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Comment: Re:So a fake pub with drinks and a place to sit (Score 1) 118

by Another, completely (#46283781) Attached to: Fake Pub Studies Drinking Habits


I'm guessing it depends on the nature of the interaction.

Anyone can listen to nearby conversations and form opinions, but that's not the same as conducting a study. If someone associated with a university tries to publish results from a study without signed permission from all participants, the university ethics board will not just frown. Tenure might save you, but students and assistant professors are in trouble. This is taken very seriously.

Comment: Re:What about the windows only software? and offic (Score 3, Interesting) 116

And you think Word does that? If you are going to write a doctoral thesis in Word, then you have my pity starting out. With LaTeX, you have a formatting area at the front, your references in a nice separate bibliography file, and most of your document is just the text you have written. Setting up a master document that includes separate documents for each chapter, allowing cross-referencing, a single bibliography, and a table of contents is possible in Word, but it's dead simple in LaTeX.

Setting it up in the first place may take a little looking into, but building a master document in Word isn't intuitive either. If it takes more than a day to get your basic file structure sorted, then you aren't trying. It's three or four years of your life that you will be writing this thing. If the format guidelines change during that time, you can fix it in one place (in fact, some procrastinating student will probably build a fresh style file to share so you don't even need to fix it yourself). How long would it take you in Word to change the margins or line-spacing for a multi-chapter document? What about copying formatted text from a research paper you just finished, keeping all the figure references and citations, but in your university format instead of the journal publisher's?

I'm in business now, and use Word and Excel regularly because that's the de facto standard. Every time I need to re-format anything in Word I wish I just had to edit LaTeX instead. It's just simpler. In the long run, it will save you time and agony.

Comment: Re:Cloning sucks. (Score 1) 156

by Another, completely (#45957183) Attached to: Chinese Firm Can Now Produce 500 Cloned Pigs Per Year

In other news, cloning is fun to know how to do, but totally worthless because it has no valid applications.

You left out the cloning to eliminate most variables when you give an experimental medical treatment to one animal but not to another. I'm surprised you thought about cloning sex slaves before getting to that one.

Comment: Maybe the line is moving (Score 4, Insightful) 304

Could this be because it's easier to get diagnosed with diabetes, COPD, or other non-healthy conditions than it was in 2002? I've heard enough anecdotal evidence to make me ask the question, but it would be nice to see a study. How many people who were considered healthy in 2002 could visit a doctor in 2013 and be declared unhealthy, and how does that fraction vary by country? Unless an article can control for that variable, the other numbers don't really mean much.

Comment: Re: Whatever (Score 1) 95

by Another, completely (#45376385) Attached to: Physicists Smash Record For Wave-Particle Duality

The equation is irrelevant. The Chelonian Uncertainty Principle demonstrates that the more accurately you know the momentum of a turtle, the less accurately you know its position. Since any usefully accurate value for its quantum wavelength would need very high accuracy for its momentum, you would never be able to find the turtle for which you had made your calculations, especially since they can look just like little rocks under the water and are naturally given to hiding.

The Turtle Moves!

Comment: Re:The Type (Score 1) 336

by Another, completely (#45365735) Attached to: Elementary School Bans Students From Touching Each Other

parent who should never have been allowed to have children

I was unaware you needed a license for that. Or did you mean to imply procreation should be regulated - perhaps by you?

Wish I could remember what movie it's from: "There should be a test before people can become parents. Beyond the practical, I mean."

Comment: Re:what about freeze tag? (Score 1) 336

by Another, completely (#45365641) Attached to: Elementary School Bans Students From Touching Each Other

Oh - it is also a big no-no for them to make the "gun sign" (point your finger like a gun). This includes anything that even slightly resembles making the gun sign (like making the "L" for loser sign on your forehead).

Certainly wouldn't want anyone to think you were doing something as dangerous as making a finger-gun sign when you were just engaging in the traditionally constructive stigmatization of school colleagues as losers who deserve an identifying tattoo on their forehead to protect society from accidentally interacting with their feeble selves. Catching a glimpse of a mimed gun might lead to emotional problems later in life, so it's best to clamp down on such foolishness.


by Another, completely (#45347625) Attached to: Why There Shouldn't Be a Chess World Champion

Damn! I've been out of the country for a long time, and haven't followed baseball, but the Expos moved to Washington D.C.?

Why do I need to learn about things this way? Now it really is the "National" league that it always claimed to be, leaving the "American" league the old "North America" excuse.

The amount of beauty required launch 1 ship = 1 Millihelen