Then you go out of business. Welcome to market economics. Become more efficient like workers are constantly told they should.

You do not have a shortage of good applicants, such a shortage is impossible in a market system like we have. What you have is too low a price point. Quadrupedal the offered pay rate and you will find plenty of such applicants, because you will be able to poach them from other companies for a start. I cant help but feel that any employer who ever mentions the word 'shortage' in relation to labour should be immediately required to increase the pay they give the relevant employees by 20% and handed a leaflet explaining exactly how market economies work.

Hanlon's Razor doesn't really work when each individual entity has a reason to be malicious. Don't rule out malice after all.

Your like the corrupt cop who says "When I take bribes to arrest my paymasters political enemies people hate me, but when I let the perp go because 'fuck it' people still hate me! I cant win!". No shit bombing people on behalf of Haliburton, propping up dictators while ignoring genocide is going to get you on peoples naughty list.

I think the MATLAB vs. python environment is something of a horses for courses situation. Spyder does a decent job replicating the MATLAB feel, and I generally prefer working in ipython than in the MATLAB terminal because the MATLAB terminal is generally speaking more sluggish. Of course I'm running it on top of Linux, so I don't know what it is like on Windows, and I suspect the situation is probably reversed.

As for importing everything in one go: ipython --pylab gets you 90% of the way there. The remaining 10% is really not worth it as it will import a whole bunch of packages you don't need, slow down things a bunch and makes it very difficult to work out the dependencies of your program (unless you keep the namespaces, which can be a royal pain in the arse in and of itself).

Who started it matters a great deal.

And your own case works against you. The German strategic bombing efforts were poor, the British knew they were poor and they knew the only effect of them was to piss off civilians and motivate them further to fight. Neither side had any idea what a massive bombing campaign which tore the heart out of a country would do to civilian moral (although both were pretty sure what it would do to industrial output). There were reasons to suspect it would diminish morale if you could strike hard enough, and Speer admitted that there were a few occasions when he was concerned for civilian morale, although you would rightly point out that he asserted the allies didn't have the capacity to maintain the pressure to realise his fears. Those reasons, as again you rightly point out, turned out to be fallacious. That is why I would oppose a strategic bombing campaign in a contemporary war unless extreme methods were used to reduce civilian casualties. The allies had no way of knowing for certain if their strategic bombing campaigns were working though. And they certainly damaged Germany's productive capacity even if their effect on morale was a net negative for the allies.

The Germans and Japanese don't get to use the fact that they were shit at strategic bombing as an excuse for why the allies shouldn't do it. They normalised it, they had to live with the consequences. The Second World War reminded us of an important and valuable lesson, don't normalise an atrocity, because your opponents capacity to actualise it might be greater than yours and once you have made it a normal part of the war, you might suffer it far worse than your enemy.

As for atrocity always being counter-productive to war effort, sadly it is easy to imagine scenarios where this is not the case. Consider if, during the tension in 1980's the Soviet Union had launched a massive nuclear strike on NATO in response to Able Archer. Clearly an atrocity, but what would happen if the West did not respond in kind (and responding in kind would also be a clear atrocity)? NATO would lose.

Not disagreeing, but usability is only one factor. In addition the MATLAB stats package are individually easier to learn, but have no consistent interface making them globally more of a chore. If you only ever do one kind of ANOVA then MATLAB has you covered. I know plenty of academics who only ever use an ANOVA, although some of those really, really should be using something else some of the time.

Never said we were the good guys. I said you cant commit an atrocity then act shocked when that atrocity is normalised. If Germany and Japan didn't want the bombing of cities done to them, then they needed to not do it to others first.

Dresden and Tokyo are an example of "don't start nothing, wont be nothing". The Blitz, the attacks on Warsaw and Rotterdam, the Rape of Nanking.

Germany and Japan both committed such horrendous war crimes that the rapid destruction of the control those nation states had over their military forces took priority over some of the usual niceties of war.

MATLAB has loads of neat stuff python does not, but the same is now also true the other way around. On a par depends on what you want to do. I never use MATLAB now-a-days, numpy, scipy, matplotlibs and the yaml libraries do 95% of what I need to do for data processing.

The most difficult thing about using python rather than MATLAB is most of my colleagues use MATLAB, but academics are geeks, and they are generally arrogant geeks. If they need to do something which only python has code for (often specialised code another academic has written) then they will just learn python well enough to use it. Long term I think this is going to kill MATLAB because too many then start using python for other things.

Another factor which is slowly killing MATLAB is the presence of R in the academic sphere. MATLAB's stats package sucks hard (most people supplement it with SPSS), but R does pretty much everything academics need.

The major, major, major advantage MATLAB has at the moment is Simulink. Nothing like that in the open source realm. Simulink is a little niche though so I do think that is going to save it.

You do known Satan was given permission by Elohim? And remind me, the children that Satan killed with Elohim's permission, were they raised from the dead?

I clearly haven't communicated my point very well. I hold formal instruction in the rules of English in disdain, not effective communication. I'm well aware of how you would check what effective communication is, there are even a small number of studies (done by people in Communication Sciences rather than the English faculty) which are very helpful in this regard. They follow exactly the experimental paradigm you suggest.

"This is the experiment that will back up the idea that people in general can evaluate the quality of somebody's writing -- generally an uncontroversial statement. Having established that, guidelines (much more common than "rules") for effective writing can be established by people who specialize in the field on the weight of their own experience."

No, this experiment wont back this up. It will back up whatever rule or guideline was being tested (say 'use a small number of words on a presentation slide') and only if the metric of quality applies. There is no such thing as /*the*/ quality of somebody's writing in general so there is no way to judge it. You can judge my writing by how well I communicate my ideas because I have told you I am explicitly interested in and trying to convey ideas, but it is not a general property. Sometimes we value writing for its obtuseness. Art which conveys layers of meaning subtly for example. To judge my writing style in such a way that I care you need to know my intent (a fact which flies directly in the face of the ever popular New Criticism and other post modernist bullshit which permeates the English academy).

You judge writing style in couple of ways, you can relay your experience, which is fine but only matters if I care about communicating to you in particular, or you can relate my writing style to some generalisable epistemology. The only one of those we have is the scientific method. English does not use the scientific method, as far as I can tell it uses no effective epistemology what-so-ever. If anything those who study English (rather than communication) are more disinterested in effective communication than most scientists.

I never said I was disinterested in effective communication. I said English majors and people who adhere to rules about how writing should be done can fuck off. While the statistics and experimental methods of communication science might be a bit dodgy at times I have nothing but respect for that endeavour and have used the fruits of that particular scientific process to improve my own writing and presentation.

The rest of your post I largely agree with. You outline a collection of nuances and particulars which would impact a careful, scientific study of science communication. Something which people who complain about how I end this sentence would have trouble getting at. People who study English are doing a bad job because they think there is an objectively correct way to write. They are doing such a bad job I just praised Communication Science as a discipline in comparison.

You clearly misunderstood. I don't consider myself bad at something for which there is no acceptable standard.

So what metric are you using to claim they are writing poorly?

Arbitrary rules about how writing should be structured are just one more reason much of English is a waste of time. If they don't do the psychology experiment to show that some particular rule of the English language facilitates communication then I have no motivation to obey it.

I will try (and generally fail) to obey the rules because I don't know which ones make communication more effective, if all I have is the witchdoctor then to the witchdoctor I will go. That said sanctimonious English majors can fuck right off if they want to lecture me without actual science backing up their judgemental attitude.

The two examples I gave are of things for which there are definitely laws against, and HSBC were let of with a slap on the wrist. That is why I listen them. We have probable cause, they misfiled their reports to the SEC, the value they claimed their assets had they didn't. I happy to let the few banks which didn't require bailout money go, for the rest we have a reasonable suspicion they mislead the regulator and can search their records.