I am sure that the fact that it is still possible for a person to grow up poor and with determination and hard work become rich is something that you either do not believe in or something that you do not believe happens.
Oh, it happens, it just doesn't happen very often. And a hell of a lot less often than it used to. The game is increasingly rigged, and if you don't see that, you're just one of the legions of useful suckers.
Of course arXiv is open-access, but only in the same sense as everything on the internet that isn't deliberately locked up. And in terms of academic publishing, "journal" pretty much implies "peer-reviewed" -- while it is true that not every journal is peer-reviewed, those that aren't peer-reviewed really aren't a meaningful part of the discussion. In short, arXiv isn't a journal at all (by any definition) and I don't think anyone involved with it would claim that it is. OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me at all if PRISM et al. would like people to think that it is, because that would be very useful for the anti-open-access-publishing propaganda campaign.
ArXiv is not an open-access journal. The phrase "open-access journal" has a very specific meaning, and using arXiv as an example of such does nothing but muddy the waters. Specifically, putting an article up on it doesn't really count as publishing -- you don't put "deposited on arXiv" on your CV. Open-access journals such as those published by PLoS and BMC have the same editorial and peer-review standards as traditional journals (higher standards, in many cases) and their success has scared the hell out of a lot of the traditional journal publishers, who are now scrambling to catch up.
Note that this isn't intended to sell arXiv short. It's a wonderful service, and I'm glad to see it expanding into many different fields. But it's important to keep the terminology straight. Groups like PRISM are already pushing the "open acess = no peer review" meme; don't play their game.
Yes and yes, of course. In particular, invoke any of the magic words "terrorism," "national security," "child pornography," "drug dealing," or "intellectual property," and the Constitution no longer applies. The kind of large-scale fishing expedition you describe is entirely in keeping with this policy.
If you think that only "socialists" do these things, you are desperately naive. Unless of course you're using the definition of socialism which seems to be quite popular among so-called conservatives these days, "any policy I currently don't like."
Responding to my own post to clarify: I should have said "... everyone agrees on the physical processes involved in pregnancy" above. As opposed to IOW, unless you believe that a fetus gains a soul at a certain point between conception and birth, there's broad agreement about what happens during those nine months; the argument is over what we should do about it. With climate change, you have a large group of people involved in the argument who deny that it's happening at all, and another large group who acknowledge that the change is happening but deny that humans have anything to do with it. It's more comparable to arguments over evolution than over abortion.
It's a little different from abortion, because everyone agrees on the physical processes involved. Same for gun control, Iraq and Afghanistan, and other hot-button issues. The arguments on climate involve fundamental disagreements about what's actually happening, not just whether certain things should happen or not. When new data can help clarify the "what's happening" issue, it's absurd to say we shouldn't bring it up because some people might get offended.
Not "I didn't see it so it hasn't happened," but rather "I couldn't possibly have seen it yet so it hasn't happened." This isn't solipsism, it's an accurate description of the way reality works.
I'll say it again: relativity is weird and counter-intuitive, but it's the best model we have so far for the relationship between time and space. There is no absolute time, only time within a given reference frame -- and on Earth, Earth's reference frame is the one it makes the most sense to use.
You can't say a lightning strike hasn't happened yet because you haven't heard the thunder.
But you can say it hasn't happened yet if you haven't seen the flash.
Really. It's not "it's happened, but I don't know about it." It hasn't happened.
Relativity is weird and counter-intuitive, but it's the best model we've got so far; certainly it seems to explain how time works a lot better than our intuitive, naive notions about simultaneity.
If you have a set of k elements, and you know the set of all sequences (k_1,..., k_m) such that k_1 +... + k_m = k for all integers m between 1 and k, then it's pretty easy to go from that to the set of all partitions of the set. Finding the partition function of the size of the set is the first step in the set-partitioning algorithms I know of; there may be other ways to do it, of course, but I don't know what they are.
Well, in statistics it's pretty common to fit models to partitions of data, and the partitioning process gets ugly when the data set is large (in terms of classes of data, not in terms of the number of points in the data.) And translating from partition numbers to actual partitions is trivial. Speaking as a statistician who only deals with number theory on the (rare) occasions that it's directly relevant to my work, I have to say that the existing partitioning algorithms, although they work, strike me as inelegant, and I'd be happy to have something cleaner that can deal with an arbitrarily large number of classes of data in "O(something small)" time. I can see this speeding up model selection problems at least somewhat, although most of the computational expense will still be in actually fitting the models and calculating the relevant performance criteria.
Speaking as a bioinformatician who does a lot of DB work (the only one in the lab who has professional DBA experience...) and I'll be the first to say that I can't see myself storing data this way. I'd be willing to be convinced, but as it stands, I don't see any use for this. IMO, YMMV, etc.
As an example, let's consider a forum. One row per thread, one column per post.
Um, okay, but why would you set your database up that way in the first place? I really don't see the advantage of this over a more standard table table having columns for, say, forum ID, thread ID, poster ID, timestamp, and content.
Think of it in terms of trespass. Trespass law says, basically, "It's a crime to be on private property if the owner doesn't want you there," but it doesn't say anything about why the owner doesn't want you there. So if I say "you can walk across my yard" and my neighbor says "you can walk across my yard as long as you're not wearing a red shirt," you're committing a crime if you walk across my neighbor's yard wearing a red shirt, but walking across my yard, you're fine.* The crime is not in your choice of clothing, but in being on the property against the owner's wishes.
*Except, of course, that you will be killed by the monster of the week.
... to see a list of the top ten errors in Britannica (or any other respected paper encyclopedia) corrected in Wikipedia. I suspect that it wouldn't be hard to make at all; the only challenge would be choosing the ten best from a very long list. But of course that wouldn't play to the article's message.
Have any of you noticed that every year they use a different set of reporting stations to "show" that it's the hottest year?
Perhaps if that were actually happening, we'd have noticed it. Since that's not what's happening, the only people who have "noticed" it are la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you crowd like you who will happily "notice" anything that confirms their existing biases, even if they have to make it up.
No it's not. 1998 was an outlier, as anyone with more than half a brain can tell by looking at the data. By definition, trends do not rely on outliers.
It's easy to make fun of Cletus The Slack-Jawed Yokel filing this kind of suit... but it's less funny when you realize that his rhetoric is no more overheated than what the US government is saying about Wikileaks.
Really? I would like to see some citations where DNA interacts with any other molecule by any mechanism other than enzyme-substrate noncovalent binding.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure that the fact that it is still possible for a person to grow up poor and with determination and hard work become rich is something that you either do not believe in or something that you do not believe happens.
Oh, it happens, it just doesn't happen very often. And a hell of a lot less often than it used to. The game is increasingly rigged, and if you don't see that, you're just one of the legions of useful suckers.
And your evidence for this assertion is ...?
Of course arXiv is open-access, but only in the same sense as everything on the internet that isn't deliberately locked up. And in terms of academic publishing, "journal" pretty much implies "peer-reviewed" -- while it is true that not every journal is peer-reviewed, those that aren't peer-reviewed really aren't a meaningful part of the discussion. In short, arXiv isn't a journal at all (by any definition) and I don't think anyone involved with it would claim that it is. OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me at all if PRISM et al. would like people to think that it is, because that would be very useful for the anti-open-access-publishing propaganda campaign.
ArXiv is not an open-access journal. The phrase "open-access journal" has a very specific meaning, and using arXiv as an example of such does nothing but muddy the waters. Specifically, putting an article up on it doesn't really count as publishing -- you don't put "deposited on arXiv" on your CV. Open-access journals such as those published by PLoS and BMC have the same editorial and peer-review standards as traditional journals (higher standards, in many cases) and their success has scared the hell out of a lot of the traditional journal publishers, who are now scrambling to catch up.
Note that this isn't intended to sell arXiv short. It's a wonderful service, and I'm glad to see it expanding into many different fields. But it's important to keep the terminology straight. Groups like PRISM are already pushing the "open acess = no peer review" meme; don't play their game.
Could this happen? Will it happen?
Yes and yes, of course. In particular, invoke any of the magic words "terrorism," "national security," "child pornography," "drug dealing," or "intellectual property," and the Constitution no longer applies. The kind of large-scale fishing expedition you describe is entirely in keeping with this policy.
If you think that only "socialists" do these things, you are desperately naive. Unless of course you're using the definition of socialism which seems to be quite popular among so-called conservatives these days, "any policy I currently don't like."
Responding to my own post to clarify: I should have said "... everyone agrees on the physical processes involved in pregnancy" above. As opposed to IOW, unless you believe that a fetus gains a soul at a certain point between conception and birth, there's broad agreement about what happens during those nine months; the argument is over what we should do about it. With climate change, you have a large group of people involved in the argument who deny that it's happening at all, and another large group who acknowledge that the change is happening but deny that humans have anything to do with it. It's more comparable to arguments over evolution than over abortion.
It's a little different from abortion, because everyone agrees on the physical processes involved. Same for gun control, Iraq and Afghanistan, and other hot-button issues. The arguments on climate involve fundamental disagreements about what's actually happening, not just whether certain things should happen or not. When new data can help clarify the "what's happening" issue, it's absurd to say we shouldn't bring it up because some people might get offended.
Not "I didn't see it so it hasn't happened," but rather "I couldn't possibly have seen it yet so it hasn't happened." This isn't solipsism, it's an accurate description of the way reality works.
I'll say it again: relativity is weird and counter-intuitive, but it's the best model we have so far for the relationship between time and space. There is no absolute time, only time within a given reference frame -- and on Earth, Earth's reference frame is the one it makes the most sense to use.
= 1/4 the size of Texas
In other words, just about the portion of Texas that's devoted to the "awl bidniz" right now? Convenient.
You can't say a lightning strike hasn't happened yet because you haven't heard the thunder.
But you can say it hasn't happened yet if you haven't seen the flash.
Really. It's not "it's happened, but I don't know about it." It hasn't happened.
Relativity is weird and counter-intuitive, but it's the best model we've got so far; certainly it seems to explain how time works a lot better than our intuitive, naive notions about simultaneity.
If you have a set of k elements, and you know the set of all sequences (k_1, ..., k_m) such that k_1 + ... + k_m = k for all integers m between 1 and k, then it's pretty easy to go from that to the set of all partitions of the set. Finding the partition function of the size of the set is the first step in the set-partitioning algorithms I know of; there may be other ways to do it, of course, but I don't know what they are.
Well, in statistics it's pretty common to fit models to partitions of data, and the partitioning process gets ugly when the data set is large (in terms of classes of data, not in terms of the number of points in the data.) And translating from partition numbers to actual partitions is trivial. Speaking as a statistician who only deals with number theory on the (rare) occasions that it's directly relevant to my work, I have to say that the existing partitioning algorithms, although they work, strike me as inelegant, and I'd be happy to have something cleaner that can deal with an arbitrarily large number of classes of data in "O(something small)" time. I can see this speeding up model selection problems at least somewhat, although most of the computational expense will still be in actually fitting the models and calculating the relevant performance criteria.
Speaking as a bioinformatician who does a lot of DB work (the only one in the lab who has professional DBA experience ...) and I'll be the first to say that I can't see myself storing data this way. I'd be willing to be convinced, but as it stands, I don't see any use for this. IMO, YMMV, etc.
As an example, let's consider a forum. One row per thread, one column per post.
Um, okay, but why would you set your database up that way in the first place? I really don't see the advantage of this over a more standard table table having columns for, say, forum ID, thread ID, poster ID, timestamp, and content.
AUPs and TOSs aren't contracts, though. The law hasn't decided exactly what they are. It's an area that will almost certainly keep evolving.
Think of it in terms of trespass. Trespass law says, basically, "It's a crime to be on private property if the owner doesn't want you there," but it doesn't say anything about why the owner doesn't want you there. So if I say "you can walk across my yard" and my neighbor says "you can walk across my yard as long as you're not wearing a red shirt," you're committing a crime if you walk across my neighbor's yard wearing a red shirt, but walking across my yard, you're fine.* The crime is not in your choice of clothing, but in being on the property against the owner's wishes.
*Except, of course, that you will be killed by the monster of the week.
Ah, thank you!
Most of those errors are very minor and could be typos, but there are some pretty big ones in there too.
... to see a list of the top ten errors in Britannica (or any other respected paper encyclopedia) corrected in Wikipedia. I suspect that it wouldn't be hard to make at all; the only challenge would be choosing the ten best from a very long list. But of course that wouldn't play to the article's message.
Humans lost a ton of land then too and we survived and did well as a species.
As a species, we survived and did well after the Black Plague, the Thirty Years' War, and the Holocaust, too.
Have any of you noticed that every year they use a different set of reporting stations to "show" that it's the hottest year?
Perhaps if that were actually happening, we'd have noticed it. Since that's not what's happening, the only people who have "noticed" it are la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you crowd like you who will happily "notice" anything that confirms their existing biases, even if they have to make it up.
The trend is flat since 1998.
No it's not. 1998 was an outlier, as anyone with more than half a brain can tell by looking at the data. By definition, trends do not rely on outliers.
It's easy to make fun of Cletus The Slack-Jawed Yokel filing this kind of suit ... but it's less funny when you realize that his rhetoric is no more overheated than what the US government is saying about Wikileaks.
How do you think DNA gets methylated? The Methylation Fairies?
Really? I would like to see some citations where DNA interacts with any other molecule by any mechanism other than enzyme-substrate noncovalent binding.
Plenty of citations to keep you busy for a while.
I think I know what you meant, but the statement as you made it was remarkably silly.