Really? So the entire basis of modern medicine and biology is based on "a few observations"?
No. Much of evolution and much of modern medicine and biology are different. By evolution, I meant macro evolution, species transitions, start of life, etc. There's a lot unknown on that.
And "few" is relative to the observations about cosmology.
And I, being from physics, would say the opposite. At the end of the day, both basically say -- "here's the evidence, what's the closest model to what we have that's theoretically sound." Trying to answer more than that, without holding onto uncertainty reasonably well, causes tons of problems. My general rule of thumb? People always underestimate the uncertainty in theories. True for the Big Bang, true for evolution, true for financial models, etc. '
There is a lot of consistent evidence for a type of big bang happening, along with space and time beginning, but saying anything about what happened before that goes beyond all current models and is merely speculative. And most physicists, being reasonable, don't lump such things in with the big bang. Saying a theory is less believable because it answers only the evidence at hand instead of your subjective questions is ludicrous.
On the other hand, much about evolution is, I think, less certain than most people make it. We have only a few observations, compared to the number of observations relevant to the big bang. Much of the "well, we've demonstrated that it could have worked this way" types of results are presented to people as gospel truth. Just like the climate debate, the naysayers -- who often don't or are unwilling to understand the intricacies in the science -- make actually putting the uncertainties on the table for discussion really tricky.
So the guy pushing for the removal cannot maintain a consistent argument for that removal.
Not how I see it. People interpret yes/no questions very differently; hence his "blunt instrument" remark. In general, I (background -- statistics) would probably answer yes to a binary question if I felt it to be mostly true. My wife (background -- philosophy) would probably answer no or "i don't know" to many of the same questions.
The problem with accurately designing surveys often boils down to understanding how people react if they have qualms about giving a yes/no answer but really feel in the middle. What this guy is saying is that there are people who are ignorant about the topic and fall somewhere in the middle, and some who are very informed and thoughtful about it but have some reservations and thus fall somewhere in the middle. So, frankly, I think his argument is consistent unless you ignore the subtleties.
Also, note the double negative:
When asked if he expected those academics to answer "false" to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: "On that particular point, no."
It seems that not answering the question is an option for these people.
How did this get modded offtopic? It does belong, loosely at least, to a class of partitioning problems (e.g. knapsack problem) that are NP-hard. One such problem is optimally cutting a round log into boards to conserve the most wood. Adding different shapes, doing it online, etc. would make it harder...
It seems it's a counter example to the "NP-hard = fun" hypothesis, then.
(possible lost profits from complying with net neutrality) > (potential financial benefits as proposed by FCC)? Are there some bargaining chips still on the table? Or is it just about "freedom of doing business how we want to"?
And yeah, I assume the "benefits" implied by the article -- funds for improving internet to rural areas -- are peanuts to comcast...
Maybe, but often common sense will lead even the most diligent scientist astray. Many times the answer that "just can't be right" is; the problem comes when we "throw away the statistics" instead of figuring out why and how it gave the answer it did.
Furthermore, variances and probabilities and confidence intervals are often discarded in favor of a point answer. It's an unfortunate reality; properly done statistics very nicely captures real life uncertainties, but the untrained eye or the popular media doesn't work that way.
I think the ideal solution is for the general technical culture to become both more knowledgeable about basic probability and less accepting of bad statistics (e.g. the world WILL be 5 degrees warmer in 2050). This will encourage people to really understand the procedures they are using. And yes, there are many fronts to this problem -- as a phd student in statistics I'm well aware of the complexities involved -- but I do trust statistics more than my common sense.
Don't know about games, but many types of numerical processing can easily take advantage of this. ATLAS and other high-performance linear algebra libraries already use all available cores (no, IO is often not the biggest bottleneck with these libraries, as they seem to squeeze out all possible advantages from the L1 / L2 caches). In other words, for my scientific computations, I would definitely notice a difference.
Also, OpenMP is becoming easier and easier to use with recent gcc releases, and it only takes a few #pragma statements in some parts of the code to give a huge speedup if you know what you're doing and have appropriate code.
On a dual boot system, hadn't used vista in a while. This is seriously what happened. 6 PM or so -- start boot up process into vista. 6:45 -- get login screen, then screen goes black. Hard drive thrashing. 7:00 -- screen still black. 8:00 -- screen still black, decided to reboot. 10 AM -- vista still booting, decided I didn't really need to use vista that bad.
I read your comment and laughed hard enough to sneeze snot all over my lunch. Now I'm going to go get some chocolate to make it okay. Fortunately, it's not counterfeit.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I was math-inclined.
Really? So the entire basis of modern medicine and biology is based on "a few observations"?
No. Much of evolution and much of modern medicine and biology are different. By evolution, I meant macro evolution, species transitions, start of life, etc. There's a lot unknown on that.
And "few" is relative to the observations about cosmology.
And I, being from physics, would say the opposite. At the end of the day, both basically say -- "here's the evidence, what's the closest model to what we have that's theoretically sound." Trying to answer more than that, without holding onto uncertainty reasonably well, causes tons of problems. My general rule of thumb? People always underestimate the uncertainty in theories. True for the Big Bang, true for evolution, true for financial models, etc. '
There is a lot of consistent evidence for a type of big bang happening, along with space and time beginning, but saying anything about what happened before that goes beyond all current models and is merely speculative. And most physicists, being reasonable, don't lump such things in with the big bang. Saying a theory is less believable because it answers only the evidence at hand instead of your subjective questions is ludicrous.
On the other hand, much about evolution is, I think, less certain than most people make it. We have only a few observations, compared to the number of observations relevant to the big bang. Much of the "well, we've demonstrated that it could have worked this way" types of results are presented to people as gospel truth. Just like the climate debate, the naysayers -- who often don't or are unwilling to understand the intricacies in the science -- make actually putting the uncertainties on the table for discussion really tricky.
So the guy pushing for the removal cannot maintain a consistent argument for that removal.
Not how I see it. People interpret yes/no questions very differently; hence his "blunt instrument" remark. In general, I (background -- statistics) would probably answer yes to a binary question if I felt it to be mostly true. My wife (background -- philosophy) would probably answer no or "i don't know" to many of the same questions.
The problem with accurately designing surveys often boils down to understanding how people react if they have qualms about giving a yes/no answer but really feel in the middle. What this guy is saying is that there are people who are ignorant about the topic and fall somewhere in the middle, and some who are very informed and thoughtful about it but have some reservations and thus fall somewhere in the middle. So, frankly, I think his argument is consistent unless you ignore the subtleties.
Also, note the double negative:
When asked if he expected those academics to answer "false" to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: "On that particular point, no."
It seems that not answering the question is an option for these people.
How did this get modded offtopic? It does belong, loosely at least, to a class of partitioning problems (e.g. knapsack problem) that are NP-hard. One such problem is optimally cutting a round log into boards to conserve the most wood. Adding different shapes, doing it online, etc. would make it harder...
It seems it's a counter example to the "NP-hard = fun" hypothesis, then.
(possible lost profits from complying with net neutrality) > (potential financial benefits as proposed by FCC)? Are there some bargaining chips still on the table? Or is it just about "freedom of doing business how we want to"?
And yeah, I assume the "benefits" implied by the article -- funds for improving internet to rural areas -- are peanuts to comcast...
Maybe, but often common sense will lead even the most diligent scientist astray. Many times the answer that "just can't be right" is; the problem comes when we "throw away the statistics" instead of figuring out why and how it gave the answer it did.
Furthermore, variances and probabilities and confidence intervals are often discarded in favor of a point answer. It's an unfortunate reality; properly done statistics very nicely captures real life uncertainties, but the untrained eye or the popular media doesn't work that way.
I think the ideal solution is for the general technical culture to become both more knowledgeable about basic probability and less accepting of bad statistics (e.g. the world WILL be 5 degrees warmer in 2050). This will encourage people to really understand the procedures they are using. And yes, there are many fronts to this problem -- as a phd student in statistics I'm well aware of the complexities involved -- but I do trust statistics more than my common sense.
Don't know about games, but many types of numerical processing can easily take advantage of this. ATLAS and other high-performance linear algebra libraries already use all available cores (no, IO is often not the biggest bottleneck with these libraries, as they seem to squeeze out all possible advantages from the L1 / L2 caches). In other words, for my scientific computations, I would definitely notice a difference.
Also, OpenMP is becoming easier and easier to use with recent gcc releases, and it only takes a few #pragma statements in some parts of the code to give a huge speedup if you know what you're doing and have appropriate code.
Wow. Daryll McBride vs. Chuck Norris.
just make shots of liquid oxygen? it burns on the way down, but hey, what's new? With the right chaser, it'd be the next big thing...
no lisp for at least a week
a programmer who doesn't get bitten by race conditions on occasion, and I'll show you one who doesn't program more than basic multithreaded code.
A good programmer is a good debugger...
I'll second that! Python makes calculating fun again.
That's what she said!
But some resist...
http://comics.com/zoom/306504/
http://comics.com/zoom/306506/
http://comics.com/zoom/306507/
[Bypassing ads...]
next goes to the planet Zork, he'll ask them. That is, if they can stop reading slashzork, the local, well, you know.
I'm surprised they didn't choose smarter animals. Like sharks. The results would have probably been better.
But when the sharks in EE can build their own lasers after passing the quals, oh boy.
So, back to mice.
Okay, that might make sending sympathy cards a bit harder.
True. This is a sad day for everyone who searches bing and yahoo first before trying something else. All 8 of them.
On a dual boot system, hadn't used vista in a while. This is seriously what happened.
6 PM or so -- start boot up process into vista.
6:45 -- get login screen, then screen goes black. Hard drive thrashing.
7:00 -- screen still black.
8:00 -- screen still black, decided to reboot.
10 AM -- vista still booting, decided I didn't really need to use vista that bad.
And you can buy stuff on it? brb while I google that.
http://wondermark.com/555/
I read your comment and laughed hard enough to sneeze snot all over my lunch. Now I'm going to go get some chocolate to make it okay. Fortunately, it's not counterfeit.
Exactly. Here is how the process works: http://wondermark.com/555/.
Like send this thread south for the winter?