I'd like to see some more support for the claim that NCLB contributed much for this.

When I was in middle school, my 7th grade teacher found a printed off copy of the Anarchist Cookbook of mine that a friend printed off and gave to me at school. This was a bit after Columbine, which meant I probably was going to be expelled for this sort of thing. I was lucky that that particular teacher was the one who found it. She was a former Army officer and, at least in this instance, was a good judge of character. She sat me down, sternly told me that she did not have the slightest inclination that I was planning anything beyond teenaged mischief, but that I could never bring anything like this to school again. She explained that I would be expelled for this sort of thing and that essentially I owed her. While I was an honors student, I did have a rap sheet 1, which would've surely meant automatic expulsion. I was extremely lucky that that teacher was reasonable; most were not.

If NCLB did anything, it may've amplified the trend, but that trend has been going for quite some time, I suspect.

1: I had jumped a kid earlier in the year. He was making fun of the fact that I and several other boys had recently lost our fathers. We explained that if he kept it up, that we would kick his ass. He kept it up and we obliged. Maybe it was due to this being the South, but no administrator or adult told me that I did anything wrong per se, only that they had to suspend me for two weeks. The most condemnation I received was from my football coach who was upset that he had to lose a starting player for two games; he advised me to take the kid off campus in the future (so kidnapping and assault).

This sort of issue is why I am upset that Paypal has turned out to be a problematic company. The main problem I see for getting people to pay, who would want to pay, is that payment causes a hassle. Have a seemless micropayment option would facilitate people paying without the need to enter your financial information into yet another random site and perhaps also create an account. That extra effort just isn't worth it for many users and for me as well.

I've often wondered whether the micropayment option would provide sufficient revenue to online magazines as well. Rather than going with a paywall where you generally prepay for content, have an easy payment option. Every day I read articles that I'd gladly pay $0.10 or $0.50 for without pause. Asking me to prepay for content even for a provider that I like, e.g. foreignaffairs? Only a rare few sites will get that out of me.

Currently running or in production: Game of Thrones, Homeland, Louie, Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad (I can't personally vouch for it, but a lot of people whom I respect love it so I am quite confident that it is worth your time if you're remotely interested in watching good TV).

Ran in recent memory: The Wire (might be too pessimistic for your tastes but excellent nonetheless), The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Freaks and Geeks and Battlestar Galactica.

If you're interested in comedies then there are mounds more. Like with all things, there's a lot of crap with a few gems.

I don't know what measure you're using to claim that alcohol is the 'hardest' drug. This source certainly doesn't agree with you. And while there are a very small number of drugs that can directly kill an addiction during the withdrawal phase, alcohol isn't alone. Benzodiazepines and methadone are also in that group.

You do realize that sports books do not set lines with the intention of accurately predicting the outcome, right? They set lines to induce equal betting on both sides so that they make money from the vig. The final outcome plays a role in setting the line but other aspects weigh heavily, e.g. whether a team is a public team or whether one team had an overwhelming recent win that will weigh heavily in the minds of the public.

Also, the Packers weren't really very middle of the pack.

I didn't get that from the article and I don't see why you should presume that based on a popular press news article. The article seems to describe a bunch of techniques that they use to ferret out cheaters but each technique (which surely isn't an exhaustive list) surely isn't used on each test.

The metric of large gains is best used on tests like the GRE or LSAT where there is sufficient incentive for the test taker to be halfway competent to begin with so future scores are unlikely to be extraordinarily higher; contrary to what some believe, there are marginal returns on studying for tests like the GRE and LSAT. This is less effective for say a 8th grade remedial math test.

Whereas the metric of erased answers is useless for computer based tests like the GRE and much less useful on tests like the SAT where there isn't sufficient incentive for an individual to go behind the test-takers and change answers. There may be for teachers at elementary, middle and high schools where their merit pay can be linked to some test performance measure.

I agree that calories are calories

"A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics.

The Mineral Miracle? Or a Massive Information Operation?.

The biggest tragedy (to me) about Africa is that the people there are left hanging between the two systems - hunter gatherer and civilized. They cannot go back, because due to our "humanitarian help" their numbers are too high.

Go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Do you have any evidence for this? There are very few genuine hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa (Hadza, San, a few pygmy groups, and maybe a handful more). Colonization may've pushed some into an agriculturalist mode of production, but the powerful African kingdoms were doing that well before any European had ambitions of exploiting Africans. And since this story of agriculturalists pushing hunter-gatherers onto marginal land fits with the experience of every other geographic location, I have no reason to think that Africa would be unique and that European colonization is a particularly good explanation for this trend.

BTW, after seeing all the posts online about how many people hate the iPad even before it came out should have predicted it wouldn't sell at all - even though it seems to have sold pretty well so far. I guess their theory didn't predict that their theory failed. Oh wait, now that I've posted this it does predict it.

Did you get a representative sample? Or are you just voicing the opinion of a small group of tech blogs?

Science doesn't "change" its mind. It forms models that allow humans to predict how the universe works.

Humor me, but isn't one of the implicit claims of the scientific worldview that if one wants to be accurate in their assessment of the world, that they ought to believe that the current model is true? Minimally, act on that basis. This seems to be a widely held perspective.


Personally, I am pretty sure that isn't how actual scientists actually work (see this book for an easy reference). So if you're the type of person who likes to follow those you are quite clever and accomplished, then that's an objection. Philosophically, science seems to be best fueled, in the normative sense, by inspiration and intuition, beyond mere minor extension of a current theory. The key element to the enterprise of science is that those intuitions are tested in a rigorous manner to see if they correspond to reality.

I'm pretty sure he's toying with the notion of supervenience (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, Wikipedia). Where, it is thought that you can completely explain changes in the more complicated phenomena (people, organisms, molecules) in terms of changes in the less complicated phenomena (basic particles). It may be needlessly complicated to do so. To express the changes in physical system of an animal running using only particle physics may require more time than is left in the life of the universe. But the thought goes, that it can in principle happen.

Maybe you have a more nuanced objection to that view, but that's different. The view isn't as implausible as you make it seem.

Less crime and less punishment by Mark Kleiman is of interest here.

everything degrades in quality over time, and that's just the way it is, and always will be

Everything good will likely degrade in quality over time. Regression to the mean, combined with the fact that creators of these works have lives. Their attention and dedication can fade because they have other things that they care about (different projects, families, etc). I am upset when an author mails one in, but I try hard to compare the work they produced to the alternatives that I would've considered. Usually, even then, the author that I read for legacy's sake comes out ahead.

There have been reports which say that places like Atlanta are still paying for the olympics.

I was under the impression that Atlanta was one of the success stories of economic growth resulting from hosting an Olympics. This story indicates that there were net economic benefits from hosting the Olympics, but you are generally right, the economic benefits from hosting the Olympics are questionable in general. As others have mentioned, Montreal only recently finished paying off the Olympic stadium they constructed for the 1976 games. The Birds Nest stadium that the Chinese were so proud of is scheduled to host 1 event in 2009, but using Beijing as an example is dubious since it seemed clear from the beginning that the Chinese intended to host a hugely wasteful Olympics for ego purposes.