I've been writing ethnographic field notes for about 15 years. I had a couple of phases of trying to do this electronically, but the notes from each of those 3 month experiments are for the most part now lost or at least difficult to access - proprietary formats, failed backups, accidental deletions, you name it. Whereas the paper notebooks are sitting on my bookshelf beside my desk. For one project I chopped the spine off the notebook and dropped the pages into a bulk scanner before perfect-binding the notebook back together again, but the resulting physical notebook is a bit more delicate than I'd like. But I do like having an electronic version, both for backup and so I have a copy available when I'm away from my bookshelf. So these days I photocopy each notebook and drop the photocopies through the scanner (and more recently I've been able to have a student or an intern do it, but for a task I only needed to do every three-six months it was never that onerous to begin with), storing both the photocopy and a copy of the pdf offsite. I've played with various indexing schemes over the years, from leaving the last dozen pages blank and writing a single-line description of the contents of each page as I filled it (2002-03-21: key informant interview, ER doctor, hospital xxx), through to embedding metadata on relevant pages of the pdf to make it searchable (my handwriting is way way too bad for ocr to have any utility). But the 'write the index on the last few pages of the notebook as you go' method has been the simplest and most robust, and it rarely takes long to find anything, even with 30 or so notebooks on my bookshelf. And picking up an old notebook every few months and just reading or skimming through it is often a worthwhile exercise, reminding you of ideas and streams of thought and research context in ways that simply searching for something you already know is in there never can.

As an additional benefit, I've always found making notes in a notebook to be less intrusive in meetings or interviews than typing or using a stylus on a tablet (although changing social norms may make the latter less intrusive eventually), and the act of writing to be less intrusive to my own thought processes than typing (maybe just because no red squiggly lines appear under my notes as I type, or text reflowing, drawing the eye as it does so), but that might just be me, or I might just be showing my age.

NSA 'compaining' about tails? Oh, no, please don't throw me in that briar patch!

http://americanfolklore.net/fo...

Same here. I tried TurboTax one year and it didn't save me any money, didn't really save me any time, and had annoying DRM. You have to research what you can deduct on your own anyway in advance anyway so you can preserve documentation throughout the year, and that is the time consuming part. So paying money just to have software fill out and submit the form doesn't seem worth it for me.

The 'holding some event after the time poeple are leaving so some people stick around longer' is sort of what happened - in the early days everyone used to leave on sunday (the man was tourched on saturday night) then the group who build a structure called the temple each year started burning that on sunday night, so for a couple of years departure was spread across sunday and monday as half the attendees continued to leave on sunday and the other half stuck around to watch the temple burn then left late sunday night or on monday. But the temple burn is now so popular most of the attendees stay for it, and everyone is trying to get out somewhere between sunday night and monday. Maybe we need some niche events for monday which would only appeal to 1/3-1/2 of attendees :)

I moved to the US 14 years ago from another developed nation, but had spent a lot of my childhood in developing nations; I quickly found that anything that baffled me in the US abruptly made a *lot* more sense when viewed as if the US is a third world nation.

"It is a common error, but an error nonetheless, to talk of 'ninth amendment rights.' The ninth amendment is not a source of rights as such; it is simply a rule about how to read the Constitution." Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law 776 n. 14 (2nd ed. 1998).

I think the wholepoint of regulating ride sharing is it *does* impact someone else - taxi drivers and taxi owners. And it impacts them because you're imposing different regulatory burdens (and hence cost, since regulatory burdens always have at least some complance cost) on two groups of people engaged in the same activity - providing transport in exchange for something of value. The argument the taxi folks are making is the regulatory burden should be equal for people engaged in what's essentially the same activity, and so far that's looking convincing to regulators in Seattle (among other places). Your idea for 'payment' in what's essentially a microcurrency which can only be used to purchase one thing does shift things a bit, and that might help convince city government that it should be regulated differently, but my guess is the number of people willing to drive strangers around town in exchange for a microcurrency which can only be used for purchasing rides from other strangers will be far far fewer than the number of people willing to drive strangers around town in exchange for a currency which can be used for any purpose, and the whole thing will collapse because every time you log in to the app to get a ride, no-one will be close by ready to offer you one, so people will stop using the app. But that's just my cynical opinion.

With respect to politics, I completely agree that the interests of the general public are diffuse compared to the interests of a given industry, and this often has a perverting effect on lobbying. But as someone who has done lobbying at city, state, and county level, I have to tell you that representatives are usually extremely jaded about paid industry lobbyists, and while they'll happily go along with them if there appears to be no non-industry opposition to something, the second you get 10 or 20 obviously fired up regular citizens in front of them, you have their complete attention, because they *know* that those 10 or 20 people who are fired up enough to take the day off work and go to try and meet with their elected representatives are representative of much much larger numbers of people who will be voting at the next election. So if you think there's a case to be made that rideshare systems should be regulated differently than taxis, get together two or three people from each council district together, call every counciller's office and make an appointment, and go and talk to them (or more likely one of their staffers, but it'll still get back to them). Believe me, this works like nothing else does.

I didn't say it was acceptable, but yeah, that's how democracy usually works. I say 'usually' because most democracies also have courts and executive branches in an attempt to moderate the excesses of mob rule - to try and enact the priciple that democracy *should* implement the will of the majority without infringing the rights of the minority.

"but as long as money is changing hands, (1) the city will certainly view it as within their rights to regulate the ridesharing industry"

I hate to point this out to you, but the fact "money is changing hands" is not even remotely a required precondition for a city or other government to regulate an activity. No money changes hands for you to take your kid to the playground in the local park, but cities can and do regulate safety standards for playground equipment in public parks. No money changes hands when my neighbors decide noisy leafblowers are the best way to remove fallen leaves from their lawns, but cities can and do write regulations limiting or banning their use.

There's absolutely nothing stopping a city regulating any form of ridesharing, including the informal deal myself and my neighbor have to take turns driving so we can use the HOV lane (itself another example of regulation where no money changes hands if they really wanted to.

Or rather, the one and only thing that either prevents or requires a city government to regulate something is the fact that city governments are representative democracies, and if the people a city councilmember represents effectively communicate that they want something regulated (eg leafblowers) or do not want something regulaed (eg ridesharing), and are convincing in arguing that they are communicating a widely held desire, city councilmembers will fall over themselves to act accordingly, or will expect to be challenged in the next election. So if you really want ridesharing to be unregulated but taxis to be regulated,communicate this to your local representatives and stop whining.

Your mention of 'unconscious cues' made me wonder if some aspects of acupuncture could be tested by putting patients under general anasthesia, then having acupuncture delivered either at recommended acupuncture points vs randomly selected points. Or even having acupuncture vs no acupuncture (I've never had acupuncture so don't know if it's noticable an hour or so later). Either way, might help eliminate cue bias from patients experience of symptom relief (or whatever the trial is investigating).

The placebo effect has been shown to work even when people are told they're receiving a placebo (and yes, they explained what 'placebo' means).

http://www.plosone.org/article...

Just about every developed country other than the US provides highly subsidized tertiary education, making it much much cheaper than the US (in some cases free). So move to another country then enroll. Downside is you may have to marry a local or do something similarly complicated to get residency. :)

The translation of a literary work can be purely scholarly or purely artistic, but usually it is a mix of both. Given Tolkien's mastery of both worlds, and the fact that his love of Beowulf went far beyond linguistic and historical study, it is pretty clear that his translation will be of broad literary interest, not just scholarly.

Where I live the community colleges are inexpensive, but do not have flexible class times for working people, and most of the tracks that have good job prospects have 2-5 year waiting lists. So many students choose to rack up the debt at TVI, PMI, UoP, where they can start immediately and continue a full-time job.

The problems at our CC are mostly because they can't attract enough instructors. The community college pays them half of what of what they would make working in the field or teaching at a for-profit college, and are horribly mismanaged. In the electronics department, I frequently heard the instructors compain about pressures to dumb things down to pass more students. The place where I work has started to favor techs from TVI & DeVry because the quality of students from the CC has decreased. When my wife was doing her nursing degree, the department head would be constantly changing things (like room locations, curiculum dates, rules about how to evaluate students, etc) literally the night before class, so the instructors could never be prepared for class. Many people are willing to take a pay cut to do something that they enjoy more, or work under a horrible boss if the pay is good, but very few are willing to do both.

My dog is definitely more important than your kids.