs, in the help wanted section of the newspaper? Are you going to buy used stuff from the print classifieds?

There are laptop formfactor Android computers for under $100. Those probably don't make sense for more affluent users, but now you can write a resume and cover letter for an online job application. And then of course there are always other peoples computers. But it's not unreasonable for a poor person to have a computing device these days on which he can read an ebook and maybe tap out emails when there's wi-fi he can borrow. It is not some kind of absurd luxury for poor people to own an ebook capable device.

We could send up a shuttle to retrieve it ... oh ... mothballs.

One of the effects of the bill will be to make it impossible to use data from large scale public health studies. The raw data is secret for privacy reasons and for practical purposes impossible to replicate. For example the highly respected Framingham Heart Study has been running since 1948; under the terms of the bill its results couldn't be used in setting policy because the data are simply impossible to replicate.

... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.

Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.

Fraud she certainly is, but the fraud was so transparent that clearly she's not right in her head.

While the financial aspect of this makes her culpable, building an outrageous fraud around readily disprovable details of your personal biography is a very bad idea in the long run if you're simply a con artist. Doing that suggests that there are short term needs that trump simple financial considerations. Perhaps she felt she deserved more sympathy, nurturance and nurturance than she'd gotten in life. That's common enough that there's name for it: Factitious Disorder.

Over the years I've read many stories of people who assumed false biographies. Most often this took obvious forms -- passing for white before the Civil Rights Era. But in some cases people chose to assume minority identities, particularly as American Indians in the early 20th C. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance was (by the terminology of the age) a negro with some Cherokee ancestry. He ran away to join a wild west show where he learned from Cherokee language from other performers, used that to get into Carlisle Indian School and later traded up his "Cherokee" identity for a Plains Indian one. Wenjiganooshiinh -- "Grey Owl" -- was an Englishman who was abandoned by his father in childhood then later adopted an Apache/Ojibwe identity.

What makes these two men relevant to this case is that they were both advocates of Indian rights. As outsiders, they understood what sympathetic outsiders wanted Indians to be better than an Indian would. And they would't have been able to pull it off if they weren't a little off their nut; if they didn't want to escape who they were for a more glamorous alternative.

If involves breaking the law -- not just some kind of namby-pamby administrative regulation but the basic stuff of civilization like like the prohibitions on assault or murder -- then I'll sure as hell tell what not to do.

If you're a veteran I'll gladly shake your hand and thank you for your service. I'd be honored to buy you a drink. But I won't hand you a get out of jail free card.

Have a little perspective. Yes it's wrong to impersonate a veteran, but it doesn't impugn the character of veterans. But claiming that all veterans will and should overreact to a breach of propriety with violence *does* impugn their character. Which is worse?

Well, the idea of copyright is to incent creators to create, not to reward them per se. So the sensible way of approaching is to ask how many years in advance a reasonable person would make economic plans for.

Corporations seldom worry about income streams ten years out; such future income is discounted to insignificance. On the other hand an artist planning on managing his own creations might very reasonable think about fifty years out. Seventy-five years is beyond the pale of reason if we're talking about incenting creation. So is any extension of pre-existing copyrights.

If we wanted to maximize the present value of future income to an artist contemplating creating or performing a song, I think a fifty year term would be reasonable, with the proviso that any assigned rights automatically return to him without encumbrance after ten or fifteen years. Such an arrangement would have no impact economic on his ability to sell the rights to his work immediately, and hold out the promise of getting a second bite of the apple in a decade or so.

Ah, I see they do offer comparable pricing to Boost. 1GB with service is $30. 2GB is $40, but if I use 1.5GB they credit the difference. Sounds like it's worth trying.

You can change his plan too. Boost offers 2GB/mo 4G LTE for $30/mo, which simply degrades to 3G when he hits 2GB.

I don't bother with the higher plans. I play Ingress a lot, use it constantly for mail, and I do a lot of web stuff when not home. Like searching for reviews and price comparisons when I'm out shopping. I also occasionally tether my laptop if I need to do something and don't have wifi available. At home and when I'm in an office, I get on wifi. It's not a bandwidth saving measure though, it's just faster to be on a fat pipe than anything wireless trying to penetrate buildings. When I check my usage, I'm usually only at 1.2 to 1.5 GB per month.

I ran into my first problem with Boost a month ago. They messed up provisioning Visual Voicemail when I switched phones, so it isn't sending transcribed messages to me.

It would seem that they're targeting a small market with this new plan.

Ah, they got their site up. It was throwing an error last night.

If that's the story I'm thinking of, we're not resurrecting the mammoth, we're cloning it. Those are usually introducing the DNA into somewhat comparable modern animals. It's not like the mammoth would wake up and say "Hey, what happened? Last thing I remember was eating frozen grass in the tundra." That's assuming mammoths could talk. :)