There are two things about this. Pennsylvania's "two-party consent" only applies in situations where those being recorded without their consent have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." I have a problem with the judge finding that people (teachers and students) have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the classroom. The other thing is that the Pennsylvania law also has an exception that states that you do not need to permission of someone who is committing a crime in the recording. That would not have applied in this case since not all of those being recorded were committing a crime. (I am not sure if any of the actions recorded crossed over into criminal territory, or not. Although if I was a judge, or on a jury, they are at a minimum close enough that I would be unwilling to convict the person recording them.)

A couple of points about this. My first thought when I heard this was that Pennsylvania law on recording someone requires their consent except in certain circumstances; one of those circumstances is when a crime is being committed. I thought that was the case here, except the boy recorded others as well as those committing a crime (terroristic threats, at the least). However, there is another exception to Pennsylvania law, when one does not have an expectation of privacy. The judge ruled that the boy recorded people when they had an expectation of privacy. Since everything I have read indicates that all of the recordings occurred in the classroom, I have a serious problem with the idea that anyone in the recordings had an expectation of privacy.
Further, the judge claimed that she was confident that if the bullying had been reported to the school, it would have been taken care of appropriately, the the school did not tolerate bullying. How the judge could reach that conclusion is a mystery to me, considering that the incident which was recorded occurred in the presence of a teacher.

Actually, the key is to eliminate anything which allows me to connect the majority of the comments by one individual as all being by that individual. All of those other things are only relevant if they combine with multiple comments to build a picture of one person who has more wisdom on the subject than everyone else. When I read comments by an Anonymous Coward on slashdot which claims the things which you reference, I always read the rest of their comment more critically. If I find their argument to use suspect logic, I am more likely to consider them to be acting in bad faith (even when I agree with their point of view on the topic) than if they do not make such appeals to having greater authority. I suspect that most people do something similar.

Except that the "expert" forecasters are influenced by the charisma* of certain individuals to produce the type of results those individuals desire. There have been studies that show that one of the most important aspects of "crowd wisdom" is eliminating the ability of individuals to use their force of personality to influence the decision reached by the crowd.


*I am using "charisma" here to sum up all of the aspects of force of personality and authority over those evaluating the data.

That is because elections happen in a way that eliminates the most important aspect of crowd wisdom. In order for crowd wisdom to be reliable it must be insulated from being influenced by the charisma of individuals. There is no way to set up elections to do this. Actually, I wonder if the secret ballot may in a way actually exacerbate this problem.

This thought just came to me now, so I do not think I can explain the reasoning as to why that might be so. I will try any way. It seems possible that the necessity of having to explain to one's peers the reason one made a choice which was unpopular with them might offset the amount which the individual charisma of the candidate (or the candidate's representatives) influenced the decision. The other way in which eliminating the secret ballot would influence the outcome is that it would make it harder to manufacture votes for a particular candidate, since everyone would have some idea how everyone else voted.

Actually, if you read the entire article, it appears that what that pharmacist is doing, inside her own head, is averaging what all of the various sources she reads have to say on any given subject. The mistake would be to say, "Oh, over the last three years, her predictions have been 30% better than the experts. Let's make her one of the experts!" If at some point she were to start to believe that she was an expert at this forecasting, her accuracy would fall off because she would stop adjusting her understanding of events based on sources which disagreed with what she already "knows".

You are right that the wisdom of crowds does not come from having experts. The wisdom of crowds comes from having a lot of people who all have a little bit of knowledge relevant to the subject. Some of that knowledge might be something that you would not necessarily think was relevant, but when applied as a filter on the other knowledge present produces a result much more accurate than an expert on the subject would ever produce.

The results of this study are not new. Back in the lat 70s, early 80s, there was a study which showed that a group of people with no particular expertise on the subject will reach a better decision than an individual expert on the subject as long as certain criteria are met in the group discussion. The most important criteria that needs to be met is that the groups deliberations must be such that the individual charisma of each person must not be allowed to influence the group discussion. My understanding is that they accomplished this by having all of the discussion occur in anonymous text (such as if all of the comments on slashdot were from Anonymous Coward).

I'm sorry, but if you are not doing something so that your posts appear in a different font than everyone else, why is your font different than everyone else? Oh, and your signature is in the same font as everyone else's post, not the font which your post is in. So, it seems probable that you have decided to post in a font other than the slashdot default.

Well then the first case to get to the Supreme Court would probably have been the one wending its way through the court system now based on the "origination clause". (I have lost track of where it is currently) The Constitution states that all tax bills must originate in the House. The ACA originated in the Senate. The defenders of the ACA claim that it originated in the House, but the only thing in the ACA that is the same as the bill which the House passed is the number of the bill (the bill passed by the House with that number was on a completely unrelated subject and all of the words, including the title, were replaced in the Senate version).

Actually, the Constitution at NO place states, clearly, or otherwise, that the Supreme Court is the arbiter of what is and is not constitutional. That is a role which the Supreme Court assigned to itself.

It's not a court case, but how about the employer mandate in the ACA? The law specifically states that it takes effect January 1, 2014. Yet it does not take effect until later (we do not know when yet, since that date has yet to arrive). There are other examples of the same thing. What does it matter what the letter of the law says if those whose job it is to enforce it refuse to enforce it in certain cases?

What, you still think that the actual wording of the law matters any more?

Oh, I believe it is possible. Because I believe that it was designed to make it difficult to determine who was responsible for the missing antennas.

I reviewed both linked articles and discovered that despite the fact that the study called it an "80% mortality rate" that is not what they actually measured. They measured the reduction in the population of the group. That means that by the methodology used they count those who moved away as having died. I am sure that mortality rates among isolated populations which are contacted are high, but without some measure of how many move out of the area we do not have any way to judge how many die vs how many just move away.

Would you still old that position if he was fired for supporting "gay marriage"? Should it be Mozilla's choice to fire a man for having sex with other men?
I tend to think that it should be, both in this case and in those other cases. All too many people forget that blacks were not forced to sit in the back of the bus because the bus companies wanted it that way. They were forced to sit in the back of the bus because the government passed laws mandating it. There is evidence that if those "Jim Crow" laws had not existed, segregation would have gone away on its own.