Also those for whom the vaccination does not work. It turns out that vaccinations are NOT 100% effective. In some people, the vaccination will not provide immunity for whatever reason. Well, there's not really any good way to test this. It's not like we can go in infect people with potentially deadly diseases, just to see if they in fact are immune to those diseases. However, when a large percentage of the population has been vaccinated, the herd immunity acts such that basically nobody gets it since the disease can't find hosts to spread from.

However as the term "herd immunity" implies, it requires a large part of the "herd" to be vaccinated. When too few people are vaccinated, diseases can find enough vectors to spread.

As you note, this isn't just an individual issue this affect society as a whole. There are people who cannot be vaccinated, for various reasons, and there are people who will choose to be vaccinated but the vaccination won't work for, and they don't know. As such is important for as many people as possible to be vaccinated against disease to make sure that it does not spread.

Hell I'm 33 and I don't want shots now. I don't know that anybody actually likes getting shots, it's just that when we get older most of us at least understand that it's worth the trade-off.

It's fairly ridiculous to list what the kids want in this article. Kids are not good at making long-term decisions, because they don't really have a long frame of reference, nor fully developed logical reasoning skills. To me, this seems like someone attempting to give weight to the anti-vaccination argument. "Oh the children don't want it, we should think about what they want." No, we shouldn't. They don't want to shot because getting a shot is not a fun thing to do at best, and slightly painful at worst. They are not capable of understanding the consequences that could happen of not getting the shot. As such their opinion on the matter really isn't very relevant.

That might be what happens in some cases, but probably not that many. In some cases, it can be due to a bad experience with a needle. That's part of the reason why I still hate needles to this day. When I was a teenager, I had plantar warts. Regular treatments failed to remove or control them, so I had to get them removed by electrolysis. The doctor that did it was "not very skilled" to put it mildly. Having the Novocain putting my feet was the sole most painful thing I've ever had happen. I was literally screaming at the top of my lungs it hurt so much. This is part of the reason why I don't like needles even now. I've never had another experience like that, in fact all my more recent experiences with needles have been incredibly non-painful. However, that still sticks with me and I still hate needles and have to look away.

In other cases it's a simple phobia, something that doesn't really have a logical reason but you're afraid of it anyway. It probably starts with the fact that having something poked into your skin is normally not a good thing, so you have a natural aversion to it. From that you can develop a full-blown phobia. It isn't based on anything logical, it isn't based on anything that happened to you, that's what a phobia is an irrational fear. You even know it's irrational, but that doesn't make you any less afraid of it. It's like other phobias such as fear of spiders, public speaking, that sort of thing.

I'm not saying it's useful to lie to kids about the fact that getting a shot might hurt a little, but I don't think that's where it comes from at least not in most cases.

And clearly you're trying to trick me into accessing your creation here, whereupon you'll claim some sort of damages!

Look out, it's a trap!!

The failure in the implementation is failing in temporal targeting. It doesn't matter if you know what someone's interests are if you don't know _when_ they are. Someone may be interested in psychedelics but they're not interested in them when at work or while chatting to a friend. They're interested in them while reading information on psychedelics.

That's why the tracking is pointless. You're getting worse targeting than if you simply target the content because it doesn't matter who they are, it only matters what they're doing at the moment. The content gives you both the information that they're interested in the target subject and that they're interested in it at that point in time.

You don't want a random sales guy sitting down at your table in a bar when you're talking with a friend and saying 'I've been following you around and would like to suggest you buy this oven I can tell you about'. But you might actually be receptive to a sales guy coming up next to you when you're looking at ovens and saying 'I can tell you something about the oven you're looking at if you want'.

Well, I don't smell any hint of corruption here, no sirree!

</sarcasm>

Notice it is from 2009. Things have changed a lot in that time. Back then, the Seattle-Tacoma airport charged for WiFi, now it is free there, as a simple example.

However it is also region/country dependent to an extent and also in certain ranges of hotels. The really nice places don't tend to charge. Their guests expect that dropping a couple hundred for a room means you don't get nailed with piddly shit and will get mad. Also the budget places don't tend to charge, as it costs them very little and it is something that will drive customers somewhere else. If someone is worried about paying $40 for a room, they'll sure as hell worry about paying $10 for Internet.

The places that still most often charge (though they are coming around) are the middle ground hotels. The three star business types. Places where it is expensive enough that people who stay there have cash and aren't too price sensitive, but not luxury such that an addon could be seen as an insult.

Smartphones have also had an impact. Getting much more common to have a phone you can tether and thus use that if the hotel tries to screw you. So a chain will find that basically nobody is paying their exorbitant fee, thus they are making nothing, but they ARE driving away some customers by charging, so they decide to make it free.

I recall reading that there's some evidence that certain varieties of schizophrenia are essentially the symptoms of toxoplasmosis infection, to such an extent that treatment with drugs designed to kill toxoplasmosis cures some patients of schizophrenia.

See Google for more.

Heh. I don't know how much of that change is just middle age, and how much of it is bigger macro-cycle stuff having to do with end-of-empire nation-scale depression and assorted emotional fallout. Then again, I did grow up in DC and have been pretty cynical from my teen years onwards; then again again, life now does seem to hold less opportunity than it did, at least on a personal level...

[...sigh...]

Frankly I doubt it's that useful an indicator, with the prevalence probably ranging in the 50+% range (and I wouldn't be surprised at an actual 100% prevalence). Traits like empaty and reasoning like ethics take time to mature. Now, if they still abuse animals or insects at 20+ there may be some possible issues.

Personally I can recall some magnifying glass incidents I'm not proud of. 30 years later, I'll usually release flies outside if I manage to catch them alive.

Loving the album artwork too. Monorails -- especially as something snazzy and hip -- man, that dates things. :)

Cheers,

Russell Brand is the new cowbell?

Quantizable and meaningfully quantizable are both beside the points of usefully quantizable, and useful to whom.

Case in point: one of my wife's middle school students in humanities (basically English + history) was getting quite competitive and was obsessing over her grades in specific, narrow areas, to the point that her overall performance in class was deteriorating -- her scores on individual tests and assignments were good, but her actual comprehension was lacking. After talking with the parents, my wife floated the notion of not providing the child with a grade, i.e. not quantizing her performance, in an effort to get the child to stop obsessing over the number. The student calmed down, stopped obsessing, and her understanding of the material increased. And, in not being so competitive about the number she was assigned, she became friendlier and socialized more.

Part of the dynamic in this case is something that gets lost by any test-centric approach. Specifically, there's more to school than just the subject matter, particularly at the younger grades. How does one quantize a student's sociability? Friendliness? Cooperativeness? Etc. Many of these different aspects certainly can be quantized, but without any objective measure for doing so, these numbers are meaningless outside of the subjective context of whomever is assigning them. Sure, 1 + 1 = 2. But how does one objectively work out the math for "my pet hamster died and I feel sad and don't know how to talk about it, and don't want to"? Or, "I don't get along well with this teacher because our communication styles are too different, and she reminds me of that horrible Aunt Edith who spits when she talks and always gives me scratchy wool for Christmas, and I'm allergic to wool"?

Humans are deeply contextual. Math isn't. Trying to apply math to human contexts doesn't always work very well, and often has unintended consequences. One of the biggest issues is when a number score ostensibly represents a particular metric, but a deeper inspection of the scoring algorithm reveals that the metric doesn't actually measure what it's supposedly measuring. Quantization represents a gross kind of summarization, and in extreme cases, the baby does get thrown out with the bathwater (that is, all of the detail that's been summarized away). Sometimes the numbers do effectively lie.

It'd be pretty easy for a terrorist type to make something you could use from the ground. If the very small amount of EMF generated by electronic devices on the plane was a problem, well someone could make something that emits a lot more, but not a ton, down a fairly narrow beam from the ground and it would have the same effect.

Planes are shielded, it just isn't an issue. This is just the FAA refusing to admit they've been being stupid. The FCC has told them they are being stupid, but they won't back down. It was one of those rules that made sense in the beginning: This is something new and it could cause problems, so let's prohibit it until we've time to test it. Well, it has been tested, extensively, and that's no issue. So remove the rule. But they didn't, and they kept not doing it, and kept on and kept on way past any kind of sense, so now they keep on doing it because they don't want to look stupid (which just makes them look worse).

My cousin is a military pilot and has no fucks to give about electronics being on when he's flying. As he says, if his (military issued) iPad is dangerous to his aircraft then he is completely fucked when he flys by an Aegis radar.

Is all works of the US Federal Government are, by law, public domain. This isn't to say that something can't be done with regards to mug shots (and they are generally not federal anyhow) but just FYI with relation to copyright and ownership. You'll see a lot of pictures on Wikipedia that note they were taken by a government employee in the course of their job, which makes them public domain.