The technique they use to estimate this is called a species-area curve. As others have explained, you intensely survey a very small piece of land, and can statistically correlate that to how many species you'll find in a larger area.
Some regions, like the tropical rainforest, are very high in species. You might have a certain type of plant that has five insect species that can only survive on that plant, and those insects might have little parasite wasps in them that specialize only in that insect, etc.
That's why instinctions rates of species can be confusing. A few types of ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots. You might find ten thousand distinct speies in a cubic meter. Whether these species are as "important" as a less-specialized species that is more widespread and adaptable is a matter for debate. But in terms of estimating the total number of species, the species area curve holds across different types of ecosystems. As you spread out from the small plot you surveyed in detail, you encounter new species and repeat species at a predictable rate, until you hit a new type of ecosystem.
Re:The problem behind the problem
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think the exerpt was saying that it's hard to tempt programmers making from 50-80k into being somebody's post-doc researcher, making maybe $20k a year, or less.
If you work professionally in bioinformatics, you will do much better, probably on par with being a programmer professionally. This guy was just pointing out that its much harder to convince bright and well trained people to slave for nothing in the academic world, since their skills are still rare and in high demand. Since everyone's working for private corporations, nothing gets published, so the body of open research in bioinformatics increases only very slowly.
Re:Brin has no sense of perspective
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Could Thoreau have done what he describes in Walden today? Of course not - or at least, not legally. He had no means to pay the property taxes that would be levied on his "house in the woods".
Wasn't legal then either. Thoreau got tossed in jail for non-payment of taxes and sat there for a while with every intention of using the incident to publice his views on civil disobedience. Then someone paid his taxes for him, and they booted him out of jail.
Slightly more info here.
I think a lot of people feel the same way you do. I used to be an editor at a Computer Science publishing company (also not the one with the animals) and most of our books had a useful lifespan of 2 - 3 years, at most. They get outdated awfully fast, and since our books were written by academics, they took an *awfully* long time to write.
We had only one or two books that were an exception to this. One was an Introduction to Computer Science Using Pseudocode, which we reprinted dozens of times for more than ten years since its first publishing date. For all I know, they may still be selling this book. I think the other book was an intro to the theory of computation.
Of course, from the publishers' perspective, they want books that will be outdated in a few years, because when the next thing comes along, you have to buy a new book. This is why docs that come with a piece of software often have free updates on line, but books you buy independently come out with new editions. For a software company a book is a cost center. For a publishing company, it's a profit center.
This is an experiment, performed to create a living human being, that takes place without the consent of the subject. Sure, that person doesn't exist at the start of the experiment, but at the end of it, they know that their entire existence is due wholly to research that they had no directing part in. That's a tough call to make, playing God like that.
How is this different than any other instance of becoming a parent? Surely the words "Well, I didn't ask to be born!" ring a bell for for most people who have, or were, teenagers?
In general when I'm looking for something on the net, I use google, because it works. The same reason I used to use altavista, before the signal to noise got too high.
Last week, I started a search that proved surprisingly difficult. I was looking for the net traces of a guy who had asked for my number (yes, chicks do this), and I was astonished when google turned up nothing of relevance, since this guy had been a sysadmin for years. My three-month old nephew had a bigger net presence.
So after getting nothing on google, I went to altavista, which gave me more results, but only because it included sites that had almost no relevance. More out of stubborness than anything else, I went through all the different search engines I could, and I finally found this guy using hotbot, which has to be the most scorned search engine out there.
It had a bunch of sites not listed in the other engines, and they were relevant. Why? I can't imagine. Does it ignore robot.txt? Has it discovered some secret algorithm that specializes in hard-to-find information? I can't explain it, but I tell you one thing. Next time I can't find something (and I know how to look hard) hotbot will be the place I try.
DeAnza college has a very well developed distance learning program. It's a community college so may not offer all the advanced classes in a subject, but if you're looking to get started in a new subject area, it's a great place to start.
I first came across them about five years ago when I was "New Media" editor for a textbook publishing company. There were a lot of innovative course materials coming out of their programs.
Murder seems to be a fairly common way for ancient corpses to have met their ends. There are some interesting sites on the peat bog bodies, found in many areas of the UK and Ireland. Many of them have their skulls bashed in, their throats cut, and IIRC, one was even stabbed in the back.
A good starting place is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/overkill.shtm l
Depending on your audience, teaching in hypercard was not a bad idea (really). For several years I worked for a CS textbook publisher, and we had a very successful intro to CS using hypercard book. It was called The Analytical Engine : An Introduction to Computer Science Using HyperCard. It made basic concepts accessible to absolute beginners. We're not talking folks who already have a strong enough interest to be declared CS majors, but as an intro class to spread understanding in the general population and possibly spark enough interest in a few students to go farther, it was fantastic.
This pair of authors (Decker and Hirschfield) also wrote one of my favorite intro to CS using Java textbooks, programming.java. (Disclaimer: I was an editor for one of the editions of this books). It approaches Java from an objects-early perspective, and uses the AWT so that you can actually see impressive looking results in the first week or two.
Of course, if you go on in CS you should learn multiple languages and get into the nitty gritty of the machine, but as an introductory language, Java excels in making programming accessible. Some have declared here that programming shouldn't be accessible, but that's what an "intro" is all about.
I just completely a Java language class at the graduate level for work (although I did English undergrad). I pulled out my old programming.java textbook and used it instead of the lame one we'd been assigned. We just got our grades for the final, mine was 3rd best out of 40, most of whom were full-time CS students. Although I do enjoy bragging, my point here is that almost any language can teach you important and widely applicable ideas if it is taught well. Most of the other students had taken several years of CS classes, and I had taken one quarter of C++ 6 years ago. But I worked publishing CS textbooks for several years, and learned a lot about how to teach (and learn) a programming language.
No language will serve you if it's taught poorly. almost any language will serve you if you can learn its lessons and extrapolate from them.
I'm dying to know where the funds for this "research" came from.
I first got carpal when I was 21, before I was a tech-geek, before I'd ever heard of it, and way before I even had health insurance. I got it under control with way too many ibuprofens daily, and by stopping all "unnecessary" manual activities: reading books, sewing, crochet...
Ibuprofen helped, and I took it for seven years every day, until it started giving me an ulcer last fall.
Since then I've switched to a much better alternative for treatment, lifting weights at the gym. I wish any of the doctors I had seen had recommended this method of control to me, since nothing else I have tried has been effective without other side-effects. But carpal is still always there, I'll always be prone to it (as long as I stay in my writing profession), but at least I can pick up a pen, and open a jar, and live like a normal person.
The article mentions the woman who's carpal "went away like it had never been" after her company spent all kinds of money on a dictaphone for her. Did it not cross anyone's minds that perhaps this device helped her? Or that her increased awareness of how she sat and what activities caused her pain allowed her to adjust it?
Carpal is more prevalent than ever. When I started wearing a brace years ago, almost everyone assumed I'd done a header on my bike or otherwise injured myself "acutely". They were surprised when I told them it was chronic, because I was so young. But I was apparently just being a trend-setter. In my office of 25 or so, about 6 or 7 of us either wear braces, do physical therapy or have those kooky side-impact keyboards (funded from our own pockets).
Perhaps these researches are frustrated because they look at medidal conditions as a specific set of symptoms that can be "cured" by some drug or surgery. I agree carpal is not like that. As a result of my complete lack of success getting any medical treatment or even good advice for it, my entire view of doctors and my willingness to put trust in them has been greatly lessened. I miss it. I want to believe that when something hurts, they can make it better.
These people are on crack if they think we're all torturing ourselves just because we don't like our jobs and can't admit it to ourselves, or whatever psychological justification they're going for. I am really happy for those who have gone into remission, but how dare they use some special-interest funded study (HMO's perhaps?) to tell the rest of us we're just imagining that we're injured.
I work in documentation. I've used a bunch of different version controls systems and performed needs analyses a few times when companies I worked for were switching over to "integrated" systems for development and version control, and someone decided that docs should go along for the ride.
Before you decide what system to recommend, you *have* to know what problem you're trying to solve. If the documentation is a mess, is it because you have a million old version sitting on your intranet, or even in binders? Is it because nothing is indexed so you cannot find the information you need, even though you suspect it exists? Is it written for a mess of different audience types? (PHBs, engineers, end-users, marketing?)
If any of these are the root of the problem, any type of version control is not the answer. What you need is a document repository. This can take the form of an intranet (MS's server happily displays office docs, though it will eat tons of drive space) a shared directory, or even a designated bookshelf where all the docs go.
Training whoever produces these docs on whatever system you use probably won't help, because it sounds like the real issue is that they haven't grasped the whole process of information management, notwithstanding whatever tools you provide to them to make that easier.
So, send these people to an information architecture course, or if that doesn't help (since there are a lot of not-super competant people working in docs, I hate to admit) get them an admin or a student co-op whose sole purpose in life is to keep track of these things. It may be a longer-term cost that telling them to use CVS, but it will actually work. Trust me, the problem isn't that they lack the tools. Good documenttion can be produced by quilting, if you're product cycle is long enough. The problem is that your docs manager (if you have one) doesn't understand how to manage information and keep it current. You should get a new one, or send the one you have to training, if you think they're redeemable.
If you are required to come up with some kind of software solution, here are some pro's and cons of systems I have used:
CVS: My personal favorite, I've used it on both UNIX and through a Web front-end. Pros are that it's incredibly flexible, free, and easy to migrate from if you switch to another system later. Cons: You can't diff unless it's a plain text file, and if you throw a lot of office or Frame documents in there, you better have a *lot* of disk space. Plus, we had a lot of resistance from people who had never used versioning. It is surprisingly hard to see the benefits, for a lot of people. We constantly had people writing over files, checking in old verions, and causing all kinds of havoc. Plan on having someone administer to this kind of thing if your user base is how you described it.
Visual Source Safe: Stay Away! I've used this in conjunction with an MS intranet server, which carried a large mixed bag of html and office documents, mostly posted by folks with very little technical knowledge. It was a mess. We ended up devoting a lot of our time just administering the thing, which is not as easy as microsoft likes to claim. and slow Slow SLOW. Sometimes I could hardly believe it. On the plus side, you can visually diff office documents, if you have the patience.
StarTeam: This system is weird. Docs went along with the rest of the engineering group on this one, but it will seem awkward for people unfamiliar with versioning, and it's very quirky. Its collaborative features, like file locking and bug tracking, are really awful.
And remember, version control makes a lot of sense for code development, but not usually as much for docs, because:
code is generally much more of a collaborative effort. It is rare for several people to work on the same file in docs.
unless you're documenting in native HTML (which doesn't sound like the case) you can't do diff's with most systems, and binary files eat disk space like you wouldn't believe.
Most word processing software has some kind of native versioning and locking, which often gets totally foobar'd when you try to integrate it with another "source control".
There are a lot of documentation consultant companies out there, some of which are very good, and most of which will happily outsource your whole doc department. Consider that option too.
All I recieved in the mail was the Massachusetts package of what the ballot questions were about. Usually, I recieve a phonecall or two asking for support for the candidates, or some malings about the candidates and their issues.
That's because there are so many states where the candidates are in a dead heat, and those are where they've been spending their money. I live in Oregon - normally completely ignored because it has only seven electoral votes, and most recent national elections have been decided before the polls even close here at 8PST.
This year tho, it's been crazy. Al Gore called me. Robert Redford called me, (taped messages, but still fun to boast about) a slew of other prominent and supposedly influential people have called me, to the point where I haven't picked up the phone in over a week. *Four* different times, live people have called to offer to pick up my ballot for me, or drive me to a drop box.
The irony is, I voted last week. Oregon is 100% vote-by-mail, and almost two-thirds of all voters had turned in their ballots by yesterday (They're expecting 85% turnout overall). If I had thought either major party candidate actually cared or knew about issues important to Oregon, I might have been flattered by their attention. But Al Gore has refused to take a public positions on locally prominent and controversial environmental issues, and George Bush Jr. just alarms me on too many levels.
I thought about doing the lesser of two evils thing, until democrats started running adds saying a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, and that if George wins, on Jan 1, 2001 all women who think about having abortions will be arrested, etc. They know Gore would win if not for the strong Nader presence here, but their use of FUD pissed me off so much they'd have had a better chance if they just left it alone.
I can't wait until tomorrow. There are blessings to living in a "sure thing" state, and you should count 'em. Protest and conscience votes are much less ethically challenging, and when the phone rings, odds are it isn't a recorded message asking you to change the ballot you cast a week ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The technique they use to estimate this is called a species-area curve. As others have explained, you intensely survey a very small piece of land, and can statistically correlate that to how many species you'll find in a larger area.
Some regions, like the tropical rainforest, are very high in species. You might have a certain type of plant that has five insect species that can only survive on that plant, and those insects might have little parasite wasps in them that specialize only in that insect, etc.
That's why instinctions rates of species can be confusing. A few types of ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots. You might find ten thousand distinct speies in a cubic meter. Whether these species are as "important" as a less-specialized species that is more widespread and adaptable is a matter for debate. But in terms of estimating the total number of species, the species area curve holds across different types of ecosystems. As you spread out from the small plot you surveyed in detail, you encounter new species and repeat species at a predictable rate, until you hit a new type of ecosystem.
A really good article called How many species are there on Earth?" explains all of this in much greater and more accurate detail.
I think the exerpt was saying that it's hard to tempt programmers making from 50-80k into being somebody's post-doc researcher, making maybe $20k a year, or less.
If you work professionally in bioinformatics, you will do much better, probably on par with being a programmer professionally. This guy was just pointing out that its much harder to convince bright and well trained people to slave for nothing in the academic world, since their skills are still rare and in high demand. Since everyone's working for private corporations, nothing gets published, so the body of open research in bioinformatics increases only very slowly.
You can find a list of bioinformatics programs here: http://www.ib3.gmu.edu/courses/bioinfogradprgm.htm l
Wasn't legal then either. Thoreau got tossed in jail for non-payment of taxes and sat there for a while with every intention of using the incident to publice his views on civil disobedience. Then someone paid his taxes for him, and they booted him out of jail. Slightly more info here.
I think a lot of people feel the same way you do. I used to be an editor at a Computer Science publishing company (also not the one with the animals) and most of our books had a useful lifespan of 2 - 3 years, at most. They get outdated awfully fast, and since our books were written by academics, they took an *awfully* long time to write.
We had only one or two books that were an exception to this. One was an Introduction to Computer Science Using Pseudocode, which we reprinted dozens of times for more than ten years since its first publishing date. For all I know, they may still be selling this book. I think the other book was an intro to the theory of computation.
Of course, from the publishers' perspective, they want books that will be outdated in a few years, because when the next thing comes along, you have to buy a new book. This is why docs that come with a piece of software often have free updates on line, but books you buy independently come out with new editions. For a software company a book is a cost center. For a publishing company, it's a profit center.
This is an experiment, performed to create a living human being, that takes place without the consent of the subject. Sure, that person doesn't exist at the start of the experiment, but at the end of it, they know that their entire existence is due wholly to research that they had no directing part in. That's a tough call to make, playing God like that.
How is this different than any other instance of becoming a parent? Surely the words "Well, I didn't ask to be born!" ring a bell for for most people who have, or were, teenagers?
In general when I'm looking for something on the net, I use google, because it works. The same reason I used to use altavista, before the signal to noise got too high.
Last week, I started a search that proved surprisingly difficult. I was looking for the net traces of a guy who had asked for my number (yes, chicks do this), and I was astonished when google turned up nothing of relevance, since this guy had been a sysadmin for years. My three-month old nephew had a bigger net presence.
So after getting nothing on google, I went to altavista, which gave me more results, but only because it included sites that had almost no relevance. More out of stubborness than anything else, I went through all the different search engines I could, and I finally found this guy using hotbot , which has to be the most scorned search engine out there.
It had a bunch of sites not listed in the other engines, and they were relevant. Why? I can't imagine. Does it ignore robot.txt? Has it discovered some secret algorithm that specializes in hard-to-find information? I can't explain it, but I tell you one thing. Next time I can't find something (and I know how to look hard) hotbot will be the place I try.
Do what you're good at, and use what works.
DeAnza college has a very well developed distance learning program. It's a community college so may not offer all the advanced classes in a subject, but if you're looking to get started in a new subject area, it's a great place to start.
Their distance learning page is here: http://distance.deanza.fhda.edu/
I first came across them about five years ago when I was "New Media" editor for a textbook publishing company. There were a lot of innovative course materials coming out of their programs.
Murder seems to be a fairly common way for ancient corpses to have met their ends. There are some interesting sites on the peat bog bodies, found in many areas of the UK and Ireland. Many of them have their skulls bashed in, their throats cut, and IIRC, one was even stabbed in the back.
A good starting place is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/overkill.shtm l
Depending on your audience, teaching in hypercard was not a bad idea (really). For several years I worked for a CS textbook publisher, and we had a very successful intro to CS using hypercard book. It was called The Analytical Engine : An Introduction to Computer Science Using HyperCard. It made basic concepts accessible to absolute beginners. We're not talking folks who already have a strong enough interest to be declared CS majors, but as an intro class to spread understanding in the general population and possibly spark enough interest in a few students to go farther, it was fantastic.
This pair of authors (Decker and Hirschfield) also wrote one of my favorite intro to CS using Java textbooks, programming.java. (Disclaimer: I was an editor for one of the editions of this books). It approaches Java from an objects-early perspective, and uses the AWT so that you can actually see impressive looking results in the first week or two.
Of course, if you go on in CS you should learn multiple languages and get into the nitty gritty of the machine, but as an introductory language, Java excels in making programming accessible. Some have declared here that programming shouldn't be accessible, but that's what an "intro" is all about.
I just completely a Java language class at the graduate level for work (although I did English undergrad). I pulled out my old programming.java textbook and used it instead of the lame one we'd been assigned. We just got our grades for the final, mine was 3rd best out of 40, most of whom were full-time CS students. Although I do enjoy bragging, my point here is that almost any language can teach you important and widely applicable ideas if it is taught well. Most of the other students had taken several years of CS classes, and I had taken one quarter of C++ 6 years ago. But I worked publishing CS textbooks for several years, and learned a lot about how to teach (and learn) a programming language.
No language will serve you if it's taught poorly. almost any language will serve you if you can learn its lessons and extrapolate from them.
I'm dying to know where the funds for this "research" came from.
I first got carpal when I was 21, before I was a tech-geek, before I'd ever heard of it, and way before I even had health insurance. I got it under control with way too many ibuprofens daily, and by stopping all "unnecessary" manual activities: reading books, sewing, crochet...
Ibuprofen helped, and I took it for seven years every day, until it started giving me an ulcer last fall.
Since then I've switched to a much better alternative for treatment, lifting weights at the gym. I wish any of the doctors I had seen had recommended this method of control to me, since nothing else I have tried has been effective without other side-effects. But carpal is still always there, I'll always be prone to it (as long as I stay in my writing profession), but at least I can pick up a pen, and open a jar, and live like a normal person.
The article mentions the woman who's carpal "went away like it had never been" after her company spent all kinds of money on a dictaphone for her. Did it not cross anyone's minds that perhaps this device helped her? Or that her increased awareness of how she sat and what activities caused her pain allowed her to adjust it?
Carpal is more prevalent than ever. When I started wearing a brace years ago, almost everyone assumed I'd done a header on my bike or otherwise injured myself "acutely". They were surprised when I told them it was chronic, because I was so young. But I was apparently just being a trend-setter. In my office of 25 or so, about 6 or 7 of us either wear braces, do physical therapy or have those kooky side-impact keyboards (funded from our own pockets).
Perhaps these researches are frustrated because they look at medidal conditions as a specific set of symptoms that can be "cured" by some drug or surgery. I agree carpal is not like that. As a result of my complete lack of success getting any medical treatment or even good advice for it, my entire view of doctors and my willingness to put trust in them has been greatly lessened. I miss it. I want to believe that when something hurts, they can make it better.
These people are on crack if they think we're all torturing ourselves just because we don't like our jobs and can't admit it to ourselves, or whatever psychological justification they're going for. I am really happy for those who have gone into remission, but how dare they use some special-interest funded study (HMO's perhaps?) to tell the rest of us we're just imagining that we're injured.
Look at the email address. This is not a (deliberate) troll.
I work in documentation. I've used a bunch of different version controls systems and performed needs analyses a few times when companies I worked for were switching over to "integrated" systems for development and version control, and someone decided that docs should go along for the ride.
Before you decide what system to recommend, you *have* to know what problem you're trying to solve. If the documentation is a mess, is it because you have a million old version sitting on your intranet, or even in binders? Is it because nothing is indexed so you cannot find the information you need, even though you suspect it exists? Is it written for a mess of different audience types? (PHBs, engineers, end-users, marketing?)
If any of these are the root of the problem, any type of version control is not the answer. What you need is a document repository. This can take the form of an intranet (MS's server happily displays office docs, though it will eat tons of drive space) a shared directory, or even a designated bookshelf where all the docs go.
Training whoever produces these docs on whatever system you use probably won't help, because it sounds like the real issue is that they haven't grasped the whole process of information management, notwithstanding whatever tools you provide to them to make that easier.
So, send these people to an information architecture course, or if that doesn't help (since there are a lot of not-super competant people working in docs, I hate to admit) get them an admin or a student co-op whose sole purpose in life is to keep track of these things. It may be a longer-term cost that telling them to use CVS, but it will actually work. Trust me, the problem isn't that they lack the tools. Good documenttion can be produced by quilting, if you're product cycle is long enough. The problem is that your docs manager (if you have one) doesn't understand how to manage information and keep it current. You should get a new one, or send the one you have to training, if you think they're redeemable.
If you are required to come up with some kind of software solution, here are some pro's and cons of systems I have used:
CVS: My personal favorite, I've used it on both UNIX and through a Web front-end. Pros are that it's incredibly flexible, free, and easy to migrate from if you switch to another system later. Cons: You can't diff unless it's a plain text file, and if you throw a lot of office or Frame documents in there, you better have a *lot* of disk space. Plus, we had a lot of resistance from people who had never used versioning. It is surprisingly hard to see the benefits, for a lot of people. We constantly had people writing over files, checking in old verions, and causing all kinds of havoc. Plan on having someone administer to this kind of thing if your user base is how you described it.
Visual Source Safe: Stay Away! I've used this in conjunction with an MS intranet server, which carried a large mixed bag of html and office documents, mostly posted by folks with very little technical knowledge. It was a mess. We ended up devoting a lot of our time just administering the thing, which is not as easy as microsoft likes to claim. and slow Slow SLOW. Sometimes I could hardly believe it. On the plus side, you can visually diff office documents, if you have the patience.
StarTeam: This system is weird. Docs went along with the rest of the engineering group on this one, but it will seem awkward for people unfamiliar with versioning, and it's very quirky. Its collaborative features, like file locking and bug tracking, are really awful.
And remember, version control makes a lot of sense for code development, but not usually as much for docs, because:
There are a lot of documentation consultant companies out there, some of which are very good, and most of which will happily outsource your whole doc department. Consider that option too.
Good luck.
All I recieved in the mail was the Massachusetts package of what the ballot questions were about. Usually, I recieve a phonecall or two asking for support for the candidates, or some malings about the candidates and their issues.
That's because there are so many states where the candidates are in a dead heat, and those are where they've been spending their money. I live in Oregon - normally completely ignored because it has only seven electoral votes, and most recent national elections have been decided before the polls even close here at 8PST.
This year tho, it's been crazy. Al Gore called me. Robert Redford called me, (taped messages, but still fun to boast about) a slew of other prominent and supposedly influential people have called me, to the point where I haven't picked up the phone in over a week. *Four* different times, live people have called to offer to pick up my ballot for me, or drive me to a drop box.
The irony is, I voted last week. Oregon is 100% vote-by-mail, and almost two-thirds of all voters had turned in their ballots by yesterday (They're expecting 85% turnout overall). If I had thought either major party candidate actually cared or knew about issues important to Oregon, I might have been flattered by their attention. But Al Gore has refused to take a public positions on locally prominent and controversial environmental issues, and George Bush Jr. just alarms me on too many levels.
So I voted for a candidate I actually liked, and he didn't even have to call me on the phone.
I thought about doing the lesser of two evils thing, until democrats started running adds saying a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, and that if George wins, on Jan 1, 2001 all women who think about having abortions will be arrested, etc. They know Gore would win if not for the strong Nader presence here, but their use of FUD pissed me off so much they'd have had a better chance if they just left it alone.
I can't wait until tomorrow. There are blessings to living in a "sure thing" state, and you should count 'em. Protest and conscience votes are much less ethically challenging, and when the phone rings, odds are it isn't a recorded message asking you to change the ballot you cast a week ago.
Brin's third sanity test was extrapolation, the extremely important ability to foresee the likely consequences of your actions.