No, the real question is.......why the fuck should we care?
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them. The loss of even hundreds of thousands of species is statistically insignificant.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
Biodiversity is very important. Aside from the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen there are practical implications. For example many of the medicines we use today were discovered by people going into the Amazon, brining back everything they could find, and seeing which of the weird things they found could fight different illnesses on a petri dish. Lose the diversity and you lose all those undiscovered opportunities. In a more general sense loss of diversity within a species leads to increased susceptibility to stressors, this may impact upon economically important species (known as well as unknown) as well as rare frogs.
Also, you don't know what statistically significant means so don't use that term. While the loss of hundreds of thousands of species is important is itself, but is more significant as a marker of the loss of environment leading to the losses of all those undiscovered species and damage to an ecosystem that we rely on but don't really understand.
I wonder how governments will attempt to regulate space once it becomes a truly commercial frontier (I mean aside from orbit). On the one hand, I'm against regulations on what is essentially just an un-owned patch of "space". On the other hand though...it'd be scary to have any company that can afford to send things to the moon or into space. I mean, that much equipment just floating around out there and something's bound to go catasrophically wrong.
I think the current row over who owns the Arctic is pretty indicative of what will happen on the moon. Unless some deal similar to the Antarctic treaty that bans mining and military use can be created and ratified (my quick Google search has turned up the Moon treaty which has not been ratified by any space-going nation).
Your solution is a good one, but one can nitpick on everything in security, I'm guessing the medical information probably have enough information in it too identify subjects. Web search logs usually help you to identify the user if you have enough data. (see AOL logs debacle).
Possibly, although at the moment we keep things like test scores and self-reported health and demographic information so it would be very hard to identify subjects. We are getting into whole genome analysis though, which researchers will need and will be potentially identifiable, so somebody is going to have to think very hard about that. Fortunately it's not my problem.
Truecrypt Whole Disk Encryption has less than 1% over head. I can't see the problem. Surely the patent and IP information security outweighs this minimal overhead.
I work in a similar environment and we use truecrypt when transferring between labs and for data collection. For all other purposes we don't encrypt at all. What we do is keep medical information on a secure network but stored with with no personal identifiers, only a study id. The personal data as far as we need it is kept in a separate location on a machine that is not networked and is physically protected so that only the study admin team can use it (ie the same level of security as the paper records). The medical records and the personal identifiers do not usually need to be kept together for research purposes.
glad to see we have our priorities sorted. cure for cancer? cure for aids? clean energy? nope, preserving gaming "history"
Just so you know medical research got direct funding of about two billion pounds last year from government. I don't know how much of this will be diverted to the gaming museum, but if you're right it's gonna be awesome!
What we really need in order to 'preserve' video game culture is not some expensive museum space full of trite screenshots of software still under copyright that nobody is legally allowed to play themselves, but we need a relaxation of copyright and a strengthening of fair use so that old cultural artifacts that are no longer profitable and would otherwise be forgotten are defaulted to the public domain.
You're right about copyright etc but there's more to a museum than just displaying old stuff. The curators have an important job of putting everything in context, finding the really interesting stuff and giving it prominence, and providing the historical and cultural background behind each gaming milestone. And make it interesting for old gamers and people who aren't old gamers.
So I would expect the museum to show me stuff I'd never think of looking for on my own, to talk about who made the games, who was playing them, where they were played etc, and to help my kids to understand more about how I grew up.
After a while you would become depressed because your money is the wrong color.
man have simply not evolved to be happy. depression is clearly not a new fad.
People hated their jobs in the 12th century and still do.
That's absolutely true - but I think an extra problem for these guys is being stuck somewhere without the usual things we can try to make depressed people feel better (like go on holiday, buy a dog, get some exercise, change your life, etc), and the danger of somebody mission critical being out of action for a prolonged period.
So while it's an old problem - I think it has new complications. I wonder if there's any historical documentation of depression on long sea voyages and what was done about it.
Boot time is a pain that we have had since the first IBM PC was released. And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.
I don't mind boot time so much - what really gets on my nerves is when a machine comes on, pretends it's ready but is then maybe five minutes doing other stuff before you can actually use it while you stare at the screen and frustratedly try to click on things. That's especially bad in the roaming profile scenario you mentioned.
OK first thanks for taking me seriously. I am actually quite flattered that there is now
a webpage dedicated to describing how much of an idiot I am.
I also hope you have the good grace to post my rebuttal to both your arguments, first
that science cannot be conducted without experiments, and second that correlation does
not equal causation. You have my permission to publish this so long as you do so in its
entirity.
I'm going to give you a short CV, just so you know (not sure it's relevant but anyway).
I have a degree in mathematics, a masters degree in mathematical statistics, a PhD in
evolutionary biology (my thesis topic was along the lines of 'what can we infer from
comparisons of gene orders of extant species') and I've worked for four years as an
epidemiologist on a observational study of health and cognition. It's fair to say that
over the past ten years I've thought about the ideas of correlation, causation, and inference for a living. If I
had any doubt that what I was doing was fundementally flawed from a scientific point of
view I wouldn't do it.
Regarding your Saturn example, well you've managed to find two things that increase with
time, but are quite clearly unrelated in every other regard. You have calculated their
correlation as 0.88, suggested that I would draw the conclusion that one causes the
other, which is plainly absurd, therefore my argument that correlation implies causation
is incorrect.
There are two ways I will respond.
The most obvious is that you did not read my argument. I claimed A->B, OR B->A, OR C->A
and C->B. Clearly here we have a correlation, so one of these must be true. A->B and B
->A are both obviously silly, so we are left with C->A and C->B. Well what could 'C' be?
Here it helps that you've not plotted A vs B as would be traditional to illustrate a
correlation, but you've helpfully plotted A and B against a third factor, 'time'. In
this case C=time, the passing of time has caused the stock market to increase and has
caused Saturn to do whatever it did (I'm not an astronomer). If you do a regression of A
vs B adjusting for time I'd be pretty sure you'll see the correlation would be gone.
Second, (and this is a more minor subtle complaint) there is the issue of statistical
significance. I don't know but I'd bet the correlation you showed does not hold much
outside of the small window you've showed it, and that you've selected this particular
example to illustrate your point. If you give me any two time series I could probably
find a small window in which they are both increasing, so that correlation is
statistically meaningless because of multiple testing issues (note I qualified my initial
claim with the words 'statistically significant')
Next, I absolutely agree with you that experimentation is the gold standard of scientific
research. I cannot accept however that it is the only way to draw conclusions. Much of
science cannot be tested experimentally because it would be impractical, unethical (as
with most of the work I do) or just plain silly. My earlier example 'lung cancer is
caused by smoking' is a good example of a purely observation finding that was totally
unexpected at the time and was found simply on the basis of observing the smoking
patterns of people in lung cancer wards compared with others. The big prospective
studies came much later, and experiments will never be done, yet I'm sure you would
accept this finding as true.
I also agree with you that most science posted on Slashdot is rubbish, for a variety of
reasons, mostly because science progresses in very small increments, and so on its own no
paper is ever really newsworthy, and has to have its significance bloated out of all
proportion to get into the news (ie they fail the 'so what' test). However faulty
causation is not often the culprit, because most scientists are very good at adjusting
for potential confounders in their relationships (and journals are very go
It doesn't mean existence in the context of this article, it means the probability of one event (voting) is higher given the occurrence of another (similar face). So a traditional Pearson correlation wouldn't be applicable, but a tetrachoric correlation can be calculated quite adequately. There is plenty of room for causal relationships to be implied.
Slashdotters are right to point out the Correlation is not, and never will be causation. Never, never, never, never, never. If you want to show causation, then you must have a model and you must subject it to experiment. Experiment! Not statistical mumbo-jumbo.
I think you are wrong. Epidemiology and observational science have given up a lot without the need for experimentation (we know smoking causes lung cancer, though this has never been directly established through an experiment, since it would be massively unethical). Correlation does imply causation, as I've pointed out in an earlier comment, the hard part is working out what the causal relationships are (ie A->B, B->A or C->A and C->B, these are the ONLY explanations for statistically significant correlation).
The reverse possibility B->A here is nonsense, because voting patterns cannot affect your looks, and the way this study was conducted (you can read the details) pretty well rules out the confounding factor 'C', leaving us with A->B as the only plausible explanation.
I'd like to see you try to refute this (without resorting to insults or rhetoric), particularly if you can think of a way for variables to be correlated without some form of causal relationship as I've described.
But in order to pinpoint C, you have to work back from A and B via E,F and D. Verifying a C is relatively easy. Finding C can be very nasty. And if there are loops involved it can be a lot nastier.
Sure, correlation implies causation. But which one?
You're right of course, but you don't have to understand the complete chain to discover C. It helps to think it through obviously, but you can easily try adjusting for things (in this case like demographic factors, genetics, etc) until you hit one that accounts for the association, and then work forwards to try to work out why, although understanding why (ie knowing D,E,F) is not often necessary, (for example if C is genetic).
Where does the correlation come from then? Unless you suggest that people who look the same ACTUALLY have the same political views.
The correlationisnotcausation tag really winds me up because correlation DOES imply causation. If A and B are correlated then either A causes B, B causes A, or C causes both A and B (or it's a chance finding but that's what p-values are for). So once you have a correlation its just a case of working out which causal relationship is true. I'll leave this specific case as an exercise for the reader.
I'd like to see it made a felony to have a computer instigate a call. Who's with me?
How about a mandatory nominal connection fee (like 5 cents or something) per call, paid from the caller to the reciever. wouldn't affect your grandmother calling to wish you a merry christmas, but would probably deter cold callers making '00000s of calls.
I thing the point of this is to keep the rocket engines completely separate from the rover.
Too bad the sky crane couldn't drop the rover, then land somewhere to become a stationary observation station. Turn it over to a university to operate for whatever data they can get from it. Seems a waste just crash it somewhere. There wouldn't be a lot of room in there but it seems like you'd want to put instruments on just about anything you're going to send all the way to Mars.
Crash it fast enough and you might get an interesting fresh impact crater to explore. Don't know if that's possible though.
How many stories about companies, government agencies, etc spying on your profile with negative consequences do you need before you learn to stay away from social networking sites.
The brain is different. I don't even understand how basic things like memory work. Why do some things stick easily in your mind, and others continue to drop out despite repeated attempts to remember them?
Your argument seems to be "we don't understand it all now, therefore it will never be understood". Or even "I don't understand it all now, therefore nobody ever will." This seems a bit short sighted. I know how a neuron works, I know how learning works at the physiological level, and I understand neurodegeneration. There are people around who know how memory works. It's just that at the present time we don't have the technology to replicate or fix it. There are hardware simulations of mammal higher cortical functions, but they aren't yet powerful enough, (which I why I call general or strong AI an engineering problem not a scientific one).
Can you really explain everything a computer does? That would surprise me. I'm sure you would have to look most of it up. The brain is just a big biological computer - just one for which we don't have the manual. General AI isn't really a scientific or philosophical problem any more than it is an engineering one.
What? The only piece of information anybody would need to do any of that is either your name or your number plates. Neither of these things are things you can keep private.
Seriously, how could improved privacy prevent any of the above?
I'm still using a credit card and say yes to pretty much every cell phone or application EULA, but I think these are less likely to hit me in the long run than publicly available and mineable personal information over which I essentially have no control.
Well there's at least two other people who don't use facebook, the parent post and the moderator who gave it an insightful.
If you want to protect your privacy, then fine, but do it for some actual reason, not just for the rather nebulous abstract concept of 'privacy' in itself, which is actually fairly meaningless if you think about your interactions with the rest of the world. It is necessary that people know stuff about you in order for you to function as a human being, it only becomes an invasion of your privacy when people are taking stuff you don't want them to and spreading it around for others to see.
There's not a lot of substance behind these headlines. Only one reports any benefit of a gaming intervention, and that is only in the short term. The others are all about general physical and mental activity.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the real question is.... ...why the fuck should we care?
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them. The loss of even hundreds of thousands of species is statistically insignificant.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
Biodiversity is very important. Aside from the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen there are practical implications. For example many of the medicines we use today were discovered by people going into the Amazon, brining back everything they could find, and seeing which of the weird things they found could fight different illnesses on a petri dish. Lose the diversity and you lose all those undiscovered opportunities. In a more general sense loss of diversity within a species leads to increased susceptibility to stressors, this may impact upon economically important species (known as well as unknown) as well as rare frogs.
Also, you don't know what statistically significant means so don't use that term. While the loss of hundreds of thousands of species is important is itself, but is more significant as a marker of the loss of environment leading to the losses of all those undiscovered species and damage to an ecosystem that we rely on but don't really understand.
I wonder how governments will attempt to regulate space once it becomes a truly commercial frontier (I mean aside from orbit). On the one hand, I'm against regulations on what is essentially just an un-owned patch of "space". On the other hand though...it'd be scary to have any company that can afford to send things to the moon or into space. I mean, that much equipment just floating around out there and something's bound to go catasrophically wrong.
I think the current row over who owns the Arctic is pretty indicative of what will happen on the moon. Unless some deal similar to the Antarctic treaty that bans mining and military use can be created and ratified (my quick Google search has turned up the Moon treaty which has not been ratified by any space-going nation).
Your solution is a good one, but one can nitpick on everything in security, I'm guessing the medical information probably have enough information in it too identify subjects. Web search logs usually help you to identify the user if you have enough data. (see AOL logs debacle).
Possibly, although at the moment we keep things like test scores and self-reported health and demographic information so it would be very hard to identify subjects. We are getting into whole genome analysis though, which researchers will need and will be potentially identifiable, so somebody is going to have to think very hard about that. Fortunately it's not my problem.
Truecrypt Whole Disk Encryption has less than 1% over head. I can't see the problem. Surely the patent and IP information security outweighs this minimal overhead.
I work in a similar environment and we use truecrypt when transferring between labs and for data collection. For all other purposes we don't encrypt at all. What we do is keep medical information on a secure network but stored with with no personal identifiers, only a study id. The personal data as far as we need it is kept in a separate location on a machine that is not networked and is physically protected so that only the study admin team can use it (ie the same level of security as the paper records). The medical records and the personal identifiers do not usually need to be kept together for research purposes.
glad to see we have our priorities sorted. cure for cancer? cure for aids? clean energy? nope, preserving gaming "history"
Just so you know medical research got direct funding of about two billion pounds last year from government. I don't know how much of this will be diverted to the gaming museum, but if you're right it's gonna be awesome!
What we really need in order to 'preserve' video game culture is not some expensive museum space full of trite screenshots of software still under copyright that nobody is legally allowed to play themselves, but we need a relaxation of copyright and a strengthening of fair use so that old cultural artifacts that are no longer profitable and would otherwise be forgotten are defaulted to the public domain.
You're right about copyright etc but there's more to a museum than just displaying old stuff. The curators have an important job of putting everything in context, finding the really interesting stuff and giving it prominence, and providing the historical and cultural background behind each gaming milestone. And make it interesting for old gamers and people who aren't old gamers.
So I would expect the museum to show me stuff I'd never think of looking for on my own, to talk about who made the games, who was playing them, where they were played etc, and to help my kids to understand more about how I grew up.
Slashdot ought to either hire a science editor or stop reporting science. Although the present study isn't one of the worst by a long way.
After a while you would become depressed because your money is the wrong color. man have simply not evolved to be happy. depression is clearly not a new fad. People hated their jobs in the 12th century and still do.
That's absolutely true - but I think an extra problem for these guys is being stuck somewhere without the usual things we can try to make depressed people feel better (like go on holiday, buy a dog, get some exercise, change your life, etc), and the danger of somebody mission critical being out of action for a prolonged period.
So while it's an old problem - I think it has new complications. I wonder if there's any historical documentation of depression on long sea voyages and what was done about it.
Boot time is a pain that we have had since the first IBM PC was released. And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.
I don't mind boot time so much - what really gets on my nerves is when a machine comes on, pretends it's ready but is then maybe five minutes doing other stuff before you can actually use it while you stare at the screen and frustratedly try to click on things. That's especially bad in the roaming profile scenario you mentioned.
OK first thanks for taking me seriously. I am actually quite flattered that there is now a webpage dedicated to describing how much of an idiot I am.
I also hope you have the good grace to post my rebuttal to both your arguments, first that science cannot be conducted without experiments, and second that correlation does not equal causation. You have my permission to publish this so long as you do so in its entirity.
I'm going to give you a short CV, just so you know (not sure it's relevant but anyway). I have a degree in mathematics, a masters degree in mathematical statistics, a PhD in evolutionary biology (my thesis topic was along the lines of 'what can we infer from comparisons of gene orders of extant species') and I've worked for four years as an epidemiologist on a observational study of health and cognition. It's fair to say that over the past ten years I've thought about the ideas of correlation, causation, and inference for a living. If I had any doubt that what I was doing was fundementally flawed from a scientific point of view I wouldn't do it.
Regarding your Saturn example, well you've managed to find two things that increase with time, but are quite clearly unrelated in every other regard. You have calculated their correlation as 0.88, suggested that I would draw the conclusion that one causes the other, which is plainly absurd, therefore my argument that correlation implies causation is incorrect.
There are two ways I will respond.
The most obvious is that you did not read my argument. I claimed A->B, OR B->A, OR C->A and C->B. Clearly here we have a correlation, so one of these must be true. A->B and B ->A are both obviously silly, so we are left with C->A and C->B. Well what could 'C' be? Here it helps that you've not plotted A vs B as would be traditional to illustrate a correlation, but you've helpfully plotted A and B against a third factor, 'time'. In this case C=time, the passing of time has caused the stock market to increase and has caused Saturn to do whatever it did (I'm not an astronomer). If you do a regression of A vs B adjusting for time I'd be pretty sure you'll see the correlation would be gone.
Second, (and this is a more minor subtle complaint) there is the issue of statistical significance. I don't know but I'd bet the correlation you showed does not hold much outside of the small window you've showed it, and that you've selected this particular example to illustrate your point. If you give me any two time series I could probably find a small window in which they are both increasing, so that correlation is statistically meaningless because of multiple testing issues (note I qualified my initial claim with the words 'statistically significant')
Next, I absolutely agree with you that experimentation is the gold standard of scientific research. I cannot accept however that it is the only way to draw conclusions. Much of science cannot be tested experimentally because it would be impractical, unethical (as with most of the work I do) or just plain silly. My earlier example 'lung cancer is caused by smoking' is a good example of a purely observation finding that was totally unexpected at the time and was found simply on the basis of observing the smoking patterns of people in lung cancer wards compared with others. The big prospective studies came much later, and experiments will never be done, yet I'm sure you would accept this finding as true.
I also agree with you that most science posted on Slashdot is rubbish, for a variety of reasons, mostly because science progresses in very small increments, and so on its own no paper is ever really newsworthy, and has to have its significance bloated out of all proportion to get into the news (ie they fail the 'so what' test). However faulty causation is not often the culprit, because most scientists are very good at adjusting for potential confounders in their relationships (and journals are very go
It doesn't mean existence in the context of this article, it means the probability of one event (voting) is higher given the occurrence of another (similar face). So a traditional Pearson correlation wouldn't be applicable, but a tetrachoric correlation can be calculated quite adequately. There is plenty of room for causal relationships to be implied.
Slashdotters are right to point out the Correlation is not, and never will be causation. Never, never, never, never, never. If you want to show causation, then you must have a model and you must subject it to experiment. Experiment! Not statistical mumbo-jumbo.
I think you are wrong. Epidemiology and observational science have given up a lot without the need for experimentation (we know smoking causes lung cancer, though this has never been directly established through an experiment, since it would be massively unethical). Correlation does imply causation, as I've pointed out in an earlier comment, the hard part is working out what the causal relationships are (ie A->B, B->A or C->A and C->B, these are the ONLY explanations for statistically significant correlation).
The reverse possibility B->A here is nonsense, because voting patterns cannot affect your looks, and the way this study was conducted (you can read the details) pretty well rules out the confounding factor 'C', leaving us with A->B as the only plausible explanation.
I'd like to see you try to refute this (without resorting to insults or rhetoric), particularly if you can think of a way for variables to be correlated without some form of causal relationship as I've described.
But in order to pinpoint C, you have to work back from A and B via E,F and D. Verifying a C is relatively easy. Finding C can be very nasty. And if there are loops involved it can be a lot nastier.
Sure, correlation implies causation. But which one?
You're right of course, but you don't have to understand the complete chain to discover C. It helps to think it through obviously, but you can easily try adjusting for things (in this case like demographic factors, genetics, etc) until you hit one that accounts for the association, and then work forwards to try to work out why, although understanding why (ie knowing D,E,F) is not often necessary, (for example if C is genetic).
Where does the correlation come from then? Unless you suggest that people who look the same ACTUALLY have the same political views.
The correlationisnotcausation tag really winds me up because correlation DOES imply causation. If A and B are correlated then either A causes B, B causes A, or C causes both A and B (or it's a chance finding but that's what p-values are for). So once you have a correlation its just a case of working out which causal relationship is true. I'll leave this specific case as an exercise for the reader.
I'd like to see it made a felony to have a computer instigate a call. Who's with me?
How about a mandatory nominal connection fee (like 5 cents or something) per call, paid from the caller to the reciever. wouldn't affect your grandmother calling to wish you a merry christmas, but would probably deter cold callers making '00000s of calls.
I thing the point of this is to keep the rocket engines completely separate from the rover.
Too bad the sky crane couldn't drop the rover, then land somewhere to become a stationary observation station. Turn it over to a university to operate for whatever data they can get from it. Seems a waste just crash it somewhere. There wouldn't be a lot of room in there but it seems like you'd want to put instruments on just about anything you're going to send all the way to Mars.
Crash it fast enough and you might get an interesting fresh impact crater to explore. Don't know if that's possible though.
How many stories about companies, government agencies, etc spying on your profile with negative consequences do you need before you learn to stay away from social networking sites.
one?
The brain is different. I don't even understand how basic things like memory work. Why do some things stick easily in your mind, and others continue to drop out despite repeated attempts to remember them?
Your argument seems to be "we don't understand it all now, therefore it will never be understood". Or even "I don't understand it all now, therefore nobody ever will." This seems a bit short sighted. I know how a neuron works, I know how learning works at the physiological level, and I understand neurodegeneration. There are people around who know how memory works. It's just that at the present time we don't have the technology to replicate or fix it. There are hardware simulations of mammal higher cortical functions, but they aren't yet powerful enough, (which I why I call general or strong AI an engineering problem not a scientific one).
Can you really explain everything a computer does? That would surprise me. I'm sure you would have to look most of it up. The brain is just a big biological computer - just one for which we don't have the manual. General AI isn't really a scientific or philosophical problem any more than it is an engineering one.
What? The only piece of information anybody would need to do any of that is either your name or your number plates. Neither of these things are things you can keep private.
Seriously, how could improved privacy prevent any of the above?
I'm still using a credit card and say yes to pretty much every cell phone or application EULA, but I think these are less likely to hit me in the long run than publicly available and mineable personal information over which I essentially have no control.
In what way are they likely to 'hit' you?
Well there's at least two other people who don't use facebook, the parent post and the moderator who gave it an insightful.
If you want to protect your privacy, then fine, but do it for some actual reason, not just for the rather nebulous abstract concept of 'privacy' in itself, which is actually fairly meaningless if you think about your interactions with the rest of the world. It is necessary that people know stuff about you in order for you to function as a human being, it only becomes an invasion of your privacy when people are taking stuff you don't want them to and spreading it around for others to see.
Flowcharts, and keep it simple. Visual aids really help.
If you're looking for visual aids a series of tubes might help.
There's not a lot of substance behind these headlines. Only one reports any benefit of a gaming intervention, and that is only in the short term. The others are all about general physical and mental activity.
Yeah you're probably right. Though my money is still on it being a publicity stunt.