Slashdot Mirror
Green Card Lottery Judgment Favors Mathematical Randomness
guusbosman writes "Yesterday a district court in Washington, D.C. issued its ruling in a case that boiled down to the definition of 'strictly random.' In the 2011 drawing of the U.S. 'Green Card Lottery,' a computer programming error was made and two weeks after the official drawing of the lottery the Department of State closed the website and voided the results. A lawsuit sought an injunction claiming that, while the process was not mathematically random, it was random in the dictionary definition of 'without definite aim, direction, rule or method.' The court, analyzing language from the State Department's regulations, and examples from laws on casinos and the like, rejected that and came out in favor of a mathematical definition of randomness. The lottery is voided and the results of the new drawing came out today at noon EST."
Sometimes xkcd is pretty relevant
With all the rest of the ridiculousness going on in this country, it is quite refreshing to see that logic and reason--and scientific basis--can still win the day occasionally.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case. For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.
As much as it must suck for those that wont he first time around, this is obviously the only fair choice. A random choice that is limited to a particular subset is NOT random for the entire set. Only those in the subset would have a non-zero chance.
Anybody else remember the Green Card Lottery Spam all over USENET. Good times. Canter & Siegel...
Isn't any string of numbers random ? It is just how probable to get that string that is relevant. And whether the output of the generator can be predicted or not.
I always thought that's what arbitrary meant. Random (to me, an admitted geek) is always in the mathematical sense.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
This year they also added a CAPTCHA after you've signed in for the results.
So I had a little OMG moment today before the usual let down.
My wife and I have applied every year for the last 9 or so (since they went to internet based registrations). It's always been the same, nothing has changed until now.
In hindsight, since I never applied in the first two weeks I was probably wasting my time all those years which is a bit of a bummer.
I probably should have just went over on an H1-B. It always seemed a bit like indentured servitude tho..
// $gets_green_card = ( rand()/rand_max() < $green_cards_to_give_away / $total_applicants ? true : false); //randomly choose applicant //choose from an array!
$gets_green_card = ( in_array($applicant_name, $array_of_my_friends_to_give_green_cards) ? true : false);
That sort of programming error? what sort of error are we talking about here?
I just hate it when my random number generator only returns a single value of 4
So your statement that Asians "have the greatest intelligence on average of any race" shows that you're not racist. Now that's a solid argument.
But in your example, the jury is attempting to rule on the basis of scientific fact. An "expert" in court is deemed to be as credible as the "expert" that wrote the textbook.
1898 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. CXCI. 230 Every artificial or even random selection of a group out of a community changes not only the amount of variation, but the amount of correlation of the organs of its members as compared with those of the primitive group (OED, 2nd ed)
Well, the point was that for a large number of applicants (namely all those who didn't apply during the first two days), the probability of being chosen was exactly zero.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
At least not as far as anyone knows. This is not a scientific question, it is more of a philosophical or even a theological question. If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything. Realistically, no one will have the computational power to make such a prediction, so achieving randomness is really just a matter of achieving something close enough to truly random that no one can predict it.
In the Eudemonic Pie, some young iconoclasts managed to predict the "random" behavior of a roulette wheel. Any randomizing algorithm that you can find in a standard library assumes some environmental condition - often related to the time - is unknown. These are probably pretty good assumptions, but the results are not truly random.
The only way we could have true randomness is if there are some sort of measurable phenomena that cannot be predicted. Quantum mechanics dances around this question, and even if there is a state change that is genuinely random, it would be difficult bordering on heroic to measure it in a practical way so as to create a random number generator.
However, there is no biologist out there with any credibility who can simply say that human ideas and mental performance and behavior are divorced from our genes.
Quite true. However, there are credible biologists who will simply state that human mental performance is divorced from race. The last time I checked, it was all of them. No credible geneticist believes that mental performance is tied to race.
Please, please cite your legitimate sources that say that Asian genes are superior. I assure you, I am in the process of digging up my own.
You are a racist.
A racist is someone who makes up shit for an agenda. Actual facts, shown by hundreds of studies, backs up my statement.
The problem was that the buggy algorithm only randomly selected entries that were submitted during the first two days that the submission system was open. The law specifies that entries are to be selected "in a random order," which implies (at least to the judge) that all of the entries must be shuffled in, and given equal probability of being chosen.
I didn't say they were superior. They are following a different R strategy which is why they have higher intelligence on average, smaller physical size, longer maturation periods, less sex, and take lower risks. These are all known facts that are both backed up by hundreds of studies and are fucking obvious.
Mother nature determines who is superior, and obviously intelligence is only one factor.
And where would you deport citizens who failed?
For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.
Well this is surely a weighted claim if I've ever heard one. Just think about this for a moment.
Scenario 1: A building burns down. An expert comes in and calls it arson. Arson being a crime, the police investigate, find a suspect, put them on trial, and the expert is presented as a witness explaining why they think it is arson.
Scenario 2: A building burns down. An expert comes in and calls it accidental. Accidents are not crimes. There is no investigation, no suspect, and no trial for the expert to sit at and say it was not arson.
So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?
Should I be warming up the ovens for those aphasic scum?
You are a racist. You identify traits by race and use them to judge all of those people. There is no justifications you can add that will invalidate that racism. If you really believed in genetics, you would be interested in letting in "brown people" who passed some tests. That way we'd get the best genetics from all. But you are just a bigot who claims genetics without racism without understanding genetics or racism.
Learn to love Alaska
A racist is someone who judges a class of people by race, whether correct or not.
Learn to love Alaska
I think he's talking about Cameron Todd Willingham. The case involved a house burning down with kids inside. The mother was shopping, the father escaped alone with burns.
After the man was executed, Gov. Perry stalled the commission tasked with looking into whether the fire marshall investigating the arson had done his job properly (going so far as to restaff it when the first set of handpicked people started to look like they might not give him the answer he wanted).
The final outcome of the final commission with Gov. Perry's best hand-picked cronies was that the arson investigator used outdated techniques and terribly bad science. The commission was disbanded without considering what conclusions would have been reached by applying modern techniques to the evidence.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Of course, an adversarial system's not so hot when the government has a good prosecutor and you get stuck with a crappy public defender; don't know if that was an issue in this case, but it's a well-known problem without any real good solutions...
I think the problem in this case was not so much with the lawyering - rather, the low quality of the evidence and testimony was not apparent until years later. (By which point the convict had already been executed, unfortunately.)
This is the question that nobody seems to want to ask.
How come the green card lottery worked just fine the
years before? Why did they need the change this year
in the first place?
The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case.
I don't get it. What's the deal with distinguishing the difference between the mathematical and dictionary definition of random? The argument that it fits the dictionary definition does not hold water.
To suggest that a process which methodically ignores eligible applications is "without definite aim, direction, rule or method" is erroneous. Excluding applicants that filed after the second day is both a method and quite definite.
If labor is to be restricted from freely leaving one country and coming to another, then so too should capital be restricted. If I cannot walk across the border and sell my labor where it is more highly valued, why should the business tycoon on the other side of the line be allowed to set up a factory in my country and exploit my lower standard of living and lower wages? You cannot have an ethical and just system where only one form of immigration is allowed to be effectively infinite and the other is not. The restrictions on capital moving between borders should be similar to the movement of labor. I'd prefer this to be accomplished by loosening the restrictions on the movement of labor, not by restricting capital flow. Letting capital walk the earth freely while we keep workers chained to their place of birth is one of the primary tools of the capitalist elite ruling class and the Global North countries to maintain their hegemony over all peoples. It is directly opposed to the principles of self-determination and progressive philosophy.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.
But even if we could, it is still about unpredictability. Just because you can't predict the output of an RNG, doesn't mean it will always be unpredictable. People find new patterns that may fit your RNG's output and make it non-random. Randomness is not a permanent quality, as you can see, but exists only as long as we are unable to come up with some deterministic explanation for it.
The Supreme Court once ruled that a tomato was a vegetable even though it is scientifically a fruit. That case, Nix v. Hedden, dealt with a tariff on vegetables but not fruits. The government taxed tomatoes as vegetables even though they were botanically fruit. Tomato importers who had paid the taxes sued. The Supreme Court ruled that even though tomatoes were botanically fruit, the law was meant vegetables in the colloquial sense. Go for lawyers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
The big flaw is that raw intelligence is only a very small part of being successful. Hard work, thriftiness, ability to see what products are marketable, ect all lead to success. The reason the USA is so successful is our liberty. People are allowed to try lots of things and fail and try other things until they find their niche. Failure is one of the most important success factors in an economy and biology. Evolution isn't what creates new traits. They are being created all of the time by genetic randomness. It is the real world that tests those traits to see if they are advantageous to survival.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
A string of numbers is never random in and of itself -- it's the method by which they are generated that is random or not. The sequence "9 9 9" is random if and only if it happens to be the output of a random function.
What you perhaps mean is that any string of numbers could have been the output of a random function. That's not strictly true, but it's close enough. You certainly can't tell just by looking at the string of numbers whether it's really the output of a random function -- though you can often make a good guess.
An article on the internet about the green card lottery and not one mention of Cantor & Sielgel? For christ's sake...what short memories we have.
the best evidence available shows that Asians have the greatest intelligence on average of any race of people.
You have no clue what you're talking about.
I take it you live in the USA? The set of Asians who live in the USA is a very very biased and unrepresentative sample of the set of all Asians. The US immigration system is designed to select the best and brightest immigrants. That's why the Asians in the US are so smart and hard-working. The average Asian from an Asian country would be nothing special in America. But Asian Americans as a group are taken from the top 0.5% of all Asians, because US immigration laws are designed to keep out the stupid people. It's completely the opposite of what you claim.
If you actually go to an Asian country you'll find that the people there are no smarter than Americans. But from your condescending attitude it's clear that you're happy to claim international expertise without ever having left the USA. Try traveling or even immigrating to another country sometime -- it'll work wonders on your world view.
With blacks and Hispanics, it's a totally different story. African Americans came mostly as slaves, and Hispanics have illegal immigrants to skew the numbers. That's why the selection effects of US immigration law are significant only for Asians and not other races.
It wasn't that crazy, though, since the tariff was on "vegetables", which itself is not a scientific word - so applying a scientific term in the first place wasn't valid. In fact, the original definition of "vegetable" was *all* plants. That would have been a cool Supreme Court ruling...
And which language should that be, being as there is no official one.
How good is your Spanish by the way? Italian? Polish? I could go on :)
http://www.random.org/randomness/ has a useful discussion of pseudo-random (program generated) versus "true" (aka physically generated) random numbers.
If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything.
Well, for starters, there are objections to your premise.
Then the second problem is your assumption that physical laws "govern" how objects interact. We don't have to accept that assumption; we can assume instead that physics is a collection of predictive theories about the world, which we accept because they meet some statistical criteria.
The experiments that support your typical physical theory don't produce the exact numbers that the theories' equations predict. We don't reject the theories because of this; rather, we use statistical tests to see how well the numbers fit the theory if we assume that they are the result of random deviations from the prediction.
In this case, then, we can support a deterministic physical theory without having to conclude that the world must be nonrandom, because we cannot prove that the deviations that we observe from the theory are deterministic. Such a proof would require yet another theory to predict the deviations, and the experiments to support that second theory would in turn have the same random deviation from our predictions.
Are you adequate?
A judgment is a subjective thing; a matter of opinion. A study that determines something factual is not subjective. Therefore, if your metric for saying something is racist requires that it be a subjective judgment, a study confirming something about a racial class that differentiates it from another racial class isn't racist.
It still is. If black people are taller on average than whites, then assuming a black person would be taller than a white person when you've seen neither is racism. It doesn't matter if it's true or pejorative.
"Racist" is almost universally agreed to mean something that is a pejorative based on racial classification.
And prejudice indicates a pejorative prejudgment. However, neither require negative connotations to be correct, and there is no other word for either that doesn't also indicate pejorative. As such, without a replacement word, they retain both the original non-pejorative as well as the current pejorative because there is no other option.
Learn to love Alaska
Baseball teams are collections of people. People also have different affinity for math.
Therefore the New York Yankees are better at math than the Baltimore Orioles.
The logic breaks the same way. Just because race is caused by genes, and intelligence is influenced by genes, does not mean race influences intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
"Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests performed in the United States have consistently demonstrated a significant degree of variation between different racial groups, with the average score of the African American population being lowerâ"and that of the Asian American population being higherâ"than that of the European-American population. At the same time, there is considerable overlap between these group scores, and individuals of each group can be found at all points on the IQ spectrum. Similar findings have been reported for related populations around the world, although these studies are generally considered less reliable due to the relative paucity of test data and the difficulties inherent in the cross-cultural comparison of intelligence test scores. While the existence of racial IQ gaps is well-documented and not subject to much dispute, there is no consensus among researchers as to their cause."
Why wouldn't it? There's whole journals on this subject, and no matter which way the data is massaged there's still differences.
Because he would investigate every scene, and ALWAYS say it was arson. Because there was no statistical or numerical way to show if a particular burnt patch ACTUALLY was arson, beyond a reasonable doubt. Because the supreme court bitchslapped it down, after the state of Texas murdered the man, and they released several other prisoners sent to prison for the same reason.
So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?
You're missing the point. Of course arson investigators hired by the government are going to testify that arson occurred more often than they say it was accidental. The point is that arson investigations are often conducted by people totally unqualified to do so.
I saw the Frontline episode the OP is talking about. One of the many points it tries to bring home is that fire investigators in many states don't have any scientific training in how fires spread, and are more often than not just experienced fire-fighters "with a hunch". They haven't conducted scientific studies on fire, don't have degrees in science, and have little more knowledge about fire than simply having experience. Experience without theory, and rigor is little more than a series of anecdotes. Frontline showed the opinion of an ACTUAL expert (with scientific training, academic study, and experimental evidence) who said it was quite obvious that the fire was accidental if you've studied how fires happen.
Now it so happens that this was a jury trial, so the judge had little or no involvement in deciding whether the fire investigator was qualified or not. So this isn't a particularly good counter-example of a judge making a bad ruling.
AccountKiller
Computer science spent a fair bit of time on randomness and put it to bed. See also Knuth's Shuffle Algorithm (for fun) and MIT's Lavarand (for profit.) Not to mention the various discussions on /dev/random and how much entropy you really need before you have true random. For starters.
For your assertion that there is no such thing as strictly random, I'm going to fine you one PhD Thesis on why there is not no such thing as strictly random. Get to work.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The process is generally
Scientist: What do we call stuff like this?
General Public: Vegetables
Scientist: OK.
-Time passes-
Scientist: Hmm. There seems to be a difference between some things in this group and other things in this group. I'll exclusively call the other things vegetables.
-Time passes-
Scientist: What do we call stuff like this?
General Public: Vegetables
Scientist: You're wrong, you idiots.
Back in pre-online application days, Green Card lottery used to be pretty much a sure shot for anyone with half a brain and ability to follow basic instructions.
They had no real form to fill, but rather a set of fairly simple and specific guidelines. You had to use a plain piece of paper, and write in order (numbered or not) your name, date of birth, mailing address, a few other items I now forget. You needed to attach a photo of specific size (with a staple, in the top right corner of the page). You had to mail it in an envelope of specific size (standard US, though not necessarily elsewhere) to a specific address that depended on your "origin". You had to specify your origin (more or less nationality) based on certain rules - primarily your place of birth. You could only send a single application per year.
Doesn't seem so complicated? Well, evidently they used to get about 1 - 2 million applications per year. Of these, well over 70-80% were discarded by failing to follow these rules. People would, evidently, include personal letters and stories, family photos and what not. Quite a few people sent multiple applications anyway.
That left perhaps 300-500K valid applications. Of these 100K "winning" applications were selected and half of those actually got a green card (evidently quite a few people do not apply etc, which is why more were selected).
So, for anyone able to submit a correct application, probability of winning was hovering about 20%, and realistically meant a virtually certain win over a course of about 5-6 years. Since winnings were allocated by area, some areas fared even better. In particular, those few educated persons from some of the countries with generally less educated population could approach a 100% win probability.
The internet based process changed it all. Now any application that is submitted is technically correct, nothing is being discarded and many more applications are being submitted. Probability of winning at this point is quite low (I would estimate it in single %)
This statement is particularly ironic because one of the fathers of modern genetics, James Watson, is a notorious racist.
http://www.slate.com/id/2176709/
And the supreme court made the right call.
Are you trying to argue that words can't have multiple meanings? Language is evolving all the time, and it's not controlled by one group of people. Context matters, and in this case the context wasn't a botanical one. People don't treat tomatoes like fruit, they treat it like a vegetable. This is legislation, not a scientific paper in botany.
AccountKiller
One of the many points it tries to bring home is that fire investigators in many states don't have any scientific training in how fires spread, and are more often than not just experienced fire-fighters "with a hunch". They haven't conducted scientific studies on fire, don't have degrees in science, and have little more knowledge about fire than simply having experience. Experience without theory, and rigor is little more than a series of anecdotes. Frontline showed the opinion of an ACTUAL expert (with scientific training, academic study, and experimental evidence) who said it was quite obvious that the fire was accidental if you've studied how fires happen.
You can bring in expert witnesses to say whatever you want them to say. It is the job of the defense attorney to question their conclusions, their training, their credentials. If they can't do that, then they're of no worth.
People generally get their ideas about race from personal experience, and personal experience is often skewed. If you were white and grew up in the ghettos of Detroit, you might get into your head that blacks have a proclivity towards crime, because many of them commit crimes there. However, this would be subject to selective attention, because in fact many of the whites and many people of every other ethnic group are also commiting crimes there. I'm not even trying to be politically correct here. The fact is that the vast majority of negative things that people attribute to blacks (in particular, but also various latin groups as well here in the US) are NOT a function of race but instead a function of SOCIAL CLASS. (Or perhaps other related things like socioeconomic status, etc.) Even if there is some effect of race on behavior (although what it is is probably 100% neutral), it is FAR overshadowed by the effects of class. The main differences between lower-class blacks and lower-class whites (e.g. trailor trash) are minor cultural things that have only superficial effects on their lack of social graces, education, values, and other things (as they are perceived by people of middle and upper classes). Now, it may be, due to residual effects of slavery or any number of other reasons, that a greater proportion of blacks in the US are lower class, but there ARE plenty of upper-class blacks, and they're no different from the upper-class whites. Dave Chappelle even did a show on this, where each ethic group got to recruit people, and the whites wanted Tiger Woods, and the blacks wanted Eminem. Being "black", culturally and dialectically, is so much a function of where and how you grew up that any effects of race (insofar as there is any such thing) completely disappear into the statistical noise.
I was reading somewhere about the IQ differences between caucasians, Africans, and Asians. IIRC, Asians tested slightly high, Africans slightly low, and caucasians in the middle. However, the variance was HUGE compared to the differences in mean. The overlap between races was far greater than the differences. It's hard to infer anything useful from these minor differences. However, the fact that one average may be slightly different from the other MAY indicate some differences due to genetics, but we have to keep in mind that (at the risk again of sounding P.C.) no one race is superior, but in fact, we're all superior in the context of how we are adapted to the environment we evolved in. There are some differences in environment between sub-saharan Africa and northern Europe, with the most obvious thing being skin tone. More sun requires more protection against UV rays, or else you get skin cancer. Less sun requires less protection against UV, or else you'll suffer vitamin D deficiencies, which lead to birth defects, among other things. Well, sun isn't the only environmental difference, and there are of course random mutations that differ between geographically divergent groups, or else natural selection couldn't have selected for skin color in the first place. One thing I have noticed, subject of course to observation bias, is that although I am white, I have a _slightly_ easier time connecting socially with blacks, particularly strangers. (Of course, there could just as well be something I'M doing that might explain this better than race or culture or whatever.) But in fact, sociologists have documented studies of low-IQ children and found that while a 70 IQ white kid will typically be socially retarded, a 70 IQ black kid will be socially normal. (I don't recall if the number they mentioned was actually 70, but you get the idea.) Among other things, there may be some suggestion that Africans have evolved slightly superior social intelligence. IQ doesn't measure social intelligence, and the human brain has tradeoffs, where all of our talents must fit within some total capacity. If some capability is greater, then generally some other capability is reduced. Personality theories like Myers-Briggs at
Well, I see I'm a little late to the party that ShooterNeo (ugh) is throwing here... and I think someone has always pointed out the idiocy of the idea of the US being made of "good genes" that will get diluted if we let "brown people" in (after all, the US as we think of it today is a result of years of immigration/contribbutions by those very same brown/yellow/whatevs people)... and anyone who has studied the history of the IQ test knows that it is a culturally biased clusterf*ck... so I guess the real question is:
What kinda combo mod does this merit?
-1 Flameracist? -1 Racistbait?
Considering that holding the government accountable for official pronouncements it makes may actually be a more important legal value than strictly following the letter of the law, I believe the initial winners should be offered visas. Further, considering that the 50,000 person quota is arbitrary and that there's no distinct harm in allowing more people from this list to immigrate, the government should be compelled to both honor its initial announcement and then to run the lottery again following the court's interpretation of "in a strictly random order".
Hey, how's it going?
People generally get their ideas about race from personal experience, and personal experience is often skewed.
Innumeracy is the root of bigotry.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.
The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a
permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.
PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.
The only countries NOT qualifying are: Mexico; India; P.R. China;
Taiwan, Philippines, North Korea, Canada, United Kingdom (except
Northern Ireland), Jamaica, Domican Republic, El Salvador and
Vietnam.
Lottery registration will take place soon. 55,000 Green Cards will be
given to those who register correctly. NO JOB IS REQUIRED.
THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS
NOW!!
For FREE information via Email, send request to
cs...@indirect.com
--
**
Canter & Siegel, Immigration Attorneys
3333 E Camelback Road, Ste 250, Phoenix AZ 85018 USA
cs...@indirect.com telephone (602)661-3911 Fax (602) 451-7617
(not from the US) I though all this "Green card lottery" stuff was just some satirical comment on the US immigration process, turned into banner text by unscrupulous scammers trying to steal money from unsuspecting foreigners. Which retard thought that a lottery would be a good idea?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I was curious so wanted to check the diversity lottery website (http://dvlottery.state.gov/) and encountered this statement: "This web site only supports Internet Explorer 6.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0.". I guess if you want to take part in the diversity lottery you have to do away with some of your freedoms to make use of say Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari. :) Makes you also wonder who is the target audience for this lottery.
Somehow the term "diversity" does not seem to cover that bit
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
It does't say "uniformly random", only "strictly random". Picking a random element from a preselected subset can still be "strictly random", it just isn't "uniformly random" over the entire set.
You obviously can't make a decision on an individual case on the basis of a generality.
But I don't see where the person you're replying to claimed you could.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There are lots of characteristics of the body that correlate strongly with race. Bone density, lactose intolerance, alcohol capacity, sickle cell anemia, red hair.
Why should the brain be different? It's part of the body, unless you want to claim it's somehow special by invoking mumbo-jumbo like "the soul".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If it's not genes, then what causes white parents to produce white children? Why don't Inuits have children that look like Zulus? Mate a Jersey cow with a Jersey bull and what do you get? It's not a Frisian calf or a kitten, is it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I agree with most of what you said. But it is particularly difficult to study race in a way rooted in biology and genetics because race is a not a definition made by scientific but rather sociological factors. You could make general statements about "Africans" or "Asians" because African-Americans and Asian-Americans are thought of as a distinct racial group in this country, but what does that really mean?
Most African Americans are descended from West Africans brought over during the slave trade, but that is not absolutely true. Many come directly from Africa or are immigrants from other countries with populations descended from slaves. And African Americans descended from slaves have assimilated much of their genetic material from whites and non-white Americans for centuries. The genetic material of an African American descended from Ghanaian slaves and mixed with Taino and Spanish (a common mixture for descendants of Dominican slaves) differs greatly from the genetic material of an African American descended from Nigerian slaves and mixed with Cherokee and British genetics (like what might have been the case for a slave brought to the Deep South). A Mexican American with roots in the north of the country might have Spanish and other European ancestors with almost no Native American or African, but someone from the southeastern part of the country might be nearly 100% Native American or some mixture of Native, European, and African. And someone from Peru would have an entirely different range of ancestors. Yet in this country Hispanic or Latinos are generally thought of, at least in popular vernacular, as distinct races.
All Asians are grouped together, but from a scientific perspective you can't group together countries with such wildly different racial and genetic histories. There are hundreds of ethnic groups in China or India alone, not to mention the vast differences between the populations of Japan, the Phillipines, Vietnam, Pakistan, etc. that we lump all together as "Asian." Even reducing it further to South Asian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, etc. does not improve the specificity.
To try and separate the genetic differences and study it scientifically requires a specificity that popular racial definitions do not possess. The definitions we use are much too broad, and with little to no basis in modern science. In order to study it in detail and with proper rigor, you have to remove the common terms and use more scientific definitions. And to do that properly would more or less require us to sequence genomes on a worldwide scale. Certainly possible, especially in the future, but not for the armchair sociologist in today's world.
So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?
50/50 - depending on whether he's been hired by the prosecution or the defense.
As an adjective, the word vegetable is used in scientific and technical contexts with a different and much broader meaning, namely of "related to plants" in general, edible or not — as in vegetable matter, vegetable kingdom, vegetable origin, etc.
And what would be the harm in having all those who applied after the 1st two days given a 2nd chance? Rescinding the offer puts the cost of the mistake on those who won with a higher chance. But they didn't do anything to cause that mistake to happen. So why should they pay the price? Having a slight increase in the number of green cards issued during one month would not have harmed anyone.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?
I suppose that depends on how much an expert witness is paid to testify in court.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Or even running auto updates on windows to the latest IE
Instead of doing the right thing, and cancelling the lottery outright, they've now approved an additional 50K green cards into one of the worst US employment markets ever. Thanks for the gift that keeps on giving from the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
While I know more or less what the judge meant, and I think the ruling is good, I also think it's funny that, technically, there is no mathematical definition of randomness.
Our intuitive notion of randomness is, essentially, unpredictability. Usually when we look at trying to address unpredictability from a mathematical perspective, we (intially and naively) focus on trying to ensure uniform distribution. This makes sense, because we don't want any value to be more likely than any other value. But the output of a simple repeating counter is uniformly distributed but not at all unpredictable, so clearly uniform distribution isn't sufficient to ensure unpredictability. So we can apply a bunch of other mathematical tests, such as those in the Diehard suite, trying to find any correlations between different parts of the output stream. When we've verified that the stream passes every test we can think of then we've come as close as we can to a "mathematical" demonstration of randomness.
But that still doesn't give us any guarantee of unpredictability. Lots of deterministic PRNGs pass the Diehard suite -- indeed, that's the primary use and purpose of the Diehard tests, to evaluate the apparent randomness of PRNGs. But if you know the PRNG algorithm and any relevant state (e.g. the seed), then the result is no more unpredictable than a counter.
Indeed, it's probably more useful to look not for randomness not in mathematics, but in physics. Many quantum processes are believed to be inherently random, and therefore truly unpredictable.
Sort of.
The problem with physical processes is that although they may be inherently unpredictable at some level, they aren't necessarily uniformly distributed, which means that some values are more likely than others. This inherent bias towards some values and away from others means that although they aren't totally predictable, they are somewhat predictable, and in a way that can usually be exploited. Further, beyond the inherent biases, the measurement process often introduces additional biases.
We can get really good results by combining seed data from an inherently-random but biased source with a mathematical process that "smooths" the data into a nice uniform distribution without measurable biases. So I guess you could call that "mathematical randomness", but it depends as much on physics as it does mathematics.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Your argument assumes that the number of people immigrating is irrelevant and has no impact on the US. That being the case, why not simply do away with numbers and let anyone who wants to immigrate? Even if you truly believe that, what about the effect on the countries that are losing people. Some of them might be the ones to improve their home country considerably. In other words, I don't think it's a one off issue, that can be easily dismissed.
Actually, no. My argument assumes that fairness requires the party which is responsible for the mishap to bear the burden of its consequences. Since the people with increased chance of receiving a green card were in no way responsible, they should not be bearing the cost of having received and consequently rescinded allotment. The cost should be born by the responsible party. In this case the mishap was result of an error by a US government service. So it should be the INS (as an agent of the US government) which should be forced to bear the burden of extra allotment.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.