What makes you think they took down the criminal mastermind?

Remember this is the government we recently learned abducted a German citizen, beat him, chained him in the Salt Pit where he was rectally violated, only to learn they'd snatched a vacationing car salesman who happened to have the same common Arabic name as the guy they actually wanted. It was like kidnapping and anally raping "John Smiths" until you found the one you wanted.

As Terry Pratchett's "Patrician" is fond of saying, freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Nor does it mean freedom from responsibility.

Saying you have to make your own arrangements for schooling doesn't seem so oppressive to me, so long as the arrangements aren't made in a punitive spirit. Lots of parents do make their own arrangements because of philosophical differences with state-run schooling. Pious parents send their kids to religious schools. Conservative parents send their kids to military schools. Liberal parents send their kids to alternative, unstructured schools.

Schools should make reasonable efforts to accommodate the philosophical preferences of parents, but there simply isn't any way to square this circle. Most parents want their kids going to a school where everyone is vaccinated. If you want something different there's no way to accommodate that preference, unless there's enough of you to set up a parallel program. I have a relative who did just that -- started an alternative school; not for anti-vaxxers, but for anti-regimentation parents who want the kids to go to a school where they do whatever the hell they want all day and where no attention whatsoever is paid to ed-reform mandated standardized tests. And the school works because of the high degree of involvement of the parents, many of whom are high status professionals like doctors and university professors. You *can* have whatever you want for your kid, but you've got to put the effort in to make it work.

Does anyone remember a country called the United States of America? I seem to remember something about freedom and liberty and certain inalienable rights.

I wonder what happened to that country.

Are you from 1998?

Ah yes, ergonomics. The thing with little science dictated by someone in HR who barely made it past high school....

Nothing. The Institute apparently thinks he's a scumbag and doesn't want to be associated with him, which is their right.

Looking at the lecture, it doesn't seem to be all that special by MIT standards. Everyone there takes at least two semesters of physics, and Physics 8.01, which almost everyone takes in their first semester on campus, is probably the largest course taught. There's a long tradition of lecture showmanship in 8.01, with varying degrees of success. A friend of mine once saw Henry Kendall almost knock himself out with a bowling ball pendulum. He was explaining how the pendulum would only return at most to the point it was released from, but because he was talking he didn't notice that instead of just releasing the pendulum, he'd given it a little push, which was supposed to be the *next* demo. Kendall had to dive out of the way at the last second.

Some countries place a high premium on memorizing and repeating back the teacher's words. These countries still produce their share of good and bad engineers, but they're sometimes bad in unrecognizable ways.

I once hired a software engineer from a third world country who had an encyclopedic knowledge of design patterns. You could name any pattern in the GoF *Design Patterns* book and he could reel off the UML without hesitation and give a convincing sounding explanation of how the pattern worked. But when I started inspecting his code, I quickly realized he had no understanding of what any of it meant. It was just pictures and words he'd memorized, an impressive and prodigious feat, but ultimately useless to me.

Now I should say I've hired some very good software engineers from this country; it's not that they don't make good engineers over there. For most people the discipline to absorb a lot of information yields many benefits. But this guy was an outlier; he managed to get a master's degree over there in a subject he had no practical understanding of whatsoever.

Everybody in my family was a precocious reader -- me, my wife, my kids were all reading on an adult level while we were still quite young. So consequently we *all* have words we mispronounce because we learned them from reading before we heard anyone use them. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my word "sub-tull" and the word "suttle" I sometimes heard were one and the same -- "subtle".

The family will be sitting around and someone will use an unfamiliar word, then there will be a brief pause while everyone else envisions the phonetic spelling of the mispronounced word.

When you hear "drone" you probably are picturing civilian quad copters. While some military drones are that small, others are substantial aircraft. The Air Force's Global Hawk weighs over ten tons and requires a runway 3700 feet long to take off.

Obviously some military drones can be hand launched, but the MQ-1Cs mentioned in the article weigh 2200 lbs fully loaded and requires a minimum runway of 2000 feet.

We didn't let our son play video games at home until he was in second grade -- of course it's nearly impossible to avoid them at other people's houses without moving to a remote village without electricity. Consequently gaming became an obsession with him. When we visited relatives he'd spend all his time talking with his older cousins about games pretty much from the time he could talk. In kindergarten he started taking books out of the library on beating video games. By the time he was in first grade he was the neighborhood gaming consultant: kids would ask their moms to invite him over because they were stuck. But he couldn't play games at home.

Finally I realized that forbidding games was just making him more obsessed (it's a family trait he gets from both parents). We bought a console and it was the best Christmas EVER. He quickly settled down to a pattern where he gets a new game, plays it relentlessly for a few days until he figures out all the interesting ways to beat it, then sets it aside. Now he's a teenager, and gaming is just another thing he does. It's *important* to him, but if you average out his playing time it adds up to maybe four hours a week. The time he plays the most is when his older sister comes back from college. They'll play through a stack of old games, like it's their way of reconnecting.

People worry too much about parenting issues like this. You have to be prepared to be tough if an actual problem arises, but most of the time you're better off relaxing and seeing what happens. Think of it as "agile parenting". You don't have to foresee everything, you just have to be on top of what actually happens.

Well, some kids actually like that -- maybe not talking over the coach, but the practice and camp and such. I had one of each, one who hated organized activities and another who liked them.

And we *did* force both our kids to stick with some things they didn't want to do. In some case it was about commitment -- you asked to join the soccer team, you can't quit just because the team is losing. In other cases it was parental judgment about what's best -- I know you don't like swim lessons but you're going to stick with them until you can swim a hundred yards. And some times it's because kids have to learn to at least make the effort to follow through on their plans. You wanted piano lessons, we bought and moved the piano, so you have to stick with those lessons for at least a year before you switch instruments.

The first step in addressing the question scientifically is determining whether the question even makes sense. You have to *establish that the question is valid* before answering it.

A hundred years ago scientists didn't know about DNA, couldn't characterize someone's genes. They went with what they could observe: skin color, hair, eye shape etc. And they came up with various compelling three race and five race schemes. But we aren't limited like they were. We can open up someone's genetic black box and characterize his heritage precisely. And when we did that all those compelling, intuitively obvious schemes fell apart.

The problem with the question you pose is that it makes no sense to lump all Sub-Saharan Africans into one "race". Most of the genetic diversity of the human race is in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are ethnic groups in Africa that have more genetic diversity than all human populations originating outside Africa *combined*. So we can't answer the question you pose because it's very assumptions contradict the facts.

If we were to divide humanity into five "great races", they'd probably end up being five *African* races, with the rest of the world tacked on in various ways. What's more it would turn out that there were *other* equally justifiable ways to construct five African races.

Race is like constellations. Humans *will* see patterns in complex, random data. Just because Orion *looks* like an object doesn't mean that the stars in Orion are linked by some process. But boy is that pattern ever compelling.

What you need to do is look at the impact factor of each journal -- a measure of how often articles in that journal are cited. What constitutes a "good" IF varies from field to field, so you want to compare the IF of a journal to the leading journals in that field. In this case the IF for the journals in question are 1.47 (0.3 for a five year period) and 1.15.. By comparison, the ACM Transaction on Intelligent Systems and Technology has an impact factor of 9.39.

There have always been low quality journals, but recently I'm seeing an uptick in pseudo-science advocates like anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists citing "published research" that makes absurdly broad claims. It's important to look up the IF for the journals referenced, they're often predatory journals that function like a "vanity press" for unpublishable papers.

The site http://scholarlyoa.com/ is also very useful. It maintains a list both of predatory journals and predatory publishers in the business of giving a platform to junk scholarship. Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems is not on the list of standalone predatory journals, nor is the publisher American Scientific Publishers on the list of predatory publishers -- yet. Aperito *is* on the list of suspect publishers.

Unforutnately IF isn't infallible. You can't automatically dismiss a paper because it's published in a low IF journal. You have to look at the whole pattern. A new paper making unusual claims is a lot more credible if it's published in a high IF journal like Nature. If it's published in Fred's Research Journal, you have to wait and see whether the paper gets cited by reputable scholars or by papers in more mainline journals.

It's really quite different from a password. And you don't know the meaning of "security through obscurity", either. All cryptographic systems rely upon secrets; a well designed one relies upon a single secret that is impractical to guess. Security through obscurity is relying upon a number of weak secrets, like the methods you are using.

You need to read up on public key cryptography. There's a huge difference between a certificate and a shared password.

... into carbon dioxide and water vapor, eventually, through a of several intermediate products. So the presence of methane is *at least* as important as CO2, because that's what it decays into. Nothing in nature just "goes away", you have to ask what it becomes.

The half-life for tropospheric methane is about 8.5 years by the way (Bergamaschi, P., & Bousquet, P. (2008). Estimating sources and sinks of methane: An atmospheric view. In The Continental-Scale Greenhouse Gas Balance of Europe (pp. 113-133). Springer New York. Photoxidation of CH4 is not a major sink of tropospheric CH4. It does occur in the troposphere in the presence of high concentrations of NO and may be a contributor to the ozone in urban smog.