Domain: kcl.ac.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to kcl.ac.uk.
Comments · 41
-
Re:Like an opinion article
It's based on this scientific study: http://ajph.aphapublications.o...
Press release from the college here, a bit easier to read: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevent...
A hungry person can procrastinate eating a long time, especially if he or she doesn't keep anything ready to eat in the house.
There is more to it than just that. Even if you switch to a carefully managed, calorie counted diet you can still gain weight or at least fail to keep it off. After the initial weight loss period your body goes into starvation mode, reducing the idle calorie burn significantly (500 kcal/day is not uncommon). So if you were on 2,200 kcal/day and drop to 1,800, you will be gaining weight. Going below 1,800 starts to get dangerous for other reasons and you need to be extremely careful to get enough nutrition. Meanwhile you feel tired and stressed and hungry, and you feel that way forever because your body never corrects even after many years of sticking to your extreme diet.
That's why the contestants on shows like The Biggest Loser mostly regain all the weight afterwards. Dieting works in the short term, but once the body's set-point is too high the only known way to lower currently is a faecal transplant.
-
Re:Source data for this study?
This study's major flaw is that the researchers needed 10 more patients to pass the threshold for statistical relevance.
Wait...are you saying their sample size is too small to make any statistically significant inferences? I can't find the full study anywhere online, but the text of the paper's abstract seems to say they're using a 95% CI.
-
Re:Over my dead body!
Heh
:o) In all seriousness, I've actually already filled in the forms to donate my brain to the MRC London Brain Bank for Neurodegenerative Diseases.
It's not like it's going to be much to use to me. Just hoping they'll still be around, since I'm hoping it'll still be some way off. -
Re:I don't get the big deal....
I am in the UK, thanks very much for your reply.
There's a lot of information at http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/departments/?locator=380 with an FAQ for others interested in this.
I've requested an information pack - thanks very much for your advice! -
Re:give me a break
Some stats prison populations: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php
-
Will somebody please. . .+5 Insightful?
Will somebody please mod this person correctly?
How many documented civilian deaths since 2003 is Pakistan responsible for? (In ONLY one other country?) --For that matter, what percentage of its own citizenry does Pakistan keep in prison as compared to the U.S.?
Just because our TVs are filled with lots of colorful distractions, and our homes are nicely replete with Walmart furnishings, it does not stand true that all is right with the world. The Military Industrial Complex requires for effective functioning that a portion of its gear box be well-oiled. If you were a good little rally-attending German citizen, then life in the late thirties was also pretty good. If one is to guage the state of our governments, one needs to care about how people other than ourselves are being treated by those governments.
Also. . . People in North America are concerned about such disturbing trends as the large number of empty prison camps built on U.S. soil, and the whole Black Water thing.
I can see many reasons for people to be concerned about the U.S. government. Outward shows of totalitarianism, like having the internet lock up for a day because of religious/political dogmatic beliefs, are certainly impressive. I can't find anything in the news to soften my own reaction to the Pakistani government. But "Who is worse" arguments seem to me a distraction. There are problems all over which should all be recognized. Getting caught up in nationalism is a great way to lose focus on the actual issue.
-FL -
Re:new method of detecting GPL violations
As stated by someone in the comments section of this article, the method is old ( http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=27
9 761&cid=20356633 ).
The method has not been validated against a big database of programs. I would like to see this technique find one program in a database of 1000 programs.
An alternative approach might be:
(From the Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2007) conference)
"Fast Approximate Matching of Programs for Protecting Libre/Open Source Software by Using Spatial Indexes"
http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/zheng/scam/scam2007 /papers/37.pdf -
Jails?
No, he'll build more jails.
Last I heard, he wasn't much into building jails. That seems to be more of a US thing, which has the highest prison population rate in the world.
And since you seem to imply Venezuela would build jails for political prisoners, would you have a few examples of such political prisoners? -
Re:This must changeSee the leading report on such statistics for further details, sources of data and so on. Fair enough -- though it's extremely close according to this chart. If you read it's chart of populations and prison populations, it doesn't actually give a figure for Prison population rate for Rwanda, and instead says `*(Prison population total includes about 53,000 held on suspicion of participation in genocide.)' But if you do the math yourself, 67,000/9.2m = 728 per 100,000, compared to the US's 738. But 738 is indeed higher than 728, so I stand corrected (but the change is relatively recent -- for comparsion, here's several earlier versions of that report.)
Though it's interesting that the authors of this report find that Rwanda's prison population isn't worth including in the rankings, presumably because so many people are being held for suspicion of genocide. But they're still being held, aren't they?
-
Re:This must change
Your information is out of date: the US is the 'world leader' in prison population both in absolute terms and per capita.
The article that you link to is from 2001. Since then, tens of thousands of people in Rwanda who had been detained on suspicion of participation in genocide have been released, bringing Rwanda's per capita rate under that of the US.
Over the same period, the per capita rate of imprisonment in the US has increased.
See the leading report on such statistics for further details, sources of data and so on.
-
Earlier work 1989-1997 on street scene analysisApologies for blowing my own trumpet here, but there was much earlier work in the 1980s and 1990s on recognizing objects in images of outdoor scenes using neural networks that achieved a similarly high accuracy compared to the system mentioned in this article:
1. WPJ Mackeown (1994), A Labelled Image Database, unpublished PhD Thesis, Bristol University.
2. WPJ Mackeown, P Greenway, BT Thomas, WA Wright (1994).Design of a database of colorimetrically calibrated, high quality images of street scenes and rural scenes, with highly accurate near-pixel ground-truth labelling based on a hierarchy of object categories. Example of labelled image from database
Design of a neural network system that recognized categories of objects by labelling regions in random test images from the database achieving 86% accuracy
The database is now known as the Sowerby Image Database and is available from the Advanced Technology Centre, British Aerospace PLC, Bristol, UK. If you use it, please cite: WPJ Mackeown (1994), A Labelled Image Database, PhD Thesis, Bristol University.
Road recognition with a neural network, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 7(2):169-176.A neural network system that recognized categories of objects by labelling regions in random test images of street scenes and rural scenes achieving 86% accuracy
3. NW Campbell, WPJ Mackeown, BT Thomas, T Troscianko (1997).
Interpreting image databases by region classification. Pattern Recognition, 30(4):555-563.A neural network system that recognized categories of objects by labelling regions in random test images of street scenes and rural scenes achieving 92% accuracy
There has been various follow up research since then
-
Re:My .02 cents
Another part of the Microsoft bashing, in my opinion, is the bandwagon syndrome. It's become officially 'cool' to bash Microsoft and so many people who have never had a single problem bash them anyways.
Here are all the people who haven't had problems with M$: -
Re:Interesting.
Here's the list you're looking for:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/world-prison- population-list-2005.pdf
714 inmates per 100,000 population. That's about 200 more than its nearest competitor, Russia. -
Re:Interesting.
Knock yourself out. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/home.html
-
Re:Interesting.
Actually, the UK prison population rate is slightly more than one fourth of Russia's. (Source, PDF.) I haven't checked stats for alcohol related crime, and I don't think I will.
-
Re:Ahem... One tiny, tiny tiny problem...As a matter of fact economisists are probably much better than medical researchers.
A British medical researchers who did not understand statistics put hundreds of people in jail by giving (incorrect) evidence as an expert witness. The worst of them was Roy Meadow, a leading medical researcher who also invented Munchausan syndrome by proxy.
No one who has studied econometrics (which is part of any economics for financial economics degreee) would make such basic errors.
I know whose conclusions I would rather trust.
-
Academia dupe?
Since when is this a new idea? I heard about people doing stuff like this years ago.
http://neuralnets.web.cern.ch/NeuralNets/nnwInHep
H ard.html
http://www.particle.kth.se/~lindsey/elba2html/sect ion3_5.html
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Gorse/research/pRA M.html
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/neuronet/about/roadmap/hardwa re.html -
Re:Fortran 77 still used
FORTRAN is still an evolving language, look for FORTRAN 90, 95, and 2003.
Many graduate students in applied mathematics and statistics write their new code in these languages, especially since one can find a excellent F95 compiler, free for non-commercial uses on Linux. -
Re:They won't really listenWell yes and no. I imagine that the very problems he laments breeds apathy and perpetuates cynicism.
I get off my ass and take a little responsibility and I don't think they really listen.
Biggest demonstration in the world ever and no one in power even blinked.
-
Re:Bodies Float -- Bush Smiling, Playing Guitar
Definition of Complacent: Contented to a fault; self-satisfied and unconcerned: He had become complacent after years of success.
US involvement with broad international affairs was not really active until after WWII.
http://www.answers.com/topic/isolationism
The Marshall Plan was enacted BECAUSE europe was totally destroyed in the power play between Britain, the US, Germany and the Soviet Union. The US/Britain conquered Germany, divided up europe with the soviets, and then rebuilt the place. So what? Thats what the winners do in war, rebuild their newly found economic sub-states.
Vietnam? What did that conflict have to do with the United States? It was a country trying to wrestle freedom from the French imperialists. I thought the US supported this. Where did you learn your history anyway?
The Korean conflict was a "police action" fronted by the UN in order to allow the US to send troops without a declaration of war, as called for in our constitution. Again, what threat did this war pose to the United States? Who exactly were we helping? The folks we killed, or the folks who shared our economic ideals?
Umm.. The US leads the world in prison population and has for many years:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/worldbrief/hi ghest_to_lowest_rates.html
What "communists" funded the "insurgent rebel groups" in South America? They fought their civil wars with shitty weapons, no funding and little but idealogical support. Fortunately for the US, the fascist despots won most revolutionary wars in south america due to our heavy involvement.
The United States INVENTED nuclear weapons (oh - and used them, btw). China did not. The Russians did not. Something is only invented once you know. Information from the manhatten project filtered into russion hands, which is what fueled their nuke program. China obtained the information in the same way.
Anyway I'm really not interested in arguing this with you. Check out Amnesty International's report on North America:
http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/2am-index-eng
I've had this same tired argument on the internet for over a decade. Do I dig US foreign policy? No. Do I think we are an admirable nation? No. Do I think the US government is evil? Yes. So, there you go. You're not going to convince me otherwise. So go buy your "support the troops" stickers or whatever, and I'll continue to keep saying "NUKE THE TROOPS." -
Re:No more freon in carsUS inmate population is in the 1 million range isn't it?
About 2.1 million according to the International Centre for Prison Studies The prison population rate is 726 / 100,000 in comparison Germany has 96 / 100,000. The population there is 82.6 million, so in order to get to the same rate, Germany would have to imprison (726-96) / 100,000 * 82.6 million = 520,380 people (more than 6 times the number imprisoned there now).
-
Re:Mostly fellons
Yeah, here's a list of prisoners/100,000 people in different countries.
-
You want stats, you got stats
Lots of them, here and here.
The 12% number is off, but the 25% number is correct. The US does have the largest prison population in the world, both as an absolute number and in percentage terms. More than China and Russia, and 5 to 8 times the rates of Canada and Western European countries. And a lot of people are there for nonviolent drug offenses, including this 25-year-old who's going to be in prison until age 81, with no chance of parole.
I wish this insanity would stop, although I don't hold out much hope at the rate things are going. -
Re:My Question:I was using the data from www.prisonstudies.org, they list rwanda as having 109 inmates/ 100,000 citizens and the the US as having 715 inmates/100,000 citizens. If you check the rwanda page linked from your link, it says:
(per capita): 109 prisoners per 100,000 pe [82nd of 164]
(per capita): 14.34 per 1000 people [1st of 164]
One of those numbers has got to be wrong. -
Re:My Question:I was using the data from www.prisonstudies.org, they list rwanda as having 109 inmates/ 100,000 citizens and the the US as having 715 inmates/100,000 citizens. If you check the rwanda page linked from your link, it says:
(per capita): 109 prisoners per 100,000 pe [82nd of 164]
(per capita): 14.34 per 1000 people [1st of 164]
One of those numbers has got to be wrong. -
VSF
WSF is obviously a
/. typo. Even on NTT DoCoMo's own website they refer to it as VSF-OFCDM.
I found a good PDF Presentation from NTT DoCoMo explaining in detail VSF-OFCDM. Of interest is its use of Turbo codes for the channel encoding (Turbo codes were mentioned in a previous Slashdot story), and that the uplink bandwidth of the system is 40MHz versus the downlink bandwidth of 101.5MHz. Very interesting stuff! -
What VS-OFCDM is
VS-OFCDM (variable spreading factor orthogonal frequency AND code division multiplexing) is a special case of MC-CDMA (multi-carrier CDMA).
CDMA has lots of advantages for ease of frequency-reuse, as you can have a lot of people on the same frequency, but each one spread with different codes.
OFDM has a lot of resistance against fading (i.e. signal going in and out as you move through diffracted and relected signal peaks and valleys), because you are putting out your signal on a wide range of frequencies. You also get additional frequency diversity from OFDM.
Put them together by doing CDMA spreading first and OFDMing the result, and as much like in the combination of peanut butter and chocolate that results in peanut butter cups, you get an excellent result!
This paper and this paper gives some background.
VS-OFCDM changes the spreading factor adaptively based on cell structure, channel load, radio link conditions, etc. -
Re:shall we start taking in a collection?
...Are you people seriously telling me, that a suitable punishment for spamming is being fucked up the arse?A lot of that talk is frustration. Our constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Unfortunately, many judges have interpreted that as forbiding any real punishment. Why else do so many keep going back to jail again and again?
China has a much lower prison population than the US, both in total number and in prisoners per 100,000 people (China: 119/100K, US: 701/100K; figures from http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/worldbrief/w
o rld_brief.html). The China numbers include the so-called "political prisoners", so the number of true criminals is probably much lower.While there are numerous reasons, one of them is life in a Chinese prison is bad. China has few repeat offenders (ok, partially because repeat offenders tend to get executed). While in the US, working is optional, yet you still get decent food, clothing, medical, and shelter. Convicted murderers have a better health care plan that I do! Many US criminals spend their time learning from others how to be better criminals.
If it wasn't for abuse by other prisoners, a lot more people (in the US) wouldn't care if they went to jail. It's the only real punishment some criminals get. Getting seriously abused is a powerful message not to screw up again.
My mother used to teach at an inner city school where her students getting sent to juv hall was a regular occurance. They would tell her that they didn't mind because it was better than their home life. When a 12 year old (repeat offender) pulls up to cop in a stolen car and asks him if he wants to drag race, it should tell you how much they care about being caught.
The talk you are referring to is just people wanting some punishment that make the offender (and others) not be a repeat offender. If it takes making the spammer someone's girlfriend to get the message across, then so be it.
-
Re:posting textbooks
It is a well known fact that the authors don't get much (financially) for publishing a textbook. On the other hand I wouldn't go as far as saying that publishers don't add any value, but I'd say that the value they add is not proportional to the final price.
The trouble, of course, is that with (especially graduate) textbooks, there are very few people who'd possibly buy it, making publishing them an expensive task.
By the way, if you're intrested in mathematical analysis but you aren't prepared to spend an entire years budget on those nice yellow Springer books, check out Modern analysis online for not so much books as lecture notes; still a good source.
As a side note: The papers on "Modern Analysis Online" are still copyrighted by their respective authors. I'm sure you can download them, print them, but certainly not publish them. The website has all the boring details. -
Re:Hmm..
Man, please do something for me next time. The next time you read something or hear something, take 5 seconds to double check and see if it even makes sense. See if it contradicts almost every piece of knowledge you have already previously aquired. Do you really think the U.S. is less free than Chine or the Middle East? If not, and you read something to the contrary, starting thinking. Start asking questions.
Yes, we should all reject data that conflicts with our preconceptions. My post was short to draw attention to the fact, and not bury it in an essay. I probably could have given a better citation however. Perhaps you'd like to play with the World Population Brief for a while. There's also a very highly recommended PDF from the Sentencing Project. Just because it conflicts with the dogma drilled into our heads in schools and the propaganda you see every day on american news doesn't mean it's not true. If everyone thought like you we'd still be doing astronomy with epicycles.
And frankly, no it doesn't contradict anything I know about the USA. The american government is currently waging a war on people like me. That kind of thing shocks you out of your comfortable illusions pretty quickly.
Now I'll be the last person to praise the governments in the middle east, but at least they're not deluded into thinking the goverment is working for them. According to my immigrant friends at least. Of course you appear to have first-hand knowledge of middle eastern legal systems, so maybe you'd like to confirm or deny that.
Note also that I never said america was "less free" than anyone. Just stated a fact and noted its irony. Perhaps it's you should try reading more critically. -
Re:Spirit is indeed a software problem
-
Re:US = Over 2 million prisoners
-
I'll see your "Hmm", and raise you another "Hmm".
Sure, we Americans have more enummerated rights than you Brits, but we've also got a higher percentage of our population in prison than you. In fact, we've got the highest confirmed prisoner per capita rate of any country on Earth.
Numbers like that make me wonder if we're somehow missing the point here in the States. Rights on paper are nice, but they don't tell the whole story.
(Here's a big chart of imprisonment figures, if anyone wants details.)
-
The land of the free?
Unbelievable.
The USA has taken the lead in the incarceration rate.
It's prison population rate was between 686 (in 2001) and 702 (in 2000) prisoners per 100,000 of the national population, according to various sources.
Also see here and some additional info here.
I wonder what were the rates for 2002 and what they are today.
-
Put them in jail and improve the US world record
Why not put them in jail and improve the US world record in imprisonment statistics? -
Just for fun.
Here are links to a couple articles I found on google searching first for "scientific naturalism", then for "philosophical naturalism".
Scientific Naturalism
Philosophical Naturalism -
Kings College, London
KCL, UK ban linux, stating You may not run any Unix operating system since they can represent a serious risk to network integrity. Any student found running a Unix system (e.g. Linux) connected to the College network will have that system disconnected.
I tried emailing them a corrected version, but their email address was down - so much for network integrity.
"You are encouraged to run a Unix based operating system since they dont
suffer serious risks to network integrity like Nimda, Code Red and Outlook
Worms. Any student found running any insecure system (e.g. most windows
boxes) connected to the College network will have that system disconnected."
Confusingly they do allow the unix based Mac OSX. -
Kings College, London
KCL, UK ban linux, stating You may not run any Unix operating system since they can represent a serious risk to network integrity. Any student found running a Unix system (e.g. Linux) connected to the College network will have that system disconnected.
I tried emailing them a corrected version, but their email address was down - so much for network integrity.
"You are encouraged to run a Unix based operating system since they dont
suffer serious risks to network integrity like Nimda, Code Red and Outlook
Worms. Any student found running any insecure system (e.g. most windows
boxes) connected to the College network will have that system disconnected."
Confusingly they do allow the unix based Mac OSX. -
Bow before Father Busa, tadpoles!People, you are demonstrating a pitiful lack of awareness about your own history. Father Busa has been coding since your grandparents were in diapers. If you've used the online Oxford English Dictionary or any other dictionary or concordance software, you owe what you're doing at least in part to Father Busa's interest in text processing 50 years ago. For that matter, if you use XML, since much of the work in SGML/XML and the theory of markup languages has been done by people coming out of humanities computing.
Repeat in chorus with me: We are not worthy...
-
Is there a future for ALICE style intelligence?
The pursuit of human level machine intelligence has been gaining momentum in the past decade. The introduction and advancement of biologically plausible neural networks, the work of John Taylor, Hugo DeGaris and others has led me to believe that we are finally approaching the realization of human level intelligence and cognition. However, these new advancements have diverged drastically from the techniques used in ALICE, do you still believe there is a place for ALICE style intelligence?
-
Re:Where is the BSD port announcement?
Presumably either RiscBSD or ARMLinux will run on this with a 'little' reworking.