This can be a misleading calculation. First, not all of the days without classes are teacher vacation days. Second, if the job offers a good wage, but the hours are restricted, then it may still not be a good job.

eg: you may complain about only getting 3 weeks of vacation every year, but how would you feel about a mandatory week of unpaid vacation every month? No overtime those other three weeks, and it'd be nice if you spent some of your vacation time earning continuing education credits.

The trouble is getting a sample size large enough for meaningful determination. In the case of teaching phonics vs whole-language, the outcomes depend on student - meaning income, race, geography, parental engagement, preparation, etc - and on the teacher. So you really need a national-scale study, with many different teachers (each following the same syllabus), coordinated over years, with some way to make sure that students don't switch methods just because their parents move.

No one's going to pay for that. No one's patient enough to wait for this year's first graders to graduate from high school to evaluate the techniques.

People will pay to summarize anonymized student data over a few years and a handful of school districts, but that gets you the kind of hand-wavey outcomes everyone's complaining about.

You can do great physics because you can make sure that every piece of steel you test is almost identical. Do a test 5 times, and you can be confident to 4 significant figures. You can do good biology because you can make sure that your mice all have the same genotype, diet, and general environment. You can usually tell +/-10% with a couple dozen animals. Humans? You can't control their genetics or their environment. You can't trust them to finish the experiment. You can't even make many reproducible measurements, because you can't take the subjects apart when the experiment is over, and none of the cognitive tests are objective.

Sounds to me like ganjadude has never been rickrolled or goatse'd. It's nice to know that such naivete still exists.

Graphic content is one thing. The message in these videos is "This is an appropriate way to kill infidels. Get to it." That may not be the message that you, a well-adjusted participant in Western society perceives, but that is the message intended by the video producers.

Many countries restrict hate speech, and "Convert the infidels or burn them" seems to fall into that category. Most countries restrict speech intended specifically to incite violence, and "Here's how you burn a caged heathen," seems like it falls into that category.

To me, the question is whether you want to report on the story and explain the distorted vision of Islam being propagated by these groups, or whether you want to propagate their message. You won't see Anderson Cooper reading Klan propaganda to marginalize the KKK; why would you use ISIS propaganda to marginalize them?

This, of course, is likely FOX's intention. Nothing garners eyeballs like a good war against an inhuman enemy of amoral monsters. Some nice explosions, some touching stories of sacrifice by 'our boys,' and rapid, glorious territory gains. I'll bet FOX still has a lot of people who remember the glory days of Shock and Awe (tm), with people glued to their TVs and starving for FOX's nationalist jingoism. ISIL videos, like the Abu Ghraib videos, are the bass in the drum beat to war. They're the emotional fire that obliterates rational discussion.

You see how well it's already worked on you? There is no room for negotiation, reconciliation, or rehabilitation. The only good extremist is a dead extremist.

So do I. But let me ask you: how many of the suspicious packages that bomb squads across the country have investigated and blown up have actually been explosive? In Atlanta, they investigate about one "device," abandoned briefcase, or discarded shopping bag a month, but the last actual bomb was in 1996.

If you're in Kabul, and you find a thing duct taped to the inside of a wrecked car, that has high bomb probability. If you're in a US city, 3 blocks from a college campus, and you find a thing duct taped with a clear view of traffic and an explanatory note, that has a high goofy college student probability.

I know this may run counter to a lot of the propaganda you've been fed, but THE US IS NOT A WAR ZONE

That sounds like an appropriate response, if one is in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other conflict zone where IEDs are a regular, or even unusual occurrence. Here in the US, we seem to have about one bombing or bombing attempt every two years (half of which are FBI "sting" operations) despite having 10 times as many people. In that environment, it seems appropriate to put a little more credence in the note explaining the art project.

If you're out on the lake, and it quacks, it's probably a duck. If you're in a cubicle at the office and it quacks, someone probably farted.

No, almost certainly enamel. Powdered glass fused to the metal at around 2400 oF, rather than powdered polymer fused at 350 oF. True enamel is what powder coating aspires to. Also not "enamel" that you buy at the hardware store.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Because the game doesn't end today, it starts over again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. It's a horribly monotonous game and no one cheers if he wins on any particular day. And while he's got the rule book in front of him saying that he's only got to stop eating snacks when he gets to 20, he's also got a whole team of sexy cheerleaders saying 'just one more.' Then lap dance for him when he loses. WTF wants to win that game?

Dieting is psychology, not biology. You may be able to use the biology to trick the psychology a little, but when you're talking about a person's voluntary decision to eat or not eat, you're absolutely in the realm of psychology. It's really hard to 1) do well controlled psychological studies that provide valid results and 2) communicate the constraints of those results to the popular press. This gets even harder if you think you're a nutrition scientist and not a psychologist.

That's great, but you're either being naive or disingenuous if you think that's what "diet" advice is about.

Diet advice is psychology. People are used to their bodies 'just working.' They don't have to pay attention to their breathing, but automatic systems ensure they get just enough oxygen. They have an automatic system for nutrient detection, but many people think their system is miscalibrated. ie: they still want to eat even after they've consumed the necessary calories. Look at diet advice, and you'll see it's all about making you "feel" full (or increasing your basal metabolism).

There's substantial quackery around 'mobilizing fat.' There's a ton of people out there who offer little more than 'this worked for me' under the guise of some kind of professional title or credential. Including the people citing thermodynamics. eg, if you happen to be one of the people with low UCP1, then your calories used will be much less than the magical textbook formula. In fact, only about 2/3 people will fall within that range.

You do illustrate a good point, though: if you go to the trouble of actually learning the science, and accommodating the limitations (generally) stated with that science, then things usually work (unless you are an individual outside of a standard deviation). If you get your science 3rd hand from a 'counselor,' 4th hand from the popular press, or 5th hand from your coffee clatch, then you are destined to be disappointed.

This depends entirely on the modification. The two most popular GMOs are "roundup ready" and "Bt." Roundup-ready plants are resistant to glyphosate, which allows farmers to use higher amounts of the herbicide. "Bt" plants produce their own insecticide, which allows farmers to reduce their external application of such agents. As glyphosate resistance transfers to weed plants, biotech companies have begun developing resistance to other herbicides: the next step in the evolutionary arms race.

No one has genomic techniques to successfully create a protein from whole cloth. All GMO techniques involve transferring an existing gene into a species that lacks that gene. eg, "Roundup ready" crops contain an Agrobacterium enzyme to supplement their own EPSPS (enolpyruvylshikimate-phosphate synthase). So if your concern is just that these genes are "in the environment," then they already were.

Their commercial use greatly increases the quantity of those genes in the environment, in the same way that commercial farming has greatly increased the number of cows and corn plants. And it's distinctly easier to transfer genes laterally among closely related species (say, wheat and grass) than less related species (say, bacteria and grass), although one of the attractive features of agrobacteria is that they have long been know to mediate lateral gene transfer (ie, tumor formation) into plants. A farmer purposefully planting and cultivating 1000 acres of any single species gives that species a massive advantage over any species dependent solely on birds and bees for propagation.

Modern, monoculture agriculture methods make us more susceptible to a potato-famine like event, regardless of whether the monoculture has been engineered or not.

You do see that there's a fundamental difference in the business of oil and Apple, right?

The oil guys are, basically, taking stuff out of the ground and selling it to you. Their profits derive from carefully controlling the supply so that there is always a shortage. So that their customers are always competing for the privilege of giving them money. People give money to the oil companies because they have to.

Apple is in the business of creating technology that didn't exist before. They're moving society, if not culture, forward, and making the world different than it was before. Their profits derive from being more creative or more fashionable than other tech companies, not from artificially restricting supply (much). People give money to Apple because they want to.

Seems to me that the CIA is not quite as omnipotent as their propaganda claims. Julian Assange has not had serious appendicitis, let alone a tragic heart attack nor freak accident, and we all know exactly where he is. How many years did it take to track down OBL, while he sat eating take-out in the suburbs?

No, I think it's pretty clear that the CIA have trouble finding their asses with both hands. Most of the time that doesn't matter too much, because the media is happy to believe without question that the identified bad guys were really bad, and the public would rather believe in James Bond than Maxwell Smart. I'm sure there are a few very clever and very capable people within CIA, NSA, etc, but I'm equally sure that they are, by and large, massive, hidebound bureaucracies employing legions of tenured civil servants whose sole goal is to get home in time to catch the evening weather report

The problem with this analogy is that in the physical world I can arrange to have privacy. I can meet with other individuals outside of the public eye. I can whisper in their ear so that only they hear communication. I can go to remote places where there are no observers. The CIA and KGB developed excellent methods for completely anonymous communication in the physical world, almost all of it based on the economics of real world surveillance: it costs money to watch someone in the real world. On the internet, there is a record of everything, and that record lasts as long as someone else chooses. It costs almost nothing, per person, to surveil the internet, especially if you forbid encryption and anonymity. Do you really want prospective Singularity One clients to see drunken pictures from USask? Or to know that you're bipolar? I mean, that's stuff that you're proud enough to have voluntarily posted to public forums, but a lot of people would find it embarassing.

We all have stuff we're embarrassed by. That same CIA and KGB have a long history of using such embarrassing, not-quite-public information to manipulate people, even to making them violate their own ethical standards. Are you so anxious to give them that power over you? Are you so anxious to give that power to the North Korean government and to the Russian mafia?