... de-identification is an area of active research, because we'd really like to be able to mine all that juicy medical record data without infringing on patients' privacy rights. The gold standard so far seems to be Vanderbilt's Synthetic Derivative, which cleverly alters individual records enough that they can't be traced back to the actual patient. If these records are then used to create aggregate data, then attempts to reconstruct patient records by "correlating different aggregated forms" won't work, because they'll just reconstruct the SD instead. It seems to me that a similar two-stage process could be applied in a number of realms, so Google or whoever could still do all the "Big Data analytics" they want without raising privacy problems.
Few ideas are more absurd. They will have to outlaw all recorded media and burn down the libraries. Make ignorance the law of the land.
"Right to be forgotten" is an odd phrase, but it doesn't mean anything like what you seem to think it means. Basically it just means you have the right to request that information which you have provided to a particular data repository be removed from that repository. IOW, no more "we own everything you post forever" policies. Seems reasonable enough.
The problem with this idea, which is relied upon by almost all Anthropogenic Global Warming models, is that it can't happen. According to the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law, unless the substance in question is an ideal "black body", which is a perfect absorber (and radiator) of energy, and which frankly does not exist, it's just impossible. Warmer objects cannot, and do not absorb lower-energy radiation from cooler objects.
Congratulations, JQP, you've gone from your usual "wrong" into "not even wrong" territory.
And you still ended up with Stephen Harper. I find a lot to admire about Canada, but I have to say, as a practical matter your electoral system doesn't seem to produce any better results than ours does.
We are as democratic as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
It may be mean-spirited of me, but I sometimes wish that people who say things like this could spend a year living in the world of their paranoid fantasies. If they survived the experience, I suspect they'd have a very different perspective afterward.
Again, you display your total lack of understanding of what an ad hominem argument actually is. That hole you're standing in is getting pretty deep; you might want to stop digging.
AwesomeMcgee isn't saying, "You're stupid, so your argument is stupid." He's saying, "Your argument is stupid, from which I conclude you're stupid." The first would be an example of the ad hominem fallacy at work. The second isn't.
And I have to say, the more you write, the more evidence you provide that his analysis is correct.
I will say this, I definitely received less bullying at a private school than I believe I would've at the local public school. I never felt like I should underperform in order to fit in better or to avoid bullying.
Then you were lucky. I was terrorized at private school. Once I switched to public school, the bullying didn't actually stop, but it got down to a level I could deal with and eventually learn to defend myself against. As someone further up the thread noted, it's a whole lot harder to get the administration to deal with problem students when their parents are writing the checks. There's a class issue at work here too--my parents were sending me to schools they really couldn't afford in the (mistaken) belief that I'd get a better education that way, and being a middle-class nerd surrounded by rich juvenile delinquents is really a special kind of hell.
I believe you, but I have to say, that's just bizarre. Entering someone's home should be a much more serious crime than, say, walking across the lawn without permission.
Posting AC because posting anything that even mildly questions GW will get your karma blown into the shitter.
Says the AC who's currently modded at +3 Insightful as I post this.
You and your crew of Tough Individualists Boldly Speaking Truth To Power have plenty of company. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of your groupthink.
You may not have noticed this (yet) but nerds are not above the law. "Can I do this?" is obviously the first question a nerd should ask in a situation like this. "Will I go to prison for doing this?" should be a close second.
Good thing you posted as AC, since you're giving away AT&T's proprietary information--and I'm not kidding, I'll bet their lawyers would make that case.
No such thing as "devolving." Any population-level adaptation over time in response to environmental pressures is evolution; given how succesful the H. sap. politicus subspecies has been in that adaptation (look at the re-election rate for incumbents) I'd say they're a nice example of evolution at work.
[sigh] I do so wish Slashdot would allow editing posts, at least for a limited time (say, until they've been moderated or replied to). C'mon, even Facebook can manage that.;)
But between you and 1000 other people who care about slightly different sets, much of it is stuff that someone cares about.
This. 99.9% (at least) of the entire internet is junk that any one person doesn't care about. But every bit has someone who cares about it (or did at one time) or it wouldn't be there.
Well. I opened the story expected some reflexive Facebook-bashing, and I wasn't disappointed. When are people going to realize that FB's just another internet company with a reasonably successful business model, and worthy of neither adulation nor hatred?
In the unlikely event that a large batch of Obama votes turn up in Virginia, Ohio & Florida as fraudulent and the electoral college swings to him... the presidency is his, concession or not.
People need to learn that statistics and polling are sciences.
There are, unfortunately, a large number of people, many of them on Slashdot, who will never, ever be convinced of this. They have this dimly remembered high-school "science class" idea of what science is, and that idea doesn't include uncertainty. You can often find them trashing large, well-designed studies by claiming that the scientists who published the results of the studies didn't follow The Scientific Method, which in their minds is this checklist which must be followed and... ta da! Science happens! And if you don't follow (their idea of) the checklist, then they know you can't really be doing science, because they memorized TSM in tenth grade and by God that's the way science works. And all those so-called scientists who aren't following the checklist? Well, they're just a bunch of puffed-up ivory tower eggheads who will say anything to get rich on grant money.
Identification of specific cases of this phenomenon is left as an exercise to the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you meet The President or Prime Minister in real life. They say something that impacts you so greatly, it changes your entire life.
I met the Prime Minister once, and it had no effect on my life at all. Then again, the PM in question was John Major, so not really a surprise.
... de-identification is an area of active research, because we'd really like to be able to mine all that juicy medical record data without infringing on patients' privacy rights. The gold standard so far seems to be Vanderbilt's Synthetic Derivative, which cleverly alters individual records enough that they can't be traced back to the actual patient. If these records are then used to create aggregate data, then attempts to reconstruct patient records by "correlating different aggregated forms" won't work, because they'll just reconstruct the SD instead. It seems to me that a similar two-stage process could be applied in a number of realms, so Google or whoever could still do all the "Big Data analytics" they want without raising privacy problems.
Few ideas are more absurd. They will have to outlaw all recorded media and burn down the libraries. Make ignorance the law of the land.
"Right to be forgotten" is an odd phrase, but it doesn't mean anything like what you seem to think it means. Basically it just means you have the right to request that information which you have provided to a particular data repository be removed from that repository. IOW, no more "we own everything you post forever" policies. Seems reasonable enough.
The problem with this idea, which is relied upon by almost all Anthropogenic Global Warming models, is that it can't happen. According to the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law, unless the substance in question is an ideal "black body", which is a perfect absorber (and radiator) of energy, and which frankly does not exist, it's just impossible. Warmer objects cannot, and do not absorb lower-energy radiation from cooler objects.
Congratulations, JQP, you've gone from your usual "wrong" into "not even wrong" territory.
And you still ended up with Stephen Harper. I find a lot to admire about Canada, but I have to say, as a practical matter your electoral system doesn't seem to produce any better results than ours does.
We are as democratic as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
It may be mean-spirited of me, but I sometimes wish that people who say things like this could spend a year living in the world of their paranoid fantasies. If they survived the experience, I suspect they'd have a very different perspective afterward.
Again, you regress to Ad Hominem [sic] attacks.
Again, you display your total lack of understanding of what an ad hominem argument actually is. That hole you're standing in is getting pretty deep; you might want to stop digging.
This is an Ad Hominem fallacy.
AwesomeMcgee isn't saying, "You're stupid, so your argument is stupid." He's saying, "Your argument is stupid, from which I conclude you're stupid." The first would be an example of the ad hominem fallacy at work. The second isn't.
And I have to say, the more you write, the more evidence you provide that his analysis is correct.
I will say this, I definitely received less bullying at a private school than I believe I would've at the local public school. I never felt like I should underperform in order to fit in better or to avoid bullying.
Then you were lucky. I was terrorized at private school. Once I switched to public school, the bullying didn't actually stop, but it got down to a level I could deal with and eventually learn to defend myself against. As someone further up the thread noted, it's a whole lot harder to get the administration to deal with problem students when their parents are writing the checks. There's a class issue at work here too--my parents were sending me to schools they really couldn't afford in the (mistaken) belief that I'd get a better education that way, and being a middle-class nerd surrounded by rich juvenile delinquents is really a special kind of hell.
I believe you, but I have to say, that's just bizarre. Entering someone's home should be a much more serious crime than, say, walking across the lawn without permission.
Posting AC because posting anything that even mildly questions GW will get your karma blown into the shitter.
Says the AC who's currently modded at +3 Insightful as I post this.
You and your crew of Tough Individualists Boldly Speaking Truth To Power have plenty of company. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of your groupthink.
But I'll bet breaking and entering is still illegal, even if the only reason you do it is to get your stuff back.
You may not have noticed this (yet) but nerds are not above the law. "Can I do this?" is obviously the first question a nerd should ask in a situation like this. "Will I go to prison for doing this?" should be a close second.
Good thing you posted as AC, since you're giving away AT&T's proprietary information--and I'm not kidding, I'll bet their lawyers would make that case.
No.
So sickle-cell is caused by ... what, exactly, an imbalance of bodily humours?
Well ... okay.
No such thing as "devolving." Any population-level adaptation over time in response to environmental pressures is evolution; given how succesful the H. sap. politicus subspecies has been in that adaptation (look at the re-election rate for incumbents) I'd say they're a nice example of evolution at work.
Shaping is nothing in proteins. Function is everything.
And proper function generally requires the proper shape, duh.
(Queue Music)
FTFY
(Cue music.)
FTFY.
s/expected/expecting/
[sigh] I do so wish Slashdot would allow editing posts, at least for a limited time (say, until they've been moderated or replied to). C'mon, even Facebook can manage that. ;)
Too bad that's 99.9% junk I don't care about.
But between you and 1000 other people who care about slightly different sets, much of it is stuff that someone cares about.
This. 99.9% (at least) of the entire internet is junk that any one person doesn't care about. But every bit has someone who cares about it (or did at one time) or it wouldn't be there.
Well. I opened the story expected some reflexive Facebook-bashing, and I wasn't disappointed. When are people going to realize that FB's just another internet company with a reasonably successful business model, and worthy of neither adulation nor hatred?
Perhaps he's saving that money for the legal fees. ;-)
Hah! Yeah, that must be it.
In the unlikely event that a large batch of Obama votes turn up in Virginia, Ohio & Florida as fraudulent and the electoral college swings to him... the presidency is his, concession or not.
That would be the largest legal battle the country has ever seen. Given that Romney's campaign shut down so quickly that staffers found their credit cards had been canceled when they tried to pay for cabs on the way home from campaign headquarters, I kind of doubt he has the machinery in place for that kind of fight.
Yep, we'll kick your asses like we did the last time. Please, please try to secede. It will give us a good excuse to take out the trash.
People need to learn that statistics and polling are sciences.
There are, unfortunately, a large number of people, many of them on Slashdot, who will never, ever be convinced of this. They have this dimly remembered high-school "science class" idea of what science is, and that idea doesn't include uncertainty. You can often find them trashing large, well-designed studies by claiming that the scientists who published the results of the studies didn't follow The Scientific Method, which in their minds is this checklist which must be followed and ... ta da! Science happens! And if you don't follow (their idea of) the checklist, then they know you can't really be doing science, because they memorized TSM in tenth grade and by God that's the way science works. And all those so-called scientists who aren't following the checklist? Well, they're just a bunch of puffed-up ivory tower eggheads who will say anything to get rich on grant money.
Identification of specific cases of this phenomenon is left as an exercise to the reader.