Slashdot Mirror
Domain: ilstu.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to ilstu.edu.
Comments · 26
-
The World of Statistical Humor!
From The World of Statistical Humor!: Did you hear about the statistician who had his head in an oven and his feet in a bucket of ice? When asked how he felt, he replied, "On the average I feel just fine."
-
There are some... er, limits:
-
There are some... er, limits:
-
Re:I thought this was over and done already?
Climate can change and it will change but predicting these kinds of trends to 2050 with any kind of accuracy is ludicrous at best, since they cannot even predict whats the weather next weekend.
Again, the above is a perfect example of bullshit, or if you want a more polite term, "poppycock" or "humbug". Quoting from the above link...
Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
"bullshit" can be sometimes be distinguished from lying...
"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions.
The parent poster seems to implicitly (and deliberately?) confuse climate and weather. There are numerous quality discussions about chaotic systems, the differences between climate and weather, and how climate is predictable farther into the future than weather. The existence of these arguments, and the poster's seeming ignorance of them seems to indicate to me that the poster simply does not care about the truth, but cares rather only to appear to be truthful to those less well-read in science. As such, he falls nicely under Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshiter given in his 2005 monograph 'On Bullshit':
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
-
Re:Semicolon splice
Actually we're all wrong, this is not a semicolon splice, because
Even though the in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comments from Apple.
is not a sentence.
He could have written:
The in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comments from Apple; touch screen's instantaneous responses prove that it is outstandingly fast.
Source: according to: http://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/semicolon.htmlhttp://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/semicolon.html
-
Saw research into much larger scale uses of this
I was visiting Illinois State University's physics department because I am planning on attending this fall. They were working on a material along these lines with a fairly high efficiency rate but they were just starting actually trying to make small amounts of the material.
Their intended use of the material would be in steel foundries, etc. where millions of dollars are spent on power and even something not very efficient could save a ton of money.
From what I gathered talking to the professor there the same efficiency increasing techniques could be used even with smaller temperature differentials as long as you had different materials used.
Sorry but they don't have too much information on their website. They had a few posters with information in the building but not much online.
http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/programs/research.html
A link to the professors bio:
http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/facandstaff/marx.html -
Saw research into much larger scale uses of this
I was visiting Illinois State University's physics department because I am planning on attending this fall. They were working on a material along these lines with a fairly high efficiency rate but they were just starting actually trying to make small amounts of the material.
Their intended use of the material would be in steel foundries, etc. where millions of dollars are spent on power and even something not very efficient could save a ton of money.
From what I gathered talking to the professor there the same efficiency increasing techniques could be used even with smaller temperature differentials as long as you had different materials used.
Sorry but they don't have too much information on their website. They had a few posters with information in the building but not much online.
http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/programs/research.html
A link to the professors bio:
http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/facandstaff/marx.html -
Re:TortoiseSVN
Not sure how well you looked at TortoiseSVN's site, they have quite a bit of documentation, faqs and such on there. There's also alot of 3rd party documentation/tutorials on it floating around the web at places such as here
-
Re:Who farted?Exactly
Cherry-picking (no pun intended) search terms like this, or even relying primarily on search terms in the first place, is completely disingenuous. Such comparisons are no different than any other Bad Chart that skews data points to fit an unsupported argument.
The most dishonest aspect of relying on Google Trends to demonstrate community interest is in assuming that all possible interests are equally accessible and represented on the internet. Certainly the web is great for information and media regarding entertainment, especially pr0n, but it is less representative of other information that merely needs to be looked up occasionally, such as any outdoor activity. I can probably count the number of times I've used the internet to find anything related to jogging on one hand, even though I jog almost every day.
The second dishonest aspect is that you cannot simply compare a handful of terms to accurately judge interest in the activities. As SM points out above, not only are some terms represented by a variety of words, but some words represent a variety of concepts. Besides the various groups already mentioned, "orgy" could be used in conjunction with many non-sexual themes, such as "an orgy of violence."
The final and most blatant dishonest aspect of these comparisons are the actual concepts being compared. Even if Google fairly represented interest in all concepts equally, there is no way that "apple pie" is a relevant comparison for anything considered commonplace. So what if it's an American tradition. That doesn't mean there's a significant community interest in getting more information or multimedia related to it. An picking a random sport like surfing isn't relevant either. You could pick a big favorite like football or a niche activity like bachi ball - the community's level of interest in these activities have no bearing on how acceptable or obscene the community finds them. If there is any correlation at all, it's probably that the more interest displayed under Google Trends in an activity, the more prurient the activity is. Web surfing encourages personal and even private use, so information that is embarrassing to inquire about elsewhere will be more strongly represented in web searches.
Such a bad legal position.
-
Re:Capitalism and Healthcare Don't MixMatters of life and death are not ruled by bargain-seeking behavior
By this reasoning, the price of food should be nearly infinite. Without good food and healthcare you die, after all.
Just one point I mentioned earlier: demand for better healthcare is different than demand for food in that if you can afford better healthcare, you will want it, to the point of much better equipment, more expensive medicine, etc.. (I mistakenly assumed that saying that it is inelastic, actually the literature says it is - see link 1 -, but ), while there is such a thing as too much food, even is some is better than others "Once you meet your basic caloric needs, any additional money in your pocket is likely to be spent on other things than food." (see second link)
Here's a nice paper http://www.math.ilstu.edu/krzysio/HealthCare.pdf "Rising Health Care Expenditures: A Demand-Side Analysis"
Quoting "The proposed demand specification explains why the empirical estimates of the price elasticity of demand for medical services could exhibit a wide range. We analyze how medical insurance can result in a market failure and evaluate ideas that can correct some of the distortions in resource allocation for medical services." Another important quote: "the demand for health care is inelastic at high prices, is elastic for some price range and becomes inelastic at relatively low prices"
The quote about food I took out of http://www.iowafarmbureau.com/programs/commodity/information/tmjune06.pdf -
Re:The Good News...
I'm pretty sure we already have plenty of experience surviving on an ocean world, since we already live on one. What we're not used to is surviving while sea levels rise, perhaps uncontrollably, which is probably what you meant.
The projected maximum rise in sea level due to total melting of glaciers is around 80m. The average elevation of exposed land is about 2870m, which is about 35 times as high. Melting everything won't inundate the globe, but it will require relocation from low-lying areas. -
Re:RIAA does *not* represent artists
You kind of contradict yourself.
Each sale by a pirate probably does represent a lost legitimate sale [. .
The latter half is correct. It's the same reason a music download doesn't equate to a lost sale. The term is "market clearing price." Simplified a little bit, it is basically the price at which suppler equals demand; in other words, every single unit produced is sold, and no more units are desired.
The RIAA's implication of lost sales pretends they price at the market clearing price. "You bought it from a pirate so you would have bought it from us" is only true if the price from the pirate and from them is equal. Since it is certainly not, the ratio falls.
I saw a study (here if you want it, don't know how long it will be up though) which concludes, among other things, that the net effect of music downloading on music sales is "statistically indistinguishable from zero." Why? Because the prices are too high. People who are downloading the music are not very likely, in most cases, to buy the CD. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the jist of it. You can read the article if you want to see the methodology and full conclusions.
As far as artist royalties being lowered, I'm fine with that so long as it is a precursor to downloadable media prices being lowered. The RIAA seems to want a percentage system; that seems fair to me, and it permits them to price where they think it would sell best. (You can't price a song at 30 cents if the artists are guaranteed 40 cents, can you? And yes, I know those numbers are high!)
-
This university page doesn't load quite right
http://www.cfa.ilstu.edu/ This page doesn't seem to like FF2. Anyone else find other pages with probs?
-
Re:China won't take lightly.
because its a communist nation that will squash what it doesn't approve of
Just plain wrong. In communist nation everything belongs to everyone, so does information... In a facism nation the dictador does the rules. There is a big difference betweem them (PS - All the so called communist regimes so far have nothing to do with communism)
Check this page found in about 2 sec on google to learn the differences between regimes...
PS - If you find any english error remember, I probably write english better than you write portuguese -
statistics and benchmarks
stat jokes. Isn't it computer programmers use logic, physicists understand logic and statisticians cheat logic?
-
Knitting SocksPutting words in others peoples mouths is a bad habit to get into. Who knows what the Harvard Pres really said about women's math abilities. It doesn't matter. The whole purpose of this misleading post is to generate a lot of comments. The war between the sexes always does. Something most geeks miss out on. Anyway, Richard Feynman gave a talk entitled What is Science?. in which he said some very interesting things about the capabilities female mind.
I would like to report other evidence that mathematics is only patterns. When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics, etc. including lots of girls. I used to sit in the cafeteria with the students and eat and try to overhear their conversations and see if there was one intelligent word coming out. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered a tremendous thing, it seemed to me.
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to to the right for each row you go up, that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line. A deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side and you want to figure where they are goint to intersect." Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that is goes up, and they start twenty steps apart, ect. -I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersections was! It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks.
I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The femal mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting that the male and female are equal and capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have nevery yet discoverd a way to communicate with the femal mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
-
staging a comeback
Milli Vallini can now blame it on the hardware.
-
small cluster
I know it's nothing as impressive but we have a small cluster of 40 dual G5 at ISU (Illinois State University). We made a webpage that details how we set it up.
-
small cluster
I know it's nothing as impressive but we have a small cluster of 40 dual G5 at ISU (Illinois State University). We made a webpage that details how we set it up.
-
Re:A real woman standing up.
Okay, granted, I'm not one of them myself. I wear glasses and a size 15. I have hips. I even kinda like my hips
Now I have no idea what a "size 15" is, but its not the size of this hips that matters so much, its the size relationship they have to the waist. The wast majority of men (wether they know it or not) are attracted to hip waist ratio of 0.7 Text version here - PDF here -
Re:sick
Source? Specifics? That may be true in some places, but they don't call the US the "Land of Opportunity" for nothing. Obviously there is such a thing as inherited wealth, and such a thing as good luck or bad luck, but honestly - if you have talent, ambition, imagination, and hard work - you really can do anything.
There are any number of sociology studies that demonstrate the social stratification of the US. The common-sense wisdom of a classless society and increased social mobility within the US (compared with European countries) is just pure ideology, useful to those with real power and inherited influence, essential for the preservation of hegemony. Remember Orwell -- if you remove words from the language and ways of talking about things, then it becomes almost impossible to easily think about these things. Or try Foucault, for an example of how people's ideas can be constrained by discursive regimes.
Or think about the Usual Suspects:
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. -
Re:85% accurate?
"I had a full ethics class on that one, and we didn't even scratch the surface of things. Day 1 we tore the Turing Test apart, proved it was more pathetic than my predictions above."
Pardon me, but it sounds to me like your ethics teacher doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. If you think that successfully passing the Turing test doesn't demonstrate both intelligence and sentience, I can't deny that you may be correct. But you've got some damned serious brainpower backing the alternative position, and I really don't think that could happen if the T-test was so pathetic that a group of freshman college students could rip it apart.
I think it was Descartes who came up with the idea of automatons. They're creatures who walk around the world in human form, carrying out all the day to day tasks of ordinary human beings, but without any real consciousness working inside their skulls. Some of them may have been sitting in your freshman ethics class, contributing valuable insights to discussions.
I don't believe that automatons are possible. But the only way to seriously believe that a computer could pass the Turing test without being both intelligent and self-aware is to presume that they are. In order to do what an automaton is supposed to do, it has to at least have information about the outside world, and a way to measure what's going on outside against a system of rules which mediates its reactions. That system of rules needs to encode all the things that humans know. Finally, it would have to be aware of its own actions, have the ability to make short and long-term plans, and flexibility in the face of novel situations. Sounds a lot like us.
The most famous response to the Turing test (Searle's "Chinese Room" argument) basically says that a computer might pass the test by simply understanding the formal properties of a language without understanding the semantics of the words its using. For example, it would know that a DUCK can go UNDER WATER without becoming WET, without really understanding any of the terms involved (only their interrelations).
I think the example Searle chose to illustrate his point (found here) is misleading. While the person doing the actual input and output of the symbols doesn't really understand Chinese, he is part of a system which does. Complaining that an entire system cannot be intelligent because none of the individual parts making up the system have "understanding" of what they're doing is misleading. None of your neurons understand what they're doing; they just fire or don't fire depending on the electrochemical inputs they receive. The little bit of your neural system which turns the words you've chosen into sounds by manipulating your voice box doesn't understand the meaning of the words.
Searle tries to get around the problem by internalizing all the rules of the Chinese Room inside the person who was doing the translating, and claiming that he still doesn't understand Chinese. But the rules which have been encoded inside the person are so advanced and complex that the stream of characters he is outputting is sufficient to pass the Turing test.
In order to pass the test, these rules have to have the ability to remember the conversation that came before, and adjust the outputs accordingly. If you ask the same question twenty times in a row, and get precisely the same response each time, you can be assured that you're dealing with a computer with no self-awareness. So the rules are constantly changing, not just to reflect the course of the conversation, but to reevaluate the accuracy of the old rules. The more I think about it, the harder a time I have of believing that a human being, however intelligent, could internalize all the rules and constantly modify them to accurately mimic a human conversation, independent of any understanding of their actual meaning.
The biggest problem that I see with the Turing test is that it is a sufficient demonstration of intelligence, but not a necessary one. That is, computers will probably be intelligent long before they understand enough about our expectations of other humans to deceive us properly.
Example: We generally understand that dolphins are intelligent, but their intelligence is of a rather alien sort. Even if we mastered their language, a dolphin could easily be distinguished from a human in a Turing test because their life experiences and way of looking at the world is completely alien to us. I think the best the dolphin could hope for was to try and imitate a five year old who really enjoyed swimming.
In a way, I'm glad you threw in that little slam against the Turing test, because writing this post was way more interesting than just nodding my head in agreement. I thought your points about the nature of prediction were uncannily accurate. -
Game AI
How about one of the various games out there that let you program a bot? I took place in The Adventures of Stickman, a programming contest at Illinois Wesleyan Univeristy at Normal (Information located here).
It was probably the single most fulfilling coding experience that I have ever taken part in. It was extremely gratifying to see a game that I had a hand in. They have posted the server and clients that the contestants wrote are available online. The clients are written in C/C++, so it may not be the easiest language to start out with. However, using something like KDevelop, it makes development much easier. Be warned, though, that there will probably be some porting involved as it was developed for a SparcWorks compiler on Sun systems. See the readme for more information. Oh, and if you download it, I'm sure the officers would like to know.
Some more about the contest:
The chalenge was to write an AI client for a PacMan style game. You have a stickman running around in a maze eating pellets and avoiding, or eating, monsters and other stickmen. Just navigating the maze presents an interesting challenge (especially because we only had 8 1/2 hours to code it!). It's a great way to get familiar with C or C++ (API available for both) because its educational and entertaining. Your kids could colaborate on a client, or write clients to compete against each other. If they beat my partner and my client, let me know
-
WSH, VBScript, Preview Pane
Since when does email execute itself?
Since the combination of VBScript, Windows Scripting Host, and the Preview Pane in Outlook hit corporate America.This latest one requires the uese to click on (i.e. execute) IM_A_DUMBASS.VBS Or are you asking is there any reason for attatching an executable to email? I think that answer would be yes.
I don't think you understand the issues here: regardless how the "latest" worm is initiated, the ability for anyone to embed executable code in the message itself is a huge security violation (not even a risk). For more information see this.VBScript, WSH, Outlook Preview Pane: the unholy trinity that empower e-vandals.
-
Some Must_Haves for BP6
Some further speed improvement may be reached
by running jobs on dedicated CPUs (clean cache).
This can be done by installing pset utility.
Check your voltages and temperatures under Linux
using lm_sensors. BTW If your Vcore2 stays constant
around 1.5V: There are BP6 boards which have
switched Vcore2 and Vbatt readings.
-
Re:I Remember The The Hell.
No clothes, no guns:
http://www.ilstu.edu/~drmaure/2/mick.html
bye