What you seem to be critiquing them for is not covering the entire experimental possibility space but I think this is usually done over the course of multiple, focused experiments rather than in one super-large multi-year answer-all-possibilities experiment. (Think of it as the scientific version of doing Agile development - do many, focused experiments than one large one so that if there is a flaw in your methodology others will point it out early in the process).

I do think all of the specific questions you raise are excellent questions that certainly need to be experimentally tested. However, I think that they all can (and will) be answered in future experiments that build on the results of this one. Even if the result of these experiments show this paper is wrong, it still advances our collective understanding by showing evidence for an idea that can now be confirmed, refined or refuted by subsequent experimentation.

Right idea, wrong target.

There is one social network that is still holding on by its fingernails by focusing on music, which has always been a strength: MySpace.

I agree that for most people, 3 drinks a day is moderate.

I think most everyone would agree that getting drunk would constitute heavy drinking. Given that benchmark, I have known people for whom heavy drinking is 2 drinks, and others for whom it is 12. So to label any number of drinks as being light or heavy drinking for everybody is inherently arbitrary.

Your chemistry is sound, but your biology needs work. Our bodies are very complex, so the effects of things on whole body often cannot be summed up by simple chemistry.

For example, the concentration of uric acid in the urine is higher than the concentration in the blood, despite the fact that the two solutions "want" to have the same concentration.

So to say that distilled water has such an impact untrue, and is a result of an overgeneralization of simple chemical processes.

That doesn't make any sense: there is a big difference between when a chemical dissolved in another, and a chemical binding to another.

Blood, for example, is a complex solutions containing various vitamins, minerals, hormones and cells.

The water you drink is absorbed into the rest of your body and is added to the different fluids bodily (blood, lymph, cytoplasm, etc.).

Then, as your kidneys filter the blood, they pull out wastes like uric acid, and the water they are dissolved in.

So you drink water, this new water is added to other water that already contains minerals in it, resulting in more water with stuff dissolved in it. At this point the new water and old water are indistinguishable, and act the same way.

Nothing is expelled from the body's fluids until the kidneys do their job of filtering the blood.

Also, water isn't absorbed until it gets to your colon. So if you drink water with your food or within a few hours of eating, some of the minerals in the food that is in the process of being digested (from your mouth to your stomach to your small intestine) will get dissolved in the water as it makes its way to your colon aka large intestine.

The only way distilled water could be bad for you is if you are replacing water containing minerals that, unless you drank them in your water, you would be deficient in, which is the case for almost nobody.

They did do it right... except for the whole still-not-profitable part. So they can either make a good hardware product that looses money, or they could go back to focusing on ridiculously profitable software.

Thank you!

When I was in middle school and high school, the teachers periodically let me know what my percentage in the class was. In addition, they usually made it easy to compute the current grade assignment-by-assignment, and some students would keep track of it in "real time" if they wanted to. (College was a different story entirely) The letter grade was more for parents and the transcript.

Also, in Middle School/Junior High & High School, most of the classes are required. Trying something else often isn't really an option.

I have the same pet peeve! The scoring of Tennis bothers me for a similar reason.

However, in this case, the rest of the world has a pretty clear expectation of what an F means. Giving out failing D's would require much more explanation to change the expectations of students, parents, and other school systems that they interact with. There is also the risk of a PR disaster if in getting rid of F's, people mis-interpret that as the school passing everyone no matter how poorly they do.

I agree. Ballmer keeps trying to beat others at their own game, and loosing.

Microsoft makes most of its money selling to businesses (Windows to OEMs, and Server software, Exchange & Office directly to companies). But they keep trying consumer projects like the Xbox (decent product but no profits after 9 years), PlaysForSure, Zune, Kin, Hotmail/MSN/Bing, etc. and are being beaten by Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google and others.

You would think somebody within Microsoft would realize that their strength isn't being a "cool" company, but rather one that businesses trust.

Why does the market share matter if there are no profits? From what I have read Microsoft is still billions of dollars away from breaking even on their Xbox.

In contrast, when Apple broke into the smartphone market, they almost certainly made up all of their R&D costs within the first year, and is now very profitable in that market.

The markets are different, and traditionally consoles are loss-leaders in order to sell videogames but it has been 9 years since Microsoft entered the market.

And how!

It isn't like Apple decided that The Beatles aren't "good enough" music to sell, its the people who own their catalog that refuse to sell it in any online music store, not just the iTunes music store.

Plenty of developers have both an iPhone app in the app store & versions for other smartphones.

There were no issues approving the Kindle app, as well as other ebook and music purchasing apps. Apple even featured Pandora's app in the WWDC keynote.

So to answer your question: No.

I assume that it is nearly impossible to do an exemplary job teaching one course for one semester. It takes time to refine one's personal teaching style and to figure out what parts of the subject students grasp easily and which parts are more difficult. Nobody's teaching is perfect, so I assume that most of the criticism is legitimate.

Contradictory feedback is to be expected. Rather than ignoring it though, the proper response is to think critically to see if there were times where you did too much of X and other times you did too little of X. Sure, in the end you will probably have to ignore some of the feedback - but that doesn't mean it doesn't merit careful consideration before deciding in the end that you couldn't or shouldn't have done anything about it.

For example, if the A+ students had complained you were going to slowly and explaining things too much, but the B & C students were very happy with the explanations and needed them to keep from getting a much lower grade, then the explanations should be kept - though thought should be given as to how to keep the first group of students from getting bored when they are given.

Doing an excellent job at teaching a group of people a variety of related but not always similar things is something that is inherently challenging to do.

I personally find the purely-socratic style of teaching extremely frustrating.

I've never been graded in such a class by how well I took part in the discussion. Usually the "interesting out of textbook material" never makes it on the exam and the "confusing stuff in the textbook that I wish the instructor would discuss in class but doesn't" is the majority of the exam (and therefore, my grade).

Maybe instead of blaming students (many of whom are going into many thousands of dollars in debt to hear you speak) for wanting to be "spoon fed", maybe you should think about how good of a job you actually did.

By actually *listening* to your students' seemingly reasonable feedback you would be able to refine your technique, so your students would get more out of your class and you would become a better teacher.