I also haven't looked at the study in detail, but I agree that there are certainly a lot of people who don't fit the generalizations one might conclude from the article and summary (which are both perfect examples of scientific reporting - i.e. they are shit). For example, I (over)use emoticons and exclamation points myself, depending on the tone I'm trying to convey, and how important I feel it is to get the tone right. Maybe it is a "feminine" trait to care about tone and trying to express it clearly, but obviously that doesn't require someone with that trait to be female. Don't conflate statistical averages (i.e. more women exhibit feminine traits than men, hence their designation as feminine) with absolute accuracy in judging an individual (i.e. because a person exhibits feminine traits she must be a woman). The former is useful when trying to target ads to millions of people and hoping to improve your click-through rate, but the latter is socially dangerous.
You do raise some interesting points about whether their model would be stable over time - for example, perhaps women are just early adopters w.r.t. determining how to express tone in tweets via emoticons, and stupid men will eventually figure it out and use it as well, destroying the predictive capability of that particular feature of their model. On the other hand, it would seem they determined their features automatically via data mining of gender-tagged data, so presumably they can continue to feed new gender-tagged data to their system to evolve the model to handle shifts in writing style over time, e.g. lowering the weight of the emoticon feature as men use it more and discovering a new feature to replace it.
Statistical significance can't be pinned down to a number like.8% in the general case - statistical significance is hugely dependent upon the sample size. However, the parent poster is correct in that the article was referring to statistical significance, not necessarily to a huge correlation. Generally speaking, a study like this makes an assumption that there is no connection between appearance and political affiliation (i.e. the average accuracy of these guesses should be something like 50% - could be higher or lower depending on how the study was executed - if there were 3 possible parties to choose from instead of two for example, or if it was well known that 90% of the participants all belonged to a given party). They then execute an experiment which provides evidence for or against that hypothesis. Whatever they were expecting (let's say it was 50% correct answers if it was totally random), they found 60% correct answers - and because of the number of people participating in the study, they determined that the chances that they would find 60% correct answers if the guesses really were random (i.e. there was no hint from appearance) would have been astronomically small. In this way, 60% correct can give incredibly convincing evidence that appearance is linked to political affiliation, even if that link is relatively subdued (after all, 60% is not that much more than 50%).
I don't think people who go around complaining all day about their electric field allergies are the type who care about their image in the community. Chronic victims crave attention, positive or negative - these people will no doubt end up on the local news talking about how stupid they are because of the way society has abused them over the years.
there are a number of astronomers interested in... any class of "thing we don't yet know everything about"
The thing I love about science is that it gives us a reliable, efficient method of increasing our knowledge about the universe. The thing I love about the universe is that it gives us an infinte number of things to learn about it. Indeed, there is no class of "thing we do know everything about". 1+1=2 used to be so simple, until the day someone discovered 1=0.999...; that changed the whole meaning of 1+1=2. Some people (probably most/.ers and all hard scientists) love to learn and discover - people like the GPP will just never get it.
Whatever happened to the Cool Robot of the Week site?
For that matter, why is the Singularity Hub engaging in an annual roundup of the best robots of the year? Wouldn't they argue such a roundup would only be useful on an exponentially accelerating schedule or something? You'd think they'd practice what they preach...
You know, I love NASA and the work they do, and I learned some interesting things reading that FAQ (particularly from the links to other active projects). Sadly, I think they take the wrong approach to deal with fucktards who think they should kill themselves and their loved ones to spare them from the apocalypse. Take this quote from the FAQ, for instance:
Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?
A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs...
Okay, time out. Yes, the answer goes on to explain that "you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012". The problem here is, no, they won't go and see for themselves. In fact, they won't read to the end to even see that. They will see "Earth has always been subject to impacts", and "led to the extinction of the dinosaurs", and fucking freak out.
Granted, my response would probably be something like "No, that's a stupid question, you're a fucking idiot, and you should kill yourself anyway", but if the goal is to save retards from themselves, perhaps NASA ought to write a FAQ for idiots and post it on www.thereisnoimpendingapocalypse.com.
I disagree with some of what you said above, and I agree with some of it. I'm not going to bother highlighting either as that would require that I re-read it and quote it, which might cause my ass to bleed from the self-importance and grandiosity of your post. Allows me to summarize for others who might wish to debate:
1: History is open to interpretation.
2: Entertainment is historically inaccurate.
3: History is about concepts, not facts.
Not a whole lot there for all the bullshit you just spewed onto the Internet. FYI, this thread explains in greater detail why you suck. Personally, my debating skills go right out the window when I have to deal with some fucktard with access to a thesaurus who thinks that style is more important than substance.
Interesting point; 39 days is around the limit of how long an average healthy human can go without food before they begin to starve - it's tough to be exact because it is heavily dependent on the person (i.e. fat stores), but it's almost definitely surviveable if they send healthy people who've been prepped with a little bit of chub. On the other hand, six months is quite a different matter... almost definitely not survivable.
Of course, running short of water or oxygen, or any number of other disasters (exploding and what have you), are still a danger - but any improvement in the odds of survivability is welcome.
I think this is cool as it will enable people skilled in Flash to stick to their tool of choice
As a person who doesn't own an iPhone, I think this is so completely wonderful that I'm near tears. I can't wait until the skilled Flash developers who made this possible start pumping out iPhone apps. It accomplishes two important goals:
1: Destroy the iPhone (you people are so smug! I'm happy with my BlackBerry, thanks)
2: Reduce the amount of time people spend developing Flash for the internet
Am I being unrealistic in hoping that it somehow puts Adobe out of business as well? I mean, maybe some kinda legal battle with Apple or something? Come on, it could happen!
if this could be scaled up to larger animals, perhaps the power would cease to be an issue
I say we strap a diesel generator and a surveillance suite on an elephant. It's my understanding that even if somebody notices him in the room, they'll still act like they don't.
I think the conclusions they reached are pretty obvious, but of course "obvious" does not mean "scientifically valid", and I'm finding myself somewhat put off by their methodology here... rather than testing new variables as you suggest, I'd like them to start by eliminating the biggest confounding variable I noticed: is it possible they've just shown that victory as part of a team results in different testosterone levels than victory as an individual? WHY would they mix in such an obvious factor?!? How hard is it to just test both scenarios as 1v1... shooting your friend in the face vs. shooting some stranger in the face.
I agree 100%. There are a lot of people on here crying about how "IE SUCKS! We shouldn't fix it, we should force people to use a real browser!" etc... You know what? If the reason IE sucks is strictly because of its crappy JS engine and standards incompatibilities, and Google has now effectively fixed that, then what's wrong with people using IE?
Don't get me wrong... I love open source. I love Firefox. I use both almost exclusively for work and for play. I know that Firefox is strictly superior in numerous ways to IE. That said, my company is heavily web-centric, and if Firefox has to lose some market share, even die out completely (which it won't... it's open source), in order for everybody to have a standards compliant browser, I say FINE. Besides the fact that we spend about 1/4 of our time coding specifically to IE, my next biggest opposition to IE is the fact that MS has it on lock-down... well, with this plugin MS has to share its control over IE with Google... if MS cuts out Google and this plugin doesn't work anymore, then guess what? IE doesn't work on any websites anymore, either. FAIL. Not to say that Google is perfect either, but I think an evil conspiracy between the two down the road is an unlikely scenario.
A web browser is ultimately just a means to an end. There are trillions of dollars tied up in companies who develop content for the web, and just a few companies who develop significant browsers for it. How many billions of dollars could be saved every year if we simply didn't have to worry about how badly IE sucks ass?
For the retards out there who still don't understand why this is the only logical position for anybody who isn't a browser developer, here's an exaggerated car analogy. Say Microsoft started making shitty cars, and Mozilla started making a better open source car... And then Google created a magical perpetual motion machine for Microsoft's cars which eliminated the need for any fuel and produced food for starving children as its only byproduct. Would we all be up in arms about "OH NOES everybody's gonna start using the M$ shit car!!!1111"? What is up with your priorities, Slashdot???
You can make any demand you want. I won't join you on this issue, however; the video was interesting (the guy is a good speaker) and I'm glad to have seen it. Also, the text loaded perfectly fine for me... is "this type of summary" any summary which your particular machine and connection has a problem with? Are you suggesting that Slashdot send a tech to your house to make sure every submission works on your machine? Are we all to make this demand on your behalf?
It is possible to create a system which is actually impossible to crack, short of social engineering or unprecedented changes in technology
...and that is exactly my point. You are falling for the age-old trap of thinking of security in purely technological terms - sorry but that simply is not how the world works. Yes, maybe you can implement mathematically perfect encryption... thus forcing an attacker to torture you until you give up your key. It's that simple. Extreme? Yes. Possible? Yes. So, is it perfect? No. What this does is erect a very LARGE speed-bump for an attacker... but it simply cannot be "perfect". Ever.
Well yes, it's a well-known fact among computer scientists (and apparently not by politicians) that the following inequality is a physical property of the universe:
physical access >> root access
What I was referring to was the potentially useful but soon to be pummeled security the laptop could have offered to students who didn't lose or wipe their laptops. Too bad too.
No, they have challenged people all over the world to find all imaginable security holes in THESE LAPTOPS. Nobody cares about Windows 7, everyone knows that there will be hacks galore available for the next few years (though maybe fewer than XP?). The point is that they've said "Hey, anybody want to prove you're the world's greatest hacker? Pwn our boxen!". Guess what? Somebody will... and it's going to be big news, and the Aussies have set themselves up to look really stupid when somebody asks "So I thought these were supposed to be unhackable... how badly do you fail at life?".
not sure, since they just recruited a lot of "free" (cost-diverted) man-power
Hmmm? By your logic, next time I install a good home security system, I should go to the nearest federal prison and challenge anybody to break in when they get out? I guess that'd be free but.... I guess I still don't see the point of it.
And don't discount the importance of it, either. All security, no matter what type it is or how it is implemented, is basically designed to slow down anybody who might try to break it. Indeed, security through obscurity itself does this, but the actual slowdown it provides is minimal, and it adds an extra cost: it is difficult to tell when somebody out there has successfully broken your security. By opening up, you can get a bunch of people working on your security to strengthen it, to help offset the few people who might be interested in breaking it.
Anyway, why would you go to such great lengths to slow down any individuals who might see a profit in cracking your systems, then go and piss off a bunch of 1337 haxxorz all over the world and get thousands of them working on the problem in parallel? Kinda defeats the purpose of using strong security in the first place, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
I also haven't looked at the study in detail, but I agree that there are certainly a lot of people who don't fit the generalizations one might conclude from the article and summary (which are both perfect examples of scientific reporting - i.e. they are shit). For example, I (over)use emoticons and exclamation points myself, depending on the tone I'm trying to convey, and how important I feel it is to get the tone right. Maybe it is a "feminine" trait to care about tone and trying to express it clearly, but obviously that doesn't require someone with that trait to be female. Don't conflate statistical averages (i.e. more women exhibit feminine traits than men, hence their designation as feminine) with absolute accuracy in judging an individual (i.e. because a person exhibits feminine traits she must be a woman). The former is useful when trying to target ads to millions of people and hoping to improve your click-through rate, but the latter is socially dangerous.
You do raise some interesting points about whether their model would be stable over time - for example, perhaps women are just early adopters w.r.t. determining how to express tone in tweets via emoticons, and stupid men will eventually figure it out and use it as well, destroying the predictive capability of that particular feature of their model. On the other hand, it would seem they determined their features automatically via data mining of gender-tagged data, so presumably they can continue to feed new gender-tagged data to their system to evolve the model to handle shifts in writing style over time, e.g. lowering the weight of the emoticon feature as men use it more and discovering a new feature to replace it.
Simply identifying all tweets from a sample as 'male' would yield a higher success rate.
Great contribution, but how do you propose you might improve performance beyond 72.8%?
See Figure 9, "Performance increases with more tweets from target use." Guess they thought about this for more than 5 seconds.
...what?
Don't you see? Now all they have to do is find the usage patterns they can't quite figure out and they'll know it's all you.
Statistical significance can't be pinned down to a number like .8% in the general case - statistical significance is hugely dependent upon the sample size. However, the parent poster is correct in that the article was referring to statistical significance, not necessarily to a huge correlation. Generally speaking, a study like this makes an assumption that there is no connection between appearance and political affiliation (i.e. the average accuracy of these guesses should be something like 50% - could be higher or lower depending on how the study was executed - if there were 3 possible parties to choose from instead of two for example, or if it was well known that 90% of the participants all belonged to a given party). They then execute an experiment which provides evidence for or against that hypothesis. Whatever they were expecting (let's say it was 50% correct answers if it was totally random), they found 60% correct answers - and because of the number of people participating in the study, they determined that the chances that they would find 60% correct answers if the guesses really were random (i.e. there was no hint from appearance) would have been astronomically small. In this way, 60% correct can give incredibly convincing evidence that appearance is linked to political affiliation, even if that link is relatively subdued (after all, 60% is not that much more than 50%).
I don't think people who go around complaining all day about their electric field allergies are the type who care about their image in the community. Chronic victims crave attention, positive or negative - these people will no doubt end up on the local news talking about how stupid they are because of the way society has abused them over the years.
there are a number of astronomers interested in ... any class of "thing we don't yet know everything about"
The thing I love about science is that it gives us a reliable, efficient method of increasing our knowledge about the universe. The thing I love about the universe is that it gives us an infinte number of things to learn about it. Indeed, there is no class of "thing we do know everything about". 1+1=2 used to be so simple, until the day someone discovered 1=0.999...; that changed the whole meaning of 1+1=2. Some people (probably most /.ers and all hard scientists) love to learn and discover - people like the GPP will just never get it.
Whatever happened to the Cool Robot of the Week site?
For that matter, why is the Singularity Hub engaging in an annual roundup of the best robots of the year? Wouldn't they argue such a roundup would only be useful on an exponentially accelerating schedule or something? You'd think they'd practice what they preach...
You know, I love NASA and the work they do, and I learned some interesting things reading that FAQ (particularly from the links to other active projects). Sadly, I think they take the wrong approach to deal with fucktards who think they should kill themselves and their loved ones to spare them from the apocalypse. Take this quote from the FAQ, for instance:
Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?
A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs...
Okay, time out. Yes, the answer goes on to explain that "you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012". The problem here is, no, they won't go and see for themselves. In fact, they won't read to the end to even see that. They will see "Earth has always been subject to impacts", and "led to the extinction of the dinosaurs", and fucking freak out.
Granted, my response would probably be something like "No, that's a stupid question, you're a fucking idiot, and you should kill yourself anyway", but if the goal is to save retards from themselves, perhaps NASA ought to write a FAQ for idiots and post it on www.thereisnoimpendingapocalypse.com.
I disagree with some of what you said above, and I agree with some of it. I'm not going to bother highlighting either as that would require that I re-read it and quote it, which might cause my ass to bleed from the self-importance and grandiosity of your post. Allows me to summarize for others who might wish to debate:
1: History is open to interpretation.
2: Entertainment is historically inaccurate.
3: History is about concepts, not facts.
Not a whole lot there for all the bullshit you just spewed onto the Internet. FYI, this thread explains in greater detail why you suck. Personally, my debating skills go right out the window when I have to deal with some fucktard with access to a thesaurus who thinks that style is more important than substance.
Interesting point; 39 days is around the limit of how long an average healthy human can go without food before they begin to starve - it's tough to be exact because it is heavily dependent on the person (i.e. fat stores), but it's almost definitely surviveable if they send healthy people who've been prepped with a little bit of chub. On the other hand, six months is quite a different matter... almost definitely not survivable.
Of course, running short of water or oxygen, or any number of other disasters (exploding and what have you), are still a danger - but any improvement in the odds of survivability is welcome.
Any sufficiently successful executive is indistinguishable from a psychopath?
Seriously.
Gayest. Article. Evar.
Haha, thanks but ultimately it's futile - too many fanbois around here.
I think this is cool as it will enable people skilled in Flash to stick to their tool of choice
As a person who doesn't own an iPhone, I think this is so completely wonderful that I'm near tears. I can't wait until the skilled Flash developers who made this possible start pumping out iPhone apps. It accomplishes two important goals:
1: Destroy the iPhone (you people are so smug! I'm happy with my BlackBerry, thanks)
2: Reduce the amount of time people spend developing Flash for the internet
Am I being unrealistic in hoping that it somehow puts Adobe out of business as well? I mean, maybe some kinda legal battle with Apple or something? Come on, it could happen!
if this could be scaled up to larger animals, perhaps the power would cease to be an issue
I say we strap a diesel generator and a surveillance suite on an elephant. It's my understanding that even if somebody notices him in the room, they'll still act like they don't.
I think the conclusions they reached are pretty obvious, but of course "obvious" does not mean "scientifically valid", and I'm finding myself somewhat put off by their methodology here... rather than testing new variables as you suggest, I'd like them to start by eliminating the biggest confounding variable I noticed: is it possible they've just shown that victory as part of a team results in different testosterone levels than victory as an individual? WHY would they mix in such an obvious factor?!? How hard is it to just test both scenarios as 1v1... shooting your friend in the face vs. shooting some stranger in the face.
I agree 100%. There are a lot of people on here crying about how "IE SUCKS! We shouldn't fix it, we should force people to use a real browser!" etc... You know what? If the reason IE sucks is strictly because of its crappy JS engine and standards incompatibilities, and Google has now effectively fixed that, then what's wrong with people using IE?
Don't get me wrong... I love open source. I love Firefox. I use both almost exclusively for work and for play. I know that Firefox is strictly superior in numerous ways to IE. That said, my company is heavily web-centric, and if Firefox has to lose some market share, even die out completely (which it won't... it's open source), in order for everybody to have a standards compliant browser, I say FINE. Besides the fact that we spend about 1/4 of our time coding specifically to IE, my next biggest opposition to IE is the fact that MS has it on lock-down... well, with this plugin MS has to share its control over IE with Google... if MS cuts out Google and this plugin doesn't work anymore, then guess what? IE doesn't work on any websites anymore, either. FAIL. Not to say that Google is perfect either, but I think an evil conspiracy between the two down the road is an unlikely scenario.
A web browser is ultimately just a means to an end. There are trillions of dollars tied up in companies who develop content for the web, and just a few companies who develop significant browsers for it. How many billions of dollars could be saved every year if we simply didn't have to worry about how badly IE sucks ass?
For the retards out there who still don't understand why this is the only logical position for anybody who isn't a browser developer, here's an exaggerated car analogy. Say Microsoft started making shitty cars, and Mozilla started making a better open source car... And then Google created a magical perpetual motion machine for Microsoft's cars which eliminated the need for any fuel and produced food for starving children as its only byproduct. Would we all be up in arms about "OH NOES everybody's gonna start using the M$ shit car!!!1111"? What is up with your priorities, Slashdot???
Apparently, the UK's royal traditions have finally caught up with them and everybody in a position of power there is retarded.
You can make any demand you want. I won't join you on this issue, however; the video was interesting (the guy is a good speaker) and I'm glad to have seen it. Also, the text loaded perfectly fine for me... is "this type of summary" any summary which your particular machine and connection has a problem with? Are you suggesting that Slashdot send a tech to your house to make sure every submission works on your machine? Are we all to make this demand on your behalf?
It is possible to create a system which is actually impossible to crack, short of social engineering or unprecedented changes in technology
...and that is exactly my point. You are falling for the age-old trap of thinking of security in purely technological terms - sorry but that simply is not how the world works. Yes, maybe you can implement mathematically perfect encryption... thus forcing an attacker to torture you until you give up your key. It's that simple. Extreme? Yes. Possible? Yes. So, is it perfect? No. What this does is erect a very LARGE speed-bump for an attacker... but it simply cannot be "perfect". Ever.
Well yes, it's a well-known fact among computer scientists (and apparently not by politicians) that the following inequality is a physical property of the universe:
physical access >> root access
What I was referring to was the potentially useful but soon to be pummeled security the laptop could have offered to students who didn't lose or wipe their laptops. Too bad too.
If I had been more clever, that's exactly how I would have phrased it. Bravo.
find all imaginable security holes in Windows 7
No, they have challenged people all over the world to find all imaginable security holes in THESE LAPTOPS. Nobody cares about Windows 7, everyone knows that there will be hacks galore available for the next few years (though maybe fewer than XP?). The point is that they've said "Hey, anybody want to prove you're the world's greatest hacker? Pwn our boxen!". Guess what? Somebody will... and it's going to be big news, and the Aussies have set themselves up to look really stupid when somebody asks "So I thought these were supposed to be unhackable... how badly do you fail at life?".
not sure, since they just recruited a lot of "free" (cost-diverted) man-power
Hmmm? By your logic, next time I install a good home security system, I should go to the nearest federal prison and challenge anybody to break in when they get out? I guess that'd be free but.... I guess I still don't see the point of it.
And don't discount the importance of it, either. All security, no matter what type it is or how it is implemented, is basically designed to slow down anybody who might try to break it. Indeed, security through obscurity itself does this, but the actual slowdown it provides is minimal, and it adds an extra cost: it is difficult to tell when somebody out there has successfully broken your security. By opening up, you can get a bunch of people working on your security to strengthen it, to help offset the few people who might be interested in breaking it.
Anyway, why would you go to such great lengths to slow down any individuals who might see a profit in cracking your systems, then go and piss off a bunch of 1337 haxxorz all over the world and get thousands of them working on the problem in parallel? Kinda defeats the purpose of using strong security in the first place, doesn't it?