> promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors
Therein lies an answer - change the disincentives - instead of banning cheating riders, ban all of the sponsors of those riders for a time. Now the onus is on the sponsors to discourage cheating.
> I also remember this lunar lander game running on a couple terminals at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California, also in the mid 1970s.
I recall lunar lander being available on, IIRC, ADM-3 terminals at Lawrence in early 1973, usually surrounded by a cluster of male teens. One "feature" of the kiosk mode for games was that a carefully-timed Ctrl-C would escape kiosk mode, and allow the user to play other games. Happenstance, or catnip for proto-hackers?
I wonder if some miniature chain shot, made with ~2-3mm split shot fishing weights clamped over 20-30cm of monofilament line, all in a smoothbore shell, would work to entangle drone propellors, and perhaps leave the drone in a reusable state.
Pet peeve: During Q&A, the presenter should repeat the question. Even if the asker has a microphone, they are often not clearly audible. Repeating the question, or a brief version of it, lets the audiences, both present and via video, hear it clearly, and shows that the presenter heard and understood it before they answer it.
Fun fact: Henry David Thoreau's family was active in the pencil-making business in the 1820..1850 timeframe, and Henry D. made several innovations in the art.
In my opinion, wait times for voters of more than 30 minutes should be grounds
for civil suit or impeachment of the election officials responsible. Other variables of interest would include voter dwell time - the time it takes for one voter to cast their ballot - and the likelihood of machine malfunction, whether from inadequate preparation or maintenance, or from active sabotage by voters. Worst case is a polling place with minimal staff, fragile and antiquated machines, and a high proportion of impatient, frustrated, or angry voters. The procedure for repair of machines (never use the word "fixed" during an election) is to mark the machine as out of order, call the elections office, and begin a long wait. For non-Americans, note that US general elections typically involve 2 or 3 dozen contests, so marking paper ballots
just for one party or another is not an effective option in the US.
One approach to requiring prerequisites is to give a test on the prerequisite content on the first or second day of class, with the test scored quickly, and the results worth 20% of the final course grade. Students who do well on the test know the prerequisites, and those who bomb the test have time to drop the course and enroll in one of the prerequisite courses - or to stubbornly struggle with the higher-level material and earn a B grade. It takes some cooperation among the faculty to pull off, but can be effective.
Congress-people have few incentives to restrain or reduce the national debt. There is plenty of talk, but little action. The event horizon may be distant, but the pull is inexorable. What could possibly solve this? Could we give representatives and senators bonuses for spending less and taxing more?
It would be interesting to see train conductors on electric mountain bikes, with drones scanning each side of the stopped train for damaged or cut air hoses, hotbox bearings, etc. Could save a lot of walking, if the railroad and the union agree.
There is an excellent book that covers the topic: The Fabric of Civilization, by Virginia Postrel. The part most amazing to me was the pyramid effect of fabric production in the days before mechanization - 20 spinners per weaver producing thread, 80,000 spinners near Manchester alone, thousands of weavers turning thread into fabric, etc., and as
the spinning jenny and later the power loom came along, employment and economic patterns changed drastically, giving us the Luddites and similar movements.
One wonders what programming will look like after 10 or 20 years of AI.
Publishing reproducible research would disincentivize fraud by providing a
clear way to expose fraud, and could tend to benefit other researchers in
the field, by effectively sharing specific methods as well as results.
Incentivizing reproducibility would be hard as a grassroots effort,
but would be enforcible if it were tied to funding. Even if only a
small percentage of published studies were reproduced, and only a small
percentage of them were found to be fraudulent, the disincentive for
fraud would be present. We do not need more Andrew Wakefields.
> Effective checks would basically mean science costs 2x as much.
By that logic, we would need to enforce speed limits by having one
police cruiser following every driver.
Dual dash-cams with high-endurance SD cards can help with auto liability. If your auto policies only meet the state limits, or your home insurance has not kept up with market values or replacement costs, perhaps talk to an independent broker, and ask about an umbrella policy as well.
Rather than an post-hoc investigation model, how about promoting reproducibility in publication, with an expectation that others can run the same study with identical equipment, models, codes, playbooks, etc. For PIs getting government funding, true reproducibility should be a requirement,
and other researchers should be funded to report pro or con on the reproducibility of studies, and then ethical lapses could be much more visible. Science based solely on faith in the ethics of other researchers is just religion with more complicated rituals.
Newspapers and reviewers published in them have exposure to their reputations.
Readers who get advance copies may have no reputation to care for or defend.
Book publishers could send a few one-time codes with each advance copy if they wanted attributable reviews instead of astro-turfed buzz. Knowing the various incentives, I won't hold my breath.
Put a patch panel in the structured media center, attach all house Cat-5++ cables to it. Put in-wall keystone RJ-45 receptacles at the other end of each cable. Put ISP router/gateway/wifi box at some central location. Use patch cables and panel to connect ISP box to ISP. Add WAPs elsewhere as needed.
My spam calls are down to 1 or 2 per month after using nomorobo.com for 5 years. It is not direct action as TFA suggests, but it works well for me. Callers reach voicemail, almost never leave messages, and the phone almost never rings. Free for VOIP numbers, $20/year for mobile. Several similar alternatives exist.
Okay, make that spouse instead, because spousal immunity. Also, make the funds' holdings temporarily blind: a fund does not reveal the entirety of the holdings in its portfolio until 5 years after year-end, and waits 3 months after the closing of a position to reveal that it held XYZ, Inc. during a 37 month period. The idea is not to try to exactly match "the economy" with "the market" or even with "the funds" but to disincentivize politicians making any direct connection between their work and with individual equities, while still being able to benefit from general economic growth.
Radical proposal: Rather than trying to police leakage of insider information,
level the playing field for both politicians and fed employees by
creating a dozen or so national mutual funds of at least 1,000 equity positions each that intend to model the US economy as a whole. Anyone can invest in them, but all US Federal employees and immediate family members are required to liquidate all other positions and hold only national funds. If the economy and funds do well, all federal folks profit. Distribute fund management among multiple fund management firms.
For flight to a destination, it may be possible to use an altitude with a more favorable wind direction. For landing, the aircraft approaches a mooring mast from downwind.
Dürer made some choices that should appeal to entrepreneurs:
he was perhaps the first artist to explicitly sign his work,
and did it with with his own brand, the stylized A/D. He also
chose to work in printmaking, thus being able to readily
reproduce his works more rapidly than any painter. His work
is wonderful, but too many art commenters focus only on the art,
and miss his commercial innovations.