No. Big problems for big pharma are things like polticians who won't take payoffs, regulatory agencies, whistleblowers, class action lawsuits, etc. The placebo effect is a well known (if not well understood) and in most cases easily accomodated phenomenon that causes them no problems whatsoever. Even if they were doing all their research honestly and competently, it wouldn't cause any problems at all for either big pharma or any competent scientist. Problems are things that don't have easy or palatable solutions.
That's an important point, and of course another reason why the 6% figure is surprisingly high. Backlist books are slowly making their way into ebook format, but the coverage is still very spotty. It looks like it will be a long, drawn-out process, probably worse than what happened with CDs.
What comes after early adopters? On-time adopters and late adopters. Tablet sales are expected to explode over the next year, and pretending that the market is saturated just because the early adopters have already adopted seems willfully ignorant. My impressoin is that e-book sales aren't about to slow down, they're about to speed up. The summary suggests that 6% is somehow a disappointing percentage of the total market for new books. That's ridiculous. 6% is an astonishing accomplishment given how few people own e-book readers or tablets.
As a Kindle owner, I second all of these comments. The Kindle is the best e-book reader (for me) right now, but it's not the best e-book reader I can imagine. That's okay, it only cost $140, and for all its flaws it's a pleasure to read books on it. It's good enough for me to prefer new books in electronic format. I'll buy something better in a year or so, and something better a year or so again after that.
I'm actually astonished that e-books account for an appreciable percentage of the book market. My informal survey of fellow train riders suggests that the percentage of readers who own e-readers is tiny.
I'm not sure this answers my question. It sounds like you're basically saying all the people who are telling us to put our data in the database are wrong. Which is possible, but it doesn't explain what they thought we were going to do with it in the database in the first place. But then you're suggesting that we do a tremendous amount of extra work, including some very touchy coding, to get the metadata into a database. Unless I'm missing something, keeping the metadata up to date would then require rewriting all of the software we use (the software modifies, creates, and deletes files). Even if this were possible, it would be extremely fragile. And I'm not sure what the benefit would be. I have no idea what the distinction is between "row by row" and "set-oriented," because we don't use a database at present, and I can't even imagine what "row by row" would mean for our data. This is rich scientific data, not transactions in some financial system. And the supposed benefit sounds very meager. We don't need new ways of achieving things, unless they're better than our current things.
Can I ask a dumb question as a completely database-naive person? I'm an occasional scientist, and I have a fair bit of experimental data lying around, stored as files. I've had it suggested to me before that I clearly need to get the data into a database (and that our center in fact should force people to store their raw data this way). At the same time, my daily workflow revolves around files. I use software that opens and deals with files. Some of the software expects to find the files organized in directories in particular ways. So my question is simply this: how do I put my data into a database but have it still work with the many software packages that have been written to do this kind of work? I can't rewrite the software. Do database systems let you expose the contents as though they were in directories, while somehow maintaining the organizing facility of the database? I know this is a dumb question, but having never used databases, I don't know what I would tell, for example, a medical image viewer when it opens up a file dialog and asks me which brain image I want to look at.
I'm also an occasional software developer. Maybe that's claiming too much, but I do write software for doing this kind of research. My software opens, reads, and writes files. I'm not anxious to rewrite it to access databases, and of course I can't know in advance what kind of database system end users will have set up (the software is not just used locally). So at some level, I need to know the answer to this question from the other end as well. However, the users of our software also use dozens of other packages that will never be rewritten, I suspect there's no point to modifying my code to deal with data stored in database systems.
I should mention that when I've thought about this before, it's occurred to me that possibly it's only being suggested that the raw data be organized in databases, and that processed data can be stored as files. But this is obviously irrelevant, since it's both (but especially the processed and intermediate data) that need to be organized in labs with a lot of data.
In any case, please help us database-naive scientists understand. Thanks.
At universities that care about undergraduate education, lectures are only a tiny part of the puzzle. Access to better lectures would certainly help a lot of people. But a university composed of online lectures is just going to be the best crappy university, not the best university. Bill Gates knows nothing about education, it's unfortunate that his vast fortune once again gives him the power to appear authoritative on any subject he feels like mouthing off about.
What's most astonishing about this is that the linked article states that Larson's analysis has two problems. The only way I can figure you'd stop at two is that one and two are the only numbers you know. Or perhaps more astonishing is the fact that nowhere in this list of flaws did the author of the article see fit to point out that this is a completely meaningless analysis. Instead the author of this article, who obviously has even less experience analyzing and undertanding data than this Larson fellow, focused on two very peripheral and arbitrarily chosen points. If you want to see this kind of analysis done right, visit http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/.
For the benefit of the exceptionally clueless, let me just point out that this article failed to mention the most obvious and devastating flaw with this kind of analysis -- the critical assumption that no other factor could possibly have influenced pedestrian fatalities since 2000.
Setting aside the issue of circumventing the print publisher, exclusive deals like this are extremely consumer-hostile. We're rapidly careening towards a world in which you can only read the set of e-books that's compatible with your reader. I like to think that as a society, we'll stop buying books from publishers (Wylie is acting as publisher of the ebook in this case) that are so shamelessly consumer-hostile. And that writers will refrain from sending their work to agents/publishers that are in the business of screwing over readers. But I know better.
Over 92% of fire extinguishers will never be used, we could probably save a bit of space by having the unneeded ones stored off-site, or in less accessible corners of the garage.
Slightly more seriously, we can certainly answer this question posed by the linked article easily: "why on earth did we squander so much money by not thinking this way until now?" The answer is: because you are a moron. Anyone who has given even a moment's thought to storage has known this, either implicitly or explicitly, for a long time. So whoever's included in your "we," Steve Cassidy, is just profoundly stupid. I think that quite easily explains why you all squandered so much money by not thinking about this. Next question?
I do my fair share of transferring large neuroimaging datasets around from time to time, although I don't do it regularly. If you want to use hard drives that aren't connected to anything in transit, then I have to agree with whoever suggested doing it without a filesystem. I've always found that to be the easiest way to get around filesystem (and sometimes operating system) idiosyncrasies, whether you're writing to a DVD or a hard drive or whatever. If you can (de)serialize your data easily (using tar), then a filesystem does almost nothing useful for you, it just gets in your way.
I certainly won't agree with the respondent who suggested that you change your workflow (and perhaps your choice of tools) to use smaller files. If those are your files, those are your files. Perhaps I'd do it differently, but that's my problem, not yours.
It's usually not ASCAP's "stuff". They're a collection agency, not generally the owners of the copyrights for which they collect fees.
I'll let the lawyers and amateur pedants argue about nonsense like that. The bottom line is that ASCAP can do what they want with their stuff (or, if you have an issue with that phrase, "the creative works to which their clients hold performance and reproduction rights under title blah blah blah..."), but they can't tell me what to do with my stuff. Yes, it's obvious why they want to do it, but irrelevant. For all I care, the main reason they object to the Creative Commons is because they dislike the letter C or because they thing the CC people are a bunch of drug dealers. Whatever. At the end of the day, I hold the copyright to this Slashdot post, and for the moment, they can't tell me what to do with it.
Hey, ASCAP, why do you think you should have the right to do what you want with your stuff but we shouldn't have the right to do what we want with ours? If you don't like Creative Commons licenses, don't use them. Don't tell us what licenses to use for our works. They're our works, not yours. That's what copyright means.
This is mostly a silly proposal, but I think even if you only have two candidates, negative votes would be great. The main implication is that the candidate will no longer be able to pretend s/he has anything like a "mandate" from the voters.
Actually, negative votes don't address most of the issues with voting systems. But I think most of the innovative and useful voting systems can be adapted to accomodate this. Assuming of course that voters have a lot of time to figure it all out (imaging range voting where each voter gets to choose their range).
Very interesting -- I had never heard of IB schools, so I visited the web site and searched for schools where I live (greater Philadelphia area). Surprisingly (to me), many local schools are on the list, although basically only high schools. Not necessarily the best local schools, more like a random selection. I'd be curious to know how tight the control over the curriculum has to be for them to maintain their IB certification. Is there any reason to believe that a completely Texas-polluted curriculum would fail the certification process? (And yes, I realize I'm walking a thin line using "Texas" as a proxy for scary textbooks when I live in Pensylvania.) Where in the process does the curriculum get turned back if it, for example, rejects evolution, downplays slavery, or teaches that the USA is a Christian state? Does the IB constrain which textbooks can be used? From the web site, the IB program seems somewhat superficial, but I'd love to find out otherwise.
Is there an easy way to find schools with curricula that are less dependent on what happens in Texas? I mean, without having to read hundreds of textbooks and do lots of gruesomely painful research on my own (I get enough of that in my day job).
With these kinds of inaccuracies due to self-report, the question you need to ask is whether or not they're liable to introduce bias or just noise. In this case, I can imagine a source of bias (cancer patients may tend to recall more cell phone use than healthy people) contributing to the effect. Given the reported findings, this doesn't sound like a huge problem. Perhaps there are other reasons to suspect bias in the other direction, which would be more of an issue. But I haven't read the study yet (doesn't seem to be out yet, will check again when I get back from vacation), so I'll withhold judgment. In any case, the fact that some groups showed a negative relationship between cell phone use and cancer is not necessarily deeply surprising, again pending the details. If there is no true relationship, then half the tests should go each way. This kind of observation may be anything from a very mild surprise to a logically necessary outcome, depending on various details of the statistical approach.
Both experimental and non-experimental studies are useful for this kind of thing. Neither is perfect, neither is useless. One of the great advantages of non-experimental studies here is that you can get enough data to estimate the size of a relatively subtle effect with enough accuracy to be useful, while taking into account numerous other potentially interacting factors. As a practical matter, you can't run a study of thousands of monkeys using cell phones, even if it were a good idea (which it isn't). If you're worried about researchers conflating correlation and causation, or in general making errors due to confounded analyses or obvious sources of bias, then you're probably reading too many journal articles by researchers who don't know what they're doing. It happens sometimes, but the problem is less epidemic in better journals.
Your plan with the lab monkey and a mobile phone is amusing, but of course not useful for anything more important than the local news. Perhaps not even that, the local news is probably high on the list of disseminators of misinformation.
Sorry if I was unclear, but what I said was correct. The CRT of course would not have different resolutions or scan rates for different parts. However, you could have screens (not CRTs, but screens, a software concept) with different resolutions and see parts of different screens at the same time. I'm sure this was done by finding an optimal common video mode, and obviously if one part of the visible display needed to be interlaced, the whole display would be interlaced. When you say that the "whole screen" would switch to 640x480 interlaced, you must mean the monitor -- as I recall, the resolution of each screen (available to software running on the screen) would not change just because you moved your screens around.
Although this is somewhat tangential, I have to mention that what the Amiga had was actually much cooler than the facility to switch between screens with different resolutions. You could slide each screen down by grabbing the bar at the top of the screen with your mouse, to reveal those beneath. So at times, and quite commonly, you would have different visible parts of your monitor displaying parts of screens with different resolutions (and, if I recall correctly, their own color depths as well).
Does anyone make a liquid cpu heatsink, something to slap over your cpu (and seal)? Seems like that would be a nice innovation if it could be kept sealed.
The fact that some people do statistics poorly isn't a good argument against using statistics. However, now that I typed that first sentence, I have to admit that people who do statistics poorly are much more likely to be put in charge of deciding how the statistics will be used than people who do statstics well. Due to overwhelming base rates.
To the extent the artistic product of a video game depends critically on the input of the player, video games are crappy art. This simply follows from the fact that the vast majority of people have no appreciable creative talent. It could probably also be argued that video games in which the artistic value does not depend on the input of the player are not the best video games. That's probably only true for specific cases.
I will say this in defense of Roger Ebert. Suppose the movie Rashomon had been, instead of a fixed movie, a game that the player gets to "direct," with scenarios and virtual actors supplied by the game and the rest left up to the player. This is a few years from now, so it's really like you're getting a populated movie studio in a box. So this is a movie-ish game. I doubt that so many as one in ten thousand players could produce anything with the artistic value of the original (fill in your own movie if you don't like Rashomon). Some might produce something better, but it would be quite clear in those cases that the bulk of the artistic value came from the player and not the game. So to the extent that's what Ebert was getting at, I certainly agree.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Big problems for big pharma are things like polticians who won't take payoffs, regulatory agencies, whistleblowers, class action lawsuits, etc. The placebo effect is a well known (if not well understood) and in most cases easily accomodated phenomenon that causes them no problems whatsoever. Even if they were doing all their research honestly and competently, it wouldn't cause any problems at all for either big pharma or any competent scientist. Problems are things that don't have easy or palatable solutions.
That's an important point, and of course another reason why the 6% figure is surprisingly high. Backlist books are slowly making their way into ebook format, but the coverage is still very spotty. It looks like it will be a long, drawn-out process, probably worse than what happened with CDs.
What comes after early adopters? On-time adopters and late adopters. Tablet sales are expected to explode over the next year, and pretending that the market is saturated just because the early adopters have already adopted seems willfully ignorant. My impressoin is that e-book sales aren't about to slow down, they're about to speed up. The summary suggests that 6% is somehow a disappointing percentage of the total market for new books. That's ridiculous. 6% is an astonishing accomplishment given how few people own e-book readers or tablets.
As a Kindle owner, I second all of these comments. The Kindle is the best e-book reader (for me) right now, but it's not the best e-book reader I can imagine. That's okay, it only cost $140, and for all its flaws it's a pleasure to read books on it. It's good enough for me to prefer new books in electronic format. I'll buy something better in a year or so, and something better a year or so again after that.
I'm actually astonished that e-books account for an appreciable percentage of the book market. My informal survey of fellow train riders suggests that the percentage of readers who own e-readers is tiny.
How is it possible that no one has yet posted this link?
I'm not sure this answers my question. It sounds like you're basically saying all the people who are telling us to put our data in the database are wrong. Which is possible, but it doesn't explain what they thought we were going to do with it in the database in the first place. But then you're suggesting that we do a tremendous amount of extra work, including some very touchy coding, to get the metadata into a database. Unless I'm missing something, keeping the metadata up to date would then require rewriting all of the software we use (the software modifies, creates, and deletes files). Even if this were possible, it would be extremely fragile. And I'm not sure what the benefit would be. I have no idea what the distinction is between "row by row" and "set-oriented," because we don't use a database at present, and I can't even imagine what "row by row" would mean for our data. This is rich scientific data, not transactions in some financial system. And the supposed benefit sounds very meager. We don't need new ways of achieving things, unless they're better than our current things.
Still baffled.
Can I ask a dumb question as a completely database-naive person? I'm an occasional scientist, and I have a fair bit of experimental data lying around, stored as files. I've had it suggested to me before that I clearly need to get the data into a database (and that our center in fact should force people to store their raw data this way). At the same time, my daily workflow revolves around files. I use software that opens and deals with files. Some of the software expects to find the files organized in directories in particular ways. So my question is simply this: how do I put my data into a database but have it still work with the many software packages that have been written to do this kind of work? I can't rewrite the software. Do database systems let you expose the contents as though they were in directories, while somehow maintaining the organizing facility of the database? I know this is a dumb question, but having never used databases, I don't know what I would tell, for example, a medical image viewer when it opens up a file dialog and asks me which brain image I want to look at.
I'm also an occasional software developer. Maybe that's claiming too much, but I do write software for doing this kind of research. My software opens, reads, and writes files. I'm not anxious to rewrite it to access databases, and of course I can't know in advance what kind of database system end users will have set up (the software is not just used locally). So at some level, I need to know the answer to this question from the other end as well. However, the users of our software also use dozens of other packages that will never be rewritten, I suspect there's no point to modifying my code to deal with data stored in database systems.
I should mention that when I've thought about this before, it's occurred to me that possibly it's only being suggested that the raw data be organized in databases, and that processed data can be stored as files. But this is obviously irrelevant, since it's both (but especially the processed and intermediate data) that need to be organized in labs with a lot of data.
In any case, please help us database-naive scientists understand. Thanks.
At universities that care about undergraduate education, lectures are only a tiny part of the puzzle. Access to better lectures would certainly help a lot of people. But a university composed of online lectures is just going to be the best crappy university, not the best university. Bill Gates knows nothing about education, it's unfortunate that his vast fortune once again gives him the power to appear authoritative on any subject he feels like mouthing off about.
What's most astonishing about this is that the linked article states that Larson's analysis has two problems. The only way I can figure you'd stop at two is that one and two are the only numbers you know. Or perhaps more astonishing is the fact that nowhere in this list of flaws did the author of the article see fit to point out that this is a completely meaningless analysis. Instead the author of this article, who obviously has even less experience analyzing and undertanding data than this Larson fellow, focused on two very peripheral and arbitrarily chosen points. If you want to see this kind of analysis done right, visit http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/.
For the benefit of the exceptionally clueless, let me just point out that this article failed to mention the most obvious and devastating flaw with this kind of analysis -- the critical assumption that no other factor could possibly have influenced pedestrian fatalities since 2000.
Setting aside the issue of circumventing the print publisher, exclusive deals like this are extremely consumer-hostile. We're rapidly careening towards a world in which you can only read the set of e-books that's compatible with your reader. I like to think that as a society, we'll stop buying books from publishers (Wylie is acting as publisher of the ebook in this case) that are so shamelessly consumer-hostile. And that writers will refrain from sending their work to agents/publishers that are in the business of screwing over readers. But I know better.
Over 92% of fire extinguishers will never be used, we could probably save a bit of space by having the unneeded ones stored off-site, or in less accessible corners of the garage.
Slightly more seriously, we can certainly answer this question posed by the linked article easily: "why on earth did we squander so much money by not thinking this way until now?" The answer is: because you are a moron. Anyone who has given even a moment's thought to storage has known this, either implicitly or explicitly, for a long time. So whoever's included in your "we," Steve Cassidy, is just profoundly stupid. I think that quite easily explains why you all squandered so much money by not thinking about this. Next question?
I do my fair share of transferring large neuroimaging datasets around from time to time, although I don't do it regularly. If you want to use hard drives that aren't connected to anything in transit, then I have to agree with whoever suggested doing it without a filesystem. I've always found that to be the easiest way to get around filesystem (and sometimes operating system) idiosyncrasies, whether you're writing to a DVD or a hard drive or whatever. If you can (de)serialize your data easily (using tar), then a filesystem does almost nothing useful for you, it just gets in your way.
I certainly won't agree with the respondent who suggested that you change your workflow (and perhaps your choice of tools) to use smaller files. If those are your files, those are your files. Perhaps I'd do it differently, but that's my problem, not yours.
It's usually not ASCAP's "stuff". They're a collection agency, not generally the owners of the copyrights for which they collect fees.
I'll let the lawyers and amateur pedants argue about nonsense like that. The bottom line is that ASCAP can do what they want with their stuff (or, if you have an issue with that phrase, "the creative works to which their clients hold performance and reproduction rights under title blah blah blah..."), but they can't tell me what to do with my stuff. Yes, it's obvious why they want to do it, but irrelevant. For all I care, the main reason they object to the Creative Commons is because they dislike the letter C or because they thing the CC people are a bunch of drug dealers. Whatever. At the end of the day, I hold the copyright to this Slashdot post, and for the moment, they can't tell me what to do with it.
How about this instead:
Hey, ASCAP, why do you think you should have the right to do what you want with your stuff but we shouldn't have the right to do what we want with ours? If you don't like Creative Commons licenses, don't use them. Don't tell us what licenses to use for our works. They're our works, not yours. That's what copyright means.
This is mostly a silly proposal, but I think even if you only have two candidates, negative votes would be great. The main implication is that the candidate will no longer be able to pretend s/he has anything like a "mandate" from the voters.
Actually, negative votes don't address most of the issues with voting systems. But I think most of the innovative and useful voting systems can be adapted to accomodate this. Assuming of course that voters have a lot of time to figure it all out (imaging range voting where each voter gets to choose their range).
Very interesting -- I had never heard of IB schools, so I visited the web site and searched for schools where I live (greater Philadelphia area). Surprisingly (to me), many local schools are on the list, although basically only high schools. Not necessarily the best local schools, more like a random selection. I'd be curious to know how tight the control over the curriculum has to be for them to maintain their IB certification. Is there any reason to believe that a completely Texas-polluted curriculum would fail the certification process? (And yes, I realize I'm walking a thin line using "Texas" as a proxy for scary textbooks when I live in Pensylvania.) Where in the process does the curriculum get turned back if it, for example, rejects evolution, downplays slavery, or teaches that the USA is a Christian state? Does the IB constrain which textbooks can be used? From the web site, the IB program seems somewhat superficial, but I'd love to find out otherwise.
Is there an easy way to find schools with curricula that are less dependent on what happens in Texas? I mean, without having to read hundreds of textbooks and do lots of gruesomely painful research on my own (I get enough of that in my day job).
With these kinds of inaccuracies due to self-report, the question you need to ask is whether or not they're liable to introduce bias or just noise. In this case, I can imagine a source of bias (cancer patients may tend to recall more cell phone use than healthy people) contributing to the effect. Given the reported findings, this doesn't sound like a huge problem. Perhaps there are other reasons to suspect bias in the other direction, which would be more of an issue. But I haven't read the study yet (doesn't seem to be out yet, will check again when I get back from vacation), so I'll withhold judgment. In any case, the fact that some groups showed a negative relationship between cell phone use and cancer is not necessarily deeply surprising, again pending the details. If there is no true relationship, then half the tests should go each way. This kind of observation may be anything from a very mild surprise to a logically necessary outcome, depending on various details of the statistical approach.
Both experimental and non-experimental studies are useful for this kind of thing. Neither is perfect, neither is useless. One of the great advantages of non-experimental studies here is that you can get enough data to estimate the size of a relatively subtle effect with enough accuracy to be useful, while taking into account numerous other potentially interacting factors. As a practical matter, you can't run a study of thousands of monkeys using cell phones, even if it were a good idea (which it isn't). If you're worried about researchers conflating correlation and causation, or in general making errors due to confounded analyses or obvious sources of bias, then you're probably reading too many journal articles by researchers who don't know what they're doing. It happens sometimes, but the problem is less epidemic in better journals.
Your plan with the lab monkey and a mobile phone is amusing, but of course not useful for anything more important than the local news. Perhaps not even that, the local news is probably high on the list of disseminators of misinformation.
Sorry if I was unclear, but what I said was correct. The CRT of course would not have different resolutions or scan rates for different parts. However, you could have screens (not CRTs, but screens, a software concept) with different resolutions and see parts of different screens at the same time. I'm sure this was done by finding an optimal common video mode, and obviously if one part of the visible display needed to be interlaced, the whole display would be interlaced. When you say that the "whole screen" would switch to 640x480 interlaced, you must mean the monitor -- as I recall, the resolution of each screen (available to software running on the screen) would not change just because you moved your screens around.
Although this is somewhat tangential, I have to mention that what the Amiga had was actually much cooler than the facility to switch between screens with different resolutions. You could slide each screen down by grabbing the bar at the top of the screen with your mouse, to reveal those beneath. So at times, and quite commonly, you would have different visible parts of your monitor displaying parts of screens with different resolutions (and, if I recall correctly, their own color depths as well).
Does anyone make a liquid cpu heatsink, something to slap over your cpu (and seal)? Seems like that would be a nice innovation if it could be kept sealed.
The fact that some people do statistics poorly isn't a good argument against using statistics. However, now that I typed that first sentence, I have to admit that people who do statistics poorly are much more likely to be put in charge of deciding how the statistics will be used than people who do statstics well. Due to overwhelming base rates.
Increasingly often, I can't remember if I'm reading a legitimate news source or the Onion.
To the extent the artistic product of a video game depends critically on the input of the player, video games are crappy art. This simply follows from the fact that the vast majority of people have no appreciable creative talent. It could probably also be argued that video games in which the artistic value does not depend on the input of the player are not the best video games. That's probably only true for specific cases.
I will say this in defense of Roger Ebert. Suppose the movie Rashomon had been, instead of a fixed movie, a game that the player gets to "direct," with scenarios and virtual actors supplied by the game and the rest left up to the player. This is a few years from now, so it's really like you're getting a populated movie studio in a box. So this is a movie-ish game. I doubt that so many as one in ten thousand players could produce anything with the artistic value of the original (fill in your own movie if you don't like Rashomon). Some might produce something better, but it would be quite clear in those cases that the bulk of the artistic value came from the player and not the game. So to the extent that's what Ebert was getting at, I certainly agree.