Well, I could turn this around and claim that the thing we are doing over and over is making it harder for citizens to defend themselves, with these sorts of things as a natural consequence of that failure to change. But then I am more of an evidence-based decision maker rather than a simple ideologue.
An aside: Be careful what you wish for (lower cancer rates), treating cancer as a terminal condition might be cheaper than treating it as a disease then turning around and also paying for heart failure as the terminal condition. By the way, Total Cost of Ownership type analyses are really frowned on in a society that has disconnected health care costs from the health care consumers. So go ahead and pick from the menu 'cause the kids'll pick up the bill (a switch on the usual parents-as-ATMs, no?).
New regs are all about making it harder to fly, so we can reduce our carbon footprints, so we can delay the end of the current ice age by another 100 years (it's coming whether we all start walking yesterday).
I'll bet if you do the regression analysis to predict success you would find the coefficient on "ethnicity" large and statistically significant while the coefficient on "race" was small and statistically insignificant, which is to say that "ethnicity" (culture, nurture and life style) is important and "race" (genes and biology) is not. But then, I am just a mathematician working in medical research and am not a political scientist working in the surreal world.
But correlation is not causation, and "personal testimonials (n=1)" are not "evidence-based analysis (n>>1)". Try looking at a few GOOD clinical trials and see what you think then.
Now that MN is a political monoculture (the Governor and both House and Senate (state level) are Democratic) I am going to propose to my fellow Libertarians and the estimated 20-30% of the rational Republicans that we "New Hampshire" the MN Democratic party, so that when we discuss (for example) how bad defined benefits state pension plans are when compared with defined contribution plans, that debate is carried on within the ruling class rather than between the two competing ruling classes. Only this way can we shed the religious conservatives, with their big-government social agenda, who have hijacked the Republican party. We will carry our sustainable is important thinking along as we attempt to teach economics to the Democrats (who deny economic science the way the Republicans deny evolutionary science).
Freedom first, then peace, then justice. You can't have justice without peace because for that is mob tyranny.. You cannot have peace without freedom for that is slavery. And you have to deliver them to yourself in the only order that can sustain itself during the transitions. Freedom first. Then peace. Then justice.
This is such a fun topic, but it makes me glad that most of my programming is math and stats and I can leave the GUI and interfaces programming to better and more tightly wound coders than I. All I ask is that the mouse cursor not make me curse, the touchpad interface not make me touchy and the help files all be accessible through Google.
As a mathematician and a Republican low-level activist I am constantly muttering that HFT is antithetical to the free market. If you give me a white board I can show you why, but then I look like Ross Perot.
I tell you, this IS the Zombie Apocalypse... these mind-less nutjobs are going to take over the world based on the simple math that says they kill us for any excuse and we only kill them if we have to. [conspiracy alert] I wonder if the West's strategy is as simple as (1) insult some 1800-year old belief structre, (2) wait for the nut jobs to stick up their heads, (3) shoot them, (4) repeat 1-3 till silence prevails.[/conspiracy alert]
As part of my professional life I have coded and used the genetic algorithm, have read extensively on it, and I am constantly amazed by the cognitive dissonance that must make it nearly impossible for the social-liberal-economic-liberals (aka, the "left") to think clearly. The genetic algorithm is arguably the single most powerful algorithm we know of because of its ability to solve problems that are not even stated to be problems. Yet believing in the genetic algorithm is essentially to believe in evolution, while believing in free-markets is essentially to believe in the genetic algorithm. Both are driven by the mathematics that use "success" as a predictor of future existence, whether we are discussing a genetic line (e.g., rats) or an economic line (fast food corporations). Still, one extreme of our political world embraces evolution and rejects free-markets while the other extreme embraces free-markets yet rejects evolution (remember, these ARE the extremes). Unfortunately, correlation is not causation, as this article appears forget in its haste to point out once again that people they don't like are idiots (a classic ad hominum attack).
Please, have none of us seen the Kevin Slavin TEDTALK on this? I had my whole analytical team sitting in my office to watch this one (I'm the mathematician in the group).
As a Republican activist I argue that HFT distorts the free-market purpose of the stock markets in a way that violates basic assumptions about the market, and as such can then push to tax short term capital gains at a punishingly high level without "raising taxes" because supporting free-market principles trumps (sorry) supporting lower taxes.
Children's book my aching proboscis. But, like Brave New World, for some collectivists this is a utopia, not a dystopia. Only in a free world can both exist as micro-climes.
Exactly. If at all possible, build a test suite of data that exercises the old program, then make sure the newer versions give identical answers and if possible, generate random data as well to find logic that does not exist except by chance.
Don't know how you could do this if your are talking about a GUI program, I am thinking of engineering type problems.
I'll bet that if we really start suppressing the oil industry they will make even more money by selling oil to third world countries who still want to grow up into the 20th century lifestyles. And while it is fun to claim that conservatives are stoopid (hey, no name calling here), in point of fact, I take comfort in the bell-curve effect, which means I can suspect that while the mean IQ of conservatives may be be below that of statists, a wider variance would explain why my smartest friends are all libertarians (or apolitical scientists).
Actually, yes, it does. Every time I submit a professional paper I have to disclose my funding sources to ensure that I am either unbiased or at least open about it. That's probably a foreign concept to people whose primary source of information is NPR-Fox. As primary-pundit-in-chief at a MNGOP website you can bet I will point to this study precisely because I can at the same time point out that it is more unbiased than some other channels.
One press report discussed the idea that the Higgs field might have the same transient existence that the aether did in Electro-Magnetic theory. Do you think there is a field that will interact with the Higgs field to produce an energy transmission function similar to that described by Maxwell's equations?
The mathematics of deterrence are much more complicated than the simplistic Prisoner's Dilemma, but the Prisoner's Dilemma can inform some 30,000 foot understandings. It does not take a genius to see that when you put an infinity in one of the spaces in the PD payoff matrix, the math goes all bananas (the technical term). Religious nutjobs all seem (to me) to think in terms of infinite losses or infinite rewards. Or both. In decision sciences we would call those people irrational.
As a mathematician working in medical research I do not like GUI software for analytical purposes because everything I do needs to be replicatable. A script provides a permanent (in the second sense of the word) record of what I had to do to find out that, for example, smoking causes cancer. Indeed, "replicatable results" is the latest catch-phrase finding its way into the lexicon of medical research (as evidenced by events as UseR2012). Even commercial packages like Enterprise Miner (SAS) provide a way to get at the underlying scripts that the GUI produces precisely because of the need to be able to track where all that click-and-dragging got you. Of course, 95% of GUI-level users never peek under the hood to see what just happened, but that's another story (I am a statistician too, so I can make up my own statistics, do not try this at home).
This sort of action (trying to outlaw stupid behavior) only gets traction in a society that has decided to subsidize or otherwise centrally manage health care. This is why Republicans think that government run medical insurance programs are attacks on freedom. As an analyst in the health care industry (mostly on the medical side) I support these sorts of laws, but as an activist for freedom I deplore them. Wish my health care package covered experimental surgeries on splitting conflicted left(rational)-right(compassion) brains.
Amazing that the same types who immediately buy into global warming (science) find it difficult to believe science when it tells us something like this. Sigh.
But on another note, I've often thought (as I focused on a computer program trying to get an analysis done) that programming feeds that need for novelty that drives boy-men so much, since each puzzled out block of code quickly rewards the artist when it works, but then the need to go to the next level kicks in. And documentation is such a drag on that quest for novelty...
People, people. Where is my AI phone App... one that can sound human (Turing test) to a scammer so that the scammer will just keep trying to explain how they are going to help me? I'm thinking the language barrier would let AI-generated English pass well enough to keep someone busy.
I just attended a medical conference where we presented results that had already been picked up by the press on the relationship of obesity to health care costs. Not surprising was that obesity predicted higher costs, what was interesting was that it was a bigger factor than smoking, which has already led to headlines asking "Is obesity becoming the next "second-hand smoke" issue?"". Yup, brought to you by the same nanny-state that took away smoking, coming soon to a fast food joint near you, even more shaming of "super-sized" servings to "super-sized" people.
I guess that's the price we pay for asking everyone else to "share the costs" of what used to be personal lifestyle choices. But what cold-hearted SOB is going to be the greeter at the ER door turning away motorcyclists who "forgot" their helmets, smokers who "just could not quit" or obese people who "just ate a couple, social eaters, really". And how to cull the herd for those unfortunates who got the disease without the crime (spontaneous "wild type" lung cancers, thyroid gone-amuk obese people). A government big enough to give you everything you ask for is big enough to take away everything you've got. Even if only one shaming ad program at a time.
Well, if the movie Idiocracy has any validity, a gene for intelligence is selected against once a society reaches a level of existence beyond simple subsistence. I expect all Slashdotters understand the math, and suspect none of them know what to do about it because we also know the limits to growth that preclude a simple read-heed-and-breed solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I could turn this around and claim that the thing we are doing over and over is making it harder for citizens to defend themselves, with these sorts of things as a natural consequence of that failure to change. But then I am more of an evidence-based decision maker rather than a simple ideologue.
An aside: Be careful what you wish for (lower cancer rates), treating cancer as a terminal condition might be cheaper than treating it as a disease then turning around and also paying for heart failure as the terminal condition. By the way, Total Cost of Ownership type analyses are really frowned on in a society that has disconnected health care costs from the health care consumers. So go ahead and pick from the menu 'cause the kids'll pick up the bill (a switch on the usual parents-as-ATMs, no?).
New regs are all about making it harder to fly, so we can reduce our carbon footprints, so we can delay the end of the current ice age by another 100 years (it's coming whether we all start walking yesterday).
Hey, remember 1945? Don't make me open up another can o' whoop-ass on you.
I'll bet if you do the regression analysis to predict success you would find the coefficient on "ethnicity" large and statistically significant while the coefficient on "race" was small and statistically insignificant, which is to say that "ethnicity" (culture, nurture and life style) is important and "race" (genes and biology) is not. But then, I am just a mathematician working in medical research and am not a political scientist working in the surreal world.
But correlation is not causation, and "personal testimonials (n=1)" are not "evidence-based analysis (n>>1)". Try looking at a few GOOD clinical trials and see what you think then.
Freedom first, then peace, then justice. You can't have justice without peace because for that is mob tyranny.. You cannot have peace without freedom for that is slavery. And you have to deliver them to yourself in the only order that can sustain itself during the transitions. Freedom first. Then peace. Then justice.
This is such a fun topic, but it makes me glad that most of my programming is math and stats and I can leave the GUI and interfaces programming to better and more tightly wound coders than I. All I ask is that the mouse cursor not make me curse, the touchpad interface not make me touchy and the help files all be accessible through Google.
As a mathematician and a Republican low-level activist I am constantly muttering that HFT is antithetical to the free market. If you give me a white board I can show you why, but then I look like Ross Perot.
I tell you, this IS the Zombie Apocalypse ... these mind-less nutjobs are going to take over the world based on the simple math that says they kill us for any excuse and we only kill them if we have to. [conspiracy alert] I wonder if the West's strategy is as simple as (1) insult some 1800-year old belief structre, (2) wait for the nut jobs to stick up their heads, (3) shoot them, (4) repeat 1-3 till silence prevails.[/conspiracy alert]
Watching the news feeds from the Middle Eastern street in reaction to "Innocence of Mohammed" makes me think the Zombie Apocalypse is already here ...
As part of my professional life I have coded and used the genetic algorithm, have read extensively on it, and I am constantly amazed by the cognitive dissonance that must make it nearly impossible for the social-liberal-economic-liberals (aka, the "left") to think clearly. The genetic algorithm is arguably the single most powerful algorithm we know of because of its ability to solve problems that are not even stated to be problems. Yet believing in the genetic algorithm is essentially to believe in evolution, while believing in free-markets is essentially to believe in the genetic algorithm. Both are driven by the mathematics that use "success" as a predictor of future existence, whether we are discussing a genetic line (e.g., rats) or an economic line (fast food corporations). Still, one extreme of our political world embraces evolution and rejects free-markets while the other extreme embraces free-markets yet rejects evolution (remember, these ARE the extremes). Unfortunately, correlation is not causation, as this article appears forget in its haste to point out once again that people they don't like are idiots (a classic ad hominum attack).
Please, have none of us seen the Kevin Slavin TEDTALK on this? I had my whole analytical team sitting in my office to watch this one (I'm the mathematician in the group). As a Republican activist I argue that HFT distorts the free-market purpose of the stock markets in a way that violates basic assumptions about the market, and as such can then push to tax short term capital gains at a punishingly high level without "raising taxes" because supporting free-market principles trumps (sorry) supporting lower taxes.
Children's book my aching proboscis. But, like Brave New World, for some collectivists this is a utopia, not a dystopia. Only in a free world can both exist as micro-climes.
Exactly. If at all possible, build a test suite of data that exercises the old program, then make sure the newer versions give identical answers and if possible, generate random data as well to find logic that does not exist except by chance. Don't know how you could do this if your are talking about a GUI program, I am thinking of engineering type problems.
I'll bet that if we really start suppressing the oil industry they will make even more money by selling oil to third world countries who still want to grow up into the 20th century lifestyles. And while it is fun to claim that conservatives are stoopid (hey, no name calling here), in point of fact, I take comfort in the bell-curve effect, which means I can suspect that while the mean IQ of conservatives may be be below that of statists, a wider variance would explain why my smartest friends are all libertarians (or apolitical scientists).
Actually, yes, it does. Every time I submit a professional paper I have to disclose my funding sources to ensure that I am either unbiased or at least open about it. That's probably a foreign concept to people whose primary source of information is NPR-Fox. As primary-pundit-in-chief at a MNGOP website you can bet I will point to this study precisely because I can at the same time point out that it is more unbiased than some other channels.
One press report discussed the idea that the Higgs field might have the same transient existence that the aether did in Electro-Magnetic theory. Do you think there is a field that will interact with the Higgs field to produce an energy transmission function similar to that described by Maxwell's equations?
The mathematics of deterrence are much more complicated than the simplistic Prisoner's Dilemma, but the Prisoner's Dilemma can inform some 30,000 foot understandings. It does not take a genius to see that when you put an infinity in one of the spaces in the PD payoff matrix, the math goes all bananas (the technical term). Religious nutjobs all seem (to me) to think in terms of infinite losses or infinite rewards. Or both. In decision sciences we would call those people irrational.
As a mathematician working in medical research I do not like GUI software for analytical purposes because everything I do needs to be replicatable. A script provides a permanent (in the second sense of the word) record of what I had to do to find out that, for example, smoking causes cancer. Indeed, "replicatable results" is the latest catch-phrase finding its way into the lexicon of medical research (as evidenced by events as UseR2012). Even commercial packages like Enterprise Miner (SAS) provide a way to get at the underlying scripts that the GUI produces precisely because of the need to be able to track where all that click-and-dragging got you. Of course, 95% of GUI-level users never peek under the hood to see what just happened, but that's another story (I am a statistician too, so I can make up my own statistics, do not try this at home).
This sort of action (trying to outlaw stupid behavior) only gets traction in a society that has decided to subsidize or otherwise centrally manage health care. This is why Republicans think that government run medical insurance programs are attacks on freedom. As an analyst in the health care industry (mostly on the medical side) I support these sorts of laws, but as an activist for freedom I deplore them. Wish my health care package covered experimental surgeries on splitting conflicted left(rational)-right(compassion) brains.
Amazing that the same types who immediately buy into global warming (science) find it difficult to believe science when it tells us something like this. Sigh. But on another note, I've often thought (as I focused on a computer program trying to get an analysis done) that programming feeds that need for novelty that drives boy-men so much, since each puzzled out block of code quickly rewards the artist when it works, but then the need to go to the next level kicks in. And documentation is such a drag on that quest for novelty ...
People, people. Where is my AI phone App... one that can sound human (Turing test) to a scammer so that the scammer will just keep trying to explain how they are going to help me? I'm thinking the language barrier would let AI-generated English pass well enough to keep someone busy.
I just attended a medical conference where we presented results that had already been picked up by the press on the relationship of obesity to health care costs. Not surprising was that obesity predicted higher costs, what was interesting was that it was a bigger factor than smoking, which has already led to headlines asking "Is obesity becoming the next "second-hand smoke" issue?"". Yup, brought to you by the same nanny-state that took away smoking, coming soon to a fast food joint near you, even more shaming of "super-sized" servings to "super-sized" people. I guess that's the price we pay for asking everyone else to "share the costs" of what used to be personal lifestyle choices. But what cold-hearted SOB is going to be the greeter at the ER door turning away motorcyclists who "forgot" their helmets, smokers who "just could not quit" or obese people who "just ate a couple, social eaters, really". And how to cull the herd for those unfortunates who got the disease without the crime (spontaneous "wild type" lung cancers, thyroid gone-amuk obese people). A government big enough to give you everything you ask for is big enough to take away everything you've got. Even if only one shaming ad program at a time.
Well, if the movie Idiocracy has any validity, a gene for intelligence is selected against once a society reaches a level of existence beyond simple subsistence. I expect all Slashdotters understand the math, and suspect none of them know what to do about it because we also know the limits to growth that preclude a simple read-heed-and-breed solution.