1. Which number didn't you like? 2. How would you compute the probability? Please explain. 3. You should turn off your spam filter, because it uses Bayesian analysis to work.
The probabilities of four, 4, FOUR, cables being taken out is astronomical.
Taking a lot of information into consideration, the probabilities for a coincidence are not "astronomically" low as you assert. But any probability calculation one applies to the situation gives less than about 0.1% chance of a coincidence, which would be, at the very least, "fucking" low. If, say, two more cables are cut in the next two or three days, we can begin to talk "astronomically" low odds and "fucking" low would be a gross understatement.
Today we are going to use Bayes's theorem to determine the likelihood that all of this disabling of cables is malicious. We are not calculating the likelihood of conspiracy, just how likely it is that someone out there is disabling cables with ill purpose. (Of course, how many people does it take to disable or cut a cable with malicious intent? One? Two? More than one is by definition a conspiracy.)
First, we need a prior. Lets assume that the likelihood that someone is out there was planning to maliciously disable a cable before this latest round of disabling was about 0.0001. That's going to be our prior, 0.0001. Not very likely, and hopefully not too contentious. At this point, it doesn't really matter too much what the prior is, just that we have one. We'll see that after a few rounds of calculations, this prior washes out pretty quickly.
Now, lets assume that any time a cable is disabled, it is only about a 1% chance that said cable was disabled with malicious intent. Considering that historically these cables are cut or disabled only once a year, this assumption means that every 100 years, some asshole (or some assholes, for the tin foil hat crowd) is going to go out there and maliciously disable a cable. I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation. I mean, every hundred years, someone burns a church, or knocks over a skyscraper with a plane, or invades a country for no good reason whatsoever. Could these cables be special in that regard? For the sake of argument, lets assume they are not special and are subject to the once-in-a-hundred-year rule.
Now, we need to guess how likely it is that, if someone (or some people, for the conspiracy theorists) is indeed disabling cables maliciously, how many cables could he (or they, for the conspiracy theorists), cut per day? I'm thinking 0.5. In other words, every other day this person or people could cut a cable. The 0.5 number means that it is easy for a properly motivated entity who also has the proper means to cut cables.
Remember, there is only a 1/365 chance that a cable will be cut on any given day due to an accident. We'll need to remember this to calculate the posteriors after a cable wasn't disabled back on Day 3.
Okay, if we are all on agreement on the numbers so far, we are ready to do some Bayesian arithmetic to determine the likelihood of malicious intent.
Day 0 (before any cables disabled): 0.0001 likelihood
Day 1 (cable disabled): 0.0476644 likelihood
Day 2 (cable disabled): 0.7144896 likelihood
Day 3 (NO disabling): 0.5444762 likelihood
Day 4 (cable disabled): 0.9835428 likelihood
Day 5 (cable disabled): 0.9996654 likelihood
In conclusion, the same math that runs your spam filter predicts (99.967% likely) that someone is up to something disabling all of these cables. Conversely, we have only a 0.033% expectation that all this disabling is coincidental.
And they revealed that the way to fight traffic congestion is by taking the bus or living closer to your work. I'm going to toss the piece of shit because that wasn't what I wanted to hear.
In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficient, the Most Merciful
For such a merciful god, some of his followers sure show a hell of a lot ruthless killing sometimes. I've never killed anyone, or sentenced anyone to be killed, or advocated any one's death, or stood in a position of power to stop someone's death and didn't. Allah probably loves me more than his followers who have done these things. Eat your heart out said followers, Allah loves me more than you!
You can't prove the positive either. You can only infer one hypothesis or the other based on testing each, arriving at a refined hypothesis through the process of elimination. In science, we call that "science".
If you postulate it is not a coincidence it is upon YOU to show evidence of wrong doing.
One must formulate a hypothesis before anyone can test it. If I postulate, I have no responsibility to show evidence of such postulation--other people can do that. If they are wise, they will consider this possibility here, or risk more cables getting cut through mechanisms they have chosen to ignore.
Let us consider the facts here. For as many years as I know of, no cable has been cut. Lets think about the probabilities. We'll assume one cable is cut per 1500 days (< 5 yrs) on accident. So, on any given day, the probability is 1/1500 assuming its just another day at the beach (so to speak). Now, I have read about 3 cables being cut in as many days. We can use binomial probability to determine our expectation for 3 cables being cut in just your ordinary average year: 0.0018. How about an ordinary average week? 1.034e-8. Ok, the latter was a pretty improbable event, wouldn't you agree? How about your ordinary average stretch of 3 days?
So you are going to tell me that its even less likely that the cables were cut by one nation or organization acting maliciously to achieve some end?
[Tinny voice sounding like you]You know what, actually I think the terrorists who hijacked the planes on 911 were not colluding with each other--but I am exempt from proving this because "you can't prove the negative".[/Tinny voice] Do you see how idiotic you sound?
We knew to look for colluding terrorists after 911 because three improbable events (planes running into buildings) happened closely in time. Do you see the similarities, or are you going to assert that its just a coincidence?
All you've stated is that you don't believe the coincidence. You have given no proof that this was on purpose or preparation for an invasion. Just because you believe, or don't believe, something doesn't make it a fact.
How about, you? Hmm...All you've stated is that you believe the coincidence. You have given no proof that this was not on purpose or preparation for an invasion. Just because you believe, or don't believe, something doesn't make it a fact.
You have to believe one thing or the other. Believing in coincidences means you are necessarily believing in the low probability situation, why else would you label it a coincidence? You did use the word "coincidence" did you not?
We do need more pontificating, as a matter of fact. You are exercising your free will to disagree, but it does not mean his philosophy and suggestions are without merit. I am a hard-core atheist and a career biological researcher, and find that it helps to carefully consider the morals of various religions when doing my work. Science has a capacity to be conducted without morality (except for the moral notion of veracity) and professional scientists are trained to disregard anything that can not be taken as fact or can not be tested. I may or may not agree with him, but his points are well taken with me and may actually serve me when I come to critical junctures in my career. Perhaps I might spend time focusing on generating totipotent cell lines from non-embryonic material. In fact, it may actually be a higher purpose than studying embryonic stem cells per se. Non-embryonic totipotent cells might be derived from the actual patient and so may logically cause less problems after differentiation. I'm sure I could come up with other examples. The idea is that we can use purely moral guidance (like the Pope is offering here) to steer our research directions--and the knowledge gained by such research may actually be more practical in the long run. Perhaps this is moral karma at work.
Never had that experience. Three relatives, none with any computer savvy are now running ubuntu and thank me profusely for installing it. My dad, of course, just installed his own a couple of days ago without a hitch. Thing is, he doesn't give a shit what he puts on his machine, he just wants the damn thing to work so he can make a living. Your FUD is empty.
No. But here we can say that our president is running the country into the ground if we want. (See I just said it.) We define our citizenship by our freedoms. How about you? Any grievances with your dictator/king/despot. Silence? Hmm...Now, STFU! (Oh wait, your government is already making you do that.)
"Accuracy" does not refer to a technique but rather the quality of its product. Here, gravitational waves are probably not exactly what you imagine, but take an operational definition from the function of interferometers like LIGO. This device can be calibrated against a known source of measurement, and so estimates of accuracy comes from calibrating to said standard source.
You are confusing "indirect" detection and no detection. Consider that we know the sequence of the human genome, but we did not sequence it by directly measuring the identity of each base pair. We (the people of the human race) PCR-amplified the genome DNA, did oligomerization reactions, and visualized the results of the reactions. We then inferred the identity of the base pairs from the patterns made in acrylamide gels. This is indirect. But no one is going to argue that we did not "detect" the sequence of the genome because it wasn't direct detection.
From the LIGO home page:
Preliminary Results of Astrophysical Significance
"The sensitivity of the interferometers, as well as the large volume and high quality of science data that S5 produced, has already led to a number of significant astrophysical results for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, such as beating the gravitational-wave spindown limit for the Crab Pulsar," said David Reitze, the LSC Spokesperson. "And we haven't yet looked at the entire data set, so there is more to come."
Your analogy falls apart before it even gets out of the gate.
First of all, we can detect global warming. The average temperature of the earth is rising. We have an accurate device for this: a bunch of thermometers all calibrated and sitting all over the world. We also have an accurate device for measuring gravitational waves. Both work fine.
Now, if you had said, "failure to detect elevation of carbon dioxide levels can not account for global warming", then your analogy might hold (despite the fact that CO2 levels do seem to be rising). I.e. the proper analogy would be "the absence of an observation means we don't understand a particular phenomenon".
Wow, usually these phylogenetic trees are not rooted, which means you can divide them any way you like. So, the really amazing story is they rooted the tree of life! Good job, especially since we actually thought it was a ring of life.
I'll spell it out for you. This is not a failure of gravitational wave detection technology.
What you apparently do not understand is that this device can detect gravitational waves. However, it did not detect gravitational waves that correlated with a gamma wave burst originating in Andromeda. Normally such bursts arise from well known phenomena, such as a collision of black holes. But in this case, the collision could not have been from one of these well known phenomena.
What the article suffers from is bad writing. It should have been put in the positive--something like "the gamma-ray burst originated from a novel mechanism". Now, because astrophysicists can not account for the burst, they must go back and (1) study other similar phenomena and/or (2) revise astrophysical theory to explain the heretofore inexplicable gamma ray burst. Why is this burst inexplicable at this point? Because they did not detect gravitational waves that correlated with the burst.
When I didn't want to be a biochemist anymore, I switched to computer science mid-way. Fuck, at least I was learning something as a biochemist. I have never had a lower opinion about higher education in general as I've had after I switched degree programs. I feel like I haven't learned a damn thing.
Switching from biochem was the smartest thing you ever did, trust me on that. Sure, its hard and its neat to know you are one of the few who can make an A in P-chem, but guess what, you'd be suffering now. You'd either had spent 6 years getting that PhD so you could tell the idiots what to do (instead of the other way around), or idiots with PhDs would be telling you what to do. Thank your lucky stars that you are smarter than you think you are.
CS should be made as difficult as possible to keep the numbers of graduates low. This may not be what CS department officials want to hear, but it would be the right thing to do. Right now, the biomedical sciences suffer from a serious glut of highly trained PhDs that find they need to extend training by 4 to 8 years as "post-docs" without solid prospects for long term employment.
While this may be great for the advancement of science, it makes for a pretty bad professional situation for scientists who still looking for work in 2-year appointments at the age of 35+. Moreover, average biomedical post-doc salaries are less than what a fresh BS in engineering would make. Biomedical sciences have suffered from an overabundance of training funds and from a drive for departments to have cheap labor in the form of hard working grad students chasing the carrot of a PhD. So they (1) outsource lecturing to part time lecturers, (2) train more biomedical scientists, (3) shrink the size of permanent faculty. Moreover pressures from tightening NIH funds exacerbate these problems.
In short, training should not be easy or overly encouraged. Colleges should provide training based on market needs and discourage weaker students from saturating highly technical fields.
If CS departments can weed out potential programmers by making their curricula tougher, they should really do it. This would ensure that CS people were actually talented and devoted to the trade and that compensation in the future would remain commensurate with training, unlike in the situation in the biomedical sciences.
This is insightful? Since when is opinion stated as fact insightful?
OK--here goes:
Perl has to many shifted numbers as part of is syntax.
English words are too hard to spell.
Lisp is backwards and all of the parentheses make it hard to read.
Python is named after a snake making it a stupid name.
Python is named after a comedy troupe making it a stupid name.
C would be good except that it takes to long to make anything work.
Python makes me indent which makes me feel like a little kid.
Indent is not mandatory in most languages.
Fortran makes you start in a set number of columns from left and the lack of case sensitivity makes it seem to simplistic for anything worthwhile.
Objective C replaces periods with closed brackets making you type too much.
Put any of these languages on a server farm and milk a cow.
I'm a pony.
Basic is the best language because I've never bothered to learn anything else. It can scale up and you can write libraries to get almost anything done you want. Its easy to program in. I don't use goto that much.
It sounds like McKinstry was an individual who had an idea and he spent much of his life working towards it despite his psychological disabilities. Before you disparage him, ask yourself if you have worked towards a single goal with as much fortitude. The anonymity of your posting suggests that you haven't and so you have no idea what it means to have a sense of purpose. My guess is that you get payed well to do the biddings of your supervisor, which is a small purpose indeed. It is easy to criticize from the tiny little box where you sit.
I'm sure no one will believe it, but back when I was in college I found an entire book in the library on using LSD and other strong psychotropics for therapy. I'm not sure of the quality of research in the book, but I'm guessing the DEA has severely limited such research in the past few decades. Its probably a shame that no one can point to hard evidence either validating or invalidating psychotropics for psychological therapy. But we are gradually moving towards a society where fact is replaced by belief and conviction (e.g. stem cells, etc.) and research suffers. Hopefully the trends will be reversed when things get more secular.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Which number didn't you like?
2. How would you compute the probability? Please explain.
3. You should turn off your spam filter, because it uses Bayesian analysis to work.
Taking a lot of information into consideration, the probabilities for a coincidence are not "astronomically" low as you assert. But any probability calculation one applies to the situation gives less than about 0.1% chance of a coincidence, which would be, at the very least, "fucking" low. If, say, two more cables are cut in the next two or three days, we can begin to talk "astronomically" low odds and "fucking" low would be a gross understatement.
Today we are going to use Bayes's theorem to determine the likelihood that all of this disabling of cables is malicious. We are not calculating the likelihood of conspiracy, just how likely it is that someone out there is disabling cables with ill purpose. (Of course, how many people does it take to disable or cut a cable with malicious intent? One? Two? More than one is by definition a conspiracy.)
First, we need a prior. Lets assume that the likelihood that someone is out there was planning to maliciously disable a cable before this latest round of disabling was about 0.0001. That's going to be our prior, 0.0001. Not very likely, and hopefully not too contentious. At this point, it doesn't really matter too much what the prior is, just that we have one. We'll see that after a few rounds of calculations, this prior washes out pretty quickly.
Now, lets assume that any time a cable is disabled, it is only about a 1% chance that said cable was disabled with malicious intent. Considering that historically these cables are cut or disabled only once a year, this assumption means that every 100 years, some asshole (or some assholes, for the tin foil hat crowd) is going to go out there and maliciously disable a cable. I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation. I mean, every hundred years, someone burns a church, or knocks over a skyscraper with a plane, or invades a country for no good reason whatsoever. Could these cables be special in that regard? For the sake of argument, lets assume they are not special and are subject to the once-in-a-hundred-year rule.
Now, we need to guess how likely it is that, if someone (or some people, for the conspiracy theorists) is indeed disabling cables maliciously, how many cables could he (or they, for the conspiracy theorists), cut per day? I'm thinking 0.5. In other words, every other day this person or people could cut a cable. The 0.5 number means that it is easy for a properly motivated entity who also has the proper means to cut cables.
Remember, there is only a 1/365 chance that a cable will be cut on any given day due to an accident. We'll need to remember this to calculate the posteriors after a cable wasn't disabled back on Day 3.
Okay, if we are all on agreement on the numbers so far, we are ready to do some Bayesian arithmetic to determine the likelihood of malicious intent.
Day 0 (before any cables disabled): 0.0001 likelihood
Day 1 (cable disabled): 0.0476644 likelihood
Day 2 (cable disabled): 0.7144896 likelihood
Day 3 (NO disabling): 0.5444762 likelihood
Day 4 (cable disabled): 0.9835428 likelihood
Day 5 (cable disabled): 0.9996654 likelihood
In conclusion, the same math that runs your spam filter predicts (99.967% likely) that someone is up to something disabling all of these cables. Conversely, we have only a 0.033% expectation that all this disabling is coincidental.
And they revealed that the way to fight traffic congestion is by taking the bus or living closer to your work. I'm going to toss the piece of shit because that wasn't what I wanted to hear.
For such a merciful god, some of his followers sure show a hell of a lot ruthless killing sometimes. I've never killed anyone, or sentenced anyone to be killed, or advocated any one's death, or stood in a position of power to stop someone's death and didn't. Allah probably loves me more than his followers who have done these things. Eat your heart out said followers, Allah loves me more than you!
You can't prove the positive either. You can only infer one hypothesis or the other based on testing each, arriving at a refined hypothesis through the process of elimination. In science, we call that "science".
One must formulate a hypothesis before anyone can test it. If I postulate, I have no responsibility to show evidence of such postulation--other people can do that. If they are wise, they will consider this possibility here, or risk more cables getting cut through mechanisms they have chosen to ignore.
Let us consider the facts here. For as many years as I know of, no cable has been cut. Lets think about the probabilities. We'll assume one cable is cut per 1500 days (< 5 yrs) on accident. So, on any given day, the probability is 1/1500 assuming its just another day at the beach (so to speak). Now, I have read about 3 cables being cut in as many days. We can use binomial probability to determine our expectation for 3 cables being cut in just your ordinary average year: 0.0018. How about an ordinary average week? 1.034e-8. Ok, the latter was a pretty improbable event, wouldn't you agree? How about your ordinary average stretch of 3 days?
So you are going to tell me that its even less likely that the cables were cut by one nation or organization acting maliciously to achieve some end?
[Tinny voice sounding like you]You know what, actually I think the terrorists who hijacked the planes on 911 were not colluding with each other--but I am exempt from proving this because "you can't prove the negative".[/Tinny voice] Do you see how idiotic you sound?
We knew to look for colluding terrorists after 911 because three improbable events (planes running into buildings) happened closely in time. Do you see the similarities, or are you going to assert that its just a coincidence?
How about, you? Hmm...All you've stated is that you believe the coincidence. You have given no proof that this was not on purpose or preparation for an invasion. Just because you believe, or don't believe, something doesn't make it a fact.
You have to believe one thing or the other. Believing in coincidences means you are necessarily believing in the low probability situation, why else would you label it a coincidence? You did use the word "coincidence" did you not?
We do need more pontificating, as a matter of fact. You are exercising your free will to disagree, but it does not mean his philosophy and suggestions are without merit. I am a hard-core atheist and a career biological researcher, and find that it helps to carefully consider the morals of various religions when doing my work. Science has a capacity to be conducted without morality (except for the moral notion of veracity) and professional scientists are trained to disregard anything that can not be taken as fact or can not be tested. I may or may not agree with him, but his points are well taken with me and may actually serve me when I come to critical junctures in my career. Perhaps I might spend time focusing on generating totipotent cell lines from non-embryonic material. In fact, it may actually be a higher purpose than studying embryonic stem cells per se. Non-embryonic totipotent cells might be derived from the actual patient and so may logically cause less problems after differentiation. I'm sure I could come up with other examples. The idea is that we can use purely moral guidance (like the Pope is offering here) to steer our research directions--and the knowledge gained by such research may actually be more practical in the long run. Perhaps this is moral karma at work.
Yes, I'm aware of these things. No need to rub them in. But I like to enjoy my freedom while I have it.
Never had that experience. Three relatives, none with any computer savvy are now running ubuntu and thank me profusely for installing it. My dad, of course, just installed his own a couple of days ago without a hitch. Thing is, he doesn't give a shit what he puts on his machine, he just wants the damn thing to work so he can make a living. Your FUD is empty.
No. But here we can say that our president is running the country into the ground if we want. (See I just said it.) We define our citizenship by our freedoms. How about you? Any grievances with your dictator/king/despot. Silence? Hmm...Now, STFU! (Oh wait, your government is already making you do that.)
Will it work through my tin foil hat?
"Accuracy" does not refer to a technique but rather the quality of its product. Here, gravitational waves are probably not exactly what you imagine, but take an operational definition from the function of interferometers like LIGO. This device can be calibrated against a known source of measurement, and so estimates of accuracy comes from calibrating to said standard source.
From the LIGO home page:
They should have just said "itty-bitty".
Your analogy falls apart before it even gets out of the gate.
First of all, we can detect global warming. The average temperature of the earth is rising. We have an accurate device for this: a bunch of thermometers all calibrated and sitting all over the world. We also have an accurate device for measuring gravitational waves. Both work fine.
Now, if you had said, "failure to detect elevation of carbon dioxide levels can not account for global warming", then your analogy might hold (despite the fact that CO2 levels do seem to be rising). I.e. the proper analogy would be "the absence of an observation means we don't understand a particular phenomenon".
Wow, usually these phylogenetic trees are not rooted, which means you can divide them any way you like. So, the really amazing story is they rooted the tree of life! Good job, especially since we actually thought it was a ring of life.
I'll spell it out for you. This is not a failure of gravitational wave detection technology.
What you apparently do not understand is that this device can detect gravitational waves. However, it did not detect gravitational waves that correlated with a gamma wave burst originating in Andromeda. Normally such bursts arise from well known phenomena, such as a collision of black holes. But in this case, the collision could not have been from one of these well known phenomena.
What the article suffers from is bad writing. It should have been put in the positive--something like "the gamma-ray burst originated from a novel mechanism". Now, because astrophysicists can not account for the burst, they must go back and (1) study other similar phenomena and/or (2) revise astrophysical theory to explain the heretofore inexplicable gamma ray burst. Why is this burst inexplicable at this point? Because they did not detect gravitational waves that correlated with the burst.
Switching from biochem was the smartest thing you ever did, trust me on that. Sure, its hard and its neat to know you are one of the few who can make an A in P-chem, but guess what, you'd be suffering now. You'd either had spent 6 years getting that PhD so you could tell the idiots what to do (instead of the other way around), or idiots with PhDs would be telling you what to do. Thank your lucky stars that you are smarter than you think you are.
CS should be made as difficult as possible to keep the numbers of graduates low. This may not be what CS department officials want to hear, but it would be the right thing to do. Right now, the biomedical sciences suffer from a serious glut of highly trained PhDs that find they need to extend training by 4 to 8 years as "post-docs" without solid prospects for long term employment.
While this may be great for the advancement of science, it makes for a pretty bad professional situation for scientists who still looking for work in 2-year appointments at the age of 35+. Moreover, average biomedical post-doc salaries are less than what a fresh BS in engineering would make. Biomedical sciences have suffered from an overabundance of training funds and from a drive for departments to have cheap labor in the form of hard working grad students chasing the carrot of a PhD. So they (1) outsource lecturing to part time lecturers, (2) train more biomedical scientists, (3) shrink the size of permanent faculty. Moreover pressures from tightening NIH funds exacerbate these problems.
In short, training should not be easy or overly encouraged. Colleges should provide training based on market needs and discourage weaker students from saturating highly technical fields.
If CS departments can weed out potential programmers by making their curricula tougher, they should really do it. This would ensure that CS people were actually talented and devoted to the trade and that compensation in the future would remain commensurate with training, unlike in the situation in the biomedical sciences.
This is insightful? Since when is opinion stated as fact insightful?
OK--here goes:
Perl has to many shifted numbers as part of is syntax.
English words are too hard to spell.
Lisp is backwards and all of the parentheses make it hard to read.
Python is named after a snake making it a stupid name.
Python is named after a comedy troupe making it a stupid name.
C would be good except that it takes to long to make anything work.
Python makes me indent which makes me feel like a little kid.
Indent is not mandatory in most languages.
Fortran makes you start in a set number of columns from left and the lack of case sensitivity makes it seem to simplistic for anything worthwhile.
Objective C replaces periods with closed brackets making you type too much.
Put any of these languages on a server farm and milk a cow.
I'm a pony.
Basic is the best language because I've never bothered to learn anything else. It can scale up and you can write libraries to get almost anything done you want. Its easy to program in. I don't use goto that much.
Holy shit. Some retard wasted a mod point marking your hilarity as "flamebait"! Shouldn't there be a literacy test for moderators?
It sounds like McKinstry was an individual who had an idea and he spent much of his life working towards it despite his psychological disabilities. Before you disparage him, ask yourself if you have worked towards a single goal with as much fortitude. The anonymity of your posting suggests that you haven't and so you have no idea what it means to have a sense of purpose. My guess is that you get payed well to do the biddings of your supervisor, which is a small purpose indeed. It is easy to criticize from the tiny little box where you sit.
I'm sure no one will believe it, but back when I was in college I found an entire book in the library on using LSD and other strong psychotropics for therapy. I'm not sure of the quality of research in the book, but I'm guessing the DEA has severely limited such research in the past few decades. Its probably a shame that no one can point to hard evidence either validating or invalidating psychotropics for psychological therapy. But we are gradually moving towards a society where fact is replaced by belief and conviction (e.g. stem cells, etc.) and research suffers. Hopefully the trends will be reversed when things get more secular.