Some sort of redirection towards findings that can be verified by independent labs would seem to be an improvement on the current system. But that would require a focus non science as a system and less of the "great researcher" emphasis we see today.

I'd call that fair use. And by the way, I'm shocked, shocked to find that Wikipedia and Google would stoop so low.

Justice is blind. Whichever side puts the most gold on the scales of justice wins!

Great link to the table, and it explains some of the findings. As you point out, you can sort by any of the column headings. If we sort by unemployment percentage, we see the Law of Large numbers at work. Of the 10 majors with the lowest unemployment (0 - 2%, by the way), you can see that they are very unpopular majors. That means that very few of the people surveyed reported having majored in these things in college = small samples. When you reverse the sort for 10 highest unemployment rates, we see the same trend. With the exception of Architecture, these majors are very unpopular. Again, very small samples. Samples vary, but small samples vary more than big ones - that's the Law of Large Numbers.

Some of the majors don't make sense, either. The highest unemployment rate is for "Clinical Psychology." I can only imagine these majors are self-report data from the U.S. Census, but there is no college in the U.S. where you can major in "Clinical Psychology." You can major in Psychology, and you might get a concentration in Clinical, but you don't get a clinical psychology degree at the undergraduate level. No state in the U.S. will allow you to work as a clinical psychologist without graduate level training and many hours of supervised experience.

By the way, if you just look at people who responded "Psychology" you see an unemployment rate of 6.1% and it was the 5th most popular major (i.e., big sample, probably more accurate numbers). At a time (2010) when unemployment is arguably 10%, that sounds pretty good to me.

However, as other posters note, the data don't tell you if their jobs are mud wrestling, dog walking, or pimping, so it's rather difficult to use these numbers to judge how "useful" a particular major might be.

 

I had mononucleosis once, does that mean I am now qualified to diagnose it in others? A hallmark of the autism spectrum is difficulty communicating - Steve Jobs, seriously?

"Or have you diluted yourself into thinking that the reason we have say public education is because of the Dept. of Ed?"

Are you trying to suggest that homeopathy is the answer to our problems?

Or are you trying to say the Dept. of Ed. might need to focus more effort on helping people understand the difference between dilution and delusion?

Excellent question, and one way to examine this would be to look at bilingual speakers who have suffered brain damage. If both languages relied on a single speech center, you would expect impairment as a result of the damage to be about equal for both languages. If, on the other hand, one language was clearly impaired while the other was not, these results would suggest two independent processing centers in the brain.

Unfortunately, the results are not as clear. Sometimes the first language acquired recovers first, and in other patients the second language recovers first. In still other patients both languages appear to recover at about equal rates. Some researchers have concluded that age of acquisition, fluency in the language, and other factors can influence the results.

You might enjoy: Marrero et al.'s (2002) "Bilingualism, brain injury, and recover: Implications for understanding the bilingual and for therapy." in Clinical Psychology Review, 22(3), 465-480.

Lorenzen & Murray (2008) Bilingual aphasia: A theoretical and clinical review." in American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 17, 299-317.

At my college we had a Crazy Kong machine in 1982. It was another year before I saw a "real" Donkey Kong, and I thought the real one was the knock-off because of the gaudier (to me) color scheme. According to the Wikipedia article it was licensed outside the U.S., but this was definitely in the U.S. As I recall Atari games were still much bigger than Donkey Kong, at least with my age group. The big hits were Tempest and Centipede.

But governments like to hold onto power. Remember, you're always about 9 meals away from a revolution. As Juvenal noted, it's all about bread and circuses. Agricultural subsidies can help insure food supply and stabilize prices. As with all government subsidies (housing, education), the rich game the system, but without them you would see a lot more instability in food prices.

Get this through your head: When you stick your head in the sand, there's still a lot of you exposed. It's your kind of thinking that let the war go on 10 years with no end in sight.

Over 30,000 civilians were already dead when American bombing brought the war to an end. Why aren't you weeping for them? Or better still be thankful for the civilian casualties that were avoided when the Americans brought the war to an end.

Better to let the war rage on and keep wringing your hands from the sidelines?