Management consultant does this all the time. It really is a task for somebody focusing on management and organization, not on technology consultant. So call some nice people at a company like Arthur D. Little, McKinsey or similar. Of course, they will charge a lot to sort out this kind of situation.

If you really want to get into management consulting the easy path is typically to toss out all the value words and feelings you may have about the people involved. Don't even think words like "loathed", "ineffective", "parroting" etc. Instead you go to the hard facts. What is the properties of the department? How does it compare to other similar departments? Do they have procedures and routines? What are they? Do they have qualifications in relevant fields? etc. Don't fall in the trap of trying to pin everything on a single person, as this kind of situation is typically part of the culture of the department. The head of the department is a symptom, not the single cause of it all.

Also remember, that those that hired you are probably also responsible for hiring that head of department. Calling him incompetent is roughly the same thing as calling the people who hired him incompetent. Not a good way to build professional relationships or helping people.

If you remove the humans you can also remove the large, heavy and complex life support systems they need. The life support systems are a major consumer of power on the ISS, and a reason they have so many solar panels that can fail, as well as a constant source of small and large breakdowns in itself.

In the end it is a matter of what you want to do with the spacecraft. Unmanned spacecraft are cheap and reliable. Manned craft are a little more flexible, but expensive and unreliable. Even with the ability to repair stuff humans have they are hampered by the lack of tools and spare parts in space, so it's very unlikely that manned spacecraft will ever be as reliable as the simple robotic probes.

I have worked on navy and civilian ships, and I can't imagine going to sea with sawdust or wood chips in the engine room. Doing it in heavy weather is unthinkable and the thought sends a shiver up my spine.

Maintaining a ship takes time and dedication. In the time of the tall ships they had the boatswain and the carpenters. Today we have the chief and the engineering staff. An experienced seaman in either position would probably have stopped this trip, and that is one very important reason that the chief should be on equal standing with the captain.

I am not sure what fuzzy fantasy world you life in, where data is TEH INCORRUPTABLE NUBERZZZ!!!!, but the data I regularly handle can be tampered with, use strange units, measure the wrong thing, use a weird scale and so on regardless of being presented as numbers or as charts. A bit of rounding and 0.49 becomes 0, for example.

A chart is just a presentation of data. A remarkably useful one, as humans have a much easier time analyzing trends and patterns in a picture compared to a presentation based on a list of numbers.

Oh, by the way, to make your own inference you typically need contextual information (metadata). If the data is presented as numbers or as charts is of much less importance.

Congratulations, this must be one of the more ignorant comments I have seen on Slashdot in a long while.

Dogs have an almost insanely good sense of smell. For a dog to smell a bag of narcotics is about as hard as for you to smell if somebody opened a bottle of ammonia under your nose. The big problem is getting the smell out of your nose.

Training a drug sniffing (or any type of ID dog) involves teaching the dog first to identify a number of substances and then "mark" them. Marking is typically done either by the dog freezing and pointing with the nose, or sitting down. For a dog to be qualified you have a number of tests. Tests here involves the dog having to search 12 people, some of whom who may carry narcotics. Those not carrying narcotics get identical objects to hide on their persons. The handler, and the person holding the object, does not know if it is the real deal or not until after the test. If the dog misses a person, or marks the wrong person, it, and the handler, fails to qualify. And, yes, it's not unusual with a lineup where nobody carries anything.

A similar test often used is when a luggage band at an airport, where the dog must mark the specific bags containing explosives or narcotics. So the dogs and handlers certainly have to prove that they are able both to identify the substance and and that they know when it's not there.

Dogs are not infallible.They get tired, bored and exhausted just like their handlers. But it's not just a matter of a 'trained' officer having an 'opinion' about if the dog found something.

Isaac Newton was a very good scientist, and an even better politician. Actually, "ruthless" would probably be the best term to describe the man. He spent years discrediting anybody who had crossed him, frequently postmortem. You see, Isaac lived for a long time, and took the liberty to spend the last few years of his life smearing people like Hooke and Halley.

There is a reason he was chosen to head the royal mint, where he ensured that some 30 coiners ended up hung, drawn and quartered in less than a year.

Gaaa. So many wrong. So many wrong.

1. Small business are usually not very efficient. It's the medium-large size companies that get the benefits of scale. An economy dominated by small business can not develop. See, for example, the department store mess in India.

2. No, increased personal risk does not promote the creation of small companies, Actually, I would argue the exact opposite. When somebody says that it is too risky to start a business it means that your social safety system is not strong enough. In a country with strong social security an entrepreneur can take risks and try starting a business without risking things like health-insurance. See, for example, the high rate of successful small companies in countries with exceptionally high taxes and strong social security like the Nordic countries.

3. No, a bank will NEVER lend money to a person wishing to start a new company unless he has a good collateral. And if he has a good collateral they don't really care what he does with the money. Large loans "on your good name" is a thing that vanished about 100 years ago. An investor might invest money in a fledgling company, but they will at the very least demand equity. See, for example, any textbook in basic economy.

4. Considering your last point, why don't you argue for lower taxes on employment, and higher taxes on corporate gains? You know that the vast majority of the earning from small business are paid out as salary and not as dividend, right?

Having worked at a small high-availability data center I can assure you that AT&T does it right. Just starting the generators is not enough. You must also test your UPS systems, line sensing equipment and the long and complex line of electrical equipment that must work if you are to get a clean handover from the power grid over UPS to generator. Finding a failure in the chain is not nearly as painful when you can fall back to grid power while troubleshooting.

One of the more sneaky things to do to a facility is to walk into the transformer and kill off one or two phases, but leave the rest live. If their line sensing equipment does not work correctly (or the relay to cut out the power grid fails under load) the effect can be spectacular, and expensive. This is a classic problem not caught by just starting up the generators once a week.

<rant mode>
I had a look in the other forums I frequent, to look around for similar questions. And look what I found:

In the construction forum:
Screwdriver vs Hammer: Which is better?

In the art forum:
Pencil vs Pen: Which is better?

In the transportation forum:
Walk vs Drive: Which is better?

In the pets forum:
Cat vs Dog: Which is better?

In the energy forum:
Wind vs Hydro: Which is better?

And guess what? They all came to the same conclusion. "It depends".

Can we now stop posting "SQL vs NoSQL: Which is better?" stories like this one, as they are utterly pointless?

For the article to be useful the author needs to chose and describe use cases that actually matters to the reader. "Better" is not a use case, and I really hope people don't pick the backend for their application based on how easy it is to implement a few tiny examples in C# or Node.js which is the only thing resembling a use case in that mess of an article.
</rant mode>

...only in America...

Let me tell you how it works in the old world...

Modern assault/battle rifles makes a bad choice for a hunting rifle in my experience. To list a few reasons:
* Innate accuracy is horrible
* Many are chambered for calibers unsuitable for big game (why hunt deer with .223 Remington when there are so much better choices?)
* Stocking, balance and design are not suitable for typical hunting scenarios.
* Sensitive to dust and dirt.
* You very rarely need more than one shot to down your game. (And when you do, you have time to chamber a new round before you realize that it's needed)

Anybody showing up with a military style rifle to a hunt where I hunt would meet a contempt that is hard to imagine. Semi-automatic rifles designed for hunting are grudgingly accepted. We do not wage war on our game, and we do not need military equipment.

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

Actually I would go one step further.

The Captain was overwhelmed by the situation and had a stress reaction. People react differently to this, and his reaction (a combination of denial and irrational fleeing) is far from common. The only real protection against this kind of reaction from individuals is to have a team working and supporting each other. Yes, the captain has the primary responsibility of the ship, but if the captain is unable (mentally) to act that responsibility goes down the chain of command, typically to the first officer. This is an important part of crew resource management training, and is something a ship of this size should have been practicing regularly. You can't rely on the captain always being there to make the decisions.

When you work in maritime search and rescue you meet and hear about this kind of stress reactions. People who can't leave their sinking boat unless they first get to unscrew the new $1000 radio. People who spends hours cleaning the fuel filter when they are out of gas. People who pushes other crew members off ships to get to rescue helicopters first. It's not pretty, but it is human. That is why on a large ship your organization must be built to ensure it can handle this. And that is where the real failure was.