Given how little reliable information is available about the election most arguments are speculation, so analogies and generalizations are relevent until we have strong enough information to get some strong footing on all this. So far I've seen debates over the authenticity of previous elections, how accurate pre-election polls were, how fast you can count the votes, what to make of the high turnout, what demographics supported Mousavi, what groups are not being heard in media reports... I haven't seen a lot of reliable conclusions so I don't really know what to believe. He might not have the most informative post, but I found it insightful and relevent. Yes, comparing votes for Kerry to this election is a stretch by some means, but he doesn't make it look like more than it is.
As for how much evidence is needed, yes I understand it would be difficult if not impossible to prove the elections are rigged. What do you want people to do if they are rigged? If they should consider violent revolt, they have a responsibility to be certain that they are correct. Luckily, A'jad isn't an idiot, so if the Mousavi supporters consider violent revolt, if he can prove he was legitimately elected, he knows he must if he is to defuse the situation. Even short of violence, their protest is causing significant disruption, so they must be responsible and be certain they aren't causing trouble without reason. That said, things look fishy enough to me that I think it would be wrong for them to go home and let this go, but right now asking questions is the most they can really do.
It seems to me the argument is whether you wait for strong evidence to conclude fraud, or if you wait for strong evidence to conclude the results are genuine. He is arguing from a perspective statisticians can relate to- until you feel you can be sure otherwise, you should assume the null hypothesis true. He isn't saying there is nothing fishy, or that we should be satisfied with what we have - I think everyone wants to see more evidence. He just is in favor of waiting for that evidence before making stronger statements. It is always easier to escalate your arugment than to scale back and still save face.
I don't mean to speak for either of you, I am just saying what the situation appears to me to be. I prefer to stay conservative without further evidence, so I suppose I am not an unbiased observer, as much as I might like to claim to be. I share your sentiments, but don't feel confident enough in the evidence to lean to a conclusion just yet.
Yeah, there's a chance, but I wouldn't be pre-ordering my tickets to Jurassic Park if I were you since the last time we got a dinosaur from a microbe it took about 1.5 billion years.
The vast majority of microbes are not harmful to us. There are thousands of different species in a gram of dirt, and thousands of yet more species in another gram of dirt. If a significant fraction of them were harmful it would be impossible to stay healthy. I think our odds are plenty safe in assuming this microbe won't hurt us.
The people complaining about the ribbon without trying it are just looking for an excuse to hate M$. Have you tried to use the ribbon long enough to get used to it (not just long enough to decide you don't like it)? If you answered no, stop complaining.
I installed an add-on that put in a tab containing all the usual menus, so it helped the transition, but I found myself using it less over time. Just about every intuitive GUI I've used focuses on buttons over menus.
Did you use the buttons in pre-07 Office? All of those functions can be accesed through the menus, so if you used the buttons you musn't find the menus as useful as you claim. The ribbon just takes the menus and turns most of them into buttons. If you can click a button you can use the ribbon. Yes, you have to learn the new layout. No, it is not that hard. If you use Office enough that you think you can navigate the menus faster than someone can click a few buttons on the ribbon I think you can learn the new layout so fast next time you post a M$-bashing post you won't be able to legitimately mention the ribbon. If I'm wrong at least you have more material to work with.
Your post implies you readily dismiss responses like this, but I believe I am being reasonable in my argument. I admit I bash M$ for humor's sake, but bashing M$ for the sake of bashing M$ is an overdone meme here. You can make Microsoft look bad while being reasonable, it isn't that hard, so at least drop the trollish dismissal of everyone who disagrees with you.
You can make an analogy to illegal drugs, where the act of using the drug is illegal, and in addition the government tries to stop drugs from entering the border in the first place. The analogy makes sense well enough, but instead of filtering objects, you are filtering information. Although filtering out CP isn't a problem with most people, the false positives are. There will not be a perfect blacklist, and past and present ones have shown that they can get abused for political gain. One of the hallmarks of police states is government control of information, and one of the hallmarks of democracy is a strong paranoia of anything that could allow the formation of a police state. Unfortunately the police state mindset seems all too popular these days.
One day a kid goes with his parents to some lab, where they go to a back room. There are rows and rows of freezers, and a man in a lab coat leads them to a certain row and certain column, opening the freezer there. He takes out a plate with a dozen small wells in it. The kid is handed a magnifying glass, and directed to peer into the little wells. In each one he discovers a dot, about the size of a pin head. Except one of the wells is empty, so the kid asks.
"You were in that one", mom explains, "we had to decide which one we wanted to raise, and we picked you." His mom smiled and patted him on the head.
"But what if I was that one?" he said, pointing at one of the dots.
"Well, then we would have raised your brother there instead. But we didn't! We thought you were the most special," dad says.
"But what happens to them?" The kid points at the dots again.
"Someone will adopt them some day, right?" Mom turns to the scientist.
"Some people adopt. He had a 1 in 12 chance of being picked, but the adoptions come from any of the millions here" He waved his arm around at the rows and columns.
"Progress" by natural selection is not just about weeding various traits out, but also diverisfying the gene pool. Times are good right now so we can reduce how much gets removed by selection, which means we maximize the variety of humans around when something happens that puts our survival under threat. If people can reach parenthood today that couldn't hundreds or thousands of years ago, it is not that selection is being ignored, but that those traits do not necessarily have to be selected against right now.
Hell, when they can start letting you pick if you kid is going to be smart and/or athletic...are they gonna can that choice too?
That would cause serious problems. Parents would think that because they picked the smart one they don't have to do anything and the kid will just start earning Nobel prizes at age two. Even if they do raise the kid well, there is no guarantee of good grades. Perhaps the kid is smart in other ways, but the parents will become disappointed if the kid does not seem to be what they thought.
That gets to the biggest problem of all this: having a kid is not the same as going to the store and picking out a new toy. By letting you pick what kind of child to have you give people this impression, and we all know how often the shiny new toy ends up covered in dust on a shelf somewhere within a few weeks. Parents will grow bored if they picked traits just because they wanted a star quarterback for a son or a big-shot CEO that will earn the parents their retirement money. If you already picked what the kid should be like, you won't be happy with anything else. Some parents already try to force their kids into some sort of mold, but it would become truely scary if the parent was convinced science made their kid to fit that mold.
Part of being human is being unique and having free will. If you are a cookie-cutter child designed to be a certain way, you start to lose those two human traits. I wouldn't feel human if I were like that - I don't want to be some Frankenstein creation. But being some perfect creation of your parents isn't the worst thing: what if they mess up? Suddenly if you do poorly in school or you don't look cute enough or you end up with some terminal illness, it is becuase your parents screwed up.
Kyoto is not intended to solve global warming. It is meant to solve poverty. By putting pressure on developed nations, jobs will get exported to developing countries that have unused carbon credits or emissions allowances, thereby spreading the wealth. It is not broken.
Why do they make Hubble and Herschel sensitive to infrared light? I would think it most important to pick a spectrum that will provide the best information (i.e. instruments should be sentitive to gamma rays if you are looking for gamma ray bursts from supernovae); if that is their criteria, how does infrared help them see what they are looking for?
Because we all know from Douglas Adams that it takes so long to learn how to perform time travel you need time travel in order to do so. I don't recall what we're supposed to do instead, so just write 42 on everything and we'll be okay until we run out of towels.
He seems to overlook the fact that the most popular console is the weakest machine, and its popular games (Wii Fit, Wii Sports...) are simple enough that I am not sure how they could benefit from a hardware upgrade beyond input devices. Add to that the motion-control expansions for all the consoles and you have consoles with longer life than usual. Add in the fact that PC gaming tends to work better for the big-ticket games that push performace, and I see no reason why a console maker or game publisher would care to start a new cycle already (I'll leave it to other comments to provide reasons for Ubisoft to want this).
My impression of Congress is they spend their working hours doing nothing, and their leisure hours being wined-and-dined by lobbyists, so I propose we give them privacy when in session and watch their every move everywhere else.
Posted too soon: If I won't put it passed Ahmadinejad to indirectly nuke Israel, the Israelis won't either. When the lives of you and everyone else in your city are at stake, you aren't likely to take the bet that the enemy is bluffing. If Iran goes nuclear, Israel will consider a pre-emptive strike, and has every right to attack considering the Iranian president has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map.
We largely (entirely?) supplied Israel, so if they attack we are equally responsible for everything that happens, both in what we must do, and in who gets the blame for the attacks. Ahmadinejad might not want a direct nuclear war, but a more moderate leader would probably work with Israel on the nuclear program to defuse the situation. Ahmadinejad seems to be banking on either everyone bluffing or the US keeping Israel in check.
Iran funds/trains insurgents that go to Iraq to fight our soldiers. We can watch the borders, but we can't directly do anything to Iran about this short of declaring war (an embargo or similar would be saying they can kill our troops if they forgo product X). Iran actively supports Syria, which trains and funds terrorists in Israel. Again, we do little to Iran about this. Along with how much they get away with on their nuclear program, they know there is a lot they can do without our retaliation.
Plausible scenario: Iran simply needs to build a nuke that fits in a truck and hand it to Syria, then let them choose which part of Israel to detonate. Iran banks on us not having solid enough evidence to nuke them. Iran bets wrong and we trace the nuke to them, and any nuclear-related facilities and surrounding cities in Iran are wiped out in nuclear strikes. Russia and China get to decide what happens from there, being both powerful and willing to stand up to the US. Knowing what Ahmadinejad likes to say about Israel, I would not put it passed him to put nukes in terrorists' hands to attack Israel.
I know you were just going for humor on the Tor/Thor note, but their parliament does have some Christian members. Might not be the best country but they still allow some religious freedom.
I do not know what problems poor test-takers have, but I would think a no-surprises test takes care of most of it. My professors usually provide practice exams and go over the format and give us a good idea of what questions will be asked. Being allowed to bring our own equation sheets, we simply have to review homework, reading and any quizzes. Exam problems will often combine several homework problems, so you have to master the material to solve them, but there is nothing new and nothing surprising.
My point is unless you are in engineering/math/science you typically just need to understand the concepts behind calculus so you can understand functional analysis, finding maxima and minima, and simple differential equations. At least that is my impression of business/econ types. Should they need integration by parts, they simply have to get a computer do it for them. Maple is powerful, but it won't tell you WHY a firm maximizes profit when marginal cost equals marginal revenue - the student has to know the concepts in order to write a few sentences reasoning that conclusion.
If these students are required to work everything by hand, there is a chance they are being given the wrong approach. As an ME student, I value the ability to work everything by hand, but students requiring only a cursory overview of calculus will not remember or use many differentiation or integration methods. Teach them what they need to know - when you confuse people they give up and won't learn, and that is when they start using the calculator as a crutch.
For the people not in engineering/math/science, I don't see why they need to be deprived a calculator or similar for a calculus class. Either write problems that require the student to understand the material, or consider whether they even need calculus. I enjoyed learning it, but only a math professor has to know how to perform integration by parts by hand. If an introductory calculus course is all that is needed, concepts are more important than being able to perform the operations by hand. Business majors and the like just have to be able to see d$/dx, not freak out, and understand how to maximize $.
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Given how little reliable information is available about the election most arguments are speculation, so analogies and generalizations are relevent until we have strong enough information to get some strong footing on all this. So far I've seen debates over the authenticity of previous elections, how accurate pre-election polls were, how fast you can count the votes, what to make of the high turnout, what demographics supported Mousavi, what groups are not being heard in media reports... I haven't seen a lot of reliable conclusions so I don't really know what to believe. He might not have the most informative post, but I found it insightful and relevent. Yes, comparing votes for Kerry to this election is a stretch by some means, but he doesn't make it look like more than it is.
As for how much evidence is needed, yes I understand it would be difficult if not impossible to prove the elections are rigged. What do you want people to do if they are rigged? If they should consider violent revolt, they have a responsibility to be certain that they are correct. Luckily, A'jad isn't an idiot, so if the Mousavi supporters consider violent revolt, if he can prove he was legitimately elected, he knows he must if he is to defuse the situation. Even short of violence, their protest is causing significant disruption, so they must be responsible and be certain they aren't causing trouble without reason. That said, things look fishy enough to me that I think it would be wrong for them to go home and let this go, but right now asking questions is the most they can really do.
It seems to me the argument is whether you wait for strong evidence to conclude fraud, or if you wait for strong evidence to conclude the results are genuine. He is arguing from a perspective statisticians can relate to- until you feel you can be sure otherwise, you should assume the null hypothesis true. He isn't saying there is nothing fishy, or that we should be satisfied with what we have - I think everyone wants to see more evidence. He just is in favor of waiting for that evidence before making stronger statements. It is always easier to escalate your arugment than to scale back and still save face.
I don't mean to speak for either of you, I am just saying what the situation appears to me to be. I prefer to stay conservative without further evidence, so I suppose I am not an unbiased observer, as much as I might like to claim to be. I share your sentiments, but don't feel confident enough in the evidence to lean to a conclusion just yet.
Yeah, there's a chance, but I wouldn't be pre-ordering my tickets to Jurassic Park if I were you since the last time we got a dinosaur from a microbe it took about 1.5 billion years.
Oh well, I guess I can wait.
The vast majority of microbes are not harmful to us. There are thousands of different species in a gram of dirt, and thousands of yet more species in another gram of dirt. If a significant fraction of them were harmful it would be impossible to stay healthy. I think our odds are plenty safe in assuming this microbe won't hurt us.
The people complaining about the ribbon without trying it are just looking for an excuse to hate M$. Have you tried to use the ribbon long enough to get used to it (not just long enough to decide you don't like it)? If you answered no, stop complaining.
I installed an add-on that put in a tab containing all the usual menus, so it helped the transition, but I found myself using it less over time. Just about every intuitive GUI I've used focuses on buttons over menus.
Did you use the buttons in pre-07 Office? All of those functions can be accesed through the menus, so if you used the buttons you musn't find the menus as useful as you claim. The ribbon just takes the menus and turns most of them into buttons. If you can click a button you can use the ribbon. Yes, you have to learn the new layout. No, it is not that hard. If you use Office enough that you think you can navigate the menus faster than someone can click a few buttons on the ribbon I think you can learn the new layout so fast next time you post a M$-bashing post you won't be able to legitimately mention the ribbon. If I'm wrong at least you have more material to work with.
Your post implies you readily dismiss responses like this, but I believe I am being reasonable in my argument. I admit I bash M$ for humor's sake, but bashing M$ for the sake of bashing M$ is an overdone meme here. You can make Microsoft look bad while being reasonable, it isn't that hard, so at least drop the trollish dismissal of everyone who disagrees with you.
That is exactly how Chernobyl happened.
You can make an analogy to illegal drugs, where the act of using the drug is illegal, and in addition the government tries to stop drugs from entering the border in the first place. The analogy makes sense well enough, but instead of filtering objects, you are filtering information. Although filtering out CP isn't a problem with most people, the false positives are. There will not be a perfect blacklist, and past and present ones have shown that they can get abused for political gain. One of the hallmarks of police states is government control of information, and one of the hallmarks of democracy is a strong paranoia of anything that could allow the formation of a police state. Unfortunately the police state mindset seems all too popular these days.
One day a kid goes with his parents to some lab, where they go to a back room. There are rows and rows of freezers, and a man in a lab coat leads them to a certain row and certain column, opening the freezer there. He takes out a plate with a dozen small wells in it. The kid is handed a magnifying glass, and directed to peer into the little wells. In each one he discovers a dot, about the size of a pin head. Except one of the wells is empty, so the kid asks.
"You were in that one", mom explains, "we had to decide which one we wanted to raise, and we picked you." His mom smiled and patted him on the head.
"But what if I was that one?" he said, pointing at one of the dots.
"Well, then we would have raised your brother there instead. But we didn't! We thought you were the most special," dad says. "But what happens to them?" The kid points at the dots again. "Someone will adopt them some day, right?" Mom turns to the scientist. "Some people adopt. He had a 1 in 12 chance of being picked, but the adoptions come from any of the millions here" He waved his arm around at the rows and columns.
"Progress" by natural selection is not just about weeding various traits out, but also diverisfying the gene pool. Times are good right now so we can reduce how much gets removed by selection, which means we maximize the variety of humans around when something happens that puts our survival under threat. If people can reach parenthood today that couldn't hundreds or thousands of years ago, it is not that selection is being ignored, but that those traits do not necessarily have to be selected against right now.
Hell, when they can start letting you pick if you kid is going to be smart and/or athletic...are they gonna can that choice too?
That would cause serious problems. Parents would think that because they picked the smart one they don't have to do anything and the kid will just start earning Nobel prizes at age two. Even if they do raise the kid well, there is no guarantee of good grades. Perhaps the kid is smart in other ways, but the parents will become disappointed if the kid does not seem to be what they thought.
That gets to the biggest problem of all this: having a kid is not the same as going to the store and picking out a new toy. By letting you pick what kind of child to have you give people this impression, and we all know how often the shiny new toy ends up covered in dust on a shelf somewhere within a few weeks. Parents will grow bored if they picked traits just because they wanted a star quarterback for a son or a big-shot CEO that will earn the parents their retirement money. If you already picked what the kid should be like, you won't be happy with anything else. Some parents already try to force their kids into some sort of mold, but it would become truely scary if the parent was convinced science made their kid to fit that mold.
Part of being human is being unique and having free will. If you are a cookie-cutter child designed to be a certain way, you start to lose those two human traits. I wouldn't feel human if I were like that - I don't want to be some Frankenstein creation. But being some perfect creation of your parents isn't the worst thing: what if they mess up? Suddenly if you do poorly in school or you don't look cute enough or you end up with some terminal illness, it is becuase your parents screwed up.
Kyoto is not intended to solve global warming. It is meant to solve poverty. By putting pressure on developed nations, jobs will get exported to developing countries that have unused carbon credits or emissions allowances, thereby spreading the wealth. It is not broken.
Maybe it's time to exchange those savings for Euros.
Congress is all in favor of green tech, just not the same green as the environmentalists mean.
Why do they make Hubble and Herschel sensitive to infrared light? I would think it most important to pick a spectrum that will provide the best information (i.e. instruments should be sentitive to gamma rays if you are looking for gamma ray bursts from supernovae); if that is their criteria, how does infrared help them see what they are looking for?
Because we all know from Douglas Adams that it takes so long to learn how to perform time travel you need time travel in order to do so. I don't recall what we're supposed to do instead, so just write 42 on everything and we'll be okay until we run out of towels.
He seems to overlook the fact that the most popular console is the weakest machine, and its popular games (Wii Fit, Wii Sports...) are simple enough that I am not sure how they could benefit from a hardware upgrade beyond input devices. Add to that the motion-control expansions for all the consoles and you have consoles with longer life than usual. Add in the fact that PC gaming tends to work better for the big-ticket games that push performace, and I see no reason why a console maker or game publisher would care to start a new cycle already (I'll leave it to other comments to provide reasons for Ubisoft to want this).
My impression of Congress is they spend their working hours doing nothing, and their leisure hours being wined-and-dined by lobbyists, so I propose we give them privacy when in session and watch their every move everywhere else.
Posted too soon: If I won't put it passed Ahmadinejad to indirectly nuke Israel, the Israelis won't either. When the lives of you and everyone else in your city are at stake, you aren't likely to take the bet that the enemy is bluffing. If Iran goes nuclear, Israel will consider a pre-emptive strike, and has every right to attack considering the Iranian president has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map.
We largely (entirely?) supplied Israel, so if they attack we are equally responsible for everything that happens, both in what we must do, and in who gets the blame for the attacks. Ahmadinejad might not want a direct nuclear war, but a more moderate leader would probably work with Israel on the nuclear program to defuse the situation. Ahmadinejad seems to be banking on either everyone bluffing or the US keeping Israel in check.
Iran funds/trains insurgents that go to Iraq to fight our soldiers. We can watch the borders, but we can't directly do anything to Iran about this short of declaring war (an embargo or similar would be saying they can kill our troops if they forgo product X). Iran actively supports Syria, which trains and funds terrorists in Israel. Again, we do little to Iran about this. Along with how much they get away with on their nuclear program, they know there is a lot they can do without our retaliation.
Plausible scenario: Iran simply needs to build a nuke that fits in a truck and hand it to Syria, then let them choose which part of Israel to detonate. Iran banks on us not having solid enough evidence to nuke them. Iran bets wrong and we trace the nuke to them, and any nuclear-related facilities and surrounding cities in Iran are wiped out in nuclear strikes. Russia and China get to decide what happens from there, being both powerful and willing to stand up to the US. Knowing what Ahmadinejad likes to say about Israel, I would not put it passed him to put nukes in terrorists' hands to attack Israel.
I know you were just going for humor on the Tor/Thor note, but their parliament does have some Christian members. Might not be the best country but they still allow some religious freedom.
I do not know what problems poor test-takers have, but I would think a no-surprises test takes care of most of it. My professors usually provide practice exams and go over the format and give us a good idea of what questions will be asked. Being allowed to bring our own equation sheets, we simply have to review homework, reading and any quizzes. Exam problems will often combine several homework problems, so you have to master the material to solve them, but there is nothing new and nothing surprising.
My point is unless you are in engineering/math/science you typically just need to understand the concepts behind calculus so you can understand functional analysis, finding maxima and minima, and simple differential equations. At least that is my impression of business/econ types. Should they need integration by parts, they simply have to get a computer do it for them. Maple is powerful, but it won't tell you WHY a firm maximizes profit when marginal cost equals marginal revenue - the student has to know the concepts in order to write a few sentences reasoning that conclusion.
If these students are required to work everything by hand, there is a chance they are being given the wrong approach. As an ME student, I value the ability to work everything by hand, but students requiring only a cursory overview of calculus will not remember or use many differentiation or integration methods. Teach them what they need to know - when you confuse people they give up and won't learn, and that is when they start using the calculator as a crutch.
For the people not in engineering/math/science, I don't see why they need to be deprived a calculator or similar for a calculus class. Either write problems that require the student to understand the material, or consider whether they even need calculus. I enjoyed learning it, but only a math professor has to know how to perform integration by parts by hand. If an introductory calculus course is all that is needed, concepts are more important than being able to perform the operations by hand. Business majors and the like just have to be able to see d$/dx, not freak out, and understand how to maximize $.
Hey, I've learned a lot more Spanish from Dora the Explorer than the Jonas Brothers will ever know!
RIAA or MPAA?