I agree to a point of course. When the final product of a report or study heavily relies on THE data, then it becomes important. If it's data agnostic (such as where data is merely the tool which is used to test a hypothesis), then the data presented might serve to motivate the original hypothesis, but it is generally unnecessary.
The AC, the insults claiming I cannot understand simple math, and stupid technical arguments here really discredit you. If you really are so highly educated, one would imagine your identity wouldn't be a frightening thing to make public. The first rule of anonymous posting: always inflate your claims. From the tone though, I'd claim enjoy the troll mod.
"One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand."
Emphasis mine. I'm a math major, granted, but I can understand it just fine. It's just basic statistics. It's numbers, if you will. Being a meteorologist doesn't enter you into some magical realm where you have special magical numbers that behave completely differently than the number systems everyone else uses in mathematics. And certainly being a Ph.D. meteorologist doesn't require you even be a bachelor in Math, does it? So how would even having a doctorate degree in meteorology or any number of RELATED FIELDS result in one being capable of understanding statistics? Honestly, this absurd statement made by the author sums up what I felt reading the entire article. It's rife with the rantings of someone who doesn't really understand what's going on, clearly admits he doesn't understand the math, yet wants to chime in and put his $.02 in while discrediting someone else just as unaccredited as himself. This is sheer lunacy.
Any undergraduate student taking a statistics course can tell you when you're biased or hinted at what a dataset OUGHT to look like (expectations, or beliefs), the decisions you make on manipulations and adjustments to the graphs are almost dedicated to proving those correct, even if they're wrong. Just like when you sit down with a postulate you need to prove. You have the end result, and you are given some basic facts, now you're trying to force your way through definitions, techniques, tricks and the like to get the result that's on the paper. But when someone hands you an equally difficult proposition and says: "prove or disprove the following," the difficulty goes up tenfold if it in fact is not specifically chosen because it's easy to see that it's provable or easily disproved by counterexample. The same exists here. And I know that being a graduate math student I know that even I, my classmates, and even professors make more subtle mistakes than accidentally adjusting data in an incorrect fashion (even if your reason for doing so is 100% valid). I can assure anyone who's uneducated in mathematics that unless they are literally a doctorate in statistics, they can make those mistakes just as easily.
Here's my suggestion. Open the data. Don't funnel it to some government bureau or tightly controlled data collection agency, just PUBLISH IT and let everyone scoop up all the data for themselves. Then let people with math backgrounds or anyone really to sit down and mess with the data. Let everyone see it and if the entire community agrees that data from one node looks fishy or wrong, then we can discount it as a community, not as someone who believes "well damn, if just the data between dates A and B from this place would go away, the result would be clear... hmm.. well these do look off a bit.. maybe it's an outlier, i'll just delete this data here." Keep the thermometers used, keep notes about what's being done, publish that as well. If we believe there's an outlier, we should test the thermometers and if those are defunct, then we can throw out the data without bias. If a mistake like recording temperatures in kelvin is made, well we can adjust for this, but we don't need to discard it. Let's have some common sense people. It's PEER REVIEWED SCIENCE. Well, not technically. In peer reviewed science, we can do the SAME experiment over again and get the exact same result in a predictable fashion. In this, the data we get is from YOU, so of course it could be doctored to provide a guided result. It can ONLY be peer reviewed if absolutely ANYONE can take the RAW data and come to the same conclusions you did. This entire debate is just silly. I won't believe anyone is correct until this happens. How about we give transparency a try with this global warming crap for a change?
Just look at what they're proposing. Those who INFLUENCE other people in a way that makes a product more valuable.. are desirable customers. So we discount them or give the product to them for free because it increases the value of the product on the whole. Let's look at two examples that are present in all places one might wish to look:
1. Advertising. Duh. Sports athletes, actors, models, and other such famous figures. We see them sporting things GIVEN to them by companies. Why? Because the trend is: "he/she has it, that's so cool, I want one too!" That's exactly what this system is.
2. Referral rewards. This one is particularly damning to this patent. Many companies allow people to refer other customers and as a reward they eventually get a kickback or free stuff. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL. And there you have it, this EXACT system, down to the letter. If you prove you're influential, we give you a discount or free things because we know you're likely to bring us more customers and as a result we can raise our prices.
This patent will almost certainly be shot down via prior art if those in charge of approving them have paid attention to marketing strategies for the past few decades.
You'd need to implement something like that in a hierarchical manner, not unlike slashdot. The number of submissions would dramatically increase due to its free nature while the quality would surely decline, and nobody wants to sit there and read a large percentage of questionable work to determine if it's valid and if so if the results are correct. New submissions could be subject to quick reviews for validity testing (with moderation of course, people who troll by negatively reviewing and voting down new papers without actually reading them or considering their results, or for any bias should be barred from such reviews), and once a paper has been verified it can move on to a stage where people who don't want to sift through garbage to find the gold can really scrutinize them and see if they stand up.
An administration that has been mostly lies from its inception does. Developing the core ideas of new legislation, unfettered from bullshit, goes on in these closed rooms paid for by taxes which taxpayers are not allowed to enter. Once the details are agreed upon by the corporate interests and corrupt govt officials, a company is hired to produce an enormous bill into which the desired effects are embedded, much like a virus writer would develop a virus and hide it inside of what might seem to be a legitimate application. Once done, it is quickly rushed through congress before anyone has a chance to read it (ala, virus scanners for the analogy).
The only question I have is.. after Obama is removed from his dictatorship here, will we be able to fix any of this, or will the next guy once again just follow in the footsteps of the old guy. I'd not be surprised if Obama was put into the presidency by powerful interests, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next guy were by the same people.
And 3 years from now he will still just be continuing a war "started by his predecessor" while claiming he's against it. And probably at the same time he'll still be combating the horrible economic situation we're in thanks to GWB.
He said he was moving the troops home, now he's not, and now it's once again the "well he inherited this ________" argument. Bullshit. Wake up and smell the lies.
More money into education? How about some legislation that makes publisher deals illegal, put some standards on what can appear in texts (no more of this 45% of each page is "related notes" and "bubbles" which aren't actually course material, more just ADHD compliant crap to occupy kids minds with web links and tidbits of information which they are likely to never find useful). Why don't they make this "edition" madness illegal, so new editions each year with less than a 0.5% change in content (generally adding a few pages and maybe changing a few problems) does not warrant charging the same excessive price for a new book, when the edition 1 costs ~20/book while edition 9 costs ~150/book, while overall the information is the same (ok look, Algebra material for students in highschool has not changed in many years, why should we need new "editions" ?).
No, the public education system is too corrupt, both on a grade school and even in colleges. State mandated "standardized tests" should be banned federally because they inhibit learning by setting a bar where students "ought to be" and stifling the learning of students who are exceptional while punishing those who just aren't quite "average" (albeit the bar falls each year to match the 70% mark, or so they hope). They also promote the teaching style known as "teach the test" which benefits no one, even if the scores for the school on these standardized tests goes up marginally.
Before we hand cash over to public schools to waste on overpriced books, study materials for standardized tests, and propaganda, we need to actually REFORM public education. The money would be better spent elsewhere until it can be shown that it will actually benefit students and not administration.
It would appear that instead of running the perl script on the library machine (did they have PERL installed, would the user session remain open for weeks at a time as indicated with no shutdown etc, did he have permissions to install a task to start it on system startup, etc), he simply grabbed the cookie from the browser and hardcoded that into his script from home which allowed him to have access to PACER without credentials. This is hardly "unauthorized" access, it's just abuse of cookies.
What the cookies ever did to him to warrant such abuse, we will never know.
It doesn't ENCOURAGE piracy, the converse is true, though. Bandwidth limits DISCOURAGE piracy, because you use up all your bandwidth. The fact that the converse is true does not imply that this statement is true, however. A common logical fallacy.
Of course, we all knew the Patriot Act was a really BAD idea. But now you have a liberal whitehouse, most of whom believe bigger govt is better. While the changes appear to be good, they also seem to remove some power from the natl. govt. We have a classic contradiction here, so there's a hidden agenda, or the congressional democrats are just trying to save face with the recent crap they've been dealing. I'm not taking this at it's so called "face value" -- we don't really know what kind of catch there might be. Just because a proposition in a bill aims to repeal the immunity, doesn't mean that bill is necessarily "good."
Let's face it, these guys are just as corrupt as the Bush admin. was. Why should we expect them to hand back power to the people?
Ever hear of Barack H. Obama? Yeah, this dude is paying out his buddies over in ACORN while claiming ignorance about anything negative they do, then turning around and making all of his buddies czars and giving them unchecked power, while at the same time spending trillions of tax dollars to bail out massive corporations that are doomed to fail due to corruption in the first place. To top it all off, he wants to force people to pay for health insurance! And let's not forget the cash for clunkers PROMOTIONAL deal he just ran for his brand new car company.
"Speed trap" also refers to a place where police routinely camp and very strictly enforce a speed limit because it's very easy to "accidentally" be going over it. I'd say, "speed trollin" is more accurate. However, we have many tiny little 1000 person cities in TX on your way from say.. Austin to Dallas.. and if you go through one of them at 3:30 AM going from 70 on a highway to 40 in-town within 600 ft (note, the "speed slows" warning is roughly 600 feet from the actual 40mph sign) meaning you MUST brake quite hard to make the limit, and behind the sign through this 2 mile wide city on this one road there are at least 6 cops. I've seen it many times and been pulled over by them once, driving back home from a trip to Austin, no kidding.. in a convenient store parking lot in the middle of this deserted town I had 6.. SIX cops with their lights on behind me. I was going 44 in a 40. He only gave me a warning. Everywhere else in the country I've been it's been hard as hell to get speeding tickets but here.. they're handed out like candy.
Why is it the professors I've asked teaching in universities say students coming fresh from HS are getting worse and worse (on average). If it were getting better -- would this not be the case?
Quite "obvious." I mean aside from the continual push of "standardized" tests which amount to trying to set a standard on how intelligent a child SHOULD be, making no means to mention that oh my FUCKING god we're not all the EXACT SAME -- because that would be politically incorrect?
Oh and the fact that every subject is being dumbed down more and more with ADHD friendly books that contain 50% of each page with lots of pictures, unnecessary commentary, web references, song references, etc etc with the content becoming less and less important.
And nay, I should not even need to mention the constant never-ending drive of large corporations trying to indoctrinate children into thinking THEIR way or being hooked on their products with the assistance of local and state govt.!!!!
No, obviously this person has no kids in school. I was in "school" (I'm assuming you don't mean college because heaven forbid it's not really a school, right!?) 4 years ago. It was that way then. My brother was in "school" 7 years ago.. it was that way then. My youngest sister is STILL in "school" and it is STILL THAT WAY NOW, only becoming increasingly worse and worse.
What is clear here, however, is that you lack any insight whatsoever into the public education system. It's full of corruption and ridiculous horrible "standardized" curriculum to the brim along with lobbied indoctrination. In short, I will not be totally shocked if within the next few decades the walls in every public school in the USA are covered with corporate advertisements nor if big brother, obama's huge government machine, doesn't eventually, hand-in-hand with his corporate bedbuddies have every say about what is taught, down to the very specifics, in such public schools -- even though the parents themselves pay for their children's education. It's already clear that these schools only buy state mandated, big name publisher books that come in edition X (where X >= 7) which costs $200/ea while a book from 30 years ago, with MORE content, and a better presentation (with real insight!) may cost $20/ea. Why do you think this is fact? Because these books teach things like what students *NEED* to "pass" "standardized tests" -- because a math book, for instance, with only figures where figures make sense and with small borders and lots of words and symbols and numbers.. oh no.. that CANNOT POSSIBLY prepare our students for anything. That's just WRONG! They must be taught to take a word problem, convert it to an english problem, find the nouns and verbs, write them down, draw a picture, then apply 10 formulas they've been forced to memorize rather than conclude via some basic common sense a single linear equation and solve using elementary algebra!
You, my friend, are one hell of an ignorant person. Wake up and smell the bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree to a point of course. When the final product of a report or study heavily relies on THE data, then it becomes important. If it's data agnostic (such as where data is merely the tool which is used to test a hypothesis), then the data presented might serve to motivate the original hypothesis, but it is generally unnecessary.
The AC, the insults claiming I cannot understand simple math, and stupid technical arguments here really discredit you. If you really are so highly educated, one would imagine your identity wouldn't be a frightening thing to make public. The first rule of anonymous posting: always inflate your claims. From the tone though, I'd claim enjoy the troll mod.
This is interesting to me:
"One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand."
Emphasis mine. I'm a math major, granted, but I can understand it just fine. It's just basic statistics. It's numbers, if you will. Being a meteorologist doesn't enter you into some magical realm where you have special magical numbers that behave completely differently than the number systems everyone else uses in mathematics. And certainly being a Ph.D. meteorologist doesn't require you even be a bachelor in Math, does it? So how would even having a doctorate degree in meteorology or any number of RELATED FIELDS result in one being capable of understanding statistics? Honestly, this absurd statement made by the author sums up what I felt reading the entire article. It's rife with the rantings of someone who doesn't really understand what's going on, clearly admits he doesn't understand the math, yet wants to chime in and put his $.02 in while discrediting someone else just as unaccredited as himself. This is sheer lunacy.
Any undergraduate student taking a statistics course can tell you when you're biased or hinted at what a dataset OUGHT to look like (expectations, or beliefs), the decisions you make on manipulations and adjustments to the graphs are almost dedicated to proving those correct, even if they're wrong. Just like when you sit down with a postulate you need to prove. You have the end result, and you are given some basic facts, now you're trying to force your way through definitions, techniques, tricks and the like to get the result that's on the paper. But when someone hands you an equally difficult proposition and says: "prove or disprove the following," the difficulty goes up tenfold if it in fact is not specifically chosen because it's easy to see that it's provable or easily disproved by counterexample. The same exists here. And I know that being a graduate math student I know that even I, my classmates, and even professors make more subtle mistakes than accidentally adjusting data in an incorrect fashion (even if your reason for doing so is 100% valid). I can assure anyone who's uneducated in mathematics that unless they are literally a doctorate in statistics, they can make those mistakes just as easily.
Here's my suggestion. Open the data. Don't funnel it to some government bureau or tightly controlled data collection agency, just PUBLISH IT and let everyone scoop up all the data for themselves. Then let people with math backgrounds or anyone really to sit down and mess with the data. Let everyone see it and if the entire community agrees that data from one node looks fishy or wrong, then we can discount it as a community, not as someone who believes "well damn, if just the data between dates A and B from this place would go away, the result would be clear... hmm.. well these do look off a bit.. maybe it's an outlier, i'll just delete this data here." Keep the thermometers used, keep notes about what's being done, publish that as well. If we believe there's an outlier, we should test the thermometers and if those are defunct, then we can throw out the data without bias. If a mistake like recording temperatures in kelvin is made, well we can adjust for this, but we don't need to discard it. Let's have some common sense people. It's PEER REVIEWED SCIENCE. Well, not technically. In peer reviewed science, we can do the SAME experiment over again and get the exact same result in a predictable fashion. In this, the data we get is from YOU, so of course it could be doctored to provide a guided result. It can ONLY be peer reviewed if absolutely ANYONE can take the RAW data and come to the same conclusions you did. This entire debate is just silly. I won't believe anyone is correct until this happens. How about we give transparency a try with this global warming crap for a change?
Just look at what they're proposing. Those who INFLUENCE other people in a way that makes a product more valuable.. are desirable customers. So we discount them or give the product to them for free because it increases the value of the product on the whole. Let's look at two examples that are present in all places one might wish to look:
1. Advertising. Duh. Sports athletes, actors, models, and other such famous figures. We see them sporting things GIVEN to them by companies. Why? Because the trend is: "he/she has it, that's so cool, I want one too!" That's exactly what this system is.
2. Referral rewards. This one is particularly damning to this patent. Many companies allow people to refer other customers and as a reward they eventually get a kickback or free stuff. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL. And there you have it, this EXACT system, down to the letter. If you prove you're influential, we give you a discount or free things because we know you're likely to bring us more customers and as a result we can raise our prices.
This patent will almost certainly be shot down via prior art if those in charge of approving them have paid attention to marketing strategies for the past few decades.
You'd need to implement something like that in a hierarchical manner, not unlike slashdot. The number of submissions would dramatically increase due to its free nature while the quality would surely decline, and nobody wants to sit there and read a large percentage of questionable work to determine if it's valid and if so if the results are correct. New submissions could be subject to quick reviews for validity testing (with moderation of course, people who troll by negatively reviewing and voting down new papers without actually reading them or considering their results, or for any bias should be barred from such reviews), and once a paper has been verified it can move on to a stage where people who don't want to sift through garbage to find the gold can really scrutinize them and see if they stand up.
:)
Why not make such a website?
An administration that has been mostly lies from its inception does. Developing the core ideas of new legislation, unfettered from bullshit, goes on in these closed rooms paid for by taxes which taxpayers are not allowed to enter. Once the details are agreed upon by the corporate interests and corrupt govt officials, a company is hired to produce an enormous bill into which the desired effects are embedded, much like a virus writer would develop a virus and hide it inside of what might seem to be a legitimate application. Once done, it is quickly rushed through congress before anyone has a chance to read it (ala, virus scanners for the analogy).
The only question I have is.. after Obama is removed from his dictatorship here, will we be able to fix any of this, or will the next guy once again just follow in the footsteps of the old guy. I'd not be surprised if Obama was put into the presidency by powerful interests, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next guy were by the same people.
Do the lobbists threaten to throw stones at the senators if they don't cooperate?
Balloonboy? Is that you?
You actually read the articles?
how exactly did the DNA get folded in this manner?
wouldn't it be out-absorbs? Or out-sucks? Or just.. sucks more?
*shivers*. It's kinda chilly here in my office in Hell. I'm afraid the place might freeze over tonight.
Pretty sure that's what will cause the end of the Earth. Let's see if we can get the Discovery Channel to do a special on it.
it just keeps going and going and going and going and ............
I really wish I had some mod points. That's a great observation.
And 3 years from now he will still just be continuing a war "started by his predecessor" while claiming he's against it. And probably at the same time he'll still be combating the horrible economic situation we're in thanks to GWB.
He said he was moving the troops home, now he's not, and now it's once again the "well he inherited this ________" argument. Bullshit. Wake up and smell the lies.
Technically by that point, it would have already risen. Just FYI.
More money into education? How about some legislation that makes publisher deals illegal, put some standards on what can appear in texts (no more of this 45% of each page is "related notes" and "bubbles" which aren't actually course material, more just ADHD compliant crap to occupy kids minds with web links and tidbits of information which they are likely to never find useful). Why don't they make this "edition" madness illegal, so new editions each year with less than a 0.5% change in content (generally adding a few pages and maybe changing a few problems) does not warrant charging the same excessive price for a new book, when the edition 1 costs ~20/book while edition 9 costs ~150/book, while overall the information is the same (ok look, Algebra material for students in highschool has not changed in many years, why should we need new "editions" ?).
No, the public education system is too corrupt, both on a grade school and even in colleges. State mandated "standardized tests" should be banned federally because they inhibit learning by setting a bar where students "ought to be" and stifling the learning of students who are exceptional while punishing those who just aren't quite "average" (albeit the bar falls each year to match the 70% mark, or so they hope). They also promote the teaching style known as "teach the test" which benefits no one, even if the scores for the school on these standardized tests goes up marginally.
Before we hand cash over to public schools to waste on overpriced books, study materials for standardized tests, and propaganda, we need to actually REFORM public education. The money would be better spent elsewhere until it can be shown that it will actually benefit students and not administration.
It would appear that instead of running the perl script on the library machine (did they have PERL installed, would the user session remain open for weeks at a time as indicated with no shutdown etc, did he have permissions to install a task to start it on system startup, etc), he simply grabbed the cookie from the browser and hardcoded that into his script from home which allowed him to have access to PACER without credentials. This is hardly "unauthorized" access, it's just abuse of cookies.
What the cookies ever did to him to warrant such abuse, we will never know.
It doesn't ENCOURAGE piracy, the converse is true, though. Bandwidth limits DISCOURAGE piracy, because you use up all your bandwidth. The fact that the converse is true does not imply that this statement is true, however. A common logical fallacy.
Of course, we all knew the Patriot Act was a really BAD idea. But now you have a liberal whitehouse, most of whom believe bigger govt is better. While the changes appear to be good, they also seem to remove some power from the natl. govt. We have a classic contradiction here, so there's a hidden agenda, or the congressional democrats are just trying to save face with the recent crap they've been dealing. I'm not taking this at it's so called "face value" -- we don't really know what kind of catch there might be. Just because a proposition in a bill aims to repeal the immunity, doesn't mean that bill is necessarily "good."
Let's face it, these guys are just as corrupt as the Bush admin. was. Why should we expect them to hand back power to the people?
Ever hear of Barack H. Obama? Yeah, this dude is paying out his buddies over in ACORN while claiming ignorance about anything negative they do, then turning around and making all of his buddies czars and giving them unchecked power, while at the same time spending trillions of tax dollars to bail out massive corporations that are doomed to fail due to corruption in the first place. To top it all off, he wants to force people to pay for health insurance! And let's not forget the cash for clunkers PROMOTIONAL deal he just ran for his brand new car company.
Boy what a shining example of change, I say.
"Speed trap" also refers to a place where police routinely camp and very strictly enforce a speed limit because it's very easy to "accidentally" be going over it. I'd say, "speed trollin" is more accurate. However, we have many tiny little 1000 person cities in TX on your way from say.. Austin to Dallas.. and if you go through one of them at 3:30 AM going from 70 on a highway to 40 in-town within 600 ft (note, the "speed slows" warning is roughly 600 feet from the actual 40mph sign) meaning you MUST brake quite hard to make the limit, and behind the sign through this 2 mile wide city on this one road there are at least 6 cops. I've seen it many times and been pulled over by them once, driving back home from a trip to Austin, no kidding.. in a convenient store parking lot in the middle of this deserted town I had 6.. SIX cops with their lights on behind me. I was going 44 in a 40. He only gave me a warning. Everywhere else in the country I've been it's been hard as hell to get speeding tickets but here.. they're handed out like candy.
Why is it the professors I've asked teaching in universities say students coming fresh from HS are getting worse and worse (on average). If it were getting better -- would this not be the case?
Quite "obvious." I mean aside from the continual push of "standardized" tests which amount to trying to set a standard on how intelligent a child SHOULD be, making no means to mention that oh my FUCKING god we're not all the EXACT SAME -- because that would be politically incorrect?
Oh and the fact that every subject is being dumbed down more and more with ADHD friendly books that contain 50% of each page with lots of pictures, unnecessary commentary, web references, song references, etc etc with the content becoming less and less important.
And nay, I should not even need to mention the constant never-ending drive of large corporations trying to indoctrinate children into thinking THEIR way or being hooked on their products with the assistance of local and state govt.!!!!
No, obviously this person has no kids in school. I was in "school" (I'm assuming you don't mean college because heaven forbid it's not really a school, right!?) 4 years ago. It was that way then. My brother was in "school" 7 years ago.. it was that way then. My youngest sister is STILL in "school" and it is STILL THAT WAY NOW, only becoming increasingly worse and worse.
What is clear here, however, is that you lack any insight whatsoever into the public education system. It's full of corruption and ridiculous horrible "standardized" curriculum to the brim along with lobbied indoctrination. In short, I will not be totally shocked if within the next few decades the walls in every public school in the USA are covered with corporate advertisements nor if big brother, obama's huge government machine, doesn't eventually, hand-in-hand with his corporate bedbuddies have every say about what is taught, down to the very specifics, in such public schools -- even though the parents themselves pay for their children's education. It's already clear that these schools only buy state mandated, big name publisher books that come in edition X (where X >= 7) which costs $200/ea while a book from 30 years ago, with MORE content, and a better presentation (with real insight!) may cost $20/ea. Why do you think this is fact? Because these books teach things like what students *NEED* to "pass" "standardized tests" -- because a math book, for instance, with only figures where figures make sense and with small borders and lots of words and symbols and numbers.. oh no.. that CANNOT POSSIBLY prepare our students for anything. That's just WRONG! They must be taught to take a word problem, convert it to an english problem, find the nouns and verbs, write them down, draw a picture, then apply 10 formulas they've been forced to memorize rather than conclude via some basic common sense a single linear equation and solve using elementary algebra!
You, my friend, are one hell of an ignorant person. Wake up and smell the bullshit.