Yes, the more closely we can adhere to that, the better. That's never happened perfectly. After all, as I understand it, scientific journals started as letters among over-lapping circles of acquaintances until someone with a bit of ambition assembled, edited and sent the collections of letters back out to all of the participants. And it was common for friendships and animosities to pre-exist or to develop among these overlapping circles. When there were good editor/publishers, working with well-considered, well-written letters, it worked well.

Unfortunately, despite (because of) "peer review" as practiced today, the scientific method is often abandoned for the sake of politics... as most often is the case with the "warmist hysterics" vs. the "deniers". Factions circle around particular publications, blocking papers from other factions, and making snide remarks and otherwise propagandizing about the others, often disregarding the merits and essential faults of each.

OT1H, no one should be forced to publish sentiments with which he disagrees, or to associate with those with whom he disagrees. OTOH, sustaining the debate as openly and honestly as possibly is the thing.

IMO, it should all get published, with the names of the authors, the (unfudged, un"trick"ed, un-homogenized) data. Dispense with the propagandizing and restrictions against assertions and counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments from reaching the public light of day.

Dispense with the government subsidies for this political faction and not that, dispense with the "scientists" meetings with editorials and media moguls to plan the propaganda strategies, or at least attempt to get knowledge of all such meetings out to the public as quickly as possible and reported in as much depth as possible.

Let everyone see where data has been jiggered and decide whether those processes are valid or not. Let everyone see the back-slapping and back-stabbing cliques clearly.

Let each person examine and judge each issue to the extent of his ability within his economic means...

I don't see anything wrong with "self-plagiarism". I mean, if X wrote it, X wrote it. It doesn't matter whether X wrote it 1 time or 100 times; it's still X's work. OTOH, I can see how a publisher of one paper might object to material in that paper being re-used in another, because the first publisher won't be able to fully milk it. As a writer not compensated by publishers/producers for some work whose value went to others on a number of occasions that's not tugging at my heart-strings just now.

I hereby am saying the USA should not expect spending more on education -- whether rural, suburban, city or slum -- to necessarily improve academic results. We already spend horrendous sums in some of the under-performing neighborhoods.

What works is when the locals value academic achievement, when these individuals and family heads see some pay-back coming to "their people" whom they know well. When the school admins, teachers, students and parents place a high priority on academic achievement, when they see that it is possible and that it pays -- both personally and generally -- higher academic achievement results.

In big parts of the USA, UK, and Europe that link between effort, academic achievement and proportional rewards, meritocracy on that basis, has been broken and people won't invest more effort when they see other accessible options.

OK, let's do it this way, then; let's only test Americans in the poorest neighborhoods in which academic achievement is least valued, and test only the children in the wealthiest neighborhoods where academic achievement is most highly valued in China and see how the results come out.

Or we could test all of their students and all of our students and compare, examining the average, median, worst, best, standard deviations.

Or only test the top students in the top US schools and compare them with the top students in their top schools for a change.

Can you see the differences such selective testing produces from universal testing?

3 alternate links. Take your pick:

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell120313.php3

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/12/03/a-challenge-to-our-beliefs-n1756023/page/full

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/120213-681322-blacks-working-class-whites-were-similar-before.htm?p=full

which violates my privacy, unlike the local red-necks (which, BTW, originated as a designation for Presbyterians). But the vast majority of south-easterners drive quite well... except for some of the retirees and "Yankee tourists". I've seen a pilot project test or 2 and was not impressed.

"book scanning"

Librarians were already doing that quite well, though not well funded, and that "work on digitization" goes back decades.

Gmail is brain-dead these days, insisting on mobile phone numbers and other privacy violations. Ad targeting is similarly entertaining, at least: I don't wear many sarongs or extremely ugly high heels, not the least bit interested in dating other guys... But the search results have been getting worse and worse, with the "headlines" not matching the URLs and the content, and fairly often not matching the search criteria.

The real problem with so many of these "brilliant" firms (FB, Goog, MSFT, Oracle, GE, Siemens, LinkedIn, Friendster... and their execs) the media seem to love soooo much is their determination to violate peoples' privacy. As one receent article put it, too many people confuse getting money with earning money, being wealthy with being virtuous. Of course, the left tends to the opposite, assuming anyone who is wealthy must be evil unless proven to have leftist credentials. The reality is that one must actually look closely at how the wealth is obtained and sort out the details to arive at the net balance for each executive.

Where!?!?

I certainly don't hear of them through my network, nor from Dice, Monster, Indeed, NationsJob... As a matter of fact, the web-based job search sites have worked hard to make it nearly impossible to filter out the bodyshoppers to get to the great firms developing great hardware/software products.

Great employers have become much more difficult to find.

(And recruiting intensity has dropped through the sub-basement over the last couple decades. "Drag your rear out here for the interview and let us know when you reach town; maybe we can schedule a meeting within the next month or two after that... or the next year, perhaps." "Relocation assistance!? Training?! Esmit, Raj, listen; this guy's such a kidder!")

Sure, but how many able and willing candidates were there? 200 for every 10 openings? 300 for every 10 openings? The tech execs' lobbyists and tools refuse to say.

Yah, sure. Racists consider people of whatever race they dislike to be "unqualified". Age discriminators consider people who are older or younger than they prefer to be "unqualified". Those with unethical schemes consider people whose professional ethics preclude them from collaborating in schemes to, e.g. violate people's rights, initiate force or fraud, identity theft, extortion, privacy violation..., to be "unqualified" and "unwilling".

Many of these employers consider even highly able (gifted/genius, creative, knowledgeable, industrious, experienced) and willing/enthusiastic US citizen STEM professionals to be "unqualified", and they just can't find anyone other than guest-workers who are "qualified" (and want us all to pay no attention to the new artificial barriers they've erected to employing or actively recruiting US citizens since the advent of the H-1B visa program).

But they are willing to spend $billions on lobbyists, to try to convince the low-information public, and the easily bri, er, uh, cultivated and discerning media, congress-critters and other politicians.

H-1Bs are supposed to be TEMPORARY guest-work visas, not long-term visas. They should have to apply for renewal every 3-10 months. Of course, renewals and extensions should go a lot more quickly than the initial/new visa application, because they will only require a month or so for the incremental background investigation rather than 3-6 months for the initial investigation (of course, if they have a student visa and apply to change to H-1B, that change of status should only require an incremental, too, but then the more extensive investigation should be done before they can get the student or exchange visa). 1-5 weeks between gigs is generous.

H-1B visas are also supposedly for the "best and brightest" with arcane niche skills not available anywhere among US citizens and green card holders, if you believe the executives, immigration lawyers and their lobbyists, so the pay should be significantly above the mean and median. (And no, filling out a bodyshoppers-R-us time sheet or project planning form 8-C is not a highly valuable niche skill meriting a visa of any kind.)

weird -- Middle English wird, werd, from Old English wyrd akin to Old Norse urthr fate (as in required to fulfill a function or complete a quest), Middle English worthen from Old English weorthan to become, weorth worthy, of a specified value akin to Old High German werdan to become and werd worthy, worth... of, relating to, or dealing with fate or the Fates (the Weird Sisters), or the super-natural; magical; unearthly; mysterious; of an extraordinary character; fantastic

Sounds good, to me.

I never visited his shop, and have never seen it done that way in any of the outfits I've worked. Sure, we had mathematicians, various kinds of mechanical engineers, electrical/electronics engineers, statisticians... but those were specialties in our collaborations.

Definitely. When I worked on CAD/CAM/CAE software -- investing both the 1% creativity and that 99% perspiration in 30-hour work sessions -- and then I'd see a family car or sleek-looking sports car, or a power-tool, crane, warhead (and they tore down the wall!), back-hoe, cherry-picker, telephone, skin for a sky-scraper, diesel engine, parts for a ship defense system, toy, or disk drive... designed using our apps, it was a huge kick, especially when some customer's engineer had consulted with you.

Different people see different things as being dull and different things as being interesting or exciting. My chemistry friends don't enjoy the same things as my CS friends, and they don't enjoy the same things as my engineering friends, gardening friends, politics friends, wood-working friends, brick-mason friends, genealogy friends, carpentry friends, car restoring friends, video-gaming friends, camping/hiking friends, medical friends, economics friends, older people, the academics vs. government vs. real world...

For that matter, people in one niche of computer wrangling are quite different from those in other niches. Some relatives whose work is in different areas can barely talk shop. (There are data processing people, data-base people, ERP, networking, content management, statisticians, SCADA, sys admins, contract oversight people...)

But B-school bozos hardly ever seem to have much of a clue -- they get all worked up over some tiny spark you casually throw off, and don't appreciate great break-throughs. They also have no idea what a software developer can do in the blink of an eye while you're working on 3 other things, and what will require an extensive amount of research accompanied by a long series of experiments, consultations...

"Those visas mandate proper salaries" that are typically 12% to 35% below local market compensation for the particular kind of job. This isn't me claiming this; this is what the VP of Tata claimed, what Singh said, and what numerous researchers examining what sketchy data are publicly available have found repeatedly over the last 15 years and more.