You don't have to buy anything, either. Just walk up to a representative sample of people who think that global warming is a threat to their economic interests, and say, "actually I think it's probably anthropogenic." You'll get your shock, hostility and downright hatred.
If climatology is the hardest field to do real science in today, the vested interests that largely control the US government have a lot to do with that. I really wish we could de-politicize the whole process, too.
Doug Comer explains this best, in "How To Criticize Computer Scientists/ or Avoiding Ineffective Deprecation And Making Insults More Pointed."
In recent exchanges, members of the faculty have tried in vain to attack other Computer Scientists and disparage their work. Quite frankly, I find the results embarrassing -- instead of cutting the opponent down, many of the remarks have been laughably innocuous. Something must be done about it because any outsider who hears such blather will think less of our department: no group can hold the respect of others unless its members can deal a devastating verbal blow at will.
This short essay is an effort to help faculty make their remarks more pointed, and help avoid wimpy vindictives. It explains how to insult CS research, shows where to find the Achilles' heel in any project, and illustrates how one can attack a researcher.
The Two Basic Types Of Research
Most lousy insults arise from a simple misimpression that all researchers agree on the overall aims of CS research. They do not. In particular, CS has inherited two, quite opposite approaches from roots in mathematics and engineering.
Researchers who follow the mathematical paradigm are called theorists, and include anyone working in an area that has the terms ``analysis'', ``evaluation'', ``algorithms'', or ``theory'' in the title.
Researchers who follow the engineering paradigm are called experimentalists, and include most people working in areas that have the terms ``experimental'', ``systems'', ``compiler'', ``network'', or ``database'' in the title.
Theoretical bandwidth is a chimera. All the cars on Los Angelos freeways at a given time, carrying boxes of tapes -- now that's some theoretical bandwidth.
What matters is achieved write and read capacity -- I believe the record is 14.5 Gb/s sustained.
"A big problem amongst educated people is to think that scientists are not prone to the same illogical behavior as average people. We think that they are immune to "following the flock" or otherwise being influenced by their peers."
That would be "educated people" who don't know any scientists?
InfoWorld relies on ads, and doesn't sell a lot to Joe Paycheck. Other studies show that offshoring does cost jobs. This is really no different than industry-funded studies that claim "X" is cheaper, stronger, brighter, etc. than any alternative.
Can it make a copy of itself? Or of all its components?
It's the World' s Largest Matrix Computation
on
The Math Behind PageRank
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For a different, somewhat more technical, but more succint discussion, Cleve Moler [of Matlab fame] wrote another view of this topic, about 5 years ago.
The math is the same, of course, but two points of view may provide a greater sense of perspective. So to speak. And Cleve is always worth listening to.
The postal method [Wikipedia] used in Oregon combines convenience with a paper trail. From the article:
Concerns have been raised about the possibility of election fraud in vote-by-mail elections, varying from risks of multiple voting to the destruction of mailed ballots, but actual incidents are rare in practice and not known to be more likely than elsewhere.
It is generally agreed that most people appreciate the convenience of voting by mail...
>...form a multi-partisan committee of volunteers fore *each* ballot box. >Split up your voting population to keep each box to under 1000 votes or so. >Do the count immediately at the close of polling, at the polling place
That's the way it was done in America, 50 years ago [I remember my mother dragging home around midnight, after re-re-counting.
>Clearly, anyone intending to corrupt a vote will prefer centralized >alternatives.
Gotta give those bastards credit, they don't give up easy.
>Anyone trying to demonstrate a fair and just election must prefer >the decentralized, hard-to-corrupt model.
What are you, a communist?;)
Actually, the worst part is the centralized aggregators, in either the old way or the new one.
... "The new camera will cost about $6 million to build...
When it is finished, the new camera will weigh about 2,000 pounds and take images using a billion pixels. For comparison, a nice, store-bought digital camera uses one one-hundredth of that amount. Workers will haul the camera to the telescope using an elevator in WIYN's dome.
Project scientists expect the camera to be operational as early as 2009."
Research presented at a major scientific meeting???
How about a list of the sponsors? The petrochemical industry spends millions each year on FUD. They can afford.
Clean air causes global warming! Right... Tobacco is good for your health!! Right... Only the Business Software Alliance can save us from Communism!!! Right...
It's a common observation, if you've ever done any benchmarking, that the weakest peice of a cluster is the bottleneck. It's conceivable that heroic programming could adjust for this, but it doesn't happen in the Real World [aka MPI].
Skype threatens the telecomm oligarchy. Solution: oligarchs petition government for the right to tax VoIP.
The US is becoming an aristocratic society, and the aristocrats are getting what they want: the right to collect fees from the populace, and to pay none themselves.
Investing in politicians pays better returns than investing in technology.
DOS [and Windows] commonly included undocumented calls, which Microsoft Office used to get good performance. For a while, Lotus and WordPerfect performance lagged, until their programmers figured out what was going on; then they would rush to create a new version of their software. Add to this licensing requirements to include Office with every copy of the OS, and the OS monopoly extended to an office pproductivity suite monopoly.
Adam Barr doesn't just work for Microsoft; he works for their Bureau of Truth.
Physiologists have known for decades that neural signaling involves a change in the rate of firing [which is electrochemical, not electronic]. Some computer or cognitive scientists have built discrete models, but the computer metaphor was only that.
Slashdot Mirror
"I read the article, but I really don't understand the consequences of the theory. What would it mean for there to be more than one time dimension?"
It would be exactly like this.
When the fabricator can fabricate a copy of itself, then comes the revolution.
You don't have to buy anything, either. Just walk up to a representative sample of people who think that global warming is a threat to their economic interests, and say, "actually I think it's probably anthropogenic." You'll get your shock, hostility and downright hatred.
If climatology is the hardest field to do real science in today, the vested interests that largely control the US government have a lot to do with that. I really wish we could de-politicize the whole process, too.
Doug Comer explains this best, in "How To Criticize Computer Scientists/ or Avoiding Ineffective Deprecation And Making Insults More Pointed."
In recent exchanges, members of the faculty have tried in vain to attack other Computer Scientists and disparage their work. Quite frankly, I find the results embarrassing -- instead of cutting the opponent down, many of the remarks have been laughably innocuous. Something must be done about it because any outsider who hears such blather will think less of our department: no group can hold the respect of others unless its members can deal a devastating verbal blow at will.
This short essay is an effort to help faculty make their remarks more pointed, and help avoid wimpy vindictives. It explains how to insult CS research, shows where to find the Achilles' heel in any project, and illustrates how one can attack a researcher.
The Two Basic Types Of Research
Most lousy insults arise from a simple misimpression that all researchers agree on the overall aims of CS research. They do not. In particular, CS has inherited two, quite opposite approaches from roots in mathematics and engineering.
Researchers who follow the mathematical paradigm are called theorists, and include anyone working in an area that has the terms ``analysis'', ``evaluation'', ``algorithms'', or ``theory'' in the title.
Researchers who follow the engineering paradigm are called experimentalists, and include most people working in areas that have the terms ``experimental'', ``systems'', ``compiler'', ``network'', or ``database'' in the title.
Read the rest of the essay.
Theoretical bandwidth is a chimera. All the cars on Los Angelos freeways at a given time, carrying boxes of tapes -- now that's some theoretical bandwidth. What matters is achieved write and read capacity -- I believe the record is 14.5 Gb/s sustained.
"A big problem amongst educated people is to think that scientists are not prone to the same illogical behavior as average people. We think that they are immune to "following the flock" or otherwise being influenced by their peers."
That would be "educated people" who don't know any scientists?
InfoWorld relies on ads, and doesn't sell a lot to Joe Paycheck. Other studies show that offshoring does cost jobs. This is really no different than industry-funded studies that claim "X" is cheaper, stronger, brighter, etc. than any alternative.
Can it make a copy of itself? Or of all its components?
For a different, somewhat more technical, but more succint discussion, Cleve Moler [of Matlab fame] wrote another view of this topic, about 5 years ago.
The math is the same, of course, but two points of view may provide a greater sense of perspective. So to speak. And Cleve is always worth listening to.
The postal method [Wikipedia] used in Oregon combines convenience with a paper trail. From the article:
Concerns have been raised about the possibility of election fraud in vote-by-mail elections, varying from risks of multiple voting to the destruction of mailed ballots, but actual incidents are rare in practice and not known to be more likely than elsewhere.
It is generally agreed that most people appreciate the convenience of voting by mail...
A link to the arguments pro and con is provided.
>...form a multi-partisan committee of volunteers fore *each* ballot box.
>Split up your voting population to keep each box to under 1000 votes or so.
>Do the count immediately at the close of polling, at the polling place
That's the way it was done in America, 50 years ago [I remember my mother
dragging home around midnight, after re-re-counting.
>Clearly, anyone intending to corrupt a vote will prefer centralized
>alternatives.
Gotta give those bastards credit, they don't give up easy.
>Anyone trying to demonstrate a fair and just election must prefer
>the decentralized, hard-to-corrupt model.
What are you, a communist?;)
Actually, the worst part is the centralized aggregators, in either
the old way or the new one.
Don't worry about this. By the time they're in the 8th grade, some of the kids know how to administer them, and it's good for their self-esteem:)
What about Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex?
"The new camera will cost about $6 million to build...
When it is finished, the new camera will weigh about 2,000 pounds and take images using a billion pixels. For comparison, a nice, store-bought digital camera uses one one-hundredth of that amount. Workers will haul the camera to the telescope using an elevator in WIYN's dome.
Project scientists expect the camera to be operational as early as 2009."
This was in science fiction about the outer satellites 40 years ago. When will you people learn to go to the original source??
So how many customers will switch from AT&T TO Qwest?
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was written by Republicans. It mostly benefitted their biggest contributors, the financial industry.
And of course the government did not bring Enron down, it was Bush's biggest contributor early on, it bankrolled him.
Research presented at a major scientific meeting???
How about a list of the sponsors? The petrochemical industry spends millions each year on FUD. They can afford.
Clean air causes global warming! Right... Tobacco is good for your health!! Right... Only the Business Software Alliance can save us from Communism!!! Right...
It's a common observation, if you've ever done any benchmarking, that the weakest peice of a cluster is the bottleneck. It's conceivable that heroic programming could adjust for this, but it doesn't happen in the Real World [aka MPI].
Skype threatens the telecomm oligarchy. Solution: oligarchs petition government for the right to tax VoIP.
The US is becoming an aristocratic society, and the aristocrats are getting what they want: the right to collect fees from the populace, and to pay none themselves.
Investing in politicians pays better returns than investing in technology.
Repeat the party line: only wages should be taxed.
Cross polination has been observed repeatedly, largely attributed to viruses.
Adam Barr doesn't just work for Microsoft; he works for their Bureau of Truth.
Physiologists have known for decades that neural signaling involves a change in the rate of firing [which is electrochemical, not electronic]. Some computer or cognitive scientists have built discrete models, but the computer metaphor was only that.
Just put a transmitter on the moon, linked to another one on a moon of Jupiter.