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Профессор экономики в Техасском Техническом Университете рассказывал, что раньше никогда не заваливал студентов по одному, но однажды завалил целую группу. Группа настояла, что социализм «работает» и что никто при этом не будет бедным и никто – богатым. Великое выравнивание! Профессор сказал, что хорошо, поставим в этом классе эксперимент на предмет социализма. Все оценки будут усредняться и каждый получит одинаковую оценку, таким образом, никто не провалится и никто не получит «отлично».
После первой контрольной оценки были усреднены и все получили «хорошо». Студенты, учившиеся упорно, были расстроены, а студенты, кто учился мало – счастливы. Но ко времени второй контрольной студенты, кто учился мало, занимались ещё меньше, а те, кто учились упорно, решили, что тоже хотят халявы, поэтому занимались немного… Вторая контрольная в среднем дала «удовлетворительно». Никто не радовался. Когда же прошла третья контрольная, в среднем вышло «неуд». Результат так и не улучшился, ведь ссоры, упрёки, ругань приводили к враждебным отношениям и никто не собирался учиться за других.

ссылку!!! полцарства за ссылку!!!!!

Our country was built as a federation of States: some powers were delegated to the Feds by the States.
It endured for over a century, surviving the centrifugal forces in 1860-ies.
Then, in 1913, two huge blows were struck: amendments 16 (federal income tax - the Feds became RICH) and 17 (direct popular election of senators - the Feds became completely independent of the State governments).
The consequences have been calamitous, but we endured for almost another century.
Now it's over: Federal aid is top revenue for states and the States are now Federal subsidiaries.
This is still a great country, just not a Union (or a Federation) any more...

Вечер. Дети "спят" (т.е., расфасованы по койкам и получили последние 613е китайские предупреждения).
Благодать. Чай, интернет... Тишина.
Вдруг раздаётся слабое позванивание.
Становится громче.
Жена не слышит - у неё в ушах бананы, она открыла для себя Бритни Спирс.
Иду на разведку.
Ася спит. Укрыл.
Ляля спит. Сама не раскрывается.
А прямо под ней, на нижнем уровне bunk bed, сидит Шимон и бьёт в бубен.

С кем у Вас ассоциируется эта фамилия?
С дифференциальными уравнениями или с Толстым?

Об отсутствии правосудия в России и сложившемся в результате социально-экономическом строе государства

ментов можно уподобить саранче, которая сжирает все на своем пути, и, как известно, в конце концов сама гибнет от голода. Но нам от этого не легче, потому что все уже сожрано до того.

http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/044/15.html
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/045/05.html

http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/3909
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

Как были очищены от немцев земли, которые Сталин прирезал к Польше и России.

очень тяжёлое чтение.
http://solonin.org/full.php?show=content&id=212

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.
... none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists" — has occurred.
... decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes.
... drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization
In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006,

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/workplace-web-bludging-good-for-productivity-20090402-9ktm.html

People who do surf the internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20 per cent of their total time in the office - are more productive by about nine per cent than those who don't,

People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture - after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored,

Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a day's work, and as a result, increased productivity.

...excessive time spent surfing the internet could have the reverse effect.

Approximately 14 per cent of internet users in Australia show signs of internet addiction - they don't take breaks at appropriate times, they spend more than a 'normal' amount of time online, and can get irritable if they are interrupted while surfing.

By Cathy Young

After the recent war in Gaza, Israel has endured a firestorm of criticism worldwide over the deaths and injuries of Palestinian civilians. Yet some of the toughest criticism has come from within. There has been a vigorous debate in Israel on whether the Israeli armed forces committed atrocities during the three-week operation, whether enough effort was made to protect noncombatants, and whether religious zealots who see Palestinians as enemies in a holy war have gained too much influence in the military.

This self-questioning is an important process essential to a democratic society. But it also highlights the rather appalling double standard in the world's response.

The very question of whether similar soul-searching is being done by Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization which is also the elected leadership of Gaza, would be darkly funny. Hamas and its supporters have shown no sign of questioning their flagrant disregard for the life and limb of Palestinian civilians, let alone Israeli ones - and while many civilians in Gaza are angry at Hamas for putting them in harm's way, a robust public debate of these tactics is hardly imaginable.
( Read more... )

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=link-between-autism-and-vinyl

Children who live in homes with vinyl floors, which can emit chemicals called phthalates, are more likely to have autism, according to research by Swedish and U.S. scientists published Monday.
The scientists were surprised by their finding, calling it "far from conclusive." Because their research was not designed to focus on autism, they recommend further study of larger numbers of children to see whether the link can be confirmed.
The study was based on surveys that asked a variety of questions related to the indoor environment. Of the study's 4,779 children between the ages of 6 and 8, 72 had autism, including 60 boys.
The researchers found four environmental factors associated with autism: vinyl flooring, the mother's smoking, family economic problems and condensation on windows, which indicates poor ventilation.
Infants or toddlers who lived in bedrooms with vinyl, or PVC, floors were twice as likely to have autism five years later, in 2005, than those with wood or linoleum flooring.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16826-brain-quirk-could-help-explain-financial-crisis.html

Our brains raise few objections when presented with seemingly expert guidance, new research suggests.

"Most average people have this tendency to turn off their own capacity for making judgments when an expert comes into the picture," says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta.

Berns' team presented 24 young volunteers with a simple choice: accept a sure payment or bet on a riskier, yet higher-paying lottery.

When weighing this decision, volunteers activated brain circuits known to calculate risk and reward. In line with previous research, the team noticed more brain activation in these dopamine-delivering areas when the expected reward was higher.

"When advice is not there, when people are making these judgments on their own, you can make clear correlations with expected value in the lottery and areas associated with the dopamine system," he says.

To see how subjects respond to financial advice, the team told volunteers that Charles Noussair, an economics professor at Emory who advises the US Federal Reserve, would offer his opinion on whether they should accept the easy money or take a chance.

In reality, a computer program told volunteers to accept the sure thing if it added up to about 20% or more of the lottery sweepstake.

Volunteers usually took this advice blindly, brain scans suggest. Correlations between increased potential reward and brain activity disappeared when volunteers received the advice.

"That suggests that the normal mechanisms people use to evaluate risk and reward are not being used when you have an expert telling you what to do," Berns says.

http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/03/on-campus-the-pro-palestinians-real-agenda.php

During a recent visit to several university campuses in the U.S., I discovered that there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah.

Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber.
( Read more... )
What struck me more than anything else was the fact that many of the people I met on the campuses supported Hamas and believed that it had the right to “resist the occupation” even if that meant blowing up children and women on a bus in downtown Jerusalem.
( Read more... )
The so-called pro-Palestinian “junta” on the campuses has nothing to offer other than hatred and de-legitimization of Israel. If these folks really cared about the Palestinians, they would be campaigning for good government and for the promotion of values of democracy and freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Their hatred for Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point where they no longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians, namely the need to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the armed gangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Palestinians over the past few years.
( Read more... )
What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the “occupation” as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel.
( Read more... )
Over the past 15 years, much has been written and said about the fact that Palestinian school textbooks don’t promote peace and coexistence and that the Palestinian media often publishes anti-Israel material.

While this may be true, there is no ignoring the fact that the anti-Israel campaign on U.S. campuses is not less dangerous. What is happening on these campuses is not in the frame of freedom of speech. Instead, it is the freedom to disseminate hatred and violence. As such, we should not be surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip or the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from university campuses across the U.S.

http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high—school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation
That meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard's freshman class.
( Read more... )
Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal/index.html

There is clearly a growing recognition around the world and even in the U.S. that, strictly on empirical grounds, criminalization approaches to drug usage and, especially, the "War on Drugs," are abject failures, because they worsen the exact problems they are ostensibly intended to address. "Strictly on empirical grounds" means excluding from the assessment: (a) ideological questions regarding the legitimacy of imprisoning adults for consuming drugs they choose to consume; (b) the evisceration of Constitutional and civil liberties wrought by drug criminalization; and (c) the extraordinary sums of money devoted to the War on Drugs both domestically and internationally.

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN11358345
The war against drugs is failing and the U.S. government should break with "prohibition" policies that have achieved little more than cram its prisons and stoke violence, three former Latin American presidents said on Wednesday.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13237193&source=hptextfeature
How to stop the drug wars
Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution
“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries

The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/549822/?sc=dwhn
http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/13656.html
http://www.againstmonopoly.org/

Patent and copyright law are stifling innovation and threatening the global economy.
Abolishing the current patent and copyright system is needed in order to unleash innovations necessary to reverse the current recession and rescue the economy.
"From a public policy view, we'd ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether," says Levine, John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. "There's plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It's not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090302213822.htm

Young children who spend more than two hours glued to the TV every day double their subsequent risk of developing asthma.
The findings are based on more than 3,000 children whose respiratory health was tracked from birth to 11.5 years of age.
The amount of time spent in front of the box was used as a proxy measure of sedentary behaviour, because personal computers and games consoles were not in widespread use at the time (mid 1990s).
By the time the children were 11.5 years old, there was little difference in levels of sedentary behaviour between those with asthma and those without.
The relationship between physical activity, sedentary behaviour and asthma is complex. Recent research has suggested that breathing patterns in children may be associated with sedentary behaviour, sparking developmental changes in the lungs and subsequent wheezing.

Определим "Научные Исследования" ("науку") как добычу полезной информации об окружающем нас мире.
Критерий полезности: цитируемость, т.е., насколько данное исследование используется другими исследователями.
Для отсекания взаимно-цитирующих бездельников, потребуем конечный выход в производство (т.е., рекурсивно "учитываем" только исследования, цитируемые в уже "учтённых" исследованиях и в патентах, на основании которых производятся и продаются товары).
"Прикладная Наука" - это как раз учтённые исследования (и исследования, которые очевидным образом будут "учтены" в ближайшем будущем, ибо непосредственно развивают уже "учтённые" исследования).
Эту науку финансируют свободные предприниматели (и государственные организации типа DARPA), т.е., свободный рынок с этим отлично справляется.
Определим "Фундаментальную Науку" ("basic research"), как исследования, которые не ведут к производству в обозримом будущем, например, многие разделы математики, астрономии и физики. Исторически, такие исследования финансировались "сами собой" (т.е., "из воздуха"): меценатами ("придворные звездочёты"), университетами (платят за преподавание, нанимают - за открытия, как сейчас во многих ведущих университетах мира), промышленностью (Bell Labs).
В наше время некоторые формы фундаментальных исследований слишком дорого стоят, чтобы финансироваться "сами собой".
Канонический пример: Large Hadron Collider.
Кто будет платить за это удовольствие?
На этот вопрос есть, разумеется разные ответы.
Беззаветные либертарианцы скажут, конечно, что пусть рынок рабирается - кому надо, тот пусть и платит.
Мне же кажется, что такие исследования попадают в категорию Public Good (просто по определению: выгоду от этих исследований получают все - в форме будущих продуктов), а то, что за них никто не хочет платить, в категорию Market failure.

Вообще говоря, поддержка фундаментальных исследований должна проходить по разделу национальной обороны.

Если, скажем, 500 лет назад в случае опасности нападения можно было просто собрать ополчение и раздать ему арбалеты, то в 19 веке к войне надо было готовится за несколько лет (наделать ружей и кораблей, научить солдат и матросов ими пользоваться). В 20 же веке на разработку самолёта, танка или корабля уходит уже 10 с лишним лет, и это при условии наличия развитой промышленнсти. А представьте себе, что развитой промышленности нет? Если сперва надо научиться сталь выплавлять? Сколько времени пройдёт, прежде чем такая страна сможет сделать современный танк?
Заказывать самолёты надо не с началом вторжения, а очень и очень заранее.
Но сперва надо научиться делать радары и компьютеры.
Компьютеры завтрашнего дня - квантовые. (А может и нет, но мы же не хотим сюрпризов типа Спутника, так ведь?)
Значит надо изучать quantum entanglement, а это - дело недешёвое, и прибылями там пока не пахнет.
Ну и так далее.

DARPA может легко заказывать здесь свои фантастические игрушки именно потому, что щедрое финансирование науки в 20 веке привело к утечке мозгов со всего мира в Америку и создало плодородное поле, на которой прорастёт любое семя, брошенное DARPA.

По мотивам бесплодной дискуссии с

arbatом, которая началась передёргиваниями, а закончилась экспериментальным подтверждением Закона Годвина.
Короче, очередное разочарование в человечестве.

Девочка Настя попросила у президента России хомяка.
По интернету.
Заявка на хомяка, украшенная президентской печатью, приехала в Настин город.
Девочку с родителями вызвали к директору школы и "объяснили" им, что нехрен беспокоить занятых людей.
Родители пожаловались на травлю в газету и в администрацию президента.
Газета подарила девочке хомяка и уже совсем было собралась пропесочить местную администрацию - как вдруг администрация президента спохватилась и подарила Насте двух хомяков.
Теперь вся Россия обсуждает, имеет ли право девочка, у которой уже есть интернет, просить у президента ещё и хомяка, а бедная Настя думает, что ей делать с тремя хомяками.

Обратите внимание на имя файла (хомяк - gerbil, а не guinea pig):
http://www.newsru.com/russia/05feb2009/girl_pig.html