I keep hearing this, but perhaps it depends on your locality. Looking at the first hundred entries in our local school staff directory, I get:

71 teachers
8 secretaries *
5 special needs professionals (4 speech pathologists +1 occupational therapist)
5 nurses
4 principals*
2 guidance counselors
1 police officer
1 payroll clerk *
1 information technologist *
1 Librarian
1 assistant superintendent *

* administrative staff

So going by this sample, 15% of the school department employees are "administrators" of some sort, although most of these are secretaries who handle a lot of things that teachers and more highly paid administrators would otherwise have to. But I hear people in my town make claims like the one above, even though they could just look in the school department directory and see for themselves this isn't even close to true. They believe this, not because it's factual, but because it's "truthy".

It's like when my town passed a tax increase to pay to replace the crumbling middle school. There was an anti-tax group in town that claimed we shouldn't give the school department any more money because they kept the school budget "secret". It just wasn't true. You can go on the town website and see the budget. That's how I know that at the high school teachers account for 79% of the salaries, and that system-wide administration (including superintendent, office staff and system-wide IT support) accounts for about 6% of total salaries. When we voted on the tax increase referendum I actually saw a parent try to hand a printout of the budget to an anti-tax protester holding a "no secret budgets!" sign. The protester literally recoiled, like she'd been offered a ripe piece of roadkill.

Are there schools or school departments out there that literally have more administrators than teachers? I don't know; maybe there are. My point is we shouldn't believe this about some school or school system simply because it sounds true to us. We should check. And if the answer is "yes", then you should do something about it.

When Obama first proposed Obamacare, he didn't jump in with specifics; he just laid out some high level guidelines and let the Democratically controlled Congress hash out the details. This was politically costly, because in the absence of specifics all kinds of claims were made about what was allegedly in the program, like "death panels". The house ended up passing something that looked like the plan Heritage Foundation put together for Bob Dole in the 90s. This was essentially the least they could do that met Obama's specifications for health care reform, and the long period over which it was impossible to defend because it had no concrete form cost Democrats control of the House.

This plan looks an awful lot like that. Broad goals, but implementation details kicked down the road and downstairs (in this case to the states). The one specific detail that's being talked about is a 30% reduction in emissions from coal in 26 years -- and even that's not very specific. The total CO2 emissions associated with mining, transporting and burning coal is at present about twice that of natural gas. It's possible that coal will be mined at even a higher rate than today if the industry develops more efficient ways to use it. Twenty-six years is a long time in technology.

In any case it's kind of a no-brainer that you can't allow coal emissions to grow in proportion to how the country's economy will grow in 30 years; not if you want to reduce pollution. It's the dirtiest fuel we use across the board, not just in terms of CO2.

But however you slice it, this is a very abstract plan that won't be translated into any kind of concrete action until long after Obama is out of office, if ever. The only thing that's close to certain is that it'll create a lot of political turmoil.

What we need to know about is the existence or non-existence of unfair comparisons, i.e., problems that favor the putatively "quantum" computer.

Since I don't expect a quantum computer to be faster at everything, then finding a bunch of solutions to problems that aren't any faster on the "quantum computer" doesn't prove anything, even if the problems look like the kind of problems you'd hope would be quantum-computery. There's not much more you can do than point to the absence of evidence when the burden of proof isn't on you.

The burden of proof is on the vendor here, and standard of "proof" is conceptually simple at least: demonstrate that for some task this device offers any practical advantage whatsoever over the best available conventional technology. That could be in absolute performance against the best available tech(e.g. ASICs and supercomputers), in relative performance over similarly priced systems, or in some practical measure other than performance, such as power consumption. Any clearly identifiable and verifiable advantage counts as positive proof the vendor has something worth paying attention to.

Of course even comparable performance by a novel architecture on some class of problems is interesting, because of the huge advantages a mature technology enjoys. Performance of a new design even in the same ballpark as a mature design suggests future improvements might be in the works. But it's only a suggestion.

That would be terrible, if it was actually happening in any place other than your imagination.

With particular emphasis on "whatever". If this doesn't work, you really can't conclude anything because of all the potentially confounding factors. The only thing you *can* conclude is that other fields are more attractive to young women than CS or coding.

In years of commercial software development, I learned a number of important principles for designing new products.

(1) "Everyone wants what I would want" is a bad assumption. Chances are there are lots of people out there like you, but a lot of the untapped market may be people who want something different.

(2) There is an adoption curve for anything new. At the head of the adoption curve are people who want things that are new because they are new. At the tail are the people who don't want anything new until it's become old. In the middle are people who can be persuaded for various reasons to try something new, but only if they see other people using it successfully. Therefore the first thing a new product must be is new. The second thing a new product must be is practical. The last thing a new product must be is relatable in terms of older technology. A product that achieves all three can eventually sell to all three adopter types.

Notice how the bike in question tries to fit this model. The gear whine sound it makes struck me as unnecessarily loud, and the Harley people went on and on about the distinctive sound it makes. That sound is different from the traditional sound of Harley, which gets the attention of the early adopters. That sound is unnecessarily loud, which makes the bike relatable to a long tradition of unnecessarily loud Harleys. In a way the early adopters will be having a very traditional Harley experience of riding by and everyone thinking, "There goes one of those damned Harleys!"

(3) Experience is not the same as understanding. The classic example is the client who knows which websites he likes and dislikes thinking that means he can design a website himself.

What you experience riding a powerful bike is real. It is also artificial -- in the sense that it was deliberately crafted by talented designers, working with a toolbox of ideas that are probably unfamiliar to you unless you're a designer yourself. That doesn't mean they're smarter than you (gosh that's a big mistake for designers to make), it means they're more expert in their field than you are in their field.

There may be other ways of producing the experience you value, or indeed entirely novel experiences that would be equally powerful. They can try to reproduce the traditional bike experience, or they can try to redefine it. Chances are they'll fail either way because both are going to be difficult. Still, nobody can really know for sure until they get you on their new bike.

(4) Care about what users have to say, and listen to them very carefully, but don't believe them. Presuming they haven't contradicted themselves (which they'll do sooner or later), and you build them exactly what they ask for, most of the time they won't like it. I call it the "I know what I don't like when I see it" response. Your job as a designer is to think about what users tell you until you understand at least some of their needs better than they do. Then provide them with something they want without having realized they wanted it.

All of which means when you design something, it has to be just the right mix of surprising and familiar. The only way to know whether you've achieved that with a product like a high performance electric motorcycle is to build a prototype and have lots of typical users ride it. The results are probably going to be a total dud, as you're expecting. Or they may be a revelation. Or they may work for other people, but not for you.

Or... they could politely ask anyone using a cell phone to leave, pointing to the signs they have prominently posted.

Sure, some patrons will be upset, but not as upset as the parent who misses a call from the baby sitter telling them to get to the hospital right away.

Oh, old Gramps here can trump your whole list:

Thoughts millenials (and younger) never, ever, EVER have:

• "Maybe I shouldn't be texting right now..."

Well, I'll have a pint, thank you!

Well, I don't happen to have a settled opinion on what the "right" price for gas would be, so I don't think gas is "too cheap". But I think the price you pay doesn't include all the costs entailed in that gallon of gasoline. So whatever the current price of gas is, whether it is $1/gallon or $5/gallon, the additional costs of producing and using that gallon of gas should be included in the price, and that will increase the price, whether that price happens to be low or high.

So in effect, I think the price of gas should be increased, but I don't think gas is "too cheap".

I think it should be MANDATORY to teach the 2nd law of thermodynamics in any physics education. I wish your teachers had been more clear on it. Your notion of the 2nd law is clearly flawed or incomplete, as it would prohibit the natural formation of highly ordered snowflakes from chaotic water vapor, as well as prohibiting countless other common physical processes.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that the total entropy of a closed system tends to increase, with overwhelming probability. It does not apply to any system subject to a flow of energy an outside source. It not prohibit one location or object in a system from increasing in order while other objects/locations in that system have an equal or larger increase in disorder.

The earth is receiving energy from the sun. The enormous entropy increase within the sun easily "pays for" the ongoing creation of order and complexity here on earth. So long as the sun shines, that energy flow can and does fuel natural self-organizing physical processes. You can see this in snowflake formation, the self-organization of hurricanes, the development of an individual organism, as well as the genetic evolution of a population. There is no violation of the 2nd law here. The sun's energy input pays for, fuels, these self-organizing natural processes.

Computer science, with an active interest in physics and science in general. Computer science deals extensively with Information Theory, the ways that information can measured, processed, transformed, and CREATED. Evolution is not merely a "theory", it is an applied science. Evolutionary Algorithms is a field of computer science where complex, ordered, useful, problem-solving information is CREATED by replication with mutation and natural selection of "digital-DNA". I have personally witnessed the fact that evolution can and does create complex useful new information. It is an applied science put to active use in one way or another by a majority Fortune 500 companies. It is quite common for evolution to create designs better than the best "Intelligent Designs" by human engineers. One particular case comes to mind of one team that applied evolution to jet engine design, which evolved an engine more fuel efficient than any human engineer had ever been able to achieve. And there is at least one company solely dedicated to filing patents on valuable innovations generated via evolution.

Here is a grossly oversimplified illustration. Roll one hundred dice. The chances of them all coming up 6 is effectively zero. Now apply evolution. Take that random result and REPLICATE it, and lets apply one MUTATION re-rolling one random die. Now SELECT (keep) the set with the higher total, and kill (discard) the set with the lower or equal total. After approximately 3000 replication-selection steps you will have a perfect set of all 6's.

This process works even when you do not have a pre-determined target. All it requires to work is that you have some means of measuring which set of DNA is "better" or "worse" than another. Evolution will generate whatever information is required to satisfy the selection criteria.

But as I said, that was a grossly oversimplified example. Evolution's power to generate information is exponentially increased when there is a population with sexual reproduction (genetic recombination). This has been mathematically proven by the Schemata Theorem (J. Holland 1975). I won't attempt to explain it here, but a Google search on schemata theorem turns up 122,000 results. It is a seminal paper, widely cited by subsequent scientific work in mathematics and computer science and biological evolution. It mathematically proves a major principal whereby population evolution is almost infinitely more powerful than the trivial dice example I gave above.

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Oh joy, an "engineer" who doesn't have the faintest clue what the fuck the 2nd law of thermodynamics says, and doesn't seem to have much grasp of anything else in science either. I sure as hell hope you don't "engineer" anything safety-critical.

Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)".

Riiiiiight.... that's what it says..... which also means snow is impossible because chaotic water molecules in the air cannot self-organize into beautiful complex highly ordered snowflakes.

Jeremy Connell Ministries: Snow, it doesn't exist.

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Your comment is pointless because everyone already agrees with that.
Unless you are one of those confused people who thinks teaching evolution is atheism, in which case I suggest you ask for a refund on your "actual scientific degree from a respected university".

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I find belief in invisible-magical-people to be rather odd, but what really baffles me is worshiping Loki, god of mischief and deception.

Yep, it's conceivable that Loki exists and created the universe 6 hours ago and all of your memories and all of the apparent age of the earth is a deliberate fraud. It's conceivable that you're a disembodied brain in a jar wired to to some Matrix-style fictional reality. And it's utterly absurd to waste time with such things. If there were some malevolent all-powerful superbeing dead-set on deceiving you, then you will be deceived. If a malevolent entity wants to deceive you into thinking 2+2=3, then the entire world and all of your thoughts and memories can be deceptively manipulated on the fly. You will believe 2+2=3, if a malevolent god wants you to believe it.

If the earth appears to be 4.5 billion years old, then either the earth actually is 4.5 billion years old or Loki crafted a deliberate deception of a 4.5 billion year age. Either acknowledge that you worship Loki, or drop this nonsense a planet-worth of evidence of age might be some elaborate deception.

You cannon profess to believe in a benevolent god while rejecting truths plainly and exhaustively revealed by the scientific study of the world. If the world appears old, then the world is old. If evolution appears true, then evolution is true. If god exists, and evolution is true, then god simply created a universe which included evolution as part of the design.

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I checked your link. Most of the pages in fact explain that there *aren't* any "out of place fossils". The closest was a page so blindly-stupid as to think an overthrust creates out of place fossils, and about two lpages that bafflingly think that a newly found slightly earlier ancestor, or a later descendant, is somehow "out of place". Not one single example of a rabbit in the Precambrian, or any other remotely out of place fossil. An out of place fossil has to be an evolutionary descendant (like rabbits) appearing before an ancestor (like dinosaurs). You didn't present a single one, your link didn't present a single example.

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