It is my understanding that in German civil suits it's customary for the loser to pay the cost of the law suit, including lawyer's fees (which are usually coupled to the monetary value of the lawsuit, so frivolously racking up the fees is difficult).
In the US, the winning party in a civil suit can sometimes get their legal costs paid by the losing party. It depends on the type of case, and sometimes on whether the losing party is determined to have brought the case frivolously or for the purpose of being a nuisance.
The question, though, was whether a person in a criminal case would be reimbursed the cost of their defense by the government after being found not guilty.
Imagine a cartoon about a kid playing with a doll. Cartoon creators know a lot about related topics, like life skills, social dynamics, fashion, etc. And so they can seamlessly integrate bits of those rich domains of expertise into the cartoon. The OP cartoon bear video covers a lot of ground.
But now imagine a cartoon about a kid playing with a puddle. Cartoon creators know very little about puddles. Almost nothing of their physics, biology, chemistry, geology, engineering, and so on. No clue - stomp, laugh, mess. So science doesn't get the integrated and engaging storytelling which those other topics do. But there seems no fundamental reason it can't.
Except... searching for videos is painful. Even when you know a video exists, it's often implausible to find. Using google and bing video search to find bits of educational content, feels like searching the web circa early AltaVista - one stop among several, all of very limited effectiveness.
So to reframe my original question: I wonder if youtube kids viral video formats might be used for outreach... but the cost of creation could be prohibitively large. Though there might be low hanging fruit, like a play-do egg surprise, filled with water, or bubble foam, or jello, or liquid nitrogen, or hydrogen, or...
Thanks for your comment. I was(am?) considering an education project, but was clearly doing selective memory on just how massively time consuming it would be.
The thing is, kids are incredibly primed to recognise and cherish brands. I find it shocking, to be honest.
They want a Paw Patrol figurine to emerge from the play-doh, for the millionth time. Not some stupid liquid hydrogen (I view it the other way around, but I'm not the target audience).
And the pull of those silly videos is incredibly strong. We also have an excellent app with literally hundreds of educational clips from "Die Sendung mit der Maus" [1] [2]. My son likes them, and will watch them for hours on end if he gets the chance -- and so will I, because they are genuinely interesting and amusing.
Yet if given the choice, he will pick Youtube and the silly videos every time.
Eeep! I'd intended the "liquid" to be scoped by the comma. :) Though I'd expect liquid hydrogen to be even more popular than the pop of hydrogen gas. The play doh freezes, and breaks like glass, and then... people like big explosions.
Neat Maus show - thanks.
But... consider the difference in testing culture between app development, and education video development. I tried creating some education video, using software style iterative development, and street guerilla usability testing. Which turned up all sorts of unexpected failure modes (say "millimeters", and some have traumatic flashbacks to learning metric in school; say "fun story about viruses!", and for some, that has the emotional loading of "fun story about genocide!"). Later, I was chatting about it with someone from WGBH, Boston's PBS station. Which makes a lot of education videos. Their comment was something like, yes, we'd love to try iterative development and testing, and we will... just as soon as we find anyone willing to fund it. So an underperformance of science education videos seems no more surprising than an underperformance of large-scale waterfall software projects.
> kids are incredibly primed to recognise and cherish brands
So I'd rephrase this as: the toy industry devotes lots of effort and money and testing, to creating things kids will recognize and cherish... and the science education video industry simply doesn't.
As for the "silly" videos, imagine you were playing with kids. You might do something much like in those "silly" videos - hands on, rich in phenomena (play doh tearing, describing objects, making choices, and on and on)... fun and interesting. You wouldn't do "Now I will show you a still photograph of part of a bottle of sun screen. Note the number 10..." blah blah blah (example from the Mouse TV 1 video). I myself found the silly videos more engaging, despite an ignorance of, and distaste for, the branding and characters. So I suggest at least some of the appeal is elsewhere.
I greatly enjoy going to research talks. I generally don't bother watching science education videos. There's a richness in one that's missing from the other. And consider molecular biology thesis defenses (went to one yesterday), which at least around MIT and Harvard, end with a long thank you section. Something I've not seen in other fields. It extends to family, and significant others, and pets, and friends. It is illustrated with funny photos, and is leavened with inside jokes, and hints of their challenges and character. A moment of standing at this major milestone in their life, and looking back. It is just a richly textured few minutes. Not all defense acknowledgements are that notable. And yes, there are some science education videos which try to capture a bit of that in interviews. But you don't have people crying, or slips like "thank you to my husband <name of their professor instead>" as the room cracks up. It could be valuable educationally, to show those segments to kids. Especially with students from underrepresented groups, or no-college families. So they could see, that person is like me - that could be me in a few years, and it looks like they had fun getting there. But like so much else in science research, which might be of value in science education, the incentives along the pipeline to get them from one to the other, are absent or dysfunctional.
> this flood of trash
So perhaps a more upbeat perspective, might be that society is investing lots of creativity and resources, to discovering how to create compelling media and storytelling. Yay! And it's now up to people who care about science education, to create content which leverages those insights.
Hmm, I wonder how VR/AR will impact this silly video niche... hands-on direct manipulation play-doh egg surprises?
> Can anyone who has been using ZFS long-term at home comment? How do you add more space?
My solution is to use RAID1 exclusively. That means that I can keep attaching pairs of devices if I run out of diskspace. I can never get them out again, however :-)
> If you ask someone “Which do you think is safer: artificial vanilla or vanilla extract?” they’ll often prefer the “natural” one.
This feels like an accidental trick question :-)
For me personally, I know I'll prefer vanilla extract (or rather, actual vanilla shoots) simply because it tastes much better -- precisely because of the impurities.
I know it isn't what you asked at all, but since the question is meant to uncover emotions: I'm having a hard time taking my emotional preference for natural vanilla aroma out of my reply.
It would be better to use an example where people don't have a strong preference for one of the choices for unrelated reasons. Unfortunately I can't think of an example right now.
> usually a more difficult path than gaming on Windows
Just to speak against this notion (which absolutely used to be true, no contest there): anecdotally, I don't find that to be true anymore, at least using Steam.
It works really smoothly for me, just as on Windows. In fact I'm just about ready to drop Windows as a gaming plaform. Maybe some titles aren't available for Linux, but I still have enough to fall back on.
Perhaps by "difficult" here OP means "access to games" and not just setup.
If you choose to game on Linux, you are intentionally restricting the number of games you can play. And for some people that's obviously ok, but for most (as stats show), it's not ok.
While you make a good point, the thing is that in my personal observation only the Chinese students (they were probably the largest group, which probably plays a role TBH) kept to themselves.
The other foreign students would merrily mingle with the locals and other foreign students. Just the Chinese would stay in their bubble.
Since I had kids, I haven't gone climbing natural rock. I still go to climbing gyms (mostly to boulder these days, for unrelated reasons), but not outside.
I've discovered that I now get too fearful while climbing, too scared something bad might happen and I'd leave my children without me in the world.
It breaks my concentration, makes my actions erratic, and most crucially, makes me not enjoy it.
Who knows how I'll feel once they're older, but I suspect it won't ever change back. And that's OK.
> Surely the copilot can look at a map (when I say map I don't mean a piece of paper -- I mean a digital one with GPS and everything) and see their trajectory while the pilot is landing, right?
It's not like the pilot doesn't know there is a parallel taxiway. Of course there is. They would be (subconsciously anyway) looking for it to complete their mental map. It just went wrong in this case.
You wouldn't even have needed a fancy automated system to realise you were looking at a taxiway in that particular situation. There were four big aircraft on there, with position lights and taxi lights and everything. And apparently visibility was good. It was just a spectacular brain fart.
While the system you're suggesting might give better situational awareness, it might also be a dangerous distraction in other cases -- or be wrong for some reason. So more tools aren't automatically better.
In this case the existing system actually worked flawlessly: another controlling instance (the tower controller) discovered the error, took appropriate action, and all that happened was a 15 minute landing delay and a good story. Probably happens more often than we'd care to imagine.
> Like I'm imagining there should be something on the plane that shows them their trajectory and the runway information. If there is, why isn't it telling them when they're going the wrong way?
Well, there's the ILS (instrument landing system), but pilots like to land manually. IIRC it's recommended these days, just to remain in training. I suppose it's also fun.
Also, ILS might be wrong somehow (interference, technical defects, the pilot accidentally entering the data for the left runway when he was told to land on the right, etc).
So the truth is this was just human error, and that kind of thing just happens. You know the saying: if you make a system idiot-proof, nature invents better idiots.
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