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Domain: araneus.fi

Stories and comments across the archive that link to araneus.fi.

Comments · 5

  1. Re:expensive by mr.gson · · Score: 1 · on British Operator EE Offers £8 Million Petabyte 4G Data Bundle

    Here's a rough comparison of the price to a variety of other offerings: http://www.araneus.fi/bwcost/?highlight=71

  2. Erotic Pictures a Necessary Element by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Journal Article On Precognition Sparks Outrage

    Why settle for just 1M? Play the lottery for a few weeks and you don't even have to bother writing an article to be rich.

    So I realize a lot of people aren't going to read the article but here's the meaty parts for you statistics snobs (and really, the Bayes folks are going to be all over this one):

    Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%, t(99) = 2.51, p = .01, d = 0.25.3 In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8%, t(99) = -0.15, p = .56. This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%. (All t values < 1.) The difference between erotic and nonerotic trials was itself significant, tdiff(99) = 1.85, p = .031, d = 0.19.

    There's a lot more about eliminating random number generators (by using this little guy) leading to prediction as well as running more tests where they are asked to pick a preference of two identical images. The most interesting part is that these results seemed to hinge on pornography. The individuals only exhibited this "precognition or premonition" when they were picking erotic images or rewarded with erotic images (albeit from the International Affective Picture System).

    The skeptic in me is very pleased and excited about this part of the paper:

    Accordingly, the experiments have been designed to be as simple and transparent as possible, drawing participants from the general population, requiring no instrumentation beyond a desktop computer, taking fewer than 30 minutes per session, and requiring statistical analyses no more complex than a t test across sessions or participants.

    Grad students across the country: get to work!

    But you would have to have the lottery involve some sort of erotic pictures containing the known numbers in order for this edge to be garnered. Which would be impossible unless the lotteries changed how they worked. Maybe play blackjack with a set of playboy cards? :-)

  3. $5 per megabyte is not sky-high by mr.gson · · Score: 1 · on AT&T Introduces Satellite-Enabled Smart Phone

    $5 per megabyte is actually a bargain compared to, say, the AT&T international roaming data rate of $19.97 per megabyte, as illustrated here.

  4. AuDSL by JCMay · · Score: 2 · on Cringley On Bandwidth-Expanding Modulation Technology

    You mean like THIS?

  5. Interesting, but I wouldn't want it... by sleeplesseye · · Score: 4 · on DSLBlaster?
    ... and I'm not sure I would call it broadband either.

    As it says at their site, it is currently only able to reach speeds of 96 kbps. Why not use a modem instead?

    Other things worth noting: "Running on a 333 MHz AMD K6-2 processor, the software modem consumes about 38% of the CPU cycles." - Ouch. And that's on Linux. I wouldn't want to try something of the sort on Windoze with a few browser windows and an app or two open.

    Could this technology become interesting? Perhaps... maybe in three years when they have the bugs worked out and the code optimized, you can use it to get 256 kbps, maybe... Personally, I'm not planning on waiting that long!

    There are so many better solutions out there, and if you want my opinion, the real future of broadband is in the wire that is already running into your house. No, not the phone wire. This one. Now serving over 90% of the world's population...