Slashdot Mirror
Undersea Cables Damaged By Earthquake
ColoradoAuthor writes "The horrific earthquake and the ensuing tsunami in Japan have caused widespread damage to undersea communications, according to data collected by telecom industry sources. Initially, it was thought that the damage to the cables that connect Japan and Asia to each other and other parts of the world was limited, but new data shows the extent of the problems."
The people who care are the hundreds of thousands, nay the millions of people who are trying to contact loved ones in the quake zone.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I don't know about that.
In a couple days some of them might have tentacles of their own, so...
They're mostly already dead, so not too many more stray survivors to be found. Not everybody can dig for bodies. Not everybody can save the world from nuclear disaster. Not everybody can rebuild houses. These cables are somebody's responsibility and are very important in their own right. Clearly they're not THE TOP PRIORITY, but somebody has to address it sooner or later.
I know how awkward it sounds, but it is plural.
No. It's not. Data is not the plural of datum. Data is a substance.
Much as you can't have too many rice, you can't have too many data. You can, however, have too much rice/data, and too many grains/points of rice/data.
A datum is a single data point. Data itself is unquantifiable until you are talking about the specific points of data. When the sentence says "New data shows...", it is clear that the data in question is akin to information, knowledge, insight, measurements, etc. to every single person on the planet except the guy who took the measurements.
Data is singular.
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-12/world/japan.earthquake.tsunami.earth_1_tsunami-usgs-geophysicist-quake?_s=PM:WORLD
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Konami code appears to be the code to disable Japan in real life.
(I'm going to hell for this...)
From that wikipedia list: 12 of the largest quakes on record occurred between December and March, 4 in November, and only 8 were between May and October. So... What's so important about the winter months?
Nothing. You've offered a 4 month window out of 12 months, and showed us 12 of the largest quakes out of the top 24 landed in that period. You'd expect the mean to be eight, if quakes are completely random. I ran a t-test separating the quakes listed on your wikipedia page by 4-month groups, making your december-march one group, may-july another, and august-november the third one. Assuming the null hypothesis that quakes are completely random, the two-tailed P value for that sample was 0.5242. ie, Not statistically significant at all.