Slashdot Mirror

Damore is arguing against the position that 100% of gender differences are due to discrimination. All that is required is to show some evidence of gender preferences, and you have an alternative explanation that has to be taken seriously. Ironically, the it is you and the gender warriors who look at different outcomes and claim that they are evidence of bias. And that is mistaking correlation for causation. Jim Edwards should apply his own logic to his own position.

Logic? If as feminists and parts of society believe that gender differences are due to discrimination, we need to understand the reason why there are almost no male veterinarians in training any more. https://www.avma.org/News/JAVM... Less than 25 percent male now, and still dropping.

Oddly enough, in this strange world where women can do no wrong ever, even this drop is being blamed on men. "Pre-emptive flight" http://blog.smu.edu/research/2... is where sexist men - apparently almost all men - see that there are women at a school, so they don't go to that school.

With as much certainty as I can muster up, most women are simply not interested in STEM.

What should be interesting is after all of the efforts to make STEM attractive enough to achieve the slight female majority which is apparently desperately needed fail, what happens then? Will we finally realize that we will have to aptitude test, then force those women that have potential into STEM careers? It is difficult to imagine pre-emptive firing of men to achieve the goal.

Because for most people, STEM is simply boring. http://www2.cipd.co.uk/pm/peop... And that includes young men. But less young men than young women find it boring.

And that was the feedback that I got from years of efforts to get young ladies involved in STEM in about as friendly an environment as you can imagine for women. They didn't find it interesting. But they went for law or business for those who were interested in a career, or women's studies for those who had an axe to grind. Law and business have some horrid sexual discrimination and practices that border on sexual assault, yet young ladies eagerly sign up for those majors. Hard to imagine the stereotypically shy introvert guys in STEM are that much of a problem for them.

So yeah - boring. It simply doesn't interest most of the young ladies. Just as it doesn't interest a lot of young men, even if more young men do find it interesting. For myself, the work is exciting, and has made for a good career, so I'm not at all certain how excitement can be generated for a large number of people who are more interested in externalities than the more internalized joys of science and technology.

But that does not fit within some people's agendas. Perhaps if this guy had phrased it as simply boring, he might not have been fired. Then again....

Scales calculate mass by measuring the force exerted by gravity.

Not this kind. By comparing the torque exerted on both sides of the balance, you can directly find the relation between the mass on the pan and the masses of the sliders. Since the sliders are of known mass, this method can determine the mass of an object without being affected by small changes in gravity.

Also, pounds are now defined in kilograms, so pounds are now indirectly a unit of mass.

There are pounds for mass and pounds for force. In standard Earth gravity their values are interchangeable, but they are still two different units measuring two very different things. This is one of many reasons why it is preferable to use SI units like Newtons and kilograms where there is any chance for confusing the two.

Don't you think it would be easier to get it in your backyard, considering that the US has tons of it?

Tons of what? Petroleum? The US does not have that much proven reserves of petroleum. Supposedly what the US does have a lot of is Natural Gas. There are other sources that can come from our own backyard. What the US has much more of is sunlight and wind. According to the study by Southern Methodist University SMU Geothermal Lab project: Vast clean energy source confirmed by Google.org-funded geothermal mapping geothermal sources are capable of producing "more than three million megawatts of green power – 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants today." Relatively clean energy sources, as there are none that are compleatly clean and non-polluting, can prove all of the US's energy needs. The biggest problem, well one of them, is with the infrastructure. U.S. solar power potential untapped as infrastructure is lacking. Yearly cost of U.S. outages: At least $119 billion. If the US is losing this much a year then it would pay to build a new smart grid. Then alternative sources would be able to contribute easier.

Falcon

There's a quote in the article "Conventional U.S. geothermal production has been restricted largely to the western third of the country in geographically unique and tectonically active locations."

If you look at the map, it's abundantly clear why. Until recently, geothermal tech required fairly hot temps to be useful; the map shows that all of the areas where it would work well were predictably in the western third of the country.

Full map direct link at http://www.smu.edu/News/2011/~/media/Images/News/2011/Fall%202011/geothermal-UnitedStates-google-SMUlogo-14oct2011.ashx

A living, breathing umpire makes all these subjective decisions on every pitch. There's no way to trick the umpire into giving you a smaller or undefined strike zone.

I'm just quoting the meat of your argument for the sake of brevity. You don't need to trick an umpire to influence his interpretation of the strike zone. The pitcher apparently only needs to be a different race than the umpire.

Why stop with just robot umpires? Why not robot players? Robot bats? Robot fans?

Part of the allure of baseball for many fans is that it is a pure sport that hasn't dramatically changed for over 100 years (certainly there have been advances in player training, in the ball, and in bat design, but those are fairly minor compared to the changes in many other sports). While a robot umpire would perhaps be more "accurate," it wouldn't make baseball a better game because it would be fundamentally making it a different game.

The "purity" of baseball is a myth. Take off the rose-colored glasses and wake up and smell the game-throwing, steroid abusing, racially-biased, and ethically bankrupt reality that is MLB. To cite this fantasy purity as justification for not bringing in a machine that actually *is* pure in the sense you are using the word is fucking ludicrous.

I make a good bit of coin betting on pro sports, and participating in fantasy sports leagues. Removing the refs from pro baseball would blow an effective statistical model I've been using for nearly a decade. I've been pretty successful at predicting per game performances for pitchers (especially strike counts) in MLB by correlating the races of the homeplate umpire and the pitcher in question, and if the umpires are replaced by non-racially biased computers, I lose that edge. Unfortunately, somebody has twigged to my model. If this study gets picked up by the press, it might be enough to overcome some of the doubts about robot refs in pro sports, and pave the way for automated officiating.

Make a cereal box spectrometer (I recommend using a piece cut from a sheet of plastic diffraction grating) and use it to look at the spectrum of a compact fluorescent lamp. Here's a table of mercury's spectrum. If you can see lines with wavelengths shorter than the 404.6 nm line then you can see UV. The 404.6nm line is on the far left. Seeing the 398.39 nm line might not count because it is so close to violet. If you can see the lines around 365 nm, then you can definitely see UV; however they may be too dim to see even if your eyes are able to detect those wavelengths.

We already have plenty of places we know we can tap geothermal without messing with surface volcanoes.

Our current drilling technologies are routinely drilling 2 miles below the sea floor, starting a mile below the sea surface. We've got plenty of drilling tech to drill plenty of geothermal.

Note 1: I said, numerous times, SUBTERRANEAN volcanic structures. Yellowstone, for instance, has it's heart 3 or more miles below the surface.

Note 2: The Earth's crust, is on average, a LOT thicker than 2 miles... (ten+ times thicker)

Note 3: Please take a look at your map... the red areas are either (a) volcanic or (b) active faults or (c) geothermal features/areas powered by volcanic like structures below the surface or (d) all of the above. The geothermally active areas (dotting virtually the whole map's "hot areas") are powered by volcanic like subterranean features - like I said in an earlier post.
-C'mon, you can note much of that by looking for the little volcano icons on the map - or the little geothermal icons. And that map doesn't even include a few of the super volcanoes in the US, nor active regular volcanoes we didnt know existed (or thought were dead) - for instance, a few in Washington State that are missing. Nor does that map take into account the scale of the super-volcanoes it does mark. Yellowstone, for instance, is marked with a couple little triangles, which does not even remotely indicate that it's subterranean structure is larger (in the 2 dimensions that parallel the surface) than many states. That alone makes the map pretty useless.

On top of that, the data is ancient, when we had a very limited understanding of such. Don't believe everything you read.

Of course, the Pacific Ocean "looks" viable on the map... except for the water depths and added expense of bringing the power back to the mainland.

We already have plenty of places we know we can tap geothermal without messing with surface volcanoes.

Our current drilling technologies are routinely drilling 2 miles below the sea floor, starting a mile below the sea surface. We've got plenty of drilling tech to drill plenty of geothermal.

How Darwinian! In that sense,they are taking the role of parasite

Excellent analogy. This one in particular comes to mind. There are several parasites which are known to induce behavior designed to get it eaten. Toxoplasma is another one that comes to mind - it tends to make mice try to stand up for their rights against the mean cats.

The one about the 60% feeling entitled to "steal" IP. The Android and iPhone being sunk by piracy was pretty speculative.

You do understand how Lying with Statistics has been abused by everyone and you have to provide the raw data ? I'm not going to take your word that you are not bullshitting me, because there's a bridge in Brooklyn for sale...

Weekday Warrior, about a bored corporate drone struggling against office politics.

RuneScape has lots of resource-gathering activities (fishing, cooking, wood-chopping, etc.) that feels just like work.

Available here: http://smu.edu/anthro/faculty/dmeltzer/publications.htm

As someone who tinkers around with robots, perhaps I can shed some light on the question you ask:

I know slashdot is full of folks who want robots/astronauts actually tromping around, but what's the actual cost/benefit?

There is much to be learned by building robots galore. Intelligent machines can make many tasks much more cost effecting in the 'long run' but will cost much to start, and seem silly for a long while. I say in the long run because what we think we know today is merely the tip of an iceberg. A couple of benefits of robotics engineering experience are: iRobot's vacuum robot and bomb disposal robots for the military and police, the Canadarm on the space shuttle, Automated mechanical assembly (makes things cheaper)

When you consider the cost of sending an unmanned craft halfway across the solar system compared to cost for a similar manned mission, cost savings are incredible. This is more poignant in view of the fact that we are not sure yet why we'd send a manned mission. If robots can do the work necessary for initial and preliminary discoveries, then the cost is greatly reduced. If we find a chemical on the surface of another planet that not only sequesters CO2 but turns it into useful hydrocarbons by mixing it with seawater and sunlight... that would be worth going after a boatload of the stuff. Perhaps by sending robot explorers we find something that could replace all the predicted oil energy with just 10 trips for the next 75 years? What we don't know is exactly what we'll find and we are kind of running out of time and discoveries on this planet. Time to explore the next great frontier... surface exploration of other solar planets.

In the meantime, we take baby steps. Vacuums, IED warriers, manufacturing, toys, and other methods of financing further development. BTW, there are many groups around the globe that are experimenting with robotics in their garages. Some of them are pretty fucking awesome. Here are a couple that I've seen close up and personal that are quite impressive http://www.geology.smu.edu/~dpa-www/myrobots.html They won't be exploring Mars anytime soon, but the principles involved in creating these robots apply to exploring mars as well.

The best source I found is this reply to a curious supporter. I followed a link from the recipient's 'blog to the above e-mail.

This is a really, really tired meme that has been thoroughly debunked.

http://faculty.smu.edu/jkazez/animal%20rights/Response%20to%20PETA%20kills%20animals.htm

Wordpress is notorious for killing servers with heavy loads when there are many incoming connections. You could try making a temporary static page and disable Wordpress for a day or two; then in the comments section make a notice along the lines of "Sorry, due to server issues, commenting has been disabled until 2007-12-06".
You could also see if CoralCache can help you out a smidgeon. Check this page for further details.

Also, a piece of advice: don't sink money into an upgrade because you've been on /. frontpage once. If the load continues to be high, then yeah, go for it, but slashdotters have a short attention span. See a tale about slashdottings here

Does anyone have any experience with the Guildhall? It's a game school / computer science-ish program at SMU, a reputable university in Dallas.

http://guildhall.smu.edu/about/program.htm

Maybe that would be a good solution to your dilemma, although the tuition bill looks a little hefty.

I don't know what "TSRB" is. Google did not show me a nice photograph. Here is the shirt Oswald was wearing when he was shot. http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/AAAAAAChange06/Chang e05/OswaldRuby.jpg Looks like a normal shirt (plus a sweater).

So, can anyone point us to that nice picture?

If you want to break into the gaming industry, sign up for the Guildhall at SMU. If memory serves, its an _intense_ 18 month program. I believe somewhere around 96% of the graduates end up with jobs in the gaming industry.

...if they don't move fast enough for you:

http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/~weekdaywarrio r/SetupWeekdayWarrior.exe
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/~shantytown/file s/ShantytownSetup.exe

But before you slashdot their servers, please, think of the poor college students trying to pay off college loans. Don't make them break into their savings for bandwidth!

Sadly the experiments to which you were referring were not nearly as successful as everyone remembers. Even psychology textbooks often teach (incorrectly) that the participants had their vision flip after wearing inverted goggles for a long enough period.

While the participants scores did improve on ability tests over time, they reported that it was due to adaptation to an inverted image, and not the image actually appearing to be right-side-up.

Don't trust my word though, dig around :)
For one particular write-up try this (do a page search for "inverting"):
http://faculty.smu.edu/bthompso/spatialcontent.htm l

As for switching to sepia-tone and different color spectrums might feel something akin to wearing tinted sunglasses. To incorporate any part of the EM spectrum which is not normally visible you would need to shift/stretch the visible spectrum over a smaller area of your percieved spectrum to make room for new wavelengths (i.e. you shift everything up so that something that looks red is emiting infrared radiation while objects that others percieve as red now look yellow or orange).

You might eventually adjust to the point of functionality, but everything might look strange after switching back. And you will have terrible taste in clothing.

Geeks are more hams every day with their antenna farms.

Try reading about tower review, or join in on Tower Talk.

Better yet, get a ham license. The technician test isn't even that hard.

All the posts so far seem to be joking about this, but it sorta freaks me out!
 
Yeah, it is kind of freaky. But the cornerstone of evolutionary survival strategies is predictability. Human behavior is way too complicated for a species to base an entire phase of its life cycle on all of them acting the same way in response to a given set of chemicals flooding their brain. And parasites are extremely specific to their hosts, especially when trying to control their behavior. (The linked article doesn't discuss it, but these snails, when infected, hang out on the top of blades of tall grass when infected, reversing their natural instinct to stick to the ground where birds can't see them.
 
  Anyone familiar with these parasites in more detail?
 
A little. I've got an AAS in Medical Laboratory Technology and had a half-semester of parasitology.
 
  Are there other parasites that humans have that do cause changes of behavior?
 
Of course not, that would be a much more sensational article, and that's what they'd be plastering on the front page ;) But seriously, there are parasites that infect the human brain but they treat it like any other tasty organ to eat. So rest assured that if you get a brain parasite you can't shake, you'll go insane and die, but you'll do it without serving any sinister protozoan agenda.
 
  How do these things evolve? Are they complex lifeforms, or very very simple?
 
IANA Evolutionary Biologist. But I can tell you even if you want to confine the question to parasites that enter animals rather than riding around on their backs like that rhino-riding bird, you're talking about parasites that range from a single cell that's significantly larger than a bacterium but significantly smaller than a human body cell, up to a fish that's about an inch long. More information here.

"Besides...do game companies actually hire from these places?"

Who knows about the press release, but they have hard stats on their placement that kill all the other schools. It's over 90% placement at the hardcore game companies. Check out where all their grads have gone to: http://www.guildhall.smu.edu/placement/index.htm

Blizzard, NCsoft, EA, Bethesda, Raven, Factor 5, Ensemble, Gearbox... It's safe to say that the school is legit.

There are other parasites that infect grasshoppers and snails in a fashion more similar to the Goa'uld.

Leucochloridium paradoxum is a worm which infects snails and turns them into zombies as well. The zombie snail crawls up vegitation where it can be seen by birds and the parasite causes the snails eye stalks to extend and pulsate to atract birds.

The birds then eat the eye stalks and become infected themselves. The worms lay eggs in the bird's digestive system and they are then spread by the birds excrement which the snails eat thus repeating the cycle of life for the parasite.

Rather creepy stuff.

http://people.smu.edu/eheise/Leucochloridium_parad oxum.htm

burnin

I played the lost coast demo and minerva, can anyone recommend any others?

How about the second part of MINERVA?

...

Oh, hang on - not finished yet. Sorry... ;-)

As for other maps, there's a couple around. I haven't played all that many, but there's some reviews here, more reviews here and another map here. There's a pretty cool total conversion here, but it's incredibly short and defiantly non-Half-Life 2.

There's also eleventy billion work-in-progress multiplayer mods with endless unskinned weapons renders and concept 'art' drawn in crayon; if you look really carefully you might find one that's actually been released...

Guildhall? Teaching the arts and sciences of digital game development seems to be right on. They've been around a few years, if I recall. Funny, I remember seeing their ads on, you guessed it, penny-arcade.com a couple/few years ago.

i don't think any university teaches "game programming".

There's a parasite that does similar things to snails. It makes the snails move to exposed places where they are visible to birds, get eaten, and the parasite gets distributed by bird excrement. Aditionally, the worm pulsating inside the eye stalk looks really gross.

Lawlibraries are only open to the public where they are at state schools and due to budget constraints the paper copies of documents available on the web are being deaccessioned.

That's simply not true. It may be in some cases, but certainly not all. SMU is a private school, and their Law Library is open to the public. I assure you, there are copies of the US Code there. But why would it have to be a law library? Most other public libraries have Internet access, where you could download the PDF.

Sorry, but the divide is here and now and it has been here since the mid 1990's.

Since the mid 1990's people without broadband haven't been able to get access to US gov't materials? That's a rediculous assertion without any support.

Looks like about 100,000 hits per hour at the peak, don't know yet how many of those were the 20M video file. I'll analyze the log files and post the results for anyone interested. We would not have submitted the story with the links if we did not think we could sustain the connections. Can't wait to look at the data! This is the same system previously describe on slashdot.

oops, forgot I wasn't logged in. The robot did not get stuck, but I kicked the camera and lost a few frames. Here (23M mpg) is video before the bad frames were removed. There is an accompanying obnoxious noise burst, which is why they were edited out. This version also has a funnier ending.

You fail to undestand the inherent geeky-coolness. Did you watch any of his other videos? I think you will find what you are looking for.

thanks! Ah most observant Dunbal! You are correct. The posted video is spliced together from two different runs, one up and one down. It was about a 12 foot dropoff, and I was so busy looking at the video camera that I only grabbed it at the very last second before it plunged to its destruction. I think that little robot still needs his Daddy nearby for a while longer... It did a lot better offroad in the woods, like this video (10M) and also this one (22M).

thanks! Ah most observant Dunbal! You are correct. The posted video is spliced together from two different runs, one up and one down. It was about a 12 foot dropoff, and I was so busy looking at the video camera that I only grabbed it at the very last second before it plunged to its destruction. I think that little robot still needs his Daddy nearby for a while longer... It did a lot better offroad in the woods, like this video (10M) and also this one (22M).

No no no this is not a remote controlled car, it is totally autonomous. Look at some of the other videos. but yes, they are pretty shallow steps. dpa

Through a penny-arcade post, I discovered Bontago. I'm a complete gamer, and I haven't been this hooked on a new game in a long while.

The game is physics-based: you drop blocks on the field, and the higher your pile, the larger its control area. You can only drop blocks in your control area. Your goal is to have a majority of flags in your control area. Thus you have to balance making a high, but fragile, tower, or make lots of small stacks.

To make it a little more complicated, you can find special blocks on the field with some special effects, like the rocket that whizzes around and knocks down stacks, or the dreaded earthquake.

The rules are simple, and that's what makes it so addictive. It's a great balance of strategy and a touch of luck.

You can play alone against computer players, and of course network multiplayer (though I haven't tried it out yet)

And for you eye-candyers out there (but then, who truly isn't), it has nice 3d graphics! Check out the screenshots on their website, and you'll see what I mean.

The game is free (as in beer). It was developped by students at Digipen, a gamedev school near seattle. It's a breath of fresh, clean, mountain air (with that whiff of summer flowers) to see that people can still produce an original and goddamn fun game, and instead of an impressive but yet another FPS

Bontago!

PS: the download was hell slow. Maybe someone could put up a mirror? Otherwise, take the light version, the full just has unnecessary extra fluff.

If you don't want to be a victim of their html: http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/eclipse/screensh ots/

I wouldn't argue this mod is a total conversion, but Plan of Attack certainly wasn't, just the first real mod for hl2, still a teamplay FPS. Total conversion refers to HL rally, or before then Snark Racer, or Half-Life Chess, or ZZTetris.

From the screenshots it looked as if this mod is third-person, which is different from hl2 in which Gordon doesn't even have a player model. Kinda a good thing I guess, cos I wouldn't to see Gordon dressed anything like that. Check out http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/eclipse/screensh ots/gallery_ah05.html (better dressed than Alyx for sure)

Edit: Ok I think total conversion means shares none of the same story, textures, models etc. No. I don't have a clue. Correct me please.

The screenshots look pretty good--and they're not even /.ed yet!

Agreed. Here's a somewhat similar cheapo two-headed symetrical LVS we built a few years ago, that we have been very happy with. Nice to be able to take down either one of the two machines, while the other seamlessly picks up it's tasks, and then releases them when it comes back online.

http://www.smu.edu/forum/011101.html

http://images.google.com/images?q=Elaine+Liner&saf e=off

more
more

Not exactly a map, but a nice graph of a site getting slashdotted.

His turned into an amusing political satire.