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Re:Why are we scanning books by hawguy · 2010-03-17 10:13 · Score: 2, Informative · on Japanese Researchers Develop World's Fastest Book Scanner

There were around 400,000 books published in the 70's alone reference. Most of these books are not rare, nor would they be fragile enough to be significantly damaged by a high speed scanner. And I'd be willing to bet that most of them do not have electronic publishing files.

Some high speed scanners (like Google's) are designed to cause no more harm to a book than a person reading it.

Re:Great! by ZosX · 2009-02-03 12:43 · Score: 1 · on All Korea To Have 1Gbps Broadband By 2012?

While the people should have a greater say I am still all for a republic versus a direct democracy. Think about it, if we had direct democracy in the states, abortion would be illegal, homosexuality would be a crime, etc.

from wikipedia:

"Ochlocracy (Greek: or okhlokratía; Latin: ochlocratia) is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of constitutional authorities. In English, the word mobocracy is sometimes used as a synonym. As a pejorative for majoritarianism, it's akin to the Latin phrase mobile vulgus meaning "the easily moveable crowd," from which the term "mob" originally derives.[1]

As a term in civics it implies that there is no formal authority whatsoever, not even a commonly-accepted view of anarchism, and so disputes are raised, contended and closed by brute force might makes right, but only in a very local and temporary way, as another mob or another mood might just as easily sway a decision. It is often associated with demagoguery and the rule of passion over reason."

Our forefathers thought long and hard about direct democracy and realized that mob rule was one such pitfall. As to lobbying, it has been around since at least the beginning of the 19th century, but more likely since the dawn of the United States, however it has truly reached epic proportions these days.

http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/5107922

2 billion in 2005 alone!

Re:This scares the hell out of me by Daryen · 2008-07-21 04:42 · Score: 5, Informative · on Global Warming Stopped By Adding Lime To Sea

Despite the political rhetoric we have no proof as to how much human activity is contributing to any warming trends, and even less of an idea on the possible side effects of any direct intervention. Other scientists have actually proposed putting more particulate pollution into the air to create a mild 'nuclear winter' style cooling in order to offset any rising temperatures.

I'll leave out the fact that temperatures globally have been flat for several years now, but I will point out in closing that hair brained schemes such as this one remind me of a five year old child trying to rebuild a Formula 1 engine with a pair of chopsticks. We are so very ignorant of how and why we have or can effect the climate. The sheer hubris of some people today who assume we have such great control over climate just amazes, and scares, me.

I agree that the climate is extremely complex, and that while we cannot understand all of the factors involved, we can draw some simple conclusions about some of the effects we are having on the environment.

You probably already know that humans produce a lot of carbon dioxide. We breathe it out, we burn things, and our agricultural and industrial processes create even more.

You probably also know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that greenhouse gasses increase warming due to sunlight.

You may or may not know that the ppm of carbon dioxide has been increasing over the years.

I propose that you cannot prove that we aren't increasing the temperature of the planet

Re:Exchange rate vs. Purchasing power parity by Sentry21 · 2008-05-09 06:57 · Score: 1 · on London Lawyers Demand £600 For One Game

Don't forget the iPod Price Index (and Swivel has the numbers). A more 'modern' version of the Big Mac Index.

Re:Cut taxes until the federal government collapse by ArcherB · 2008-04-17 08:41 · Score: 1 · on DHS to Begin Collecting DNA of Anyone Arrested

Reagan's mismanagament of the economy will continue to fuck the country over for the net several decades, any harm Carter did to it pales in comparison. Let's see, since Reagan, we've had 26 out of 28 years with a positive GDP growth. In other words, a good economy. If that is how Reagan fucked us, then I'll say Reagan was the best damn fuck this country has had in quite a while. WOW! Of course, this is real data, no cherry picking here.

Nope, it doesn't. It makes the rich richer, grows the number of poor, and shrinks the middle class, as it has every time its been tried. You can cherry pick all the parts of Reagan's administration you want, it doesn't change facts. You keep saying that. Do you have any real data to back that up? I ask because in my experience and research, every time it's been tried, it has worked wonders. I gave the examples of the economy from 1980 to today with low taxes and almost constant economic growth. Where do you get that this is somehow a failure?
And as someone who has worked his way out of the lower class to just above the middle of the middle class, I have to say that my own life proves that the whole "rich get richer/poor get poorer" thing is bullshit! We've been doing this for 28 years and yet we still have a middle class. Hell, the only class that is shrinking has been the lower class. In other words, the rich have gotten richer, the middle class has gotten richer and the poor have entered the middle class!

Rome and Greece, outside of small isolated portions of their history, didn't elect leaders either. Of course that doesn't really matter- the type of government you have is unrelated to the type of economic system you have. Greece was the world's first recorded Democracy and Rome had the first elected Senate (Republic).

How is this news? by Money+for+Nothin' · 2008-02-16 12:51 · Score: 1 · on Computer Models Find Patterns In Asymmetric Threats

From the submitter's comment, it sounds like all they're doing is using undergraduate-level statistics. Finding correlations in 2 datasets is *FAR* from new; you can do it yourself with all kinds of data on Swivel.

But correlation != causation; any /. reader should know that. A correlation in data does not mean there is any actual connection between them: there is surely a non-zero correlation between lobster prices in Maine and the number of prostitutes murdered in Thailand. But that does not mean they are in any way connected.

Social scientists have been struggling with this problem for decades, particularly that most-empirical of social scientists, the economist... Predicting human behavior can be broadly performed with simple statistical models, true. But to gain accurate, actionable information is quite a more challenging task.

That CS profs are treading on ground that social scientists have already, with dismal results, suggests one or both of two things: a lack of cross-disciplinary study on the CS profs' part (quite likely, given the insular nature of us CS people), and/or an over-fascination with statistical techniques they haven't experienced enough to realize just how limited they really are in their real-world predictive capability, given dirty, inspecific, inconsistent data...

Re:When will they learn... by dj42 · 2008-02-12 01:18 · Score: -1, Troll · on Tolkien Trust Sues New Line, May Kill "Hobbit"

That's one of the dumbest comments on the movie industry/hollywood I've seen. "They do "creative" accounting so that no film ever makes money on paper." Let's try: http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/show/1000791 The top 20 movies have made between $284M and $717M, according to that page. I think they are "making money on paper", unless I'm missing something here?

Not a moment too soon by Fitzroy_Doll · 2007-12-08 08:44 · Score: 1 · on Open Source 'Sage' Takes Aim at High End Math Software

I can't wait for this! Free the data, then free the tools!

Re:The nice thing by yakumo.unr · 2007-12-07 15:56 · Score: 2, Informative · on Graph Shows Fraud in Russian Elections

All the data was uploaded and made available 1.39am UTC : http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/show/1010698

The stats were all done using swivel (probably after you commented admittedly), not livejoural, LJ is just the site he posted them.

Uploaded data to swivel - play with it if you want by gaika · 2007-12-07 14:20 · Score: 1 · on Graph Shows Fraud in Russian Elections

I've uploaded data to swivel

Re:Saw the Same Thing With Abortion by TooMuchToDo · 2007-10-23 08:00 · Score: 1 · on Crime Reduction Linked To Lead-Free Gasoline

You could have of course Google'd for keywords "crime income", but I shall make things easier on you:

The Changing Relationship between Income and Crime Victimization
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittTheChangingRelationship1999.pdf

Poverty, Inequality, and Crime
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/TOCONNOR/301/301lect07.htm

And my favorite example: Per Capita Income vs. Property Crime
http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/1015722

Totally beyond plausibility. by Kadin2048 · 2007-10-17 17:09 · Score: 1 · on Usenet.com May Find Safe Harbor From RIAA lawsuit

Hmmm, are you familiar with something called public domain? Maybe you live in a world where everything has a copyright, but I don't. Copyrights expire and for good reason; so the public can take the work and expand it which can enrich the market more so than the original work - think Shakespeare, Dickens, etc. So, is this advertising to pirates? I don't think so. Although, when a pirate sees the above article, that is what they read. Please take your myopic blinders off and remember that the world has been creating content since the beginning of recorded history, not just the twentieth century. Seriously?

Do you have any idea how much public domain content has actually been digitized? I suspect that if you took all the PD music and video that's around in digital form, combined it with all the text, you still wouldn't get close to the capacity of a big Usenet site. (Keep in mind the entire Library of Congress -- which is mostly filled with post-1923 content -- is estimated to be about 20TB; a big newsfeed might take in 3-4TB a day.)

Yes, there is a lot of old stuff around. (In fact, I'm a rather ardent supporter of digitization and preservation of public domain and other old and antiquarian material. And I think the copyright term extension was bullshit.) But you need to put in perspective that while human civilization has been around for a while, a very significant fraction of all the people who have ever lived are alive right now: some 5-10%, depending on which estimate for total population you believe. And widespread literacy is fairly new, so a lot more of those people are in a position to produce content than their forebears.

Even if the content on Usenet was a random distribution of content chosen without regard to date created -- if the people downloading content had just as much interest in copies of the Rig veda as they did in the latest pop music album -- it would still end up containing huge amounts of in-copyright material: because a massive fraction of humanity's total creative output, in absolute numbers, has been produced fairly recently and is trapped in the extremely long copyright terms we've created. (Datapoint: the U.S. alone published 106k books in 1996, and 206k in 2005 -- that's almost doubling in a decade. In the early 20th century it was around 10k new titles per year.*)

And combine that with the fact that most material created prior to the 1970s (to say nothing of material created before 1923) hasn't been digitized yet, yet we're talking about an all-digital medium here, and the public-domain argument becomes even weaker. And what stuff does exist in the public domain tends to be text, rather than video (not that there isn't some movies and video, but there's not that much), so it's pretty small in terms of space.

Look, I really believe in the importance of freedom of information, and hate the pro-copyright lobby that's twisted the laws over and over again to their own advantage, but I hate a downright stupid argument even more. And trying to assert that all the content on Usenet could plausibly be public domain stuff is laughable.

Let's not try to minimize this issue by making arguments that wouldn't last even a few seconds in front of a determined opponent or even a reasonably competent judge. I *wish* that most of the content on Usenet's binaries groups was in the public domain, but it's not and everyone knows it.

Re:I've been saying this forever. by civilizedINTENSITY · 2007-08-11 11:33 · Score: 1 · on Linux Foundation Calls for 'Respect for Microsoft'

"For Linux to be in the same position we'd have to buy most of microsoft's shares." Well, but it isn't as though China owns half of the bonds. In fact, Japan is holding about twice as much as China holds (and the UK is holding about half of what China holds).
http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/5050649

Re:I've been saying this forever. by civilizedINTENSITY · 2007-08-11 11:33 · Score: 1 · on Linux Foundation Calls for 'Respect for Microsoft'

"For Linux to be in the same position we'd have to buy most of microsoft's shares." Well, but it isn't as though China owns half of the bonds. In fact, Japan is holding about twice as much as China holds (and the UK is holding about half of what China holds).
http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/5050649

Re:I call BS by Xybre · 2007-07-23 08:25 · Score: 1 · on Vista Use Grows as Mac OS X Stays Flat

Over the past several years in IT I have personally seen many new adoptions of linux and mac, and the "phasing out" of windows servers and workstations, in business and in home use, I believe my experiences to be a decent industry cross-section, enough to gauge the overall direction of the market.

If you want statistics that are on par with the article, take a look at these:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=windows+xp%2C+ubunt u
From this graph you can easily see that Ubuntu will pass Windows in Google searches by 2008.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=windows+xp%2C+mac
And in this graph Mac OS X has already passed Windows!

Now this is just skewed data on par with the Vista vs Mac OS statistics in the article. If you were to compare Red Hat to Vista, for instance, queries involving Red Hat show an obvious decline, while there was a sharp spike in Vista queries the day of it's release. Not news either. And thats the point.

Here are some "unbiased" statistics. Note that the w3schools site says the stats are unreliable, much like the ones mentioned in this article.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2&qpmr=15&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=96
http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/spreadsheet/100047 6

I have observed in my personal experience that non-Windows OSes are very slowly gaining ground, and Vista seems to be encouraging that trend, at least for now.

Re:Billion Dollar Repair Bill's First Victim by pieisgood · 2007-07-17 10:04 · Score: 1 · on Xbox Exec Peter Moore Leaving Microsoft for EA

where's your proof that the console is doing poorly? from what I can see is that the defect is the only thing wrong with the xbox360. From what I can see in sales charts, the 360 is doing better than the PS3 on a month to month sales basis. It currently has the largest developer support and has the ability to play online games with PC users. If you really think you're correct, then I suggest you do your research to make sure anyway. Considering the only consoles that are selling extremely well are the PS2 and the DS.

and hey check it out! proof!
http://swivel.com/graphs/show/17654441

Re:EDGE is a slow network. by potmos · 2007-06-29 07:14 · Score: 0 · on iPhone Doesn't Surf Fast Enough for Jobs

EDGE really is a slow network compared to EVDO. It's around 8x slower in downloads and the real killer is it's around 65x slower in uploads.

Re:EDGE is a slow network. by potmos · 2007-06-29 07:14 · Score: 0 · on iPhone Doesn't Surf Fast Enough for Jobs

EDGE really is a slow network compared to EVDO. It's around 8x slower in downloads and the real killer is it's around 65x slower in uploads.

Re:Some things stand up, some don't by Anspen · 2007-06-25 06:20 · Score: 1 · on Blade Runner at 25, Why the F/X Still Matter

Interestingly enough, the US is one of the few countries that bucks that trend and has a growing population (even without immigration...)

wellllll. Not entirely. A quick google says it's at roughly replacement rate. And I'd imagine that a lot of that is from recent immigrants (e.i. the cilderen born to first generation immigrants) since they tend to have higher birthrates (when they come from countries with a high birthrate).

Ex-President of MySpace by swoodie · 2007-05-04 12:09 · Score: 1 · on Obama's MySpace Drama

Charting the number of MySpace friends of the candidates since March http://swivel.com/graphs/show/12874490

Swivel by chato · 2007-03-06 08:09 · Score: 2, Informative · on IBM Many Eyes After One Month

Swivel offers a similar service. One of the best things of Swivel is that datasets are usually shared by users under a Creative Commons License.