pj808
Re:Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid resear...
on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:10PM (#43145633)
I once encountered an endowment fund that was restricted for use in a defined scholarship. This was problematic because that scholarship could only be given to students of a specific race. Restricting applicants in this way would be illegal under Canada's charter, so for at least a decade the funds were simply not spent. As far as I know nothing has changed.
Re:Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid resear...
on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:07PM (#43145603)
The common argument is that universities offer vastly more services to their students then in the past. Career centers, for example, are relatively new trend. This is in part because students also 'shop' for universities with the best perks - not necessarily the best faculty. The most egregious examples include Michelin star chefs, lazy Rivers, and very fancy scoreboards in their very fancy stadiums. Less egregious examples include better campus security and health support staff. As much as it's convenient to point to administrators as a problem, part of the problem is also the ongoing arms race to attract applicants and students' expectations.
Re:The Average American Spent 2.5 Months on Their Phone in 2024
on Monday December 30, 2024 @05:07PM (#42554077)
Despite other comments that are somewhat aghast at the idea of dictating a margin of error, the threshold at which you consider something significant IS arbitrary. The 'p' value of 0.05, the inverse of the '95%'confidence interval, is commonly chosen by researchers but is by no means the only choice you could make. Some research uses less stringent or more stringent thresholds, depending on the nature of the research and the assumptions of the researchers.
Re:Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks
on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @04:11PM (#41713559)
Adding another cookbook to this excellent list: Wok by Kenji Alt-Lopez gives a fantastic, technique - based introduction to Chinese and Korean cooking, and includes very readable chapters detailing how to get good outcomes from his recipes. It's seriously levelled up my cooking skills.
Re:AI tool cuts unexpected deaths in hospital by 26%, Canadian study f...
on Wednesday September 18, 2024 @11:00AM (#41580580)
MARS is one of the smartest methods: intuitive, hard to break, easy to quantify. Friedman was a savant.
Re:Reports of the Death of Dental Cavities Are Greatly Exaggerated
on Wednesday September 18, 2024 @09:16AM (#41579349)
The claim of the headline is also not supported by the evidence shared in the article. As just one example, the article notes that many different strains of bacteria are responsible for caries. This fact doesn't necessarily say anything about the effectiveness of Lantern's treatments - although it might shed light on the mechanisms that make it effe tive (or not).
That's what the clinical trials and studies on the early adopters are for. There's lots of interesting commentary on the early research, such as Scott Alexander's write-up, that are much better than this article.
Re:How America's universities became debt factories
on Saturday September 14, 2024 @01:09PM (#41541105)
Human capital contracts are another partial solution that flips the incentives: instead of using loans to pay tuition up front, institutions are paid a % of your income for a fixed period of time, after which any remaining amount is forgiven. Typically this only applies to income over a base amount (such as 10% of income above a 40,000 base). Naturally this works great in fields with strong employment outcomes and terribly everywhere else.
Re:Startups building balloons to hoist tourists 100k feet into the str...
on Friday July 19, 2024 @12:12PM (#41007964)
F = g(m2*m2)/d^2. Earth surface gravity using Earth's radius as d; iss using that radius plus orbital height of 408km. Earth's surface gravity = 9.81m/s2, ISS gravity = 8.66m/s2.
So the answer is, if you could hold the ISS stationary without falling, people in it would feel almost as much gravity. You would have to go much higher than the ISS to feel weightless without orbiting/falling.
Assuming people feel weightless at 1m/s2 or less, you can solve for that! And the answer is 13,600 km.