To be fair, did they actually call it "ass cancer"?

I read that last sentence in my head as the Emperor.

Such battle stations are banned by treaty already. They would be really easy to shoot down (target moving in a routine and predictable orbit), and are kind of unnecessary when you have ICBMs.

I think you mean "if you are a university, you can pay the coaches more money and hire more adjuncts instead of tenure track faculty." There is a difference between a university wanting money to support staff, get new equipment, etc, and a company that is accountable to shareholders. Big difference. Look at non-profit vs. for-profit universities, for a start.

It does reduce how you run things, you know, not having shareholders to worry about. Just look at how for-profit vs non-profit universities work, for starters.

Mod parent up. As a grad student it frustrates me that people don't think I'm "on the job" or "lack work experience" when I spend all summer working and about 35 hours a week doing research on top of 20+ hours of coursework and TAing stuff.

When will you "education is a scam to get your your money" people realize that these arguments don't really hold much water when you are dealing with non-profit organizations?

Err, when I think of "Hackers" I think anti-establishment, including higher ed. Also, if you have been around higher ed since the 60s, you'd realize it wasn't full of Marxists.

And kill streaks. COD4 was bearable in that department, but MW2 was over the top. TWO harriers? The AC-130? The ability to have multiple aircraft in the air at once drove me mad. I'm so glad they added the "airspace full" rule in black ops.

Sorry folks, you can't say from a purely behavioral study what "the brain" is doing. Even if you take a totally materialist stance (as opposed to dualism) you still can't. You must point to a brain region that lights up (or is damaged), or event related potentials (a type of EEG analysis) to talk about what the brain is doing. In this case, it is entirely possible that other parts of the nervous system are influencing the biases reported in TFA and the cited articles. The peripheral nervous system is important for behavioral and emotional processes too. For example, paralyzed patients experience dampened affect, among other things.

As a neuroscientist I'm scared that the perception of my field will be hurt by crappy pop neuroscience, much like how psychology was hurt by pop psychology in the 90s (and is still recovering).

Yeah, like non-CS majors.

AP = advanced placement. You take a harder version of a given subject, and if you pass an exam, you get credit for that course in college. It is really equivalent to an IB course or a British A-Level (or whatever they are calling them now?). However, high school teachers tend to overwork the students in these courses (which is why I think they are terrible college prep, even though you learn the material) so it is very difficult to take more than three or so per year. So students who are from a remotely decent school district will probably take a few of these, which comes out to being similar to doing IB courses and then going to university. A big problem in the states is that we do have degrees in areas that wouldn't normally require university degrees in Europe (Childhood development = preschool teachers, accountants, and so on). There would be less need for gen eds if one limited US universities to only serious academic majors. Having said this, learning philosophy from someone who has a doctorate and knows the material exceptionally well is probably a better experience than learning it from a high school teacher (whether in a US AP course or a more rigorous European high school).

Right, because all of the people who put men on the moon, are trying to fix the economy, and cure diseases, are just academics who don't get anything done.

You mean the fundamental flaw in Ph.D programs is to produce more academics, rather than focusing on getting them out in the world to get things done. Undergraduate programs (especially at the gen ed level) skim the surface. If anything, a lot of fields (especially engineering and CS) try to weed out students, not push them all towards academia.

Does a barber or a janitor understand the difference between correlation and causation? Do they understand what the word "logic" really means? Do they understand basic economics? Most of them probably don't. And I wouldn't be surprised someone who is a good programmer but lacks a well rounded education is much better than his barber or her janitor.

The problem with "just reading" is that it helps to have someone who is an expert explain things to you in more detail, or to be there to answer your questions. Writing about the stuff really makes you think about it an synthesize it more. It is sort of like the difference between reading proofs of calculus without having actually taken a derivative.

I'd like to see anyone get a job at google or some other top company who "managed to barely pass final exams using nothing more than wrote memorization skills while hung over for a period of four straight years"