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estevez | 14 years ago | on: Harvard, Princeton Targeted in Asian Discrimination Probe

I don't get it. Family income is a very strong (if not the best) predictor of SAT score. In this case, if you order each race by median income you get the exact same order as mean SAT score, Asian-American families with the highest median income and SAT, African-American families with the lowest.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Ritalin Gone Wrong

If that's the case then I disagree with your characterization; I don't see any passage that refers to decade long studies that show that Ritalin is "harmful" in the long-term.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics

This is good news. As an undergrad at a liberal arts college (and a community college transfer) I'm painfully aware of how much information is locked away behind the Elsevier pay wall. In my case, I wanted to do an independent study project looking at citation analysis in early molecular phylogenetics, but so many of the relevant papers are locked away that I just gave up.

This is the second time that Elsevier et al. have tried to kill PubMed Central. I hope that this is a turning point in the OA movement.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Caution on Twitter urged as Britons barred from US

Let me play devil's advocate here and note that twitter has been used as a communication platform by what the US Gov't consider (again, I take no position on the merits) terrorist organizations,[1] and that monitoring such a public forum is at least somewhat legitimate.

The offending party probably shouldn't have been deported, but that's another matter.

[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/28/al-shabaab-twitter_...

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Ritalin Gone Wrong

>The various decade long studies on Ritalin also show it to be largely useless and harmful.

Twenty seconds on Google Scholar would lead me to the opposite conclusion. Your source?

estevez | 14 years ago | on: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

> all life will be destroyed by natural catastrophe.

I'm going to disagree with you there.[1]

A bit tongue in cheek, but regarding your larger point, I think that thinking about preserving life in our corner of the universe solely in terms of keeping meat puppets alive in interstellar space is a rather parochial way to think. We already know of two forms of life that are far better suited to the void, autonomous robots and bacterial spores, why not get them out first?

[1]: http://worldcat.org/title/impossible-extinction-natural-cata...

estevez | 14 years ago | on: The 15% Tax Rate

Or they could just kill the estate ("death") tax, ensuring that those future billionaires are their descendants.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Circumventing the No-Fly list in thirty seconds

> They could fix it by implementing some cryptographic code that's scanned at TSA entry points, verifying the actual document (boarding passes are a far cry from a verifyable document).

Yeah, I tend to believe that they really aren't serious about it. It seems trivial to include a data matrix barcode that encodes the traveller's name and flight data.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: The Demise of the Public Library

There's a 3.5 GB ebook torrent at Pirate Bay. Between Project Gutenberg and places like TPB it's within reach for anyone with an internet connection.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read

>National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell

This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle of the waiting room. I'll occasionally do it in the supermarket checkout line too. Always reminds me of pulling the first copy I got (Feb 1990) from the Christmas subscription I hounded my mom into buying for me out of its brown paper sleeve.

I don't discount how powerful the emotions elicited by the Proustian recall triggered by tactile interactions with the written word, but I just think the gains far outweigh what we'll lose. The conveniences that dominated the OP don't move me nearly as much as the idea of $10 solar-powered e-readers loaded with the equivalent of entire libraries spreading throughout places like sub-Saharan Africa or rural India (cf. mobile telephones). That kind of stuff gives me a warm fuzzy you wouldn't believe.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read

I grew up in a house almost totally devoid of books. I was completely dependent on libraries until age 18 or so, so books were always the property of the collective. To this day I can't bring myself to write marginalia in my books, the idea is just alien to me.

Perhaps this explains why I cast off physical books so easily. Once I got my kindle I systematically started paring down my library by removing any books that I was able to find electronically. Most of what got culled were mass market and trade paperbacks, and most of what I kept were books that had intrinsic value as objects (library of america, folio, and mid-century modern library editions).

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read

My reaction to your question might be telling:

  1. I dimly remember that The Shallows had something thoughtful to say about the topic;
  2. I pull out my kindle and search the full text of 443 books for "carr kindle";
  3. I wait 3 seconds;
  4. I re-read Carr's take and mull it over.
Perhaps not fundamentally different from looking it up in the index, but it certainly feels so.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Space Plan From China Broadens Challenge to U.S.

I suppose my point is that China, like Russia and the United States, see a comprehensive space program as important to its interests. As the article linked to in the parent notes, these technologies are necessarily dual use, but I see no reason for that to lock us into a Sino-US space race.

China's leaders have ambitious long-term goals for their space program that will be almost impossible to meet on its own (the cost of a Mars mission would be staggering), so cooperation with the US is in their interests as well as ours. China gains access to dual-use technology, we get to massage China's nationalism into something less virulent, and if nothing else, we both get to delay a strategic confrontation.

Hey, I'm just some guy on the internet. But it seems wise to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 20th century and do a better job of accepting the reality of China's rise to great power status and accommodating them into the international system.

estevez | 14 years ago | on: Space Plan From China Broadens Challenge to U.S.

I don't understand stories like these at all. Why are still seeing this from a Cold War perspective?

First, in what possible sense is a Chinese manned spaceflight program a challenge to the U.S. If we apply the same standard to the Russians, haven't we've already "lost"? What's with the International Space Station, can China not join the club? The first item in the National Aeronautics and Space Act [1]:

  >(a) Devotion of Space Activities to Peaceful Purposes for Benefit of All
  >Humankind.--Congress declares that it is the policy of the United States that
  >activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of
  >all humankind.
Second, why no division of labor? Let China do manned spaceflight. Hell, let's chip in (aside from debt service on all those T-bills). We can do plenty of cool stuff: start flinging bacterial spores into interstellar space, submersible probe(s) on Europa, etc.

[1]: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html#POLICY

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