This argument has been around at least since the Victorian era. Basically, when you give up the certainty of Romanticism and Religion, you need to fill the void with something in order to give life meaning and direction, or else there'll be this big empty spot where your heart used to be.

Seriously, just read through the Norton Anthology from the era. Doesn't take that long.

They are in many CS classes. My undergrad found significantly more retention of women in CS when women were also teaching the class.

So the rover is driving 2.8 miles per year.

Obviously used to DC Traffic.

I am going to go ahead and make an educated guess that Microsoft has done more to improve computer security for gullible people than you have.

I'm not saying it's perfect--but it's a lot more secure than it used to be, and they want it to be secure, and they spend a lot of money on making machines secure.

Don't be mean.

This is arguably a violation of 47 U.S.C. Section 333 (2012), prohibiting willful or malicious interference with radio communications.

So let's do something useful.

Anyone with a grass yard should be planting a small forest of actual trees. Carbon sinks. Much better for the environment, also because there is much less energy spent maintaining them.

Home Depot deployed new card readers at all their stores (of the ones I saw at least) almost overnight shortly after the target breach. I had guessed it was in response to the breach to beef up security...

But it looks like it was the new ones that were compromised... (or else it was coincidental).

Yes and no. A starving artist who makes nothing from his work should continue to receive his small royalty, if he gets any; a project that hasn't earned back its costs should have copyright extended for a *long* time--maybe 40 years or the lifetime of the artist, whichever is longer. But a project that has made its producers hundreds of millions should enter the public domain within five to ten years. There is no justification for copyright beyond that term when a project has been enormously successful.

Really just ignorantly untrue. Nice houses, second homes, good services, retirement portfolio, helping worse-off relatives, donations to charitable causes--there are many expenses that wealthy people have (or choose to have) which are perfectly legitimate and can easily go past the $200K/year mark.

Scientific consensus is like "you cannot exceed the speed of light." If you happen to demonstrate that you exceeded the speed of light, you want to be careful about how you present it--e.g. "we have this interesting result and can someone help show what we did wrong?"--but the community will take notice if you actually show that the consensus is wrong. The more consensus there is, the better the evidence you need to posit the question, but the community still listens.

That's fair. These are problems I've seen in a majority or at least large minority of the studies I've seen and that I have seen referenced, but I do not work in the field so may suffer from sample bias. :)

Many studies in psychology and sociology do study correlation. There's nothing wrong with it, it just creates a limitation that it is difficult to reliably develop clinical tools from. You can call the studies "preliminary" if you want, but that doesn't make them invalid.

There are also causative experiments that are interesting and useful. They do not suffer from the same limitation, although others (e.g. common experimental populations) apply.

Absolutely. Most of the studies I have seen discussed or come across in psychology have been correlation-based. While many people are good at saying they don't know for sure what the study means, most people looking at it interpret it to have meaning that fits with their preexisting biases.

Yes, hence the problem with conducting so many experiments on college students.

Not only them. You also see a lot of the same problems in psychology textbooks, for example, and among psychologists. Psychologists are not immune to the problems which plague non-psychologists looking at the research.

I have no problem with any study's principal investigator. I may have problems with their conclusions, but prefer to read a study before I critique it. A broad statement that I have seen certain problems in a field or two does not invalidate the work of any particular person, or even the field as a whole--it simply says that I have seen an issue that the field needs to work on. And it does, to some extent--while psychology is still bad at questioning some underlying tenets, it is much more focused on, for example, cross-cultural research than it was twenty years ago.

It's actually much worse than that.

Studies in economics and psychology tend to suffer from certain problems which limit their real-world application and the likelihood that they actually mean what people think they mean.

First, they are often based on correlation rather than causation. This is especially true with psychology studies, and readily allows confirmation bias, incorrect interpretations of data, and interpretations of data which are heavily influenced by the perspective of the researcher.

Second, they are often done on western college students. This tends not to yield rules of general applicability.

Third, most economics (and psychology of economics) experiments are advertising experiments. They are done by corporations for financial gain and the results are generally kept secret because they are part of a company's IP and help the company sell its products, and because it simply saves the company money to not bother publishing.