Caroline:
I don't know how helpful they are, but these are two links that I've found helpful in thinking about how to get big jobs out the door on time, both research and paying work:
This post on "structured procrastination" summarizes something I've noticed I do a lot to get work done.
And this speech by Hamming is justly famous, and you've probably seen it before since you're in CS, but if you haven't, it's really worth reading.
Orac at Respectful Insolence has a post up on the current guidelines. As someone else pointed out, this guy is a surgeon and researcher who specializes in breast cancer, so his commentary is worth reading if you're interested.
Earl #78, thomas #86:
I found this post on Respectful Insolence and this earlier post really nice for explaining the issues that come up here on a level I could follow, as someone with no medical background.
As I understand it, the issue here is about what happens when you get a false positive[1]. Younger women tend to get more false positives, apparently. And a false positive sends the woman who gets it back for more testing, or for a biopsy, and can eventually lead to unnecessary treatment for cancer. That means that simply getting more people tested isn't an unambiguous win--you need to know something about the false positive rate and the expected cost of a false positive, and the expected rate of disease in the group being tested, and the benefits of early detection. The risk is that you end up doing more harm (in unnecessary biopsies and surgeries and chemotherapy) than good (in saving womens' lives by detecting the cancer in time to keep it from killing them).
[1] Sometimes, you also detect something that is cancer and might progress to kill you eventually, but might also never progress or might even go away on its own. I gather that you just go ahead and surgically remove those growths to be safe--which is probably the only thing you can do, but which also means some women getting unnecessary surgeries.
abi #920:
Maybe so. I'm not sure that the fact that you've compromised on issue X means that you must, slippery-slope-like, compromise on issues X+1, X+2, ..., on to infinity.
abi #917:
I don't know, though I'd be very surprised if they didn't provide benefits for remarried people. (I'm not sure they could refuse such benefits without running afoul of antidiscrimination laws of some kind. I really have no idea how this works with churches, since some jobs are clearly subject to acceptable and expected religious discrimination--it's hard to get a job as a minister in a Christian church when you self-identify as a Jew or Buddhist or Wiccan.) And I suspect that the Church is engaging in some brinksmanship here. But I don't know that for sure.
One thing I am sure of: If legalizing gay marriage really does lead, on a widespread basis, to churches being required to recognize it in various ways despite their beliefs, that's going to become very effective ammunition for people fighting against gay marriage. That's a bad political and social outcome.
At a more philosophical level, I think the mirror method applies to this basic situation. Let's imagine (maybe it's happened, for all I know) that some state proposes a new law that forbids disbursement of taxpayer money to any organization that offers same-sex benefits. Let us suppose that some church which provides those benefits is also running soup kitchens using taxpayer money in that state, and that church says "if you pass this law, we will have to stop running soup kitchens here, because we see providing same-sex partner benefits as a moral imperative."
That's as close as I can come to setting up a mirror situation in the other direction. In that situation, I'd see both sides of the issue[1], but I'd also respect the hypothetical church for refusing to compromise on a matter of principle. The same applies here, IMO. Churches (and other organizations) *should* be willing to stick to their beliefs, even when it costs them money and support.
FWIW (for those who haven't noticed from my other posts here) I'm both Catholic and a supporter of gay marriage.
[1] This kind of situation is one reason I don't like the whole "faith based initiatives" idea--taxpayers ought not to be forced to support churches even to do good works, and churches ought not to be forced to adapt their doctrine and practices to whatever is acceptable to voters or politicians to keep the money flowing in.
I haven't followed this story much, so maybe I'm missing something. The claim I've heard (from the priest at Mass) is that the Church would become ineligible to receive some of the money it's now receiving to do some charitable works, if DC passed its gay-marriage law, but that it would continue doing whatever charitable stuff it could. That is, the law would require the Church to change its policies w.r.t. same-sex couples in ways it finds unacceptable, or stop receiving city support to run homeless shelters and such.
This article seems consistent with the priest's statement, with the added twist that the new law would require a change in the policies of organizations such as churches that provide services on behalf of the city, and those changes contradict Church law and policy. (Disclaimer: I know basically nothing about any of this, so I could be missing all kinds of important detail.)
ISTM that there is a huge difference between saying "If you pass this law, we will retaliate by closing our soup kitchens" and saying "If you pass this law, we will no longer be able to run soup kitchens with the city without violating our own beliefs."
He's in my prayers, too, FWIW.
David:
My experience with small town hardware stores and such was that Wal-Mart was a *huge* improvement in price, selection, and hours. In many ways, this probably has had bad *social* effects (fewer small business owners who answer to nobody but themselves, more employees and franchisees who answer to Corporate), but the whole experience of super limited selection at the store, high prices, and the damned store closing at noon on Saturday, not to reopen till 9 Monday morning, genuinely sucked.
I think something similar is true of restaurants. I suspect that chains have decreased the variance of quality of food; one Applebees is much like the next, none will be spectacular, but none will be abysmal either. If you're new in town, or are simply looking for a very predictable experience, that often beats the interesting local restaurant, which might be great or awful. And in the small towns where I lived when I was younger, chains were often the best or among the best places to eat. This isn't as true in the DC suburb where I live now (though we still eat at chains often enough, as some are pretty good), and surely things are very different in famous food cities like NYC, San Francisco, and New Orleans. But in mid-Missouri, that Applebees next to the Wal-Mart was often the place you hoped to go for dinner.
Paula #806:
Yes! A lot of people are chained to their jobs with a big company or government agency or whatever, even when their jobs are wildly inappropriate for them, because they dare not lose health care. One secretary in my office owns a small business with her husband. As I understand it, she works for us mainly because they have a diabetic son.
Portable health insurance strikes me as a way of making the economy more dynamic, as people are more able to change jobs without worrying about whether the move from $giantcorp to $smallcorp will result in $smallcorp's health insurance rates going through the roof, leading to pressure to change jobs yet again.
(Or is it fissionable? I can never keep those straight.)
Bill #89:
That's a wonderful swords-into-plowshares image. Instead of burning up our cities, we're just using that fissile material to keep our lights burning.
I was in college, and completely blown away when the wall fell. It was a nice example of the way you can really believe some aspect of the world is unfixably a certain way, and then it just *changes* on you. It was nice that this change (as opposed to several more recent ones here in the US) was in a good direction.
John #610: Somehow, I was expecting the date for that to be 10/9 (or perhaps, 10^9).
To steal a line from XKCD: "Anything not on your list."
David #581:
That's the problem. It's almost exactly parallel to the argument about regulating the most inflamatory political speech or hate speech or whatever, vs. trying to catch those likely to act on violent political rhetoric ahead of time.
I suspect distinguishing really dangerous people from merely creepy but harmless blowhards is inherently a hard problem until very soon before they demonstrate the difference themselves, but I'm surely no expert. And I suspect inflamatory rhetoric has an impact on pushing the already-seriously-messed-up those last few steps to violence, but I have no evidence for this, and I sure don't want to justify an even more controlled media that's even more reluctant to discuss whatever the powerful would rather not have discussed.
Joel #569:
Dear God, amazon.com is developing WMDs. Clearly, the time for UN resolutions is over and we must invade them. You're either with us or against us.
Alex:
Like using the bizarre sex organs of the Wqlzhk slime mould colonies of the planet MK3458 to render the familiar human drama playing out aboard the starship thrillingly strange.
And after bizarre alien sex, what could be more refreshing than a nice, hot bowl of Campbell's Soup, and a Coke? Especially while sitting in your Hummer, listening to your iPod, and smoking a Marlboro?
Lila #550:
Cialdini's book Influence talks about evidence that mass shootings and suicides are both partly copycat sorts of events, and thus that seeing coverage of other people doing these things seems to be a risk factor in someone deciding to do them. I wonder if that sort of dynamic is at work there.
His creepiest example involved airplane crashes in which inexplicable pilot error was the cause, particularly with small private planes. Apparently, these things tend to go in runs, presumably as very rare pilots on the brink decide to take their wife/annoying business partner/boss with them as they slam their plane into a cornfield.
This is one of those places where freedom of speech conflicts with broader social good, at least potentially. I don't know how to resolve those things--I don't want someone else deciding what I'm allowed to see or learn, and yet I also don't want rare wackos triggered to do something horrible.
Henry:
Just look at the sex roles in 1950s era SF for an example of that. You could have interesting and smart and capable women (think of Penny in Double Star), but the underlying assumptions about sex roles were as invisible to the writer and most readers, I think, as the assumptions about computers (or their lack). And I think you could see that as a kind of attempt to work out what those sex roles might look like, when you moved out to space and accepted that women were going to do important work and be edcuated and all, but still tried to integrate that into more traditional roles. (And it's not clear to me that their prediction was less plausible/likely than what we got, which is largely the result of social and political movements, as well as all kinds of technological change.)
Soon Lee #70:
SM Stirling's Conquistador did this to me. There were a dozen or so brand names thrown in constantly--I think part of this was to make clear what stuff was being imported by the Commonwealth, and part was to simplify description. But about halfway through the novel, I began to wonder if the thing had been sponsored by Segway and Hummer.
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