ecoli

Actually, I hope Mr. Johnson gets better than 5%. It would simultaneously send a message that we need more viable 3rd party candidates to challenge the system, and the votes would probably come from Tea Party holdouts who think Romney would pull a Bush and grow the federal government.

conveniently giving Obama an edge in swing states

wow phi, what a witty, subtle sense of humor you have.

My format (the basic NIH style) is as follows:

Name, address, email

Education/ degrees/ majors

[relevant] employment and research experience

Dates, Title, Organization PI or supervisor and 1 bullet point about the work

Awards (date and title)

Publications (including abstracts and reviews)

Memberships in professional societies/clubs

Grades [if transcript isn't submitted separately and its not for a job]

how much programming experience do you have? You might want to start out with a basic intro course, unless that would be wasting your time.

Added an option for my vote, hope that's ok Moontan

Phi - it's just a narrative they [politicians in general] have to keep going so that they keep getting reelected.

Interesting analysis

 

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/10/eight-causes-of-deficit-fiscal-cliff.html

 

I like how he crystalizes the analysis: we had a budget surplus under Clinton. So we need to look at what changed.

Amoung other things, a giant tech bubble that occurred during Clinton's reign popped during Bush's. Of course, this happened in a vacuum of other expansions of the federal budget (which Bush does have responsibility for), but Clinton usually gets way too much credit for having a balanced budget during his office, considering the budget surplus of 2.4% of GDP was completely unexpected by the CBO - so you can probably discredit any of Clinton's policies for growing the economy.

http://my.firedoglake.com/deanbaker/2012/09/09/clintons-surpluses-were-due-to-the-stock-bubble/

Oh and remind me who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagel again before the Clinton love fest starts?

Furthermore, the national debt did not decrease at all during the Clinton era.. while public debt went down (again largely due to the tech bubble) intragovernment debt did not. In this case, revenue from social security taxes exceeded payments so SS had to, by law, buy treasury bonds with the surplus. This caused the deficit to decrease (but never did the national debt go down) but when the bubble burst, the treasury couldn't pay back the social security fund. Which I suspect largely erased the gains from the bubble.

You'll notice that none of this was Clinton's policy. Probably his tax hikes helped with the deficit, but ultimately not with paying down the debt.

awesome diagram, thank you for the visual.

Does a college that preferentially accepts minorities racist? Perhaps, but maybe not in a negative way. Is a law that creates equal pay for women discriminatory against men? Perhaps, but it would exist in a world where men already benefit from discrimination more often than women do.

So you're saying that there's positive racism?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science#2001.E2.80.93today_.2821st_century.29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_scientists

 

Why are there so many religious scientists/doctors?

compared to what?

What makes these people immune to intellectual criticism from the scientific atheist community?

They're good at divorcing their analytic, skeptical side when it comes to accepting arbitrary cultural beliefs.

Furthermore, if it's good enough for these brainiacs why are there so many anti-religious bigots in the world?

define 'so many'...

Would you ever consider changing your stance in whatever your current spiritual belief system is now?

absolutely, if any evidence came along. Can you say the same?

Do you expect religion to ever disappear from the world? If so, when?

not anytime soon, obviously.

Also, in your opinion, what is the correlation between religiosity and intelligence?

As people become more intelligent, will they only become more religious or the other way?

I'm guessing not a strong correlation when controlling for factors such as socio-economic status, education, etc.

Do you have an interest in religion?

as a cultural phenomenon, yes.

Why is there so many religion-related threads in SFN?

because you people keep starting them!

maybe the Romneys are just trying to make a buck off the political process (state government will be spending a lot of money on these machines). That would be bad enough even without allegations of trying to control the political process.

I agree that it appears improper and its a poor move if the Romney's campaign has anything to do with it, but I don't just see the hysteria that's been over the internet.

I do wonder how much, for example sex education and gay-rights awareness etc. at school can be seen as "normalising" gay behaviour to the point of encouragement? I am not saying it is, or that such a thing is right or wrong, just wondering...

you could come to the opposite conclusion as well. By 'normalizing' gay identity, students won't seek to 'become gay' as a way of rebelling against society or to counter-signal to peers. By encouraging openness and acceptance as part of normative social influence, kids will be less likely to use sexual identity, as much as it is a choice, as a hipsterism. Which is just one argument of the anti-gay right that fails on its face.

The only thing I am genuinely worried about, and this is wider than homosexuality, is exposing children to things before they need to be. For example, my nephew was told about various drugs and glue sniffing by a local policeman who visited his primary school. Not that I think my nephew was totally oblivious to drugs, but in my opinion telling him the names of drugs and what they look like was not necessary at his age, and given his social surroundings. Not that this will necessarily encourage him to take drugs, but he did not need to know more about drugs at that time. It was simply not relevant to his immediate world.

Adults are generally oblivious to what children are exposed to in this day and age (the internet... heard of it?)

Having an adult provide a different frame of references for exposure to drugs, sex, alcohol, rock n roll then what a kid will get "on the street" is helpful. Even if most kids will roll their eyes at 'authority' they are not likely to hear about the costs from anywhere else. At what age this is appropriate is up for debate, I agree.

Hart Intercivic makes VOTING MACHINES:

 

http://www.hartinter...c.com/pages/154

oops typo. I meant Voting. Again,where is the evidence of foul play?

If Obama's family bought the voting machines in swing states, there wouldn't be enough court times in the next 10 years for all of the lawsuits and it would be all that is on FOX all the time.

 

Tagg Romney is buying up polling machine companies that service swing states. Because THAT's the integrity of the Romney campaign.

I'm confused to how owning a company that makes polling machines equate with corruption with the voting process. It's odd certainly but not definitive.

how about something like this:

[math] \frac{r_w}{R_w + P_w} + \frac{r_t}{R_t + P_t} [/math]

[math] r_w [/math] is a user's rep from the past week

[math] R_w [/math] is the SFN total for rep given in the past week

[math] P_w [/math] is the SFN total post count from the past week

[math] r_t [/math] is a user's Total rep

[math] R_t [/math] is SFN's total rep

[math] P_t [/math] is SFN's total post count

haven't fully vetted this or simulated a range of variables but think it accounts for a reasonable mix of close range, total factors and reputation and posts, though perhaps not in the exactly correct balance. Also could add a term to balance the other user's average score.

Weekly could easily be changed to any arbitrary time period.

Post count wouldn't matter. Which I now see is a fatal flaw.

 

Your rep in the last week / rep given in the last week

 

You'd need some logic to take account if rep given in the last week was 0...

So if you have a slow week your rep disappears? This seems like a good idea to encourage active posting, but probably a good way to kill the whole rep system.

A good quantifier might be the fraction of the total rep handed out during the last week that went to your posts...

how would you handle zeros? Either from zero posts or zero rep

While I agree that some sort of average points per post would be good, I thought about marking michel down for spurious accuracy.

My posts per rate, as suggested by Michel, is somewhat abyssal: 26.48 reps/post, so I'm going to protest this

though it really should be rep/posts so the number is fractional and increasing with reputation.

Actually I think would have to be a bit more nuanced than this simple rep rate. Maybe a 'bayesian' model where each rep vote is taken as evidence for your true reputation, with current rep as a prior. Could hopefully counteract longevity a bit.

What is this.. the 13th thread in recent months about people complaining about the rep system? Funny how its usually people making threads in spec forum who complain the most.

How many people actually care about a users rep when reading a post? I hardly even notice this feature when reading threads.

Please specify which lies you are accusing Biden of telling.

Here are 5 lies by Joe B in one sentence: http://i.imgur.com/JgiFM.jpg

*edit: ok maybe not 5 individual lies, but the point is made.

I hear they just gave the Nobel Prize in medicine to an attenuated influenza virus.

In a debate where the two sides argue about mostly subjective issues (or, at least non-scientific issues they cannot prove, like the economy), logically there cannot be a winner.

 

On this forum, anyone using the debating style of both the candidates would soon be suspended and then banned for consistent use of logical fallacies, ad hominems (personal attacks) and trolling.

Ding, ding, ding!

Political debates need on stage fact checking and sources for all statements. Our worst days on the politics forums are still better than these televised slugfests. And this VP, town hall style debate is the worst of them. In no reasonable, well-structured debate format is there a section where debaters are allowed to talk over each other and interrupt the moderator.

That said, I think Biden did a good job chortling like a disgruntled skeptic and Ryan was quite good at inheriting Romney's smirk.

Then on a related note I guess the My Little Ponies keep pigs as a source of gelatin. They're cartoon characters, but they at least have some biological similarities to real equines.

r/spaceclop

Nice one, John.

I've seen many that says HIV is a myth...but none tells me what caused it instead. Another virus? (=_=) seriously......

I believe the Duesberg/Mullis prevailing theory is glucocorticoid drugs.

Ironically, glucocorticoids have been shown to stimulate HIV replication and AIDs progression in [real] scientific studies.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11282284

People should be proactive about "birth control".

You don't get that by outlawing abortion. That point has been beaten to death.

I find it much better to avoid the pregnancy than to end it. If people used proper contraception, but it failed, I guess I'm okay with it. If they didn't, well, I would very much prefer it wasn't used. Unless they have a valid reason.

And what constitutes a valid reason. This is far too arbitrary.

Planned parenthood is a great program, but I believe their method of prevention should be contraceptives.

The vast majority of what PP does is distribute and educate on contraceptives and STI testing.

Abortion shouldn't be "planned", or even considered as a viable alternative, until it is deemed absolutely necessary. Btw, I believe something to have the "potential for life" when it would, if left to it's natural course, become a human life.

an aborted fetus has no potential for future life, whether aborting by natural causes or human caused.