The previous discussion is why the base rate fallacy is so dangerous. According to wikipedia, the base rate for autism is 6 / 1,000. That means a random child has a 0.6% chance of having autism. A test that raises that to 5% is a huge improvement (almost an order of magnitude).
Some people have speculated that the population explosion in African and Asian countries is caused by high mortality rates. When parents need children for farming, working, or for dowries -- and when there is a relatively high risk of the child dying before puberty -- people opt to have a lot of children to ensure that they survive to be productive.
I'm not saying I believe it, but one has to be careful in assuming that a decrease in mortality will necessarily mean an increase in population.
They're not people, nor are they moral actors, meaning there is no real good/evil associated with the company.
I find this defense of high speed trading odd -- it puts the cart before the horse. Liquidity is not a good in itself which should be promoted above all else. Liquidity in a market is important so that the price can correctly reflect the value of the thing being traded -- without liquidity a person may want to buy or sell without someone on the other end and thus the price may not reflect the actual value.
But, if high frequency trading creates liquidity but does so by also introducing price distortions (like a sudden crash), then we *should* get rid of high frequency trading so that we can maintain correct (and mostly stable) prices.
"Reading both sides" is not always a good way to find out the truth. If one side is willing to lie and the other isn't, then you won't get a balanced sense of the situation from reading both sides. Your view will be slanted toward the side willing to lie.
Perhaps no news outlet will outright lie (perhaps), but I am very confident that Fox News is perfectly willing to report things with the slimest of corroboration as cold, hard fact if it suits their political agenda. I don't mean to pick on right, there are plenty of left wing organizations that do the same too.
My point is simply that reading a bunch of different sources is not guaranteed to give you an accurate picture of the world. More broadly, this is why I think news aggregation, like google news, cannot take the place of a single, good news source.
Google news is no substitute for a good newspaper. First, a good newspaper should do the aggregation for you, and so should duplicate what google's doing. Second, a *good* newspaper should provide a balanced, fact checked commentary on the news events. The problem with google news is that they include every major news source without preference for reliability.
If the NYT and Fox News are covering the same story, I want to read the NYT coverage and not Fox News. I don't trust FN, and I do trust NYT (at least I trust them more).
This is completely right. Just because a particular vehicle for speech doesn't allow *all* speech doesn't imply that it's not a vehicle for public debate about certain topics. The newspaper doesn't print porn, does that mean that newspapers are not involved in an active democracy? Or that any attempt to censor a newspaper doesn't effect free speech because the newspaper doesn't allow a totally unvetted expression of ideas?
Thinking about free speech in this all-or-nothing way is not productive, and it tends to alienate people from supporting free speech because they feel like they have to support porn.
The city is just acting stupidly by threatening to tax the students and tuition fees. It should simply reduce police and fire services to the univ neighbourhoods and ask the univs to hire private security for protection and refuse to maintain things like synchronized traffic lights and traffic by pass and other such things.
They do. Both CMU and Pitt have private police forces. And you don't think that things like Pitt games bring venue to the city? The city seems to think so.
Also it should charge market rates for their sewer connections, water supplies and use of public spaces for utilities. The univs will come back begging to give up their tax exempt status and agree to pay real estate taxes like all other residents and businesses are paying. In fact if their tax exempt status is revoked, almost all the businesses and private property owners will see a big reduction in their tax bills.
I would hope you think we should also charge churches real estate taxes. I feel pretty confident all the churches take up more real estate than the universities. I wonder what the public reaction to that would be?
Blame the greedy CMU that charges 48000$ a year from their students,
Greedy? CMU has a *tiny* endowment compared to their status (only 10% of their operating budget). None of student tuition goes to the endowment, its all used to operate the university. And, of course, many students seem very happy to pay it. I wish that universities didn't have to charge that much, but I think it's unfair to call CMU greedy.
refuses to bear its fair share of the cost of providing civic services passing the burden on the shrinking tax base.
It's not the shrinking tax base that's to blame. Its the city mismanagement of it's pension fund. "That need stems from decades of questionable management of the city's pension fund, which holds around one-third of the $899 million it should to cover future obligations."
What do you mean students don't pay taxes like other residents? Do they get exemptions from sales and gas taxes? Do their landlords not pay property taxes that get included in the rents they pay? If they take jobs in the city don't they pay state income taxes that get partially recycled to the city?
Not only do they pay state taxes, but the city of Pittsburgh has an income tax (not an insignificant one either). In addition Carnegie Mellon along with other non-profits in the city *voluntarily* contribute money to the city to help pay for services. Many university students stay in the city after they graduate, getting jobs, etc. Of course the employees of these universities pay a lot of taxes. Even more, universities like Carnegie Mellon attract businesses. Several businesses (including Google and Intel) have offices on Campus and have employees (who pay taxes).
This is an utterly absurd attempt to cover a budget shortfall by preying on those who have little political power. They mayoral election just happened two weeks ago in Pittsburgh, so the students who are angry about this will have moved on by the next time there is an election. Many of them aren't registered to vote in the city anyway.
Absolutely! I have students that take notes on computer, and I think it's a terrible idea. First there is the problem of equations. In the class I teach we introduce a lot of symbols, so even if you have a fast system you would have to find the symbols in a big list. By the time you do, you're probably behind.
Second, note taking is a tool which helps you learn the material better. Transcribing the notes later helps significantly more, because now you get to revisit the material with fresh eyes. Something that may have seemed obvious initially may seem less so when you transcribe them. Now you can go to the next lecture an ask questions from the previous class. (As a professor, I'm *very* impressed when students do this, because it proves to me that they did something other than drink beer between the end of the last class and the beginning of the next.)
Finally taking notes on a computer provides you with many distractions. I know lots of students who claim "I don't get distracted from using a computer", but then my grader or another student informs me the were surfing the web, reading email, IMing, etc. Save yourself from having to avoid these and just use paper.
This is the standard response I always see to people questioning day traders (or to the more recent high-frequency trading). Liquidity is a good thing, so that those who want to buy can and those who want to sell can. But, as I recall, day traders are a recent invention. Is there any real evidence that the market had insufficient liquidity before day traders? Why isn't the vast amount of trading done for slightly longer term investments sufficient to create liquidity? And don't go telling me we need liquidity from day traders to support other day traders.
1) my contractual duties do not include book writing. So if I write a book, I do that in my own spare time, and I should be able to reap the benefits, just like anybody else who takes on a second job.
Yes and no. My contractual duties don't require anything *in particular*, but they do require that I do several of a list things to get promotion or tenure. On that list is writing a textbook.
I don't know about where you work, but for me the distinction between "spare time" and "work time" is extremely blurry. Other than for classes and meetings, I don't ever have to come to campus. But, of course, I'm expected to do a significant amount of work -- probably more than I could accomplish if I only worked 9-5 M-F.
2) most research monographs don't make a lot of money, but undergrad textbooks are a big business. If you can get a bunch of universities to adopt your book for first year intro classes, that can easily double your university salary.
That's only true in two cases: 1. the textbook is for a big market class like an introductory class. No matter how widely adopted, I don't think an advanced textbook on, say, the philosophy of biology is going to make much money. The market is too small.
2. You have to get the book adopted at a lot of universities. My parents wrote an introductory physics textbook that was adopted at a good number (more than 10), but they never made much money at it. We have a friend that has the majority of the introductory physics market and he's rich, but he's a rarity.
There is ZERO reason why a Prof should have the expectation that they can be Paid to work for a school and on that school's money/time work and produce a book in which the Prof can sell for self gain.
Except that in my contract (as a professor) it explicitly says that any intellectual property I create while employed is mine alone.
The good thing about the open-source education market is that if we can find a truly good way around the publication industry *many* professors would happily switch. Very few people make any real money on textbooks, and most of us would be happy to publish our research and educational materials for free. But there are two roadblocks that have nothing to do with congress or the publication industry.
First, if I work hard on writing a textbook I want to be sure that others will use it. Right now there is no good way to have my textbook "certified" other than using the publishing industry. If we could get a system going where other people could vet a book, and that fact could be advertised, then I think a lot people would release their books for free. In fact, people are already releasing books for free, but they aren't widely adopted because people don't know about them.
Second, we need to have a way of judging the quality of a textbook. Right now, if a good publisher publishes my book, my university can say "look he wrote a good book." But, if I release it under an open license, they have no way of knowing if what I wrote was crap.
There are clear ways around these problems, and once one or two systems become widely accepted I expect most of the textbook industry to disappear with or without the help of congress.
If this bill passes, it won't change anything. The professors that write these books will simply reject the U.S. funds
That's just not possible. Almost all universities run on federal funds. If a given professor's research isn't sponsored by federal funds, the cost of the building in which she works almost certainly is (at least in part). The concept of "rejecting" U.S. funds is like rejecting your paycheck, you worked hard to earn it, you take it.
and get money from other places like IBM, Microsoft, Ford, and so on.
These places are giving out money for biology, chemistry, theoretical high energy physics, english, history, philosophy, sociology, psychology?!? Maybe a little, but not much.
Professors want to be reimbursed for their many hours of work, not give books away for free (or cheap).
First, we (professors) are reimbursed, we're paid by our university to produce exactly this sort of work. So, professors who are being paid for their textbooks are (in a sense) double dipping. We are also grossly underpaid for the amount of work and the level of qualifications, so I can't really fault someone for this, but it is double dipping.
Second, we don't get much for books. We do give them away for cheap.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood
