That's an interesting perspective. Now I'm curious to see if that would happen. It's too bad that it requires a major collapse to test.

I think Africa actually would notice a bit. China has invested a decent amount of money there, and floods the market with cheap (read, "affordable") products. Now, these products are low quality, and people don't generally like them (local slang for a cheap, low quality product was "chinois" [Chinese], in Cameroon at least), but they're there. None of the kitchen faucets I bought ever lasted more than 6 months, but given the choice between a faucet that allows me to have running water in the kitchen, and not having running water in the kitchen...well, I'd pay the 3 dollars every six months to get the faucet when the old one broke.

It seems like people forget that most of Africa is "developing". A loss of outside investment and products could knock a lot of countries back down to "undeveloped". Maybe a lot of Westerners don't notice a big difference between the two, but there definitely is one.

I agree with this. I generally use Skim on OSX instead of Preview or Adobe, because I found it fit my needs better. Maybe it'll work for you.

In any profession, there are people who work hard, because they care about what they do. Is he that person? I have no idea, nor does it matter. All I know, and all I said in my post, was that one of his points is completely believable.

I'm not defending the public school system. I'm not defending teachers (although I do think there are good teachers out there). I'm not even defending the original poster. I just felt like you were focusing too much on an inconsequential point, and your argument will be better without it. If this didn't come through in my original post, that's my mistake.

My high school: 1600 students, five minutes between classes. High school across town: 1500 students (maybe 1600, maybe 1400, but you get the picture), five minutes between classes. Seven periods during the day, starting at 8, ending at 3:20. Can't remember how long lunch was, but each class was 53 minutes long. 53*7=371, so 39 minutes for lunch (also removing 30 minutes for breaks...5 minutes times the six in-between times).

If he's standing during the five minutes between classes (I remember some of our teachers doing that, but I don't know if it was required), that leaves 39 minutes to sit down during the day (if he brought his lunch and doesn't have to wait in line anywhere for it). I imagine he's sitting down in the meeting during his free period, but maybe it's standing room only.

I had to write this response, because you were hammering very hard on the "dubiously short time between classes" thing, and what he claims is exactly what I had growing up. You had time to get from one end of the school to the other between classes, if you didn't stop at your locker and walked fast. That was how it was designed, in order to keep people from loitering. If that meant you had to carry your backpack with you during the day, that's what you did.

"When I went to school, classes ran for 5 hours, with an hour lunch."

Wow. Life wasn't like that in southern Wisconsin, although it was more than a couple few years ago when I was in high school.

I guess my point was, what's the difference between believing in magic and believing in God? From what I know, there's no scientific evidence that points to God existing, or a soul, or heaven/hell, and yet the vast majority of politicians publicly state that they believe these things.

"I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven,"
"I dabbled in Christianity at one time. I never joined a convent."
"I believe in Santa Claus, but I've never gone to the North Pole to look for him."

I'm having a hard time drawing a distinction between these three statements that isn't rather arbitrary, at least from a scientific standpoint. The best I can come up with is that historical evidence suggests that Jesus Christ was a real person, but the leap from "real person" to "Son of God" is quite large.

"I dabbled in Christianity at one time. I never joined a convent."

What's the difference? Sometimes people want to believe things that science doesn't support. I'm not going to hold it against her that her mind was open to things she doesn't understand. I would get upset if she said, "I'm going to take 50% of NSF's budget and reallocate it to a new Department of Magic", but she didn't. It would be an issue if it was related to a policy decision, not simply a curiosity in her personal life. What was Einstein's quote? "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."

Can I ask what you mean by this? I'm writing this with multiple windows from multiple programs open across four desktops, and I love it. All of that love is due to Expose. F8, F9, F10, and F11 are probably my favorite features of OSX.

My biggest gripe with OSX is probably that when I open a new terminal window, it always opens up in the home directory instead of the directory I'm currently typing in (if I open it from the keyboard while focused on another terminal window). If I want to go to the home directory from an arbitrary directory, it's easy enough to "cd". It's much harder to type "cd RANDOM_DIR/SUBDIR1/SUBDIR2/YET_ANOTHER_SUBDIR/STILL_GOING". From what I remember when I was using Linux (admittedly, it's been a few years), Ctrl-N created a new terminal window located in the directory you were currently in.

I've seen something like this written several times already in this thread, and I have to question it. How much is really seen by the members of our armed forces abroad?

I ask because I served my country as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. Living in the community, I saw how attitudes/behaviors changed when foreigners were around. Things certainly got filtered, and the filters kicked up a notch when a member of the State Department (embassy worker) came through. Volunteers and State Department people lived in different worlds there. Same country, but different worlds.

One foreigner changes the situation (I certainly wasn't part of the "true" culture, even after two years). A group of foreigners changes the situation even more (especially if they all move together in fancy cars). A group of foreigners with guns/power? I'd be curious to know if any of the interactions are the same. Any military people with Peace Corps experience around to comment on this?

I have some experience with the Cameroonian educational system, loosely modeled on the French and English systems (depending on the province), and which is quite harsh (on a scale of 0-20, 10 is a fail, and it's expected that the class average is 10...i.e. half the students in any class are expected to fail). This means it's not common for a student to make it past the university level without repeating at least one year (I taught at a university, and did have several students like this...they were quite intelligent by any nation's standards).

What happens here is that you have a wide range of ages in classes (ten year olds and sixteen year olds in the same class, for instance, or even fifteen year olds with twenty five years olds...this is no exaggeration), which results in discipline problems and difficult teaching environments (well, the overcrowding and lack of resources doesn't help, either). Older kids bully young kids into doing their homework for them, disrupt the class during teaching periods, generally make life difficult for everyone, and eventually manage a pass, because after repeating a class two or three times you'll probably manage to remember something.

I'm not saying that we should pass everyone, but you can cause as many problems by failing everyone, too.

I've been using a MacBook Pro as my work machine for the past year, and I feel less stress on the hand than when I was using a regular mouse.

I attribute this mainly to the fact that I'm not clicking/scrolling in exactly the same way every time (using two finger scrolling, tap-to-left-click, and two finger tap-to-right-click) , since I can do it anywhere on the pad. It's much better than a regular mouse, and I'm starting to prefer it even to a trackball.

It's the same way in Cameroon. I was surprised by that at first, but it really makes a lot of sense. I've never seen it in Europe or the US, though, and I wonder why not.

There are still good stations out there, and with the Internet, you can listen to them wherever you are. Check out 89.3 The Current out of Minneapolis. Great stuff.

Okay, I can't access them via the radio (seeing as how I haven't lived in Minneapolis for several years), but they are still a good radio station who's going strong. At least, until everyone discovers them, runs up their bandwidth costs, and forces them to drop the live Internet stream. On second thought, forget I mentioned them. :-)

I would add something to this. It's typically better to work with someone who is well-known in the field (i.e. someone who is probably doing higher quality research). That's almost impossible to tell if you are new to the field, but ISI Web of Knowledge also lists the number of times an article has been cited. It's not a perfect measure of the usefulness of the article to the field, but it's a good zeroth-order approximation. Start with the papers which have the most citations (keeping in mind that they will be a bit older) and work your way down.

In this same line, you should figure out if you want to work for an old, established professor, or a young, up-and-coming assistant professor. The methods/environments in the two situations can be quite different, and it's good to have an idea of what you're looking for.

Are you sure about that? From their website:

"Piraattipuolue is a registered party, eligible to set up candidates in parliamentary, municipal and EU parliament elections. We have not participated in any elections yet but aim to participate in the Finnish parliamentary election of 2011."