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Absolutely correct.

I checked: http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/binomialX.html

Inputs are n=50, k=30, p=0.5
P(X > 30) ~= 0.101

The best statistics textbook I've ever come across is available free online, including applets for many statistical procedures and, more importantly, explanations of what the procedures actually mean and when they should be used.

I wouldn't go holding up FDR as a shining example of liberal success -- his constant fiddling and abysmal monetary policy ended up stretching the great depression out for a decade.

Also, because it's so easy to whip out a quick PHP webapp, many, if not most, PHP programmers fail to delve very deep into the realm of programming, preferring to sit at the edge and reap the benefits without the work (I'm not talking about coding work, rather the work of understanding your field).

Is your field writing? If so, you may wish to consider delving into Strunk and White. (See Rule 5 and supplemental Rule 28 regarding the proper usage of commas and parentheses.)

See? We can all be snooty know-it-alls.

We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.

I have not and do not intend to announce the timetable for our program. And there are obvious reasons for this decision which I am sure you will understand. As I have indicated on several occasions, the rate of withdrawal will depend on developments on three fronts.

One of these is the progress which can be or might be made in the Paris talks. An announcement of a fixed timetable for our withdrawal would c

You are right, these things are best taken with a grain of salt. Actually the RD article was reprinted from an article in Vanity Fair (The magazine that disclosed the identit of Deep Throat). The professor who wrote this article was Donald Foster, an english professor at (http://english.vassar.edu/faculty.html?bio=Donald _Foster) Vassar College.

His research specialty is analyzing anonymous next for linguistic patterns that match other known texts. He uses this method to successfully disclose the anonymous author of "Primary Colors" as Joe Klien, a Newsweek Columnist.

Using similar linguistic analysis, he traced the anthrax letters to Steven Hatfill, a US bioweapons expert.

I use it in classes rather than using stats packages that most students will never buy.

• Grace Hopper : Girl Genius of Vassar
• Lt. Hopper of the U.S. Navy
• Grace Hopper and the Mystery of the Hollerith Code
• Grace Hopper Tames the MARK I
• Grace Hopper Defeats the NAZIs
• Grace Hopper vs the Pernicious Moth
• Grace Hopper Unravells Sputnik
• Grace Hopper vs the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper Unleashes the Scourage of COBOL
• Grace Hopper Arm-Wrestles Hyman Rickover
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper : Recalled to Duty (special double issue)
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper Defeats the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper CyberGrrrrrl

• And remember, (+1, Funnay) does nothing for karma!

I should probably update this a bit, but here is what I have found useful: clicky

I had full professors for every lecture I took, and my physics discussion was also taught by a full professor(the lecture was done by some allstar guy). Apparently, Michigan should be proud that is has the highest tuition of any public school in the country

And if the lack of an engineering program isn't an issue, try out Sarah Lawrence College. Though, I must say, it's more than a little unnerving to walk into a dining hall and be one of the only guys there. Be careful what you wish for.

So far I has seen two existing projects for HUDs.

First was that one in those IBM commercials. How damn annoying would it be to have to control it by voice, even better, how damn annoying would it be to be around someone with that.

Gmate (makers of the Yopy) have had a wearable PC projects for awhile.

This may be an interesting and related read, but i dont have the time to read it.

The problem of all these are they are too damn big and geeky.

Bayes Theorem

nuff said

Bayes' Theorem

To make a long story short. This machine has a false positive rate of 10%, and a false negative rate of 25%. Assume 1% of airport travelers are liars. If an airport scans 100,000 travellers, there will be 1000 liars, 750 of which will be caught. There will be 999,000 truth-tellers, 99,900 of which will be false postives.

So, the machine will beep on 100,650 people, only 750 of, or 1.342% of which will actually be lieing. Talk about the boy who cried wolf!

Furthermore, UDP for data is highly unreliable, and I wouldn't trust it across WAN's.

You're missing the point of UDP. UDP is just a *tiny* layer on top of IP, which adds a little extra information (basically the port number) so that the OS can deliver a packet to the right application. UDP can not be compared with TCP - it doesn't provide reliability and flow control, and it has absolutely no notion of a stream of data. If desired, these can be provided in the application layer (see UDP, TFTP, NFS, etc. etc.)

TCP is a reliable transport, but it's much, much more than that. First off, the fact that you're using TCP doesn't make the path between sender/receiver any more reliable. Your packets get dropped just the same as if they were UDP or any other protocol over IP. TCP provides reliability by retransmitting lost packets, but you knew that. It also provides flow control and congestion avoidance - this means detecting when the receiving end (and the router queues in between) are ready for more data, and throttling your transmission rate to match that capacity. It also means being "fair" to other streams sharing the same bottleneck(s). It does this by "backing off" the number of packets in flight, i.e. halving the congestion window, to reduce the data rate. These algorithms are a very active field of research - there's a *lot* more to TCP than meets the eye of a socket programmer.

When TCP loses a packet, that packet must be retransmitted. This is expensive because it means another RTT.

Anyhoo...

You can think of FEC for data transmission as being analogous to RAID 5 for storage. By adding one extra bit (the XOR of the rest of the word) you can lose any single bit and still know it's value. It's very simple. If the word is:

0 1 0 1

And I add an extra "parity" bit, where the parity bit is 1 is the number of ones in the rest of the word is odd, zero if it's even:

0 1 0 1 [0]

I can now lose any one bit (including of course the parity bit). Eg if I have only

0 1 X 1 [0]

Then I know the missing bit is a '0', because if it were '1' then the parity bit would be a zero.

Applying this to data transmission, you can see that by sending just one extra packet, you greatly reduce the chance of having to retransmit anything.

EG if I have to send you 10 packets over a link with 10% packet loss, there's a 65% chance that I'll have to retransmit one of those packets. (and a 10% chance that each retransmitted packet will have to be sent again, and so on).

However if I'm using FEC and I send one extra "parity" packet, then I only have to retransmit if TWO OR MORE packets are lost. The chances of losing TWO out of the eleven packets is only 30%, so you can see that for an overhead of 10%, I've reduced the number of retransmits by a factor of more than two! I hope those figures are right. I used this tool to calculate them. Of course there are a lot of knobs you can turn depending on how much overhead you can afford for the parity information, and what degree of packet loss you want to be able to tolerate.

Anyway, you can see that there are lots of possible improvements/alternatives to TCP - it's an old protocol and a lot of research has been done since RFC 793.

There may be a perfectly simple solution for this: allow him to see again.

Depending on the type of damage he sustained from the accident, he might be able to see the output from a retinal scanning display perfectly clearly. No focusing is necessary, as it paints the image directly on the retina. If his retinas are not damaged, it will work perfectly. If his retinas have _some_ damage but not total, it will still work to a degree. Beta units are around $8,000 -- well worth it.

If this is not an option, emacspeak is the road down which he should travel. Emacspeak was written entirely from scratch by a totally blind man, T.V. Raman. It works. Get it and set it up for him.

-nukebuddy

actually, vassar college held campus wide student elections over the Internet back in 96, i think. we also are (to the best of my knowledge) the first college to put the local paper, the misc, online as well. (that used to be my job!) though i wasn't the guy who actually put electios on line, i was part of the crew. we also had a lot of fears about cheating, but it really wasn't all that difficult to take care of. at the end of the day, we saw voter turn out go up by more than double, i believe. any other schools out there that do this?

Emacspeak is a speech enabled interface
for computer users who are blind.

Written by T.V. Raman who is blind himself,
Emacspeak has opened the door of high performance
computing to many others who would be locked out otherwise.

Even the NSA is using it. So it has to be powerful :)

Emacspeak provides speech enabled web browsing,
spread sheets, speech icons, speech locking
(different kinds of text are spoken with different
voices, similar to text colorisation in Vim),
speech enabled handling of formulas, email, news
and so many more features. Check it out yourself.

Did you ever see a blind person playing Tetris?

I did and this was the final kick that convinced me,
that Emacspeak is the most advanced
non graphical user interface available on this planet.
(It is IMHO even more advanced than many GUIs :)

I therefore nominate Emacspeak for /.'s
Best Designed Interface in a Non-GUI App Award.

Enjoy!
Hans



--

Emacspeak is a speech enabled interface
for computer users who are blind.

Written by T.V. Raman who is blind himself,
Emacspeak has opened the door of high performance
computing to many others who would be locked out otherwise.

Even the NSA is using it. So it has to be powerful :)

Emacspeak provides speech enabled web browsing,
spread sheets, speech icons, speech locking
(different kinds of text are spoken with different
voices, similar to text colorisation in Vim),
speech enabled handling of formulas, email, news
and so many more features. Check it out yourself.

Did you ever see a blind person playing Tetris?

I did and this was the final kick that convinced me,
that Emacspeak is the most advanced
non graphical user interface available on this planet.
(It is IMHO even more advanced than many GUIs :)

I therefore nominate Emacspeak for /.'s
Best Designed Interface in a Non-GUI App Award.

Enjoy!
Hans



--

Emacspeak is a speech enabled interface
for computer users who are blind.

Written by T.V. Raman who is blind himself,
Emacspeak has opened the door of high performance
computing to many others who would be locked out otherwise.

Even the NSA is using it. So it has to be powerful :)

Emacspeak provides speech enabled web browsing,
spread sheets, speech icons, speech locking
(different kinds of text are spoken with different
voices, similar to text colorisation in Vim),
speech enabled handling of formulas, email, news
and so many more features. Check it out yourself.

Did you ever see a blind person playing Tetris?

I did and this was the final kick that convinced me,
that Emacspeak is the most advanced
non graphical user interface available on this planet.
(It is IMHO even more advanced than many GUIs :)

I therefore nominate Emacspeak for /.'s
Best Designed Interface in a Non-GUI App Award.

Enjoy!
Hans



--