Additionally, I commented on prisons and public shaming earlier this year, referencing the same book: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Responded up in http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

caveat: I did not produce any sources which one could validate online without paying for journal access.

However, if you do any research at all on this topic, you should be able to find the resources on your own, even online. This is such a widely known & accepted fact that it's not really considered that interesting.

Ooch. I knew this was coming.

I have about 4-5 textbooks from college, and the one I enjoyed the most out of was this one http://www.amazon.com/CRIMINAL... though it's probably quite dated by now (published in 1981).

Otherwise, there's scads of both psychological and sociological journals with papers on it ... but they're all behind paywalls. For example, http://pss.sagepub.com/content... is a very recent study that says, basically, if they feel guilty, they'll be less likely to re-offend, but shaming makes it more likely: "Further mediational modeling showed that shame proneness positively predicted recidivism via its robust link to externalization of blame."

That shaming doesn't work is really well known.

In fact, we have a great deal of information about what does and does not work when it comes to crime and punishment, and largely, it's politically and emotionally charged individuals that ignore the scientific results. For example, 'nice' prisons don't affect recidivism rates vs. 'mean' prisons, within the same culture, but people point to say, a prison in america and a prison in norway and think that's a 1:1 comparison that only involves prison systems, when it's clearly ignoring important variables.

Really, the most cost effective way to deal with crime is to make sure it doesn't happen. That means promoting education, nuclear families, and work ethic, and there's statistics to back that. Educated, job-skill-having individuals with a stable home life tend to avoid criminal acts.

It's just not politically correct to say that, for a number of reasons, much less enforce that sort of policy change.

I know it feels good for the public at large, feels like karmic justice, but it doesn't hinder offenders.

Having done a good deal of research into crime and punishment, it turns out that shaming punishments have no statistical impact on the chance they'll re-offend. Anyone who is even briefly ostracized from society will be at least as likely to turn to alcohol or drugs as they were before, and other potential impacts like losing their job or positions of respect further worsen the odds of recovery.

What does work for DUI cases is to provide access to rehab clinics followed by support organizations, though apparently not any of the -anonymous ones like AA or NA, which have a worse-than-nothing recidivism rate.

To combat the growing congestion and to meet ever-more-stringent environmental concerns (both for the sake of the environment and because it makes a place nicer), we'll block off most of the high density cities to standard auto traffic, and instead a city (or licensed companies) will maintain a fleet of local-only self-driving cars that work as taxis along side the few human-operated larger delivery vehicles. Whatever the form of ubiquitous computing is around (cell phones, etc) will allow on demand pickups as well as scheduled trips (commuting, school, etc) and even provide for things like package delivery.

Eventually car ownership in certain cities will be seen as completely unnecessary or too high of an expense, like in Tokyo, for example. Since the urban sprawl appears likely to continue to grow, it seems that this trend only become more and more likely. Personal car ownership - like in the demo - will be a rare thing, and you'd never use it living minutes from downtown anyway.

You'd think a 'future vision' company would know better than to provide some sort of brochure site that acts and works as poorly as this one does. Navigating through this was like trying to play a first person shooter using chopsticks to control the keyboard and mouse.

On time completion: It will be done as soon as it can be done, only experienced teams can provide reasonable estimates, developers provide timetables not managers, there's a specific amount of work that must be done before release and putting dates on it won't reduce the total amount of work that needs to be done.

Unclear requirements: It's now the developer's job to talk to the stakeholders and find out what all the requirements are at the point in time they need to size or implement them. They get a vague 'story' that gives an overall concept of a requirement, and then it's up to the dev to talk to whomever needs talking to, then.

Changing requirements: This happens and everyone expects it. So you do only the least work required to complete each requirement so the overhead in a change will be the smallest, and then you just pop that item on the queue and it gets done, that's it.

Context switching: Tasks are assigned to a team by managers, not as a sole developer, so if context switching is causing a problem, it's up to the team to figure out how to minimize it.

Take responsibility: They are, and increasing the duties that a developer has, while removing certain responsibilities from managers and product owners, which more accurately represents the reality of the situation.

Caveat: Recent studies have shown that Agile is not as good as a waterfall-agile mix, where you do a good amount of planning (especially architectural planning) prior to the agile-like development, which makes a lot of sense. If half your work effort is refactoring, at some point you start take a severe hit to either efficiency, quality (robustness, maintainability, operational limits like memory or speed, etc), or time.

I've written about this several times prior, so I'll just summarize those arguments here:

College is not meant to provide job skills : http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The majority of what developers do does not require advanced skills: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You don't need much training to get to a point where you're employable: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

There's other points too;
      - Once you have learned some language to a given degree of proficiency, you notice that the rest of the languages are little more than different syntactical sugar and different naming for built in functions/libraries.
      - Learning how to learn is more important, as our development environments change so often that it's expected we'd pick up new technologies after very little exposure to them, days usually, rather than weeks or months.

I've added up the hours spent in a CS degree program on purely CS classes; it's around 650 hours total. That's it. If it were back to back 8 hour days, it'd only take about 16 weeks of 8 hour days 5 days a week. Obviously that'd be a rough sell, but it's not impossible.

This is 19-25 weeks, I'm guessing 1 or 2 hour 'days', which is around 100 to 250 hours of 'training'. That's just under half - about the equivalent of a 2 year college. More than enough time to fit in the basics of theories as well as actual application, though they may not get some of the higher level specifics like graphics or compiler design.

So it seems reasonable to me, and I've been doing this for 2 decades now with my fancy college learning.

Of course one of the reasons for police cams is for police accountability; that means that public interest groups - or individuals claiming to represent public interest - should have access as well. In fact, I can't think of a sensible reason for anyone to be denied access in the general case - outside of other concerns (privacy, etc).

There's another factor to consider as well. Since these groups are often adversarial in relationship to the police, having the police themselves control the policy on who has access to it would be a bad idea. In fact, having the police anywhere in the chain is incorrect; they shouldn't have control of the video itself, much less be responsible for releasing it or not.

INAL, but ...

First, laws like the freedom of information act refer to federal institutions, so this ~may~ not apply
Second, someone has to classify the police video as 'public records'. They are not explicitly made so just because they're information produced by a public office.
Third, even if they do apply, they can be denied for valid grounds - for example, if they contain personally identifying information, underage nudity, or other public safety issues - it's going to be on a per-municipality basis.

Personally speaking though, I think that if what's being recorded happens in a public space, then there should be few barriers to viewing it. Additionally, 3 years to provide the video is complete bullcrap, and I think anyone even remotely involved would understand that. Unless they really are thinking they need to get consent forms from every person.

On the other hand, if you choose to display it in a public medium like youtube, well, maybe you would need to get permission from those recorded.

I can relate. I've had the same experience, applying for an IT job at a large bank, aside from a number of other places. They'd fly or voucher me out, I'd do the interview or two, managers would already be assigning projects, and then I'd be excluded for no apparent reason.

At one point, I had a company tell me that they were only hiring programmers with sysadmin experience (which I had) but that I had to have BOTH and ONLY "system administrator" and "software developer" as my job title for the last 5 years. Obviously this is literally not possible - I'm guessing they probably had an H1B on the hook already and I was just a seat-filler for the visa qualification process.

Once, I had actually signed a contract already, and they came in prior to their final stamp of authorization and cancelled it out of nowhere.

Another time when applying for a job at IBM in a good-ole-boy run office in North Carolina - and this was a fond memory - the hiring manager actually called me a liar and said that someone like me could not possibly have either the experience or expertise I claimed I did, based on nothing other than my appearance(*).

Two differences though; 1) I'm white, 2) I kept applying for other jobs.

Eventually I got actual job offers from actual companies.

Nothing in your story seems to indicate to me that race was an issue, or that it was anything out of the ordinary. You can't assume discrimination when more often than not it's a budget issue, or requires coordination among 3 or more departments with any one of them being able to issue a veto site unseen.

* - The appearance thing was because I was young and had been working as a sysadmin & dev since I was 16 and had more experience than they expected - it wasn't agism. They tested me and offered me the job anyway since both their DBA and lead programmer stated 'He could probably teach us'. The hiring manager said that he still believed I lied on the resume, but they'd "try me out" anyway.

Sorry, I should have been more clear.

There's apparently less corp-to-corp espionage rather than gov-to-corp*. It's simply not intrinsic to our culture, especially when the legal system provides such an easy way to strike at those who do. Heck, we even sue when people switch jobs to a competitor. If you come up with something remotely similar to an existing product - you're gonna get sued, that's how it is.

What I've noticed is that there's two general types of countries; in one type, the onus is on the potential victim to protect their IP, and in the other type, the onus is on the potential criminal to not commit a crime.

So you see places like India and China, where corporate espionage is not only expected, it's condoned at every level. Along with bribes and kickbacks, it's just how business - and often politics - is done. There's not even a cultural disconnect. It's expected! (check out another article from today : http://politics.slashdot.org/s... )

* - except when the government is running the corps, like in china...

... at least, outside of the US, it seems. Many countries have a policy that basically boils down to "if you can grab it, then it's yours, and it's impolite for another company to point fingers and claim you stole it." Not as litigious perhaps, but certainly less trustworthy. I got the standard 4 hour class from at least two companies; don't talk to folks on planes about it, don't talk to folks at the hotels, they'll arrange friendly people to sit next to you, or have a room next to you, or to flirt or whatever. Act as if your laptop/other hardware WILL be stolen or sabotaged. Keep one for travel with only the minimum relevant information on it, and so on.

I worked for a company once that did big data analysis for the semiconductor industry. Boosted yield rates by anywhere from 3 to 15%, which is a big deal. It was a service, not a software product, so we took their data, did our analysis, and the product was suggestions to correct their process, with proof. Obviously we had a lot of special software on the backend which represented our core IP, and we protected that.

When we went to China, we rewrote the executable so it was encrypted, plus locked to the CPU id.

Part of our process required about 18-20 hours to run on the puny laptops we had available, and the folks we met actually laughed when they told us we couldn't stay the night, nor take the systems back to the hotel with us because they had been exposed to their internal network. So we chained it to a desk, and the next morning, the system had died, and it looked like someone had removed the hard drive while the thing was running. Apparently after a day in a half of processing later, they realized they couldn't get their copy to run, and explained that they had to keep our machine, forever, but they would provide us with one that was equivalent - loaded with virii and spyware no doubt.

One of the individuals actually begged us to stop when we took apart our laptop and ground the hard drive and cpu up and shattered the boards. Total lack of composure, I assume he was losing his job at that point.

However, that was just par for the course for much of Asia, barring Japan.

I agree with many of your individual statements, but I think we'd disagree on the good/bad ratio of resultant trend and how they should be guided.

With the proviso that "college costs money to attend,";
        Attending college in preparation for a career is a financial investment with an expected return.
        Attending college to indulge yourself in an area of interest is not an investment, it is a luxury.

From these two simple statements, we can say that anyone who needs to take a loan out to attend college, but does not attend for vocational purposes is not only purchasing a luxury service, they're doing so by incurring debt with no method to pay it off. This is the height of personal self-indulgence and irresponsibility.

The individual-affecting downfalls you note have no meaning under these lights. So what if luxuries become more expensive? So what if people go to college to learn job skills? What if only the rich can afford to - not picking on anyone in particular - major in classical english literature?

Then we get to the other downfalls, those for society, what you call "the long term".

The original claim, and intent for liberal arts was not ever 'to learn a lot about a particular topic', but rather, to create a well-rounded individual who's had an increased potential to benefit society, if not themselves. Now a days we'd use terms like 'cross-discipline knowledge', but it's pretty much the concept that certain ideas could only form as a result of the intersection of several genres of knowledge, and never from a myopic focus on just one. ... and that's why we have gen-ed requirements today. So we're covered there too. I'd be hard pressed to prove that they do actual good, but I think the general concept is sound. Do we need experts or just basic knowledge here though? How could anyone even judge?

For now at least, I think that moves like this are a good start in weeding out non-vocational luxury studies from those who would go into debt to take them. In fact, I'd say you could go a few steps further with a simple-to-say change: every college is required to co-sign any student loan. That should correct many issues in one fell swoop; class cost, student debt, non-salable degrees, administrator's salaries, paying for non-profitable sports teams because of 'tradition', etc.

Actually, many of the trendy bars and restaurants I went to in Japan and Korea had terminals built into the table as a menu to order from. I thought it was quite neat; you got a picture of what the dish was supposed to be and they'd even provide - in one case - a timer with the expected delivery time of your order (this was at a shochu bar).

In Korea, they had already gone so far as to make vending machines and some chain stores - like Starbucks - let you order and/or pay from your cell phone. It looked like you could store your favorite orders, pick one, and then order and pay in a single wave, perhaps with a confirmation access code.

The only thing that struck me as odd was that in Japan, they still expected to be paid in cash, instead of card at the terminal, but they are a cash-based society.