Posts by James Green
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I'd say only about half of them are smiling with their eyes (which is a good predictor of it being a genuine smile). That's still pretty impressive.
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Somehow to me, Clarkson doesn't stack up as an 'average' critic. He's extremely opioniated, but it always seems like his opinion. He can pan a car as much as he likes, but I don't think it every moves me much. And I guess as opposed to a text-only critic, you also get to see him interact with the car, so you're exposed to more than just his opinion.
Personally, I can't really abide Monster Garage or American Chopper, but I lurve Scrapheap Challenge(!)
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Heh. It would certainly be amusing if the balance of power in the singles chart moved away from the teen/tween demographic...
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I've always wondered why in the ongoing frenzy for tax cuts no-one has talked about mirroring Australia and making the first $5-$10k of income untaxed, thus giving everyone a tax cut and especially helping out the poorest of the poor
I think there was some commentary about this prior to the last election and the tax cut thing then. I think doing that, or any sort of meddling with the bottom tax threshold was going to cost waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more than the planned tax cuts, or anything else. Tonight, I can't be bothered googling for the answer...
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I'm thinking of a relatively simple (but not 'naive') form of empiricism, rather than the darker depths of the philosophy of science, along with the scientific fact, which rather than being immutable, is very much open to change. Somewhat like the lovely argument that evolution is only a theory...
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Keith, you can "cheat" by using a screenshot program to snap the chart, and save it as a JPEG/PNG or whatever.
Or is you want a really geeky hack, and higher resolution, you print the chart, and check the "print to file" box to save a post-script version. Note, you don't actually have to have a printer for this to work. To enable me to make colour post-script files, I have some ridiculously expensive HP colour laser "installed". Once you have it in postscript, you can use GSView and Ghostscript to make it into a pretty pdf, or into a jpg or whatever.
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Michael, at this point in proceedings, it seems worthwhile to take a detour into the philosophy of science.
The truth of a proposition depends on the weight of evidence for or against it. This balance of evidence changes every time a new study on a topic is conducted. Therefore, what is 'true' now, may not have been 'true' 10 years ago, and what is 'false' now, may have been 'true' 10 years ago. A cute extension of this, is the idea of a Half-life of Knowledge; that is, the time time in which it takes half of what is currently considered to be 'true' to become 'false'. In psychology, it is estimated that this time is a little as 5 years.
As a result of this, it is a common mistake to make judgements based on current knowledge rather than knowledge at the time. It's especially frequent where there are personal outcomes based on it. And there can be issues around whether the withdrawal with the change in the truth value of knowledge was sufficiently timely. This would be true of things like Vioxx, repressed memory, and gender reassignment, among many, many other medical treatments. A good historical example would be Marie Curie's death, because while she discovered a lot of stuff about radiation, she didn't work out that it would kill her. Repressed memory has been good and dead for a long time now.
As an aside, you are (under current knowledge!) correct that autobiographical memory requires language, so that there is typically 'childhood amnesia' until around 2.5 years old (but this ends earlier for first borns, girls, Maori, those who have upheaval in the period; and much later for Asian children). The only memories prior to this time are 'sense' memories, usually the feel of an object, or something similar.
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David -- I absolutely accept that. It's most glaring when it's something with which you're familiar was my point. Last time I heard Fletcher speak, I'm pretty sure we came up with an equally plausible argument to explain at least some of his findings (which is why I'm not a fan of evolutionary psychology).
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The bottom line is the interview didn't qualify the extent of the study, its limitations etc.
We got what the Mills & Boons version.That seems a fairly inane criticism. I don't recollect the last time I heard some science (with which I'm familiar) being reported in the media where that wasn't the case.
Frustratingly, I can't find my copies of his papers (I think they're at home), or the notes from the last talk of his I went to (not filed), but he has run studies in the US from memory.
And as for recovered memory, repression dates back to Freud (not a psychologist), and most of the evidence from the last 20 years is pretty unequivocally against it...
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If anyone's travelling to Vietnam, I can also recommend the "weasel" coffee. Similar principle : )