Typical non-profit entities have grandiose goals such as eliminating poverty or feed orphans or some other goal that tugs as the hearts (and purse strings) of a dedicated and forgiving audience. They usually have no idea what they are doing and are making it up along the way. Of course they try really hard and maybe they accomplish a few things along away, but of course they never really "solve" the problem. If they do they find something else.**

Meanwhile, the principal of the organization get to earn a living doing what they enjoy with other folks footing the bill.

Take it for what it is people. People gotta earn a living somehow...

**for instance, the March of Dimes was started to stamp out Polio. After the vaccine was developed (none of their funding contributed to the Salk Vaccine, it was spent on palliative care), they had to find something else to do, they simply didn't wind down, which is why you have to start with a really really grandiose goal to make sure it doesn't happen to quickly

Location of first nuclear test (well, close enough)... Dumping ground for unsold ET cartridges...
Coincidence? Maybe they were hoping someone would nuke the site from orbit (just to be sure, of course) to remove all possibility of recovery...

Depends on what it was: a law enforcement honey pot for terrorist wannabes or a snot nosed trouble maker...

Well... okay, maybe you're right, it was a dumb choice either way ;^)

If your study was 100 folks and you gave 80 the vaccine and 20 placebo, you would only have a sample size of 20 to test the null-effect (e.g. how many folks naturally get better w/o the new fangled vaccine to see if the vaccine statistically helped the 80 folks or not).

To increase the placebo sample size to the same statistically significant level (e.g, 50 folks) you would now have to give your untested vaccine which may have potential side effects to 200 people (+120 more folks). Which would be more ethical?

You are assuming that the vaccine probably works and the side-effects are probably minimal. That bias has gotten many researchers in trouble throughout vaccine history. There is a reason for protocols.

Given that his wife speaks Cantonese natively, and speaking Mandarin with his wife might have been the bulk of his practice, that rating might be par for the course.

Some Mandarin speakers would rate any attempt of a Cantonese speaker at Mandarin at about 7-year old level (think of how a stuck-up French journalist might rate a person's speech who learned French from a Franco-Canadian, yeah)...

Wife speaks Cantonese, not Mandarin.

Mark's wife speaks Cantonese, not mandarin.

My wife speaks Mandarin, I speak a little Cantonese. We generally have to communicate in English...

Actually many ethnically Chinese people from Vietnam prefer to call themselves Chinese or Chinese-Vietnamese or Hoa... They often speak Chinese (often Cantonese) and sometime speak Vietnamese poorly if at all and refuse to fully integrate with the local Vietnamese population. Many of them were came to the united states during/after the Vietnam war as they were often the local "capitalists" in the Vietnamese economy (by some measures controlling 70% of the GDP prior to the Vietnam war) and thus were quite unwelcome in the new communist government. Many don't really like to consider themselves Vietnamese at all.

Think of it like people in Quebec holding on to their French heritage. A large percentage of them will call themselves Franco-Canadian or even Québécois rather than be associated with something pan-Canadian associated with the British Crown (and might have even supported the recent succession vote). If you accidentally refer to them as Canadian they will immediately correct you (after apologizing, of course, they are still Canadian after all ;^)

Just waiting for things to go 180deg...

If some companies get benefit from free advertising by google, perhaps they'll get even more benefit if they greased it with a little bit of payola... You know, kinda how yelp does things... ;^)

Sadly, they cancelled the event...

For those that aren't up on non-tech events, Malala gained fame by being shot for being an female education activist/blogger by the Taliban (allegedly, Atta Ullah Khan, a graduate student studying chemistry/physics). She later received a Nobel prize...

Even the Wikipedia asserts that the basin where the Salton sea wasn't some prehistoric stretch of desert that we somehow man has converted to a lake, it has been the location of a lake on-and off (every 100K years or so), for the last million or so years... For example, Lake Cahuilla

Like nearly all endorheic basins, in prehistoric times, the Salton basin was periodically filled by water from rain. It is generally thought that in pre-historical times, the Salton basin took water from the Alamo and Nuevo rivers beds which periodically nearly run dry.

AFAIK, in historic times, a lake in the Salton Basin existed in some form in 1884, 1891, 1892, and 1895 due to seasonal Colorado river flooding into the Alamo and Nuevo river beds...

However, in 1900 a canal (the Alamo canal) cut for irrigation purposes to improve the flow between the Colorado and Alamo river. This canal eventually silted up. The so-called "accident" was actually a deliberate attempt in 1904 to rectify this by cutting a breach in the bank of the Colorado river to feed the canal . Seasonal flooding of the Colorado river from heavy rains over a few years after this breach was created diverted nearly all the water that formed the current Salton Sea until that breach was reversed. Of course after the construction of Hoover Dam, that portion of the Colorado river generally doesn't flood any more and the controlled flows through the Alamo and Nuevo rivers beds generally aren't high enough to keep the Salton Sea from receding which means in some sense, the Hoover dam is actually killing that Salton Sea in it's current incarnation.

In some sense, Man's actions in this case are likely somewhat akin to small blip in the timing of the on-going geological-time formation and destruction of new lakes in the ancient Salton Basin, and far from being some Man-made ecological disaster (unlike some nuclear plant disaster, or a coal ash spill) if that is what you are implying...

Actually, there are many of these bodies of water around (prehistoric endorheic basins including the Caspian Sea and the Great Salt Lake). But I think the Aral sea situation is more akin to the Salton Sea... The Salton and the Aral sea are that have recently had their replenishing flows restricted by agriculture.

Or the science teachers (apparently the kinsale community school they attend has a history of producing regional, national, and international science fair winners).

Back in 1997, most of the people of hong kong went relatively peacefully into the Chinese fold (or just simply left before it happened like my grandparents)...

On the other hand, you might think of the people in southern Taiwan as kind of like a mix of US southerners and Texans...

Even if Taiwan is eventually ceded back to China, some of them will likely still hold a N/S civil war grudge for a few generations, and other will continue to claim some right to secede into a lone star state (mostly in an appropriate alcohol based setting with sufficient lubrication, of course). At least there aren't likely to be many guns involved in taiwan... ;^)

Actually It's a moving target over 40 years or so...

From the end of WWII the occupiers of Taiwan (basically the retreating/invading Chiang Kai-shek govt) pretty much considered themselves the exiled government of mainland china, thus calling themselves the Republic of China. The ground started significantly changing in 1971 when after UN resolution 2758 passed, mainland china (aka the People's RoC) was able to reclaim their UN seat which. Eventually, the notion that the RoC (aka Taiwan) was a different place than china all but faded by 1991as by then most in the RoC conceded that mainland china was lost (to the PRoC) by forcing the resignation of the so-called "representatives" tied to legacy captured provinces in the mainland.

Of course as with most things Taiwanese, it ain't that simple.

Some of people of Taiwan were repressed by the retreating CKS occupiers from the mainland (not much different than the Japanese), but that distinction is often not understood by those outside of Taiwan (see the 228 incident). If you know people from the south part of the island (e.g, Kaoshung, or Tainan), many still hold a grudge, and think of both remnants of the CKS government and the mainland as the enemy. These folks form the basis of the pan-green coalition (not to be confused with the environmental green party movement, but one favoring Taiwan independence) to oppose the pan-blue coalition (remnants of the CKS/KMT government + other parties favoring close ties with the mainland).

Of course, the people of mainland china don't see things that way at all. The see it as formosa island/taiwan provence which was historically part of mainland china (except for the time the Dutch and Japanese occupied it, of course). RoC is generally pissed about how the US handled the disposition of Taiwan after WWII (with the Treaty of Peace with Japan aka Treaty of San Francisco to which the RoC and PRoC were not invited). Basically the island of Formosa/Taiwan was treated the same as occupied territory whose responsibility was given to the US, but whose final fate was undecided (much less complicated, but similar to Berlin). In contrast, the Treaty of Taipei (a separate peace treaty between PRoC and Japan) further complicated the matter by obfuscating the issue of Taiwan by reclaiming it for the PRoC even though Japan had no authority to grant it at that point having ceded authority over Taiwan in Treaty of San Francisco...