Well, to be fair he did want to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, which would have cut the deficit considerably. These were sunsetted when they were put into effect so that the Bush administration could claim minimal impact on long-term debt.

It was a deal with Congressional Republicans. Obama got a reauthorization and extension of unemployment benefits (this was in the Great Recession), an inflation adjustment for the alternative minimum tax so it wouldn't bite middle income people, an extension of the child tax credit and earned income credit. Congressional Republicans got an extension of Bush tax cuts on people making more than $250,000 and a reduction of the estate tax.

Basically when push came to shove, both parties preferred to kick the debt can down the road for a few more years. It may have even been the right choice at the time given the weak private sector spending. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no deficit hawks during recessions.

So he's for establishing a gulag, is he? Citations please.

And of course it's even a *better* deal for the USA. We get to govern the place, put our military on it, claim the adjacent territorial waters, tax the people who live there etc., in return for the symbolic pretense that we're doing it according to ethical and legal principles. That's the deal.

Occasionally the pretense of principle presents some minor restrictions on what we do, but in that very same grand scheme of things it's still a pretty sweet deal.

In the neighborhood were I grew up there was a row of houses that were built on a paper street that had yet to be built. All those houses were accessed via temporary easements running over lots on the adjacent street. But after selling all the houses on the paper street the developer disappeared and nobody wanted to pay for the actual building of the paper street. The people who lived on the paper street just used the theoretically temporary easements on a practically permanent basis.

Once a year the owners of the adjacent lots would erect a temporary fence across the easement to prove that they hadn't legally abandoned their claim over the land. On that day the people who lived on the paper street had to ask permission to cross their neighbors' land. When I was a kid this had been going on longer than anyone in the neighborhood could remember -- judging from the age of the houses maybe thirty years -- but every year those neighbors would put those fences up in the hope that some day the paper street would be built and the easements would cease.

Of course the legal technicalities with the Hawaii telescopes are probably different, but the political principle is the same. If you don't assert your claims periodically, people will argue that you've abandoned them. And I suppose that Hawaiian natives are allowed to have politics like everyone else. Maybe sometimes there are more telescope friendly people in charge, and other times more native-rights assertive people.

was from the text used in a graduate-level data communication course I took many, many years ago. It said, more or less, that "Communication requires three things: a shared model, a shared set of symbols, and a common system for associating symbols with objects from that model."

Now here's the thing that I think is wise about that idea. People respond as if something like a famous photograph has an objective meaning and that everyone *should* somehow all have the same reaction to it. But intelligent, educated people should know better than that. Personally, I see a considerable element of self-deprecating humor in this particular choice of photo. However nobody should be particularly surprised that not everyone is laughing.

After many years of watching people drag out the pitchforks and torches when they're offended, or man the ramparts when they're offended by that offense, here's what I think the sensible way to handle this kind of thing is. When you feel offended by something someone says, say so, but without accusing the sayer of bad faith or collusion with the Forces of Oppression. When you have given offense you apologize and express yourself a different way.

You have a choice: you can either accept that people coming from different experiences will view things differently than you and work around that; or you can try to convince everyone in the world to think and feel the same way you do about everything.

I'm a member of several professional associations, including IEEE and the ACM. These societies have codes of ethics, which mandate things like respecting data privacy, accepting and cooperating with professional review, honoring contracts, respecting the rights of system stakeholders, providing honest estimates of project costs, disclosing conflicts of interest etc.

It's mostly stuff that almost goes without saying, so I have say I don't think much about these codes. But I sure would be pissed if one of these organizations was involved in helping the government violate its own code of ethics.

APA has a code of ethics for its members. Getting information out of an unwilling subject technically violates several principles the APA expects its own membership to abide by. For example the code of ethics requires APA members to safeguard the rights of anyone they're involved with professionally, and in particular those in situations where the subject's autonomy is limited. This would clearly forbid an APA member to be involved in the development of *any* coercive method, even if that method falls short of the legal definition of "torture".

Now arguably APAs code of ethics is too restrictive; arguably psychologists should be able to develop coercive methods so long as those methods are in the interest of society and do not rise to a reasonable standard of "torture". But until the APA rewrites its code of ethics it should refrain from any action which arguably might violate that code. To do otherwise, particularly secretly is morally repugnant for a dues-supported membership organization. It may even be malfeasance, since a non-profit is supposedly bound by the purpose for which it is chartered in its spending decisions.

American Psychological Association (2012) style citations please.

References:
American Psychological Association. (2012). APA style guide to electronic references.

Well, you shouldn't. It's usually the press that blows a single study way out of proportion, because they have no understanding of how science works. Science *always* generates contradictory results early on as it gets the kinks worked out of a hypothesis. This is not some kind of failure of science, it's the way science is supposed to work. A critical follow-up attempt to check on some study's results is *of course* much less likely to reach significance, because of researcher bias either way.

The gold standard for judging the state of science isn't a study, it's a review paper. This is a peer-reviewed paper, written by someone working in the field, summarizing the state of published evidence on some question in that field. These are supposed to be both comprehensive and extremely conservative in their findings.

Science is continually producing a streams of contradictory evidence. You should either pay very little attention to some new scientific idea, or be prepared to follow along in great detail over several years. But even forty years ago, when my local newspaper used to publish a whole section of science news one day a week (!!!) you could pretty much count on most of the media ridiculously overreacting to a juicy sounding bit of scientific controversy. What can you expect of today's emasculated and dumbed down reporting?

Imagine the media response if there were a study that came out that purported to show that smoking e-cigarettes was beneficial to health. It would be a media circus, but only the start of a long process in the scientific community. So rather than lighting up your e-cigarette, you should wait for the critiques and counter-studies to pile on, and then for a few review papers to come out after the dust settles. Most new ideas in science, like most new businesses, fail after a year or two.

Ebook edition of job-hunting bible "What Color is Your Parachute": $9.99.
McGraw Hill High School Equivalency Study Guide ebook: $17.89.
Typical study guide for trade test (plumbing, electrical, etc): $30-$60.
Microsoft Office for Dummies: $13.99

Cheap Chinese 7" Android Tablet that can run ebook reading software: $35.

For comparison, how much a family of four spends on food in a year: $7800 - $15600/yr.
Cost of a 2 br apartment in a crummy big city neighborhood:$13000/yr.

So, what's clear here is the cost of an ebook reader is tiny relative to other things a poor family needs, but that the cost of the books very quickly outstrips the cost of even a rather nice ebook reader like a Kindle.

Computers are cheap, especially if you don't need the latest and most powerful. You can get a functioning Android tablet that can work as an ebook reader for under $40. It won't be a *nice* tablet, but compared to the cost being shut out of the digital economy $40 is a reasonable investment for even a poor person. Otherwise how are you going to look for jobs, in the help wanted section of the newspaper? Are you going to buy used stuff from the print classifieds?

There are laptop formfactor Android computers for under $100. Those probably don't make sense for more affluent users, but now you can write a resume and cover letter for an online job application. And then of course there are always other peoples computers. But it's not unreasonable for a poor person to have a computing device these days on which he can read an ebook and maybe tap out emails when there's wi-fi he can borrow. It is not some kind of absurd luxury for poor people to own an ebook capable device.

One of the effects of the bill will be to make it impossible to use data from large scale public health studies. The raw data is secret for privacy reasons and for practical purposes impossible to replicate. For example the highly respected Framingham Heart Study has been running since 1948; under the terms of the bill its results couldn't be used in setting policy because the data are simply impossible to replicate.

... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.

Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.

Fraud she certainly is, but the fraud was so transparent that clearly she's not right in her head.

While the financial aspect of this makes her culpable, building an outrageous fraud around readily disprovable details of your personal biography is a very bad idea in the long run if you're simply a con artist. Doing that suggests that there are short term needs that trump simple financial considerations. Perhaps she felt she deserved more sympathy, nurturance and nurturance than she'd gotten in life. That's common enough that there's name for it: Factitious Disorder.

Over the years I've read many stories of people who assumed false biographies. Most often this took obvious forms -- passing for white before the Civil Rights Era. But in some cases people chose to assume minority identities, particularly as American Indians in the early 20th C. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance was (by the terminology of the age) a negro with some Cherokee ancestry. He ran away to join a wild west show where he learned from Cherokee language from other performers, used that to get into Carlisle Indian School and later traded up his "Cherokee" identity for a Plains Indian one. Wenjiganooshiinh -- "Grey Owl" -- was an Englishman who was abandoned by his father in childhood then later adopted an Apache/Ojibwe identity.

What makes these two men relevant to this case is that they were both advocates of Indian rights. As outsiders, they understood what sympathetic outsiders wanted Indians to be better than an Indian would. And they would't have been able to pull it off if they weren't a little off their nut; if they didn't want to escape who they were for a more glamorous alternative.

If involves breaking the law -- not just some kind of namby-pamby administrative regulation but the basic stuff of civilization like like the prohibitions on assault or murder -- then I'll sure as hell tell what not to do.

If you're a veteran I'll gladly shake your hand and thank you for your service. I'd be honored to buy you a drink. But I won't hand you a get out of jail free card.

Have a little perspective. Yes it's wrong to impersonate a veteran, but it doesn't impugn the character of veterans. But claiming that all veterans will and should overreact to a breach of propriety with violence *does* impugn their character. Which is worse?