If the prof has to interact in real time with actual humans this won't save the universities any money. Their only interest in all this is figuring out how to automate millions of student credit hours while using cheap labor. This approach isn't going to be the future of anything except servicing home bound students in remote areas, which some responsible universities have been quietly doing for a century.

When you look at list of states that raised the minimum wage, you see that they mainly border other states that didn't. I'd like to see an analysis of whether they just pulled people from the neighboring states. If that happened even to a small degree it would increase one state's stats and lower the other's.

I use iAnnotate on an iPad. I download the PDF or Word document from my Dropbox, highlight and so forth on the iPad, and then can sync the marked up copy back to Dropbox. It's not the Kindle solution you wanted but otherwise it seems to be just what you want.

In a word, yes. Re-opening the case would at least make it possible to identify incompetent defense, confessions by frightened intimidated or learning-challenged people, and so forth. Lots of polygraph-cheating involves taking various drugs like beta blockers, and that's why I mentioned blood tests. Psychopaths who are emotionally flat are identifiable by a competent polygraph test, so you just re-open, investigate, and re-instate. And I'm perfectly willing to include various "truth drugs" to the protocol, given the stakes here and the apparent forfeiture of lots of privacy rights by the death row inmates. I'd rather leave a couple of these people in jail for the rest of their lives than execute innocent, frightened, confused people.

This is a little off topic but I've had a somewhat relevant thought over the years: I think every death row inmate should be required to take a polygraph (with or without any drugs and blood tests you like) before they can be executed. If the inmate passes the exam, there should be an automatic indefinite delay in execution, and the case should be re-opened. There are dozens of documented cases of wrongful executions, the people on death row usually (yes, I read "usually" somewhere) get public defenders who have been or will be disbarred, many are unable to help themselves intelligently, and some are intimidated into confessions. I'm not keen on execution to begin with, but if we're going to have it, a redundant test of guilt would be a very good thing.

I met this guy once in a real meeting with genuine conversation. He's actually very bright. He went to Yale for instance. I know that's no guarantee you haven't been infected with some ideology virus, but ask yourself: if you had been to Yale and wanted a lot of red meat eating, capital punishment cheering, cousin marrying Texans to send you to Congress, what sort of stuff would you have to say in public? I really think that thought is at the bottom of a lot of his stuff. I think that he'll be okay as long as the spotlight isn't too bright. We just won't see a lot of progressive science leadership from him.

This is one reason I won't put a bank app on my phone.

A truly outrageous patent. How in the world can a company patent a way to communicate with the U.S. government? The government has to design the socket and that controls what the plug has to be. Not just for this reason alone, the patent system has to be blowtorched and started up again from scratch.

Years ago when my girls were little, we had one of these from Logitech. It worked fine (came with some software). It was essentially just a camera with some close-up capability. I can also recommend little $10 portable microscopes from, among others, Edmund Scientific. They're about the size of a cigar case. They're a small hassle to get focused but you can take them anywhere. They even have a little light.

No, I didn't read the paper. But I've done power analyses plenty of times and I know that with tiny expected effects 40 or 50 isn't enough. It's enough if you're expecting moderate or large effects, but you can't seriously propose that if you're trying to prove that the effect size is zero. You can't take Bem's effects as proper estimates of what to expect in your power analysis if you've got theoretical reason to suppose that Bem's results were overstated in his data set. If you're actually setting out to prove a null you can't skimp on sample size. Their idea was to refute the original paper, not just jab at it, and they needed a killer case to do that. N of 50 won't do, and even N of 150 won't do. If you're going to prove nothing is going on, you have to stomp on the finding, and N = 500 and upwards is going to be what's required. This sort of minimalist study design is just going to keep things going.

I don't think ESP is real either, but the journal editors had first class reasons to reject the replication-failure paper. The sample size of each replication was 50. They tried 3 times, for a total of 150. It is very hard to prove a null hypothesis--this is not the same as failing to support a research hypothesis. Roughly, the quality of support for a research hypothesis is measured in terms of Type I error, which is assessed by p levels (e.g., p LT .05). The quality of support for a null hypothesis (and not everyone agrees that this is possible in principle) is measured in terms of Type II error, or the power of a statistical test. The power of a test depends on the sample size, the expected effect size, and which statistic (e.g., r, t) is in use. A replication test of the original ESP paper must have substantial power because the expected effect size is, well, zero. To find a tiny effect size, which would be the fair design, requires more than N=50. Doing the same underpowered study three times doesn't help very much, but even N=150 wouldn't be decisive. The journal in question is one of the most prominent in psychology. Whether they publish replications or not (and they do--replications aren't done for their own sake, they are implicit in follow-up studies), they certainly shouldn't publish bad ones.