I second that. R is terribly useful for the wide variety of libraries available and esoteric statistical procedures. But you would *never* want to write a long/complex program in R.
As you say, it's most convenient to work in some other language that's actually designed to be scaleable, object-oriented, and easy to debug. It's usually straightforward to call R libraries when you need them. I find that python+scipy+rpy is an almost ideal environment for day to day scientific programming.
If a company has no potential to issue dividend then it is worth nothing and should be shorted into oblivion.
Yes, and if everyone was perfectly rational, the market would be completely efficient and we would live in a utopia. In the real world, sudden price drops in small companies trigger panic-selling. Investors often move with the herd-- they don't have time to do all the research into a company's fundamentals and make an independent evaluation of a stocks worth. When there is a sudden price drop, all the think is "damn, better cut my losses now, because all these other guys now something is wrong with this company."
There should be regulation to make it exceedingly difficult to trigger panics by naked short-selling. Regular short-selling isn't so bad.
While true, your comment doesn't address the potential for naked shorters to cause mischief. By selling stock that they don't really have, they artificially increase supply, and if done on a large enough scale, the price drops.
Of course, the shorter didn't change any fundamentals of the company, so you would expect the price to rebound as the shorters are forced to cover their position. But take human nature into account. The sudden price drop can trigger panic selling-- basically the naked shorter is making a bet on their ability to trigger a panic.
The short position wins when the naked shorter buys up the stock at the artificially low price to cover their position. Small companies are the usual victims, since their price is manipulated more easily.
Sure, it's an unethical invasion of privacy, but some good could come from it if it revealed some wrong-doing. It's morally ambiguous, like most acts of vigilantism.
I hold to the principle that the more power someone wields, the less right to privacy they should enjoy. Presidential candidates should be exposed to the closest scrutiny of all.
So yes, this was a nefarious act, but not as bad as spying on an average joe.
For all those correlation!=causation idiots who don't like case-control studies, there have been some controlled studies on primates. This article just came out in PNAS:
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/37/14187
I'm against the kind of alarmism that has become rampant in nutritional science, but there is increasing reason to be concerned about BPA
First of all, the government is not some monolithic entity with supreme authority. If an official asks you to do something, you may or may not be duty bound by law or morals to comply. Do you think any FISA judges sat in on the meetings between telco executives and NSA staff? Would they have agreed with what was happening?
It would be too easy to give examples of atrocities committed by governments in the face of a passive public unwilling to question the authority of a goon-in-uniform. I won't bother.
To me, this smacks of typical left-wing "All corporations are evil, let's get 'em" mantra.
At least you've made your biases clear. But again you've got it all wrong: Traditional conservatives are as upset (if not more) by warantless wiretapping than "typical left-wing" types. The people upset by this are those few who still take civil liberties seriously; and even if you're not concerned by the ramifications on civ-lib, this cover-up reeks of corruption. It should piss you off that telcos can buy their way out of jail so easily.
Yes, the GP is not a troll, he's a karma whore. If Roland posts a science article, the whores will denounce it as fast as they can in expectation that they will get mode points, and those that actually read the article will support them later.
The sad thing is that 9 times out of 10 the article really will be crap. But I don't see any problem with this work. It's not revolutionary, but I wouldn't by any means call it bad science.
So, to the P&GP: enough with vague denunciations. If you have a problem with the article, what is it?
...and it was OLPC wanting Intel to cease it's production of more cheap laptops that caused Intel (who had previously done a great deal of good for the project) to step out 1. You are swallowing wholesale Intel's side of the story, which incidentally was released late at night before a weekend-- most certainly so that OLPC would not have time to respond promptly. You own a lot of stock or something?
2. What good has Intel done for OLPC? They were part of the project for less than 6 months (compared to many years for google et al.). They were working on an Intel version of the XO, but that is presumably scrapped. So what has OLPC gotten from Intel but bad press? Now that I think of it, maybe that was Intel's true reason for joining in the first place...
Ya, because why would anyone want to play a game where one side had an advantage? Like chess. No one plays that anymore. Who wants to play black?
Seriously, asymmetry is the point of trem. It's not just team play. It's team play with *really* different teams. I play trem a lot. I think aliens win about 2/3 of games. I don't care if it's not 50:50.
You make a good point. Once you get to sudden death, I think aliens win about 80% of games. But that's cool -- it just means hummies need to attack early. Hummies are usually stronger in the first two stages of the game.
As for your other point, most servers allow you to accumulate creds/evos by just not dying. So if you're poor, just play defense for awhile.
I'm trying hard to understand your sense of outrage. But I can't. All the article does is review some research showing that radiation exposure leads to fewer deaths+sicknesses than previously thought. No one is saying that thyroid cancer is great, or that Chernobyl wasn't a catastrophe.
The full quote, which you left out is
The iodine 131 that escaped from the reactor did end up causing severe health problems in Ukraine. It settled on meadows in the form of a fine dust, passing through the food chain, from grass to cows to milk, and eventually accumulating in the thyroid glands of children. About 4,000 children were afflicted with cancer. Less well-known, however, is the fact that only nine of those 4,000 died -- thyroid cancers are often easy to operate on.
I think the point of this article was to review some recent epidemiological research showing that radiation exposure is not as dangerous as previously thought. The point was not to show that radiation exposure is not dangerous. Spare me your counter-spin.
If you read TFA you would know that 86,572 people within 10km of the blast were followed up to the present day. Presumably, many of these people received large doses of radiation. Only about 700 of them have died as a result of that exposure. This isnt' the result of bad definitions or faulty statistics, as you suggest. It comes from a large epidemiological study.
Unfortunately, few people know this. Wikipedia claims 105,000 died as a result of radiation.
There are no apes in South America. On the contrary, there are humans in South America. I have even talked to some of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape
But point taken.
It's true, most of the viral hemorrhagic fevers come from Africa. But there is Machupo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machupo_virus
You didn't even mention Lassa or Marburg virus. But these scary viruses actually aren't that dangerous to most people. They are too good at killing, so they don't spread. I'm more worried about a flu pandemic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
And where did that originate? Probably SE Asia, but it's impossible to say. Probably not Africa, though.
...why is the military spending millions (MILLIONS) of dollars developing technology that is not effective on the battlefield, but very effective at oppressing a civilian population?
Bingo, that kind of attitude would have prevented Einstein from getting funding today for "gravity studies". Bad example. Einstein couldn't get funding. He had to work in a patent office after failing to get an academic post. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_einstein#The_p atent_office
Furthermore, I'm not sure Einstein would have required much of a budget by modern standards. Most of his work was theoretical.
While there is an understandable trend to downplay negative results, some journals now give special treatment to negative results. It sucks to repeat an experiment that fails, just b/c someone did it previously and failed to publish.
Your cynicism if forgiveable. But kidding aside, "getting more grant money" is a worthy goal. The payoff from basic research isn't visible to the average joe for 20-50 years (and sometimes never). Still, it's worth doing, and I enjoy the press releases.
Really, historical relativism is going way too far when it equates things like the Boston Tea Party with terrorism. Was Gandhi a terrorist from the British perspective? There are right and wrong ways to engage in rebellion. Read Henry Thoreau. Passive Resistance.
I blame our current administration for diluting the meaning of important words like "freedom", "democracy", and "terrorism". And I blame idiots for calling everything the US does "terrorism".
You have to be very warped to claim that an appropriate response to "economic imperialism" is killing >1000 office workers. Might you find another way to voice your displeasure with American economic policy?
And the invasion of Iraq is not a post hoc justification of the WTC bombing. "Military target" indeed. You're full of crap.
How many times does it have to be said that you can't give voters the ability to verify at home that their vote was counted for a certain candidate because it takes the "anonymity" out of the voting process. If you can show yourself, and someone else who you voted for, then people can buy/force votes. How many times? Too many, because you're completely wrong about this. A few different schemes have been proposed that would take care of this. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/new_ voting_prot.html
I'm struggling to understand the point of your post. You admit to not being well-informed about the Darfur conflict, so we got that out of the way.
Are you saying that a different standard of human rights applies to Sudanese villagers? Why? Are they not civilized enough for you? They don't have credit cards and eat TV dinners? It's a slippery slope to use different ethical standards to people on the basis of race or nationality; we know where it can lead. If I see an atrocity, I'm going to call it an "atrocity", wherever it takes place.
The Darfur conflict has been going on for a long time between semi-nomadic Arab tribes, and pastoral African tribes. Lately it's gotten a lot worse, for among other reasons, the scarcity of water and the competition that creates between the groups. I first learned about Darfur from this 3 year old article (still informative):
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830 fa_fact1
What makes this different from a run-of-the-mill tribe vs. tribe conflict is that the Sudanese government is taking sides, providing arms logistics and maybe manpower to the janjaweed. Consequently the African tribes have suffered disproportionately. It's estimated that 400,000 have died violently in the last 5 years. Tens of thousands are currently hiding out in squalid refugee camps.
The atrocities are well documented. These aren't just satellite photos.
I respectfully have to agree with another poster who recommended that you read up on a topic before posting. I didn't get much from your post (except slightly angry).
Slashdot Mirror
I second that. R is terribly useful for the wide variety of libraries available and esoteric statistical procedures. But you would *never* want to write a long/complex program in R.
As you say, it's most convenient to work in some other language that's actually designed to be scaleable, object-oriented, and easy to debug. It's usually straightforward to call R libraries when you need them. I find that python+scipy+rpy is an almost ideal environment for day to day scientific programming.
If a company has no potential to issue dividend then it is worth nothing and should be shorted into oblivion.
Yes, and if everyone was perfectly rational, the market would be completely efficient and we would live in a utopia. In the real world, sudden price drops in small companies trigger panic-selling. Investors often move with the herd-- they don't have time to do all the research into a company's fundamentals and make an independent evaluation of a stocks worth. When there is a sudden price drop, all the think is "damn, better cut my losses now, because all these other guys now something is wrong with this company."
There should be regulation to make it exceedingly difficult to trigger panics by naked short-selling. Regular short-selling isn't so bad.
While true, your comment doesn't address the potential for naked shorters to cause mischief. By selling stock that they don't really have, they artificially increase supply, and if done on a large enough scale, the price drops.
Of course, the shorter didn't change any fundamentals of the company, so you would expect the price to rebound as the shorters are forced to cover their position. But take human nature into account. The sudden price drop can trigger panic selling-- basically the naked shorter is making a bet on their ability to trigger a panic.
The short position wins when the naked shorter buys up the stock at the artificially low price to cover their position. Small companies are the usual victims, since their price is manipulated more easily.
I hold to the principle that the more power someone wields, the less right to privacy they should enjoy. Presidential candidates should be exposed to the closest scrutiny of all.
So yes, this was a nefarious act, but not as bad as spying on an average joe.
who watches the watchmen?
These time out as well...
It is a bit odd, isn't it, that ALL of the mirrors are timing out....
I'm against the kind of alarmism that has become rampant in nutritional science, but there is increasing reason to be concerned about BPA
Fact is, many people within the government and in the telcos disagreed strongly with what was happening. Hence the appearance of whistleblowers. This fellow lost his job and is now facing litigation to bring the wiretapping to light: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein Even Ashcroft thought it stank http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051500864.html
QWest refused to comply, and were duly punished. http://www.topix.com/denver/2007/10/nsa-punished-denvers-qwest-after-refusing-warantless-wiretaps-before-911
Acts of courage like that suggest that the decision to comply with the NSA's request was not as black and white as you make it sound.
It would be too easy to give examples of atrocities committed by governments in the face of a passive public unwilling to question the authority of a goon-in-uniform. I won't bother.
To me, this smacks of typical left-wing "All corporations are evil, let's get 'em" mantra.
At least you've made your biases clear. But again you've got it all wrong: Traditional conservatives are as upset (if not more) by warantless wiretapping than "typical left-wing" types. The people upset by this are those few who still take civil liberties seriously; and even if you're not concerned by the ramifications on civ-lib, this cover-up reeks of corruption. It should piss you off that telcos can buy their way out of jail so easily.
So, to the P&GP: enough with vague denunciations. If you have a problem with the article, what is it?
The linked article only gives Intel's side of the story, which was released late Thursday night before OLPC had a chance to respond. Here is a more balanced article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05laptop.html
...and it was OLPC wanting Intel to cease it's production of more cheap laptops that caused Intel (who had previously done a great deal of good for the project) to step out 1. You are swallowing wholesale Intel's side of the story, which incidentally was released late at night before a weekend-- most certainly so that OLPC would not have time to respond promptly. You own a lot of stock or something?2. What good has Intel done for OLPC? They were part of the project for less than 6 months (compared to many years for google et al.). They were working on an Intel version of the XO, but that is presumably scrapped. So what has OLPC gotten from Intel but bad press? Now that I think of it, maybe that was Intel's true reason for joining in the first place...
Ya, because why would anyone want to play a game where one side had an advantage? Like chess. No one plays that anymore. Who wants to play black?
Seriously, asymmetry is the point of trem. It's not just team play. It's team play with *really* different teams. I play trem a lot. I think aliens win about 2/3 of games. I don't care if it's not 50:50.
You make a good point. Once you get to sudden death, I think aliens win about 80% of games. But that's cool -- it just means hummies need to attack early. Hummies are usually stronger in the first two stages of the game.
As for your other point, most servers allow you to accumulate creds/evos by just not dying. So if you're poor, just play defense for awhile.
The full quote, which you left out is The iodine 131 that escaped from the reactor did end up causing severe health problems in Ukraine. It settled on meadows in the form of a fine dust, passing through the food chain, from grass to cows to milk, and eventually accumulating in the thyroid glands of children. About 4,000 children were afflicted with cancer. Less well-known, however, is the fact that only nine of those 4,000 died -- thyroid cancers are often easy to operate on.
I think the point of this article was to review some recent epidemiological research showing that radiation exposure is not as dangerous as previously thought. The point was not to show that radiation exposure is not dangerous. Spare me your counter-spin.
Unfortunately, few people know this. Wikipedia claims 105,000 died as a result of radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape
But point taken.
And don't forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_Nombre_virus, a type of hantavirus. Remember where that started? New Mexico.
It's true, most of the viral hemorrhagic fevers come from Africa. But there is Machupo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machupo_virus You didn't even mention Lassa or Marburg virus. But these scary viruses actually aren't that dangerous to most people. They are too good at killing, so they don't spread. I'm more worried about a flu pandemic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
And where did that originate? Probably SE Asia, but it's impossible to say. Probably not Africa, though.
...why is the military spending millions (MILLIONS) of dollars developing technology that is not effective on the battlefield, but very effective at oppressing a civilian population?
Protesters: Break out the tinfoil!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_einstein#The_
Furthermore, I'm not sure Einstein would have required much of a budget by modern standards. Most of his work was theoretical.
While there is an understandable trend to downplay negative results, some journals now give special treatment to negative results. It sucks to repeat an experiment that fails, just b/c someone did it previously and failed to publish.
Your cynicism if forgiveable. But kidding aside, "getting more grant money" is a worthy goal. The payoff from basic research isn't visible to the average joe for 20-50 years (and sometimes never). Still, it's worth doing, and I enjoy the press releases.
Really, historical relativism is going way too far when it equates things like the Boston Tea Party with terrorism. Was Gandhi a terrorist from the British perspective? There are right and wrong ways to engage in rebellion. Read Henry Thoreau. Passive Resistance.
I blame our current administration for diluting the meaning of important words like "freedom", "democracy", and "terrorism". And I blame idiots for calling everything the US does "terrorism".
You have to be very warped to claim that an appropriate response to "economic imperialism" is killing >1000 office workers. Might you find another way to voice your displeasure with American economic policy?
And the invasion of Iraq is not a post hoc justification of the WTC bombing. "Military target" indeed. You're full of crap.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/new
I'm struggling to understand the point of your post. You admit to not being well-informed about the Darfur conflict, so we got that out of the way.
0 fa_fact1
What makes this different from a run-of-the-mill tribe vs. tribe conflict is that the Sudanese government is taking sides, providing arms logistics and maybe manpower to the janjaweed. Consequently the African tribes have suffered disproportionately. It's estimated that 400,000 have died violently in the last 5 years. Tens of thousands are currently hiding out in squalid refugee camps.
Are you saying that a different standard of human rights applies to Sudanese villagers? Why? Are they not civilized enough for you? They don't have credit cards and eat TV dinners? It's a slippery slope to use different ethical standards to people on the basis of race or nationality; we know where it can lead. If I see an atrocity, I'm going to call it an "atrocity", wherever it takes place.
The Darfur conflict has been going on for a long time between semi-nomadic Arab tribes, and pastoral African tribes. Lately it's gotten a lot worse, for among other reasons, the scarcity of water and the competition that creates between the groups. I first learned about Darfur from this 3 year old article (still informative): http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/04083
The atrocities are well documented. These aren't just satellite photos.
I respectfully have to agree with another poster who recommended that you read up on a topic before posting. I didn't get much from your post (except slightly angry).
ape