Comment Re:No need for cameras. (Score 1) 732
So, it's a nice idea, it works, is implemented and you can buy it with your new car for a reasonable sum
Now, I am in a different field, but I think I can give some hints.
First of all, people often want to see things as fraud/not fraud. But that is rarely true. Scientific work has different degree of rigidity depending on who does it and what the goal is. You can see the scale as something like "Fraud", "Criminal negligence", "Bad study", "Meh", "Good study", "Impressive study" and "This should be in nature/science/what-ever-the-top-publication-of-your-field-is". You have to consider the whole scientific process to see where a paper falls. Even if you do flawless statistics and report everything in detail your study can be crap if you choose the wrong methods. What would be fraud from a skilled researcher might just be an oversight from a less skilled one.
Secondly, this is such a tiny, unimportant, part of why you are getting into science/getting a PhD. If I was to give you any advice when you are getting into science it would be the following:
1. Make sure you love the field. If you are not ready to spend a whole weekend in the lab sweating while everybody else is out having fun it's not a very good path to take. Overtime is pretty much the norm where I work.
2. Make sure you love your adviser. He/she can make or break your career. And you are going to spend more time with him/her than your girl/boy friend, should you have one, over the next 7 years.
3. Make sure you have a backup plan. A majority of those with a PhD does NOT work in academia. You need to know stuff that lets you survive outside a university. Management, economics, applied science... Pretty much anything will do, as long as you can go out the doors and feel confident that somebody out there will hire you.
4. Remember that you are investing many productive years into this. Statistics says that your lifetime earnings will go down. Be ready to see your friends that went out in industry earn twice as much as you do.
Before the rants start about over-entitled public employees I think it's worth thinking this situation through. How many people in the IT field would want their performance, as measured by some random measurement (such as the ever popular Lines-of-Code-per-Hour), published by their employer? For their clients and future employers and clients to see?
There are major problems with this approach. It gives even stronger incentives for the teachers to try to game the system, which is generally detrimental to the quality of teaching. It frequently punishes teachers working in badly run schools, while it rewards teachers for working in well run schools (as their performance will in most cases be better when they work in a well functioning school). In addition to this the statistics are rather jiffy...
There are much better ways to improve the educational system than this... Such as for example paying teachers a decent salary. The day an average teacher earns as much an average engineer you will start to huge improvements in your educational system. Of course it will take 20 years before that approach starts to really pay off, in having a better educated workforce.
On the other hand, who am I to offer advice on the American educational system? It offers us engineers in northern Europe a great competitive advantage. Please keep destroying it!
Okay, I will bite. I hunt.
First of all, most of the hunters are not cowards. They are ordinary people, living pretty ordinary lives. They are no more brave, nor less brave than most people. Technically, anybody who has set a rat trap in their house is a hunter.
The matter of fairness in hunting is not an easy one. Most hunters have different takes on it. The vast majority does not consider hunting using airplanes reasonable, for example. I believe that most think wearing protective clothing against the elements is reasonable. What people consider fair also depends a lot on what and where they hunt, strangely enough. To go back to the rat trap... Do you think it's fair to the rat? Or would you prefer to kill the rat with your bare hands? Is it fair to use bait? To place the trap where the rat would usually be, or should the trap be placed somewhere else?
To me hunting isn't some kind of primal test of the abilities of my body against the abilities of an animal. It's a matter of using what the land provides. It's a matter of removing animals that causes problems with our way of life as well as gathering meat. I have no wish to bring extra suffering to the animals I hunt just because I don't use the correct tools for the job. Of course it's not fair. All predators are unfair, or they would not survive. Still the vast majority of the animals we hunt gets away. A few are unlucky, or make a bad decision.
Something I just can't help wonder is... Do you eat meat? Have you thought through the ethics of keeping animals confined for the single purpose of killing them and eating them? Compared to that I believe hunting is a better alternative from an ethical standpoint.
...I hope you are joking.
Feral goats are a serious problem in Australia, along with so many other invasive animals and plants.
A better link to look at would be this one:
http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive/ferals/index.html
"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein