I don't think the hit-rate after confirmation is known. This study ruled out only one of the potential confounding issues; there may be more. In the end, unless you can observe a planet's disk with a telescope, all you know for sure is that something causes periodic dimming on N stars, and you've ruled out a certain number of potential causes of dimming for those N stars.
It is a big number, but there's always the possibility that there are other glitches which could account for the remainder. Sunspots (on the distant star, not our Sun), flares on the distant star, variable stars, intervening objects in the hundreds or thousands of light years between us and the other stars, instrument glitches, I don't know what else, and of course I don't know which of these potential glitches have already been accounted for.
My slide rule killed no trees. It is made of plastic.
Actually, I never saw a wooden slide rule, except for the giant one that hung over the blackboard at the front of the classroom. All the others were made of plastic, metal, or bamboo.
1) The Bible, at least, never uses those terms (I don't know about other religions).
2) It's not clear that God takes up space; or putting it differently, that being omnipresent involves being in space.
Look at it this way: if you're watching (or even playing) a video game which involves a simulated landscape, how many pixels do you occupy in that landscape?
I think they call that hang until dead.
Hang, for me, is long enough that I decide to give up and re-start the program. At that point it doesn't matter whether it's forever. (Another definition of NP-complete...)
care to say why, or do you just like to gloat?
Disclaimer: I've used TBird for years, and I use Outlook at work. I much prefer TBird's layout and plugins (Nostalgy on TBird makes dealing with folders on Outlook painful). At the same time, Outlook's search is quite good, and TBird's is painfully slow and clumsy.
Perhaps a little OT, but: "Then comes the list of problems. It says, 'John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?' -- and I would explode in horror." (Richard Feynman, on a "new math" textbook he was reading)
American Sign Language (ASL) has a syntax and morphology as different from English as that of Chinese or Arabic. There are some examples here: http://files.start-american-si.... (I'm sure that's true of other sign languages as well.) It may be that these researchers do some kind of grammatical analysis (the links don't say), but it's highly unlikely that it uses the same statistically based MT approach that Google MT and other modern MT systems use, for a simple reason: statistical MT works off of bilingual parallel corpora (texts written in the two languages), but there's next to no written corpus of ASL. So they're probably translating word-for-word.
I'll agree with a lot of what you say, but I draw the line at replacing text with icons "Because text takes longer for the brain to process!" I doubt that, and at least in my case it's almost certainly not true. I've puzzled over a lot of odd icons, and even the ones that I can recognize I ignore for the text labels. (Heaven help me if they stop putting labels on the icons.)
Also, as someone pointed out above what icons make sense has changed with newer generations. My generation (Old Fogies) would recognize file cabinets and file folders; not sure that makes sense to the latest generation. But "Files" and "Folders" probably does, if for no other reason than the fact that those are still the terms used by computer geeks (or "Directories").
"H" looks the same way upside down. I guess that means if you flip your car upside down...
All seriousness aside, how much electricity does that lit-up logo use? I suppose it's not a lot, but still.
...and the disappearing scroll bars in Microsoft Office. Until you position the cursor in the right place, there is no scroll bar, making you wonder whether you're near the top, bottom, or the pane is showing everything and you just don't need a scroll bar.
Microsoft Office since the 2010 version has had an analogous problem. It used to be that the bar at the top of an app's pane would change color (dark blue to gray, for instance) when it lost keyboard focus. But now there's no such clue; many a time I've started typing (or worse, hit the key) when I thought the focus was somewhere else.
You're probably right about the shape of icons (I'm one of those old fogies, nearly old enough to remember a gramophone). But the flat icons don't help any with that. I noticed the other day that Outlook has yellow folder icons with no borders. The old icons were more or less the same color, but had borders. The new ones make me squint. There's a reason for that: human vision is sharp for black and white, but blurry for color. That's why ink-and-watercolor drawings work, even when the water colors go outside the black lines; our eyes (and brain) more or less ignore colored boundaries.
Of course menus don't have that problem. But don't get me started about the awful R_i_b_b_o_n.
"Tape Disintegration Threatens Historical Records... From the late 60s to the late 80s, much of the world's cultural history was recorded on magnetic tapes." Good heavens! Are the historical records of the early Star Trek episodes in danger?
Yeah, I live near DC, and I always figured I'd get a ticket for impeding traffic on the Beltway by refusing to drive more than 10mph over the speed limit.
Then I got a speeding camera ticket for driving 35 in a 25 zone. Four lane road in DC, no traffic, coasting downhill under a bridge. Sheez...
Slide rules are indeed a very old technology. In fact, the underlying principle goes all the way back to Noah.
After Noah got off the Ark, he sent the animals to go forth and multiply. And each month he went out to see how they were doing. As you might guess, after the first month or so there were baby rabbits, then baby cats and dogs soon after, and even a baby elephant after the first year. But month after month, Noah could find no baby snakes.
Finally it dawned on him that the snakes were cold blooded, and needed to sun themselves in order to get active. But the wet ground, and the lack of trees, had been perfect for bushes, weeds, and all kinds of plants, and the snakes were getting shaded out as it were. So Noah went back to the Ark, collected some timbers he'd used to strengthen the decks, and used them to build a table. And sure enough, the next month there were baby snakes! (scroll down...)
Which just shows to go, even an adder can multiply if you give him a log table.
If you read the press release from MIT, this discovery was about problems squarely inside P. Namely, they were (for a certain class of problems in P) able to reduce the complexity from N^^5 or N^^6 down to N^^2 or N^^3. So there would seem to be no implications for the P=NP problem.
"first check whether the lengths are equal": I suppose if the string length is marked at the beginning of the string, that makes sense. But if not (e.g. the end of the string is marked by a null byte), doesn't that just slow things down? Because you have to traverse the strings twice: once to measure their length, and once to check for identity. I suppose it depends on the constant factor.
"it might be better to compare characters at the end first, under the idea that similar strings are more likely to match at the beginning": I think that depends entirely on the nature of the strings. If they're from a language that uses suffixes, maybe; if they're from a language that uses prefixes (Bantu, Athabaskan), probably not. It also presumes that you have a pointer to the end of the strings, which depends on your data representation. For DNA, I would guess it makes no difference at all which end you start at.
This is one of many diffs (ahem) between DNA sequencing and natural language processing. Another is the alphabet size: DNA has an alphabet size of 4, while the alphabets (number of phonemes or graphemes) of natural languages range from a low of 11 (Rotokas and Mura) to a high of perhaps 140-something (!Xu, although the exact number depends on how you count things). Of course written Chinese and Japanese have much higher numbers of graphemes.
It's also the case that some writing systems don't mark word boundaries (Chinese, Thai for example), in which case the begin/end shortcut won't work at all. Which makes machine processing of such languages quite a bit harder. And of course word boundaries aren't usually indicated in fluent spoken language, except at phrasal pauses or the beginning/ end of utterances.
And finally, languages have a finite number of wordforms, although that number can be very high in languages that have lots of inflectional morphology.
That said, variants of the algorithms used for DNA sequencing are also used in computational linguistics.
One of the interesting things about a slide rule is that you get appear to get fractionally more significant digits at the 1-end than you do at the 9-end. That is, it's much easier to read off 3 digits at the 1-end than it is at the 9-end. But that doesn't really represent any increase in accuracy at the 1-end, it's just (afaik) an artifact of the way base-10 works. The ratio 1.11/1.10 (3 significant digits), say, is 1.0090909..., while the ratio 0.99/0.98 (2 significant digits) is 1.010204...; the ratio of those two ratios is 0.99889807... That is, a difference of 1 in the 3rd digit of a number near 1.1 is nearly the same as a difference of 1 in the 2nd digit of a number near 0.99.
A mathematician could probably put that more accurately, but it's sort of intuitively obvious when you look at a slide rule.
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I don't think the hit-rate after confirmation is known. This study ruled out only one of the potential confounding issues; there may be more. In the end, unless you can observe a planet's disk with a telescope, all you know for sure is that something causes periodic dimming on N stars, and you've ruled out a certain number of potential causes of dimming for those N stars.
It is a big number, but there's always the possibility that there are other glitches which could account for the remainder. Sunspots (on the distant star, not our Sun), flares on the distant star, variable stars, intervening objects in the hundreds or thousands of light years between us and the other stars, instrument glitches, I don't know what else, and of course I don't know which of these potential glitches have already been accounted for.
My slide rule killed no trees. It is made of plastic. Actually, I never saw a wooden slide rule, except for the giant one that hung over the blackboard at the front of the classroom. All the others were made of plastic, metal, or bamboo.
1) The Bible, at least, never uses those terms (I don't know about other religions). 2) It's not clear that God takes up space; or putting it differently, that being omnipresent involves being in space. Look at it this way: if you're watching (or even playing) a video game which involves a simulated landscape, how many pixels do you occupy in that landscape?
I think they call that hang until dead. Hang, for me, is long enough that I decide to give up and re-start the program. At that point it doesn't matter whether it's forever. (Another definition of NP-complete...)
care to say why, or do you just like to gloat? Disclaimer: I've used TBird for years, and I use Outlook at work. I much prefer TBird's layout and plugins (Nostalgy on TBird makes dealing with folders on Outlook painful). At the same time, Outlook's search is quite good, and TBird's is painfully slow and clumsy.
Similar to the theory of light bulbs as darkness absorbers?
Perhaps a little OT, but: "Then comes the list of problems. It says, 'John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?' -- and I would explode in horror." (Richard Feynman, on a "new math" textbook he was reading)
American Sign Language (ASL) has a syntax and morphology as different from English as that of Chinese or Arabic. There are some examples here: http://files.start-american-si.... (I'm sure that's true of other sign languages as well.) It may be that these researchers do some kind of grammatical analysis (the links don't say), but it's highly unlikely that it uses the same statistically based MT approach that Google MT and other modern MT systems use, for a simple reason: statistical MT works off of bilingual parallel corpora (texts written in the two languages), but there's next to no written corpus of ASL. So they're probably translating word-for-word.
I'll agree with a lot of what you say, but I draw the line at replacing text with icons "Because text takes longer for the brain to process!" I doubt that, and at least in my case it's almost certainly not true. I've puzzled over a lot of odd icons, and even the ones that I can recognize I ignore for the text labels. (Heaven help me if they stop putting labels on the icons.) Also, as someone pointed out above what icons make sense has changed with newer generations. My generation (Old Fogies) would recognize file cabinets and file folders; not sure that makes sense to the latest generation. But "Files" and "Folders" probably does, if for no other reason than the fact that those are still the terms used by computer geeks (or "Directories").
"H" looks the same way upside down. I guess that means if you flip your car upside down... All seriousness aside, how much electricity does that lit-up logo use? I suppose it's not a lot, but still.
...and the disappearing scroll bars in Microsoft Office. Until you position the cursor in the right place, there is no scroll bar, making you wonder whether you're near the top, bottom, or the pane is showing everything and you just don't need a scroll bar.
Microsoft Office since the 2010 version has had an analogous problem. It used to be that the bar at the top of an app's pane would change color (dark blue to gray, for instance) when it lost keyboard focus. But now there's no such clue; many a time I've started typing (or worse, hit the key) when I thought the focus was somewhere else.
You're probably right about the shape of icons (I'm one of those old fogies, nearly old enough to remember a gramophone). But the flat icons don't help any with that. I noticed the other day that Outlook has yellow folder icons with no borders. The old icons were more or less the same color, but had borders. The new ones make me squint. There's a reason for that: human vision is sharp for black and white, but blurry for color. That's why ink-and-watercolor drawings work, even when the water colors go outside the black lines; our eyes (and brain) more or less ignore colored boundaries. Of course menus don't have that problem. But don't get me started about the awful R_i_b_b_o_n.
Does Siri work with accents? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Tape Disintegration Threatens Historical Records... From the late 60s to the late 80s, much of the world's cultural history was recorded on magnetic tapes." Good heavens! Are the historical records of the early Star Trek episodes in danger?
Yeah, I live near DC, and I always figured I'd get a ticket for impeding traffic on the Beltway by refusing to drive more than 10mph over the speed limit. Then I got a speeding camera ticket for driving 35 in a 25 zone. Four lane road in DC, no traffic, coasting downhill under a bridge. Sheez...
Slide rules are indeed a very old technology. In fact, the underlying principle goes all the way back to Noah.
After Noah got off the Ark, he sent the animals to go forth and multiply. And each month he went out to see how they were doing. As you might guess, after the first month or so there were baby rabbits, then baby cats and dogs soon after, and even a baby elephant after the first year. But month after month, Noah could find no baby snakes.
Finally it dawned on him that the snakes were cold blooded, and needed to sun themselves in order to get active. But the wet ground, and the lack of trees, had been perfect for bushes, weeds, and all kinds of plants, and the snakes were getting shaded out as it were. So Noah went back to the Ark, collected some timbers he'd used to strengthen the decks, and used them to build a table. And sure enough, the next month there were baby snakes! (scroll down...)
Which just shows to go, even an adder can multiply if you give him a log table.
An editor might put a period after your 'vs'.
If you read the press release from MIT, this discovery was about problems squarely inside P. Namely, they were (for a certain class of problems in P) able to reduce the complexity from N^^5 or N^^6 down to N^^2 or N^^3. So there would seem to be no implications for the P=NP problem.
Prove it and you'll be famous.
(Or you can write a note in the margin of a book on algorithmic complexity saying that the margin is too small to contain your proof.)
Wait: finding the single longest strand is O(1). Sorting them is O(n), because you have to keep picking out the longest strand.
"first check whether the lengths are equal": I suppose if the string length is marked at the beginning of the string, that makes sense. But if not (e.g. the end of the string is marked by a null byte), doesn't that just slow things down? Because you have to traverse the strings twice: once to measure their length, and once to check for identity. I suppose it depends on the constant factor.
"it might be better to compare characters at the end first, under the idea that similar strings are more likely to match at the beginning": I think that depends entirely on the nature of the strings. If they're from a language that uses suffixes, maybe; if they're from a language that uses prefixes (Bantu, Athabaskan), probably not. It also presumes that you have a pointer to the end of the strings, which depends on your data representation. For DNA, I would guess it makes no difference at all which end you start at.
This is one of many diffs (ahem) between DNA sequencing and natural language processing. Another is the alphabet size: DNA has an alphabet size of 4, while the alphabets (number of phonemes or graphemes) of natural languages range from a low of 11 (Rotokas and Mura) to a high of perhaps 140-something (!Xu, although the exact number depends on how you count things). Of course written Chinese and Japanese have much higher numbers of graphemes.
It's also the case that some writing systems don't mark word boundaries (Chinese, Thai for example), in which case the begin/end shortcut won't work at all. Which makes machine processing of such languages quite a bit harder. And of course word boundaries aren't usually indicated in fluent spoken language, except at phrasal pauses or the beginning/ end of utterances.
And finally, languages have a finite number of wordforms, although that number can be very high in languages that have lots of inflectional morphology.
That said, variants of the algorithms used for DNA sequencing are also used in computational linguistics.
One of the interesting things about a slide rule is that you get appear to get fractionally more significant digits at the 1-end than you do at the 9-end. That is, it's much easier to read off 3 digits at the 1-end than it is at the 9-end. But that doesn't really represent any increase in accuracy at the 1-end, it's just (afaik) an artifact of the way base-10 works. The ratio 1.11/1.10 (3 significant digits), say, is 1.0090909..., while the ratio 0.99/0.98 (2 significant digits) is 1.010204...; the ratio of those two ratios is 0.99889807... That is, a difference of 1 in the 3rd digit of a number near 1.1 is nearly the same as a difference of 1 in the 2nd digit of a number near 0.99.
A mathematician could probably put that more accurately, but it's sort of intuitively obvious when you look at a slide rule.