Civilized countries are not necessarily the same as militarized countries, just as a civilized man is not the same as an armed-to-the-teeth man. We have our gentlemen and we have our soldiers.

> Educational research is profoundly flawed, and often reflected the biases of the researchers.
> Most education are humanities people, without the decades of training in the scientific process and statistics.

That's not true. Every one with a PhD is expected to have statistical training. You don't need "decades" of training in stats. Most hard science PhDs don't have that. 4-5 grad courses will generally do. Research projects with any quantitative component will typically consult a statistician for at least a sanity check.

Scientific process differs from discipline to discipline. As for rigor, it is mostly dependent on subject issues. Rigor is hard in any discipline where human subjects are involved and where the research question involves multiple factors that cannot be easily controlled for (often for the lack of money, since very large samples will be required, if done by the book - so researchers settle for more humble expectations of clarity).

As you said it yourself, brain research is still not quite operational for everyday use. Isn't brain research (whatever you mean by that: neuro science, psychology, psychiatry?) a hard science? Even something as basic as nutrition science is pretty poor today for the basic questions we have for it. So why have great expectations over education research? Its just the nature of the problem domain.

Snowden did not engage in civil disobedience in the vein of Gandhi/MLK/Thoreau. But that's fine. Civil disobedience is just one type of civil resistance. Civil disobedience only works against petty laws with limited punishment.

In this case, the legal consequences were dire. Can you name any act of civil disobedience (submitting oneself willingly to punishment as an act of disobedience) that carried the maximum possible punishment of death or life in prison? Gandhi, MLK and Thoreau broke laws where the punishment was just a few days/weeks/months. I am sure Snowden would gladly accept such a punishment if that was the choice, since the current alternative is to spend his whole life, in fear, in a foreign country.

What he did was different. He broke a law with dire repercussions in his attempt to expose constitutional violations. What you are suggesting is closer to telling the members of the White Rose Movement to willingly expose themselves to the law. Yes, I know: Godwin. A better US example would be demanding the FBI burglars to submit themselves to law. I happen to think the burglars did the right thing by not submitting themselves to the law then. Do you? How do you see Snowden as different from them?

Unlike the burglars, Snowden could not keep himself anonymous after the leak, since the NSA, unlike the case with the FBI burglary (since the burglars were completely unrelated to the FBI), would have quickly identified him. They sent someone to his house, almost immediately after the leak. So he had to run and go public. And if he ran to the only places that can resist US extradition, without going public as he did, he would have been easily labelled a spy. Going public made that charge not stick with most people. I believe that Snowden, once having chosen to expose the constitutional violations, had no real choices other than the ones he exercised.

True, but some unintentionally end up encouraging it and some discipline against it by design.
Its not the possibility that matters, but probability.

The problem here (Piketty, as well as Reinhart and Rogoff) isn't simple, data-intensive apps (that would be a business app developer's problem, perhaps you are one). It's demonstrating an innovative, scientific analysis in an easy to review format. These economist papers aren't that data intensive... they usually have much less data than a typical business app.

https://gist.github.com/vincen...
(169K as uncompressed text)

Its the analysis that is the value here. The rather short, and a computationally non-intensive analysis in Reinhart and Rogoff paper triggered financial effects to the tune of probably trillions of dollars across Europe, some would argue prematurely.

The solution for this problem is a statistical package with a notebook presentation. The ideal case would probably be R with knitr. It allows one to combine snippets of code, with data, output and documentation to discuss the analysis & results in easy to understand chunks.

IPython notebook is also an excellent alternative.
Here is a demonstration of how Reinhart-Rogoff paper should have submitted the data.
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gi...
I am sure, someone will do a Piketty one soon as well.

> Meh * 2

Those are your preferences. I have mine. But they are functional features nonetheless.

> you also get a bloated semantic desktop shoved down your throat for no good reason

As opposed to Windows (the post I am responding to) not having any features that I don't need?

> What makes you so sure?

It's not a question of being sure. I said *better* trust, not absolute trust, which does not exist.

Aside from the shell, these are the things I do get with Linux that I don't with Windows, out-of-the-box.

- Virtual desktops
- Compiz effects
- KDE Activities
- A package manager with a huge package repository
- All open source libraries that just compile and work. Mingw works, but doesn't quite cut it.
- No upgrade costs
- No need to pay for each and every machine/VM
- Better OS trust in a post-NSA world.
- Ability to run the latest OS that still receives updates on the weakest hardware (with IceWM).

What I do miss
- Speech Recognition
- Better Text to Speech

> more awesome at what

Everything. But if I had to pick one feature, I would say Activities.
Apparently, they are not still that widely used. But they are the defining feature of KDE 4 and are quite impressive once you understand to exploit them (docs could be better).

> eye candy?

KDE 4 does not look good, out of the box (Gnome 3, Cinnamon, Pantheon are what I consider to be good looking DEs, out of the box). With a little tweaking though, it looks as good or better than all my (also tweaked) desktops.

Right now, I feel that KDE 4 is a potentially great looking desktop, that is the most functional and the most configurable of the lot - just like KDE 3 was in its day.

The earlier KDE 4 releases were not good. The recent KDE editions are excellent.

Same here. I had just one prof who used his own book in his course. He simply gave the draft doc file to the class and said that buying the book is optional. I went to his book signing. He said that these academic books were rarely worth the time costs (since they cater to niche fields and so few get sold) and that his friend who writes fiction makes waaay more. Writing a book to him was more of an honor and about cementing his prestige in the field.

Now, the publishers might be profiting; I doubt that the profs are... unless the book is widely used across the nation in some popular discipline, and is generally considered a classic textbook.

> Periodically do searches for things you're not remotely interested in

Any attempt to fight an inexpensive algorithm, with expensive cognitive activity, especially when you have no feedback on how you are effecting the system, is a losing proposition. Fight automation with automation, or just don't bother.

> Clearly, the best path for people to take is to start feeding misinformation into the system.

These systems are probabilistic, not deterministic. So, they are pretty much built with the assumption that they won't be getting perfect data. Your occasional misdirections won't mean a thing. They will just go below the threshold of significance.

Fair enough. I don't disagree. It would be expensive to provide incentives to rich, smart people. But perhaps it won't be too hard to provide incentives to poor, smart people :-). Hey, humanities grad students, you will do :-).

> In today's developed countries, there are lots of benefits to not having kids, so people who are smart, intelligent, and wealthy are increasingly avoiding them. Meanwhile, the people likely to have the most kids are people who are less intelligent, poor, have less resources, etc.

If we, as a society, really believe this reasoning, then there are ways to realign incentives, at least until someone screams: eugenics... because that's what it is.

> If you think I was trying to claim freezing eggs will lead to the decline of human intelligence you're an idiot.

I don't post based on what you think. I have no access to that info nor should I be expected to. I post based on what you post.

Personally, I thought that the opposite is true...that people who have kids are selfish (and I may yet be one among those selfish people - not decided yet)... since they are adding kids to a planet that can do with a lot fewer of them.

The "replenishment" argument has not made sense in centuries. Not having a baby is the most green thing one can do. Babies have bigger carbon footprints than *anything* else you can have and most probably (unless some revolution of green technologies hits soon) more than everything else you do.

Parents having children later in life also exerts some downward pressure on population growth, even if we retain fertility rates. So more power to those who choose this technology.

https://xkcd.com/603/