This is something that duplicate bridge players do about 25 times a session . We use insertion sort.
When a player picks up a hand, it is typically shuffled, but players prefer to have cards separated by suits and descending order within each suit. Most people pick up their 13 cards and then move individual cards around using insertion sort. It is quite intuitive and relatively quick. However, insertion sort has a few other bridge-specific advantages: often players can evaluate their hand even as they are sorting it by first moving the high cards in place. Also, it is not necessary to completely sort the hand -- spot cards can be in any order and you will often find players sorting the spot cards before they put down as dummy.
I suppose the complete answer would be that humans use insertion sort to result in a partially sorted hand.
As an aside, all-time great bridge player Bob Hamman does not sort his hand. Just as moderately skilled bridge players do not sort the "spot cards" because they can figure those out on the fly, Bob Hamman can visualize and remember the entire hand without needing to sort it.
Mod parent up. If 3 people just keep citing each other circularly (avoiding self-citations), the whole ranking collapses because all their papers will be artificially inflated. Accounting for this is quite hard because it will involve distinguishing between natural clusters (of top researchers working on a common topic) or citation gamers (aiming to boost their citation counts).
Also, note in the TFA a graph with a parameter "d". That is basically slop. The authors simply changed the d until they could get a match for Nobel winners. Once you know what the answer ought to be, it's easy enough to manipulate a parameter like this.
There are serious differences in the world-view between the two candidates.
Two examples:
(1) Obama wants to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education by broadening its scope beyond just science and engineering majors:
All American citizens need high quality STEM education that inspires them to know more about the world around them, engages them in exploring challenging questions, and involves them in high quality intellectual work. STEM education is no longer only for those pursuing STEM careers; it should enable all citizens to solve problems, collaborate, weigh evidence, and communicate ideas.
whereas McCain sees science as being for geeks only. He wants more geeks, so the rest of the country don't have to bother their pretty heads while getting law and business degrees:
The diminishing number of science, technology, engineering and math graduates at the college level poses a fundamental and immediate threat to American competitiveness. We must fill the pipeline to our colleges and universities with students prepared for the rigors of advanced engineering, math, science and technology degrees.
(2) Obama sees technology leadership as being essential to national security:
It's essential to create a coherent new defense technology strategy to meet the kinds of threats we may faceâ"asymmetric conflicts, urban operations, peacekeeping missions, and cyber, bio, and proliferation threats, as well as new kinds of symmetric threats.
whereas McCain sees national security as essentially just military superiority:
As President, I will strengthen the military, shore up our alliances, and ensure that the nation is capable of protecting the homeland, deterring potential military challenges, responding to any crisis that endangers American security, and prevailing in any conflict we are forced to fight.
The summary statement gets things wrong in pretty much every respect, so this is mainly for those folks who read the summary and assume it's a fair reflection of the story.
(1) CASA is not designed to replace the existing NEXRAD network. It is designed to supplement it. NEXRADs are designed for long-range surveillance. CASA radars see "under" the NEXRAD umbrella, up to 3km in height. The article makes this clear.
(2) NEXRAD scans are not slow. The fastest volume coverage patterns (VCPs) in NEXRAD, used in severe weather, scan the atmosphere every 4 minutes. The only thing faster is phased array radar and it is still experimental (See: http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/). CASA radars don't have volume scans, but their antennas are about the same speed as NEXRAD's.
(3) NEXRAD is not limited in range. It goes up to 460 km. A CASA radar's range is only 30 km. If any one thinks that NEXRAD is "deeply flawed" due to its limited range, they need to take it up with the Flat Earth Society (the range limitation is mostly because of the earth's curvature).
Please make sure you understand an article before sending it off to Slashdot!
The way weather modification works (if it ever does: the jury's out on that one) is to find rain-bearing clouds and seed them so that the rain or hail falls somewhere other than where it would have normally fallen. The first thing, then, is to detect precipitation aloft. Pretty much the only way to do that is with weather radars -- satellite data is usually too coarse and not collected often enough.
Does Beijing have a weather radar? Good thing you asked. The Chinese government recently bought a S-band weather radar so that they could use it for the Beijing Olympic games. Unfortunately, being communists (see: East Germany), they decided that the best place to install the radar was in the middle of the city so that it could be admired by the proletariat.
Why is this funny? Because:
(a) weather radars have a "cone of silence". The radar is on the ground and has to see up high with a relatively flat beam. This means that for around 30km around the radar, it doesn't see squat. In other words, much of Beijing is in the cone of silence of the "Beijing" radar. (For comparision, the weather radar that covers Dallas in at Dallas/Fort Worth airport, far enough away from the two cities to get a good view of the weather over both of them).
(b) Most storms that hit Beijing move from West to East (as it does in most of the Northern Hemisphere). And to the west of Beijing are... mountains. Which radar can not see through. And many of the storms do initiate over those hills.
Bottom line? It's going to be hard to see the storms coming. Let alone modify the weather.
oops... i should have simply written "triangulating". I don't know what it is based on. Probably it's based on strength of signal from nearby cell-phone towers. In any case, the toolkit lets you get the user location to 300m (compared to about 3m using GPS).
I tried Android out -- we banged out a personalized weather application (even without a GPS chip, Android is capable of triangulating satellites to get within 300m of the user's position, which is sufficient for weather applications). The whole process took under an hour and was easy as pie.. So, no it's not vaporware. The hardware may be still be a few months away, but the software is enough to create real-world, practical applications.
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This is something that duplicate bridge players do about 25 times a session . We use insertion sort. When a player picks up a hand, it is typically shuffled, but players prefer to have cards separated by suits and descending order within each suit. Most people pick up their 13 cards and then move individual cards around using insertion sort. It is quite intuitive and relatively quick. However, insertion sort has a few other bridge-specific advantages: often players can evaluate their hand even as they are sorting it by first moving the high cards in place. Also, it is not necessary to completely sort the hand -- spot cards can be in any order and you will often find players sorting the spot cards before they put down as dummy. I suppose the complete answer would be that humans use insertion sort to result in a partially sorted hand. As an aside, all-time great bridge player Bob Hamman does not sort his hand. Just as moderately skilled bridge players do not sort the "spot cards" because they can figure those out on the fly, Bob Hamman can visualize and remember the entire hand without needing to sort it.
Here you go: http://not-that-sane.blogspot.com/2011/11/patent-madness_15.html
Mod parent up. If 3 people just keep citing each other circularly (avoiding self-citations), the whole ranking collapses because all their papers will be artificially inflated. Accounting for this is quite hard because it will involve distinguishing between natural clusters (of top researchers working on a common topic) or citation gamers (aiming to boost their citation counts). Also, note in the TFA a graph with a parameter "d". That is basically slop. The authors simply changed the d until they could get a match for Nobel winners. Once you know what the answer ought to be, it's easy enough to manipulate a parameter like this.
Two examples:
(1) Obama wants to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education by broadening its scope beyond just science and engineering majors:
All American citizens need high quality STEM education that inspires them to know more about the world around them, engages them in exploring challenging questions, and involves them in high quality intellectual work. STEM education is no longer only for those pursuing STEM careers; it should enable all citizens to solve problems, collaborate, weigh evidence, and communicate ideas.
whereas McCain sees science as being for geeks only. He wants more geeks, so the rest of the country don't have to bother their pretty heads while getting law and business degrees:
The diminishing number of science, technology, engineering and math graduates at the college level poses a fundamental and immediate threat to American competitiveness. We must fill the pipeline to our colleges and universities with students prepared for the rigors of advanced engineering, math, science and technology degrees.
(2) Obama sees technology leadership as being essential to national security:
It's essential to create a coherent new defense technology strategy to meet the kinds of threats we may faceâ"asymmetric conflicts, urban operations, peacekeeping missions, and cyber, bio, and proliferation threats, as well as new kinds of symmetric threats.
whereas McCain sees national security as essentially just military superiority:
As President, I will strengthen the military, shore up our alliances, and ensure that the nation is capable of protecting the homeland, deterring potential military challenges, responding to any crisis that endangers American security, and prevailing in any conflict we are forced to fight.
For more contrasts, see my blog post
The summary statement gets things wrong in pretty much every respect, so this is mainly for those folks who read the summary and assume it's a fair reflection of the story.
(1) CASA is not designed to replace the existing NEXRAD network. It is designed to supplement it. NEXRADs are designed for long-range surveillance. CASA radars see "under" the NEXRAD umbrella, up to 3km in height. The article makes this clear.
(2) NEXRAD scans are not slow. The fastest volume coverage patterns (VCPs) in NEXRAD, used in severe weather, scan the atmosphere every 4 minutes. The only thing faster is phased array radar and it is still experimental (See: http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/). CASA radars don't have volume scans, but their antennas are about the same speed as NEXRAD's.
(3) NEXRAD is not limited in range. It goes up to 460 km. A CASA radar's range is only 30 km. If any one thinks that NEXRAD is "deeply flawed" due to its limited range, they need to take it up with the Flat Earth Society (the range limitation is mostly because of the earth's curvature).
Please make sure you understand an article before sending it off to Slashdot!
The way weather modification works (if it ever does: the jury's out on that one) is to find rain-bearing clouds and seed them so that the rain or hail falls somewhere other than where it would have normally fallen. The first thing, then, is to detect precipitation aloft. Pretty much the only way to do that is with weather radars -- satellite data is usually too coarse and not collected often enough.
... mountains. Which radar can not see through. And many of the storms do initiate over those hills.
Does Beijing have a weather radar? Good thing you asked. The Chinese government recently bought a S-band weather radar so that they could use it for the Beijing Olympic games. Unfortunately, being communists (see: East Germany), they decided that the best place to install the radar was in the middle of the city so that it could be admired by the proletariat.
Why is this funny? Because:
(a) weather radars have a "cone of silence". The radar is on the ground and has to see up high with a relatively flat beam. This means that for around 30km around the radar, it doesn't see squat. In other words, much of Beijing is in the cone of silence of the "Beijing" radar. (For comparision, the weather radar that covers Dallas in at Dallas/Fort Worth airport, far enough away from the two cities to get a good view of the weather over both of them).
(b) Most storms that hit Beijing move from West to East (as it does in most of the Northern Hemisphere). And to the west of Beijing are
Bottom line? It's going to be hard to see the storms coming. Let alone modify the weather.
Disclaimer: my views, not my employer's.
oops ... i should have simply written "triangulating". I don't know what it is based on. Probably it's based on strength of signal from nearby cell-phone towers. In any case, the toolkit lets you get the user location to 300m (compared to about 3m using GPS).
I tried Android out -- we banged out a personalized weather application (even without a GPS chip, Android is capable of triangulating satellites to get within 300m of the user's position, which is sufficient for weather applications). The whole process took under an hour and was easy as pie.. So, no it's not vaporware. The hardware may be still be a few months away, but the software is enough to create real-world, practical applications.