No, it's how junk science works -- where you conduct an small and very badly flawed experiment, dominated by an effect that has been very well known in the literature for 30 years, but then claim the experiment is "suggestive" of a grandiose conclusion that the experiment clearly doesn't support in order to garner some publicity for yourself from journalists.

The researchers found the "exciting" result that the groups that received more feedback in their instruction performed better, and the group that received detailed feedback using whatever means the teacher deemed appropriate performed really well. Frankly, they could have had this "excitement" in 1984 if they'd read the educational research literature first -- the impact effects of better feedback on learning have been very well known for a very very long time, studied on wider groups over longer periods of time (not some toy 25-minute one-time task). Bloom's "two sigma" paper would have been a good place for them to start reading, and they'd have found plenty more. Only they're less exciting because they don't then tack on a grandiose claim about the evolutionary origins of instruction.

I may sound curmudgeonly, but widely-publicised science stories where some small externally invalid experiment "suggests" a grandiose conclusion reduces science to the level of QI anecdotes.

You know Beveridge's law of headlines? Here's Billingsley's law of science headlines: if a science story headline says something "may have" [followed by a grandiose claim] then it almost certainly didn't -- if the experiment had produced enough evidence to support that conclusion, the headline would say "did".

"Amazon EU ended up paying 0.5 per cent tax." So by your reckoning a tax rate of any higher than 0.5% is unwarranted government greed? I think you misunderstood what people mean when they talk about "the 1%" - it ain't supposed to be their tax rate!

No, I think I'd be too busy sipping pina coladas on a beach somewhere to complain about much of anything if had $700 million after tax!

No, much of their local competition in book sales etc (not being international companies with multiple subsidiaries in the EU) are not doing this. Apple etc's competitors are generally multinationals who also play these tricks. But in many cases Amazon's are not, and the effects of tax abuse are that much more problematic as they don't only affect tax revenue but also distort the market.

A gene encodes a protein, but there's plenty of occasions where ingestion of particular proteins has very serious consequences (and even in cases we already know about with longer periods before diagnosis is possible than GMOs are tested over before release). For example., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Secondary effects from things those proteins in turn produce are also problematic. The issue is that whereas with selective breeding we have the capacity to wreck one crop (and then, as noted in the original article with various factors making that less likely over time than GMO even in a single species), with GMO we are in a position to pollute all our food crops at once with something we later discover was harmful after all.

All public policy is based on a set of beliefs. Even without the words "under God" explicitly following them, "all men are created equal" is nonetheless a bold and essentially anti-empirical statement of faith and philosophy about the condition of mankind. (That person over there may be richer than me, that one stronger, and that other one may well be more talented -- but anti-empirically I happily declare that we are equal.) In this case it happens to have very protestant characteristics, eschewing empirical notions of value (e.g., meritocracy that this one might be better than that, or utilitarianism that so-and-so might be thrown under the bus for the good of the many) as well as other religious views (e.g., karma or that status is somehow earned through piety or betterment) in favour of a view that we are equal regardless of our past, position, or characteristics (a grace not works viewpoint). And yet there it is underpinning our notions of individual liberty, one-person-one-vote, freedom of speech, etc. And consequentially underpinning many of our laws and aspects of our government.

Back to the topic, though, one of the principles of universities is that discourse is unconstrained. Discussion is open and (with the exception of illegal personal abuse) people are free to express views, not just free to express views that we authorise.

"Excuse me sir, we've just discovered that ingestion of this particular GMO-introduced gene over a twenty year period causes a serious medical condition."

"Well, Jenkins, hop to it, ban foods containing that gene faster than you can say 'paracetomoxyfrusebendroneomycin'!"

"Right-o, sir. It's a popular and useful GMO gene, so we'll be banning the now-dominant varieties of wheat, corn, barley, maize, oats, rice, soy, lentils, tomato, cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, alfalfa, spinach, kale, potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, parsnip, turnip, most varieties of squash, citrus, apples, and pears, most stonefruit, and about half the varieties of berries. I'll send out the notice right-away."

"Actually, I feel like some lunch first. Care to join me? Where would you like to head."

"Hmm, thinking about that list. There's a good field opposite. You do like grass, don't you sir?"

I imagine it's useful to the policeman without either -- the suspect just has to believe they're using it (not that it's effective). In tense areas, people being searched can be very suspicious of why they were chosen to be searched -- whether they were targeted because of their ethnicity, etc. "It's just this device picked up a trace of something; it's probably nothing..." is possibly a very useful answer to the policeman, even if the device itself is garbage. Surely they'd rather the people they searched left cursing the useless device than left cursing the policeman.

Not a particularly noble reason for them to want it, though.

The next iPhone's going to have a translucent backplate.

The survey designers really should have known that including the words "porn" and "naked" in the text of the online survey form was a bad idea...

It doesn't need [on its own] to be sufficient to live tolerably on to have a positive effect. And that's just as well because getting it in-place in one go would a political impossibility. Oddly you're more likely to get there through the right of politics than the left. The first step would need to be something like Universal Credit (replace means-tested benefits with a universal payment), only hopefully without its bugs and teething problems. The right tend to support these policies because they lower the incremental effective tax rate (after loss of means-tested benefits are taken into account) for part-time workers, giving them a stronger incentive to take on more hours. (Increasing workforce participation is a big issue for the right.) But if you extrapolate it over time (fold in more benefits, gradually increase the rate to approximately minimum wage levels), you get a situation that looks fairly attractive -- people's basic needs are heavily subsidised without question (strong enough safety net that the community sector comfortably fills any gap), reduced financial pressure means you can do work you regard as valuable rather than necessarily lucrative (e.g. being a carer becomes viable as a career while making ends meet), nonetheless there is still a strong incentive to work, and the size of the state itself can be reduced (as it is only in the business of enabling you to take services, not of providing those services itself).

The biggest threat is the leftist push to means-test everything, which reduces the incentive to work and means it'd never get over the barrier.

So you're saying my lunchtime sandwiches should be paid for by taxpayers rather than a user-pays fee (me buying them)? Wowsers. Socialists in America go further than I thought!

That's not quite it. The problem with social education is that it usually means "the majority" dictating what your education must be like, and you end up with schools under bloated regulation run at a distance by a lowest-common-denominator bureaucracy (the school has little policy freedom, and often cannot even hire or fire its own staff). The majority-decreed form becomes free while anything else becomes very expensive [either through fees or the housing price of living in catchment]; and then if non-state options do better than the state ones [eg, private and church schools in England] you get social campaigns to try to ban them or bring them under state control too. Voucher systems, academies, or charter systems (the naming varies) whereby education does not compete on price but are driven by the school's community rather than by the state, and where you are free to choose your school, seem to be a neat way of bringing choice and deregulation to the state system, but are still young -- the private and state systems have had about 150 years head start on them getting developed.

You're wrong both times.

If you're looking for the income tax rates, go to the ATO, where you will see they are unchanged from previous years.

But in your previous post you claimed that:

In May 2013, The previous government's Climate Change minister, Greg Combet deferred those tax cuts even past 2015 when they were originally scheduled to come in. And it is those tax cuts, which had never been implemented that the current government is repealing.

You say you believe in science based policy, but then you say "simply...". Sadly, so far we have unfortunately little science on how policy impacts on carbon emission. We do know that it can on occasion create false markets for wind and solar (lots of wind and solar installed, lots of people happy to buy the carbon credits awarded for all that solar and wind and everyone cheers, except the output variability means the coal stations aren't turned down significantly and essentially just as much carbon gets pumped out of their chimneys as yesterday). We have very little idea (yet) of whether we can actually make policy genuinely reduce carbon output rather than just enabling ineffectively designed projects to skim money from the incentives.

Essentially every for-profit company has the "unswerving" goal of lock-in. Google wrote Gmail to make search "stickier" (your data tunes their search responses to you, not their competitors), the Play Store is to make Android stickier (both to you and the handset makers) because you'd have to re-buy your apps and videos if you switched, and the handset makers would lose easy access to the Play store if they didn't also preinstall Gmail, Google Now, and the Google branded apps on their phones. Your printer only works with cartridges from its manufacturer. iTunes and Apple's unique connector make using their devices stickier (as you'd need to re-purchase everything from your iPod alarm clock to your song library to easily move to a competitor). GitHub uses their own pull request mechanism, rather than the mechanism Linus Torvalds built into git, making it easier to work with other GitHub repos rather than git repos on any competing site (lock in the forks, and make the GitHub network stickier).

It is a simple fact of life that every company you do business with tries to come up with a way to defend their customer-base against competitors (or gets crushed by someone with deeper pockets outspending them until they've taken over the market as soon as they start to be successful).