The admins are aware of the feedback from what I've seen. The interface works much better if you use Chrome, but I agree, it needs tweaking. Like most of the projects, though, there are a group of people behind it who will continue to tweak based on user feedback. It's an iterative process, and personally I'm keen to throw positive support behind something that I think is a great idea and brings cutting edge datasets to the rest of us. I'm not affiliated with these guys in any way, just thing they deserve a red hot go.
It's a lot of fun - have been playing with it for the last 24 hours - until it got slashdotted:(
At the moment they've only got 35 days of data - that means you're only going to reliably spot planets with fast orbits of less than around 10 days. You've only got about a 10% chance of spotting a planet with a 365 day orbital period. Later they hope to increase this to 120 days as the Kepler mission releases more data.
It's not only planet searching that's interesting - you're looking at the light curve of stars and you see all kinds of odd stuff, from stars that have really random brightness peturbations, to stars that have oddly regular variations. Then there are things like eclipsing binaries that create complex waveforms and then stuff that's hard for an amateur like me to make head of tail of. If you've ever enjoyed backyard astronomy, this is great and very addictive.
There are some rough edges - it's a bit hard to get started as you feel you don't know what you're looking at at first, and the interface will need some improvements, but it's early days yet and they're already doing some great stuff and building on the back of other project like galaxy zoo, so I'm keen to keep at it for a bit.
I thought that quote from the parent was fascinating. To me, it's that kind of philanthropy that the US excels at. It's a LOT harder to find venture capital in many other countries.
Of course they have no real 'responsibility', but it's akin to sharing food with the rest of the tribe.
Agreed, but the rate of growth in game sizes is not governed entirely by technological factors.
The size of a game is the result of a decision on the part of the game publishers to back AAA titles which are bigger, more graphically pretty, etc. This is not the only way to go.
Given a significant economic incentive to keep games smaller (eg: digital distribution), I would not be surprised to find the growth game sizes leveling out or even contracting over time.
I might be misunderstanding you here, so apologies if I am.
Agreement absolutely should have an age restriction, because it comes down to the ability of the person making the agreement to make an informed decision. This is important because if the person making the agreement cannot make an informed decision, then we can't really be sure that noone is going to be hurt.
Is a 14 year old capable of making an informed decision? What about an 8 year old? Maybe, but as a society we've pretty much agreed that 18 is a reasonable place to set the bar.
We might ask who, if not the individual, is in a position to make such a decision on their behalf - I'd say here parents or guardians serve in that role until the child is old enough to make informed decisions.
I agree with the statement that the government is not our moral compass, but in this case I don't think this is about governments acting as a moral compass. I think it's about offering some protection to minors.
You don't have a choice with the government - you do what they say or they throw you in jail.
Hold on. Don't you elect your government in the US? When did the US become a dictatorship!? If you've elected a government that throws you in jail because you don't do what they say, then vote them out.
If the rest of the people disagree with you and vote for the government you don't want, well, that's not a problem with government, is it?
If the system's so broken you can't vote for the right people, change it. That's what democracy is all about.
Different societies have different value systems, and so different countries regulate different media in different ways.
What's important is that games get treated fairly against other media and regulated for what they are, not what scared, ignorant people worry they might be. The problem is that governments and legislators don't yet "get" games, and so fear and ignorance reign supreme.
As an example, in Australia, the government has a Classification Board that rates books, TV, movies and games. The Board is supposed to represent the values of the community and it generally does a pretty good job. Very few movies are refused classification (eg: banned).
Not so with video games. Games are regularly refused classification in Australia, largely because the highest classification for games is MA15+ - so if a game is considered only suitable for adults, then it can't be classified.
Yes, this is ludicrous and there's been a huge response from the local industry and a lot of local gamers. You can read more about it here if you are interested.
The point I'm trying to make, though, is that games are not treated on the same level as other forms of media in Australia, because they're poorly understood by government as a medium - mainly because the people in government didn't grow up playing games. I'd bet there are similar issues to varying degrees in other countries.
Give it a decade or so and things will be different. Until then, we're going to have to keep putting up with emotive comments and costly ineffective legislation from politicians looking for cheap popularity amongst their ignorant and fearful dull-eyed constituents.
The Americans have elected a courageous, intelligent man who really knows the value of freedom and democracy. He has shown that anyone really can still be president in the USA.
Kudos to everyone who voted for Obama and showed the world that those narrow-minded rednecks and neocons are just a stereotype.
Welcome back, USA. We missed you.
Space is actually a quite subtle difference in pressure from what we breath here on the surface, especially when you compare it the pressure difference to what you'd find a only a few thousand feet under the sea.
At only 10 meters (c. 30ft) beneath water you're exposed to twice the pressure you experience at sea level. It then increases by about 1 atmosphere per 10 meters. So, at one hundred meters it's an order of magnitude higher. You don't even need to go a few thousand feet under the sea to experience significantly higher pressure.
Agreed. Where I live there are large flocks of cockatoos. They are very social and can get to great ages. I've often seen them playing with street lights where they pull the rubber seal out so it dangles and they can muck about. I've seen them sit in two groups on either end of a pond and mercilessly chase ducks from one end to the other.
The most startling thing I ever saw was a cockatoo that was in the middle of the road. I was coming one way at 90kph and another car was coming the other way at around the same speed. The bird saw us coming too late. Under these circumstances most animals bolt, with predictably messy consequences. This cockatoo stood its ground, moved right to the centre of the road and stood still while we passed. After we passed it carried on. This was not seem like an animal freezing
in fear. My impression was that it was a carefully calculated strategy.
The researcher is Dr Craig A. Anderson from Iowa State University.
Have a look at the paper. You don't need to be an expert in behavioural psychology to see some significant problems. Here's four of them:
The study's sample is small, and so not generalisable. It's also not clear from the report how the sample was selected.
The way game playing and violent behaviour was assessed differed in each sample, and so they are not comparable
The derivation of the score used to denote violent games is suspect
(in the largest group of some 1,000 Japanese students aged 13-18, students were asked what 'types' (ie: genres) of games were their favorites, and what were the three next most favorite. They were given a score between 0 and 5 based on how many genres they selected were deemed violent. Behavioural scientists define violence more broadly than most people would. The Sims contains violence, for example, because people can have brawls. This 0-5 score was then moderated by the number of hours each player spent playing video games. This was the base value that was used to define how much violent material each player was exposed to.
4) The measure of violent behavior is debatable
To determine violent behaviour in the largest sample, students were asked to fill out a survey based on the Buss-Perry scale, which you can find an example of here: http://www.yorku.ca/rokada/psyctest/aggress.pdf
This told the researchers how aggressive/violent the student 'actually' was.
Now, I have serious concerns about behavioural psychology research at the best of times, but this study isn't even a good example of it.
I'd say the study's methods (and thus its results) are dubious at best. Do games or other media cause violence? Maybe. We just can't answer the question through studies like this. I would point out however that since the early 1990s violent crime in the United States has been declining:
So, if games do in fact make people more aggressive or violent, it doesn't seem (yet) to have translated into actual physical violence.
We can add this study to the heap of dodgy behavioural psych research on media effects which lazy journalists or ideologues can wheel out whenever they want to make a statement like "xxxx causes violence, and there's a lot of research to support it".
Yeah, there is a lot of research out there - bad research. But a pile of shit doesn't smell any better just because there's a lot of it. Problem is, if you're preaching to the converted, your audience will all agree they're smelling roses, and if you say it with enough confidence and can slap a PhD on the end of your name, a lot of people will assume their noses are wrong.
Too bad more people aren't educated in the basic art of critically assessing what they see, hear and read.
The next big one could come any time and kill us all. If it was really the end of the world would they let us know?
"They" is a nebulous concept that in this case includes tens or hundreds of thousands of professional and amateur astronomers across the globe. A big asteroid on a collision course with Earth would be noticed by many people as it got close, so I'd expect we'd all know about it.
From wikipedia:
a certain non-orientable surface, i.e., a surface... with no distinct "inner" and "outer" sides
So, technically, he wasn't buried *in* it:)
Digital imaging equipment doesn't see the world in colour. In a digital camera light causes electric charge to build up in photoelectric elements (CMOS or CCD) inside the camera. Lots of light makes lots of charge, less light makes less charge. In other words, an image that the camera sees is translated into brightness values - black, grey and white to you and me.
To turn this back into a colour image you need to take more than one photo, and place a filter over the top of the camera so that only light at certain wavelengths is seen.
If you do this for red, green and blue light then you get three different black and white images like this:
If you combine these together using a program like Photoshop or GIMP you get a a false colour composite. You can then tweak this to make it look how you want it.
Does it look like you'd really see it? I guess it depends on the person, but it's close enough for most of us.
* Note that I'm only guessing that the above Phoenix images were taken using red, green and blue filters - I have no information about them - but they seem to be pretty close.
Slashdot Mirror
The first images are online here: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/raw/
...who scored a perfect 10 for landing on the surface of Mars!
Gold medal, world (and Martian!) record :)
Before we cut to a talking head on NASA TV, the team were reading out landing data. Two bits I loved:
That horizontal figure is truly staggering. Well done to all involved!
The admins are aware of the feedback from what I've seen. The interface works much better if you use Chrome, but I agree, it needs tweaking. Like most of the projects, though, there are a group of people behind it who will continue to tweak based on user feedback. It's an iterative process, and personally I'm keen to throw positive support behind something that I think is a great idea and brings cutting edge datasets to the rest of us. I'm not affiliated with these guys in any way, just thing they deserve a red hot go.
It's a lot of fun - have been playing with it for the last 24 hours - until it got slashdotted :(
At the moment they've only got 35 days of data - that means you're only going to reliably spot planets with fast orbits of less than around 10 days. You've only got about a 10% chance of spotting a planet with a 365 day orbital period. Later they hope to increase this to 120 days as the Kepler mission releases more data.
It's not only planet searching that's interesting - you're looking at the light curve of stars and you see all kinds of odd stuff, from stars that have really random brightness peturbations, to stars that have oddly regular variations. Then there are things like eclipsing binaries that create complex waveforms and then stuff that's hard for an amateur like me to make head of tail of. If you've ever enjoyed backyard astronomy, this is great and very addictive.
There are some rough edges - it's a bit hard to get started as you feel you don't know what you're looking at at first, and the interface will need some improvements, but it's early days yet and they're already doing some great stuff and building on the back of other project like galaxy zoo, so I'm keen to keep at it for a bit.
FFS guys. He meant tyrants. You know, hardened battle ants who worship Tyr, the scandinavian god of war. They all come wired with mobile broadband.
Mod parent up! Great, succinct summary of two very important points that have been lost in much of this discussion.
You need to take off and nuke the site from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
I thought that quote from the parent was fascinating. To me, it's that kind of philanthropy that the US excels at. It's a LOT harder to find venture capital in many other countries. Of course they have no real 'responsibility', but it's akin to sharing food with the rest of the tribe.
Senator Stephen Conroy would like to recall the message: "ACMA Blacklist - see attachment".
Agreed, but the rate of growth in game sizes is not governed entirely by technological factors. The size of a game is the result of a decision on the part of the game publishers to back AAA titles which are bigger, more graphically pretty, etc. This is not the only way to go. Given a significant economic incentive to keep games smaller (eg: digital distribution), I would not be surprised to find the growth game sizes leveling out or even contracting over time.
Surely the quiet absence of a high point of geekdom becomes news at some point!
Maybe too many geeks moved on to something else.
agreement should not have an age restriction
I might be misunderstanding you here, so apologies if I am.
Agreement absolutely should have an age restriction, because it comes down to the ability of the person making the agreement to make an informed decision. This is important because if the person making the agreement cannot make an informed decision, then we can't really be sure that noone is going to be hurt.
Is a 14 year old capable of making an informed decision? What about an 8 year old? Maybe, but as a society we've pretty much agreed that 18 is a reasonable place to set the bar.
We might ask who, if not the individual, is in a position to make such a decision on their behalf - I'd say here parents or guardians serve in that role until the child is old enough to make informed decisions.
I agree with the statement that the government is not our moral compass, but in this case I don't think this is about governments acting as a moral compass. I think it's about offering some protection to minors.
Democracy isn't about using the government to force your opinions on other people.
No, it's not. And I didn't say that. Please feel free to invent straw men and knock them down, but don't quote me when you do it. kthanxbye.
You don't have a choice with the government - you do what they say or they throw you in jail.
Hold on. Don't you elect your government in the US? When did the US become a dictatorship!? If you've elected a government that throws you in jail because you don't do what they say, then vote them out. If the rest of the people disagree with you and vote for the government you don't want, well, that's not a problem with government, is it? If the system's so broken you can't vote for the right people, change it. That's what democracy is all about.
Most people aren't significantly above average.
Erm, yes. In fact, half the population are below average. But it's OK; the other half are above average.
Yeah, it's also terrible that nobody archived any of the 2000 Olympics stuff...
Different societies have different value systems, and so different countries regulate different media in different ways.
What's important is that games get treated fairly against other media and regulated for what they are, not what scared, ignorant people worry they might be. The problem is that governments and legislators don't yet "get" games, and so fear and ignorance reign supreme.
As an example, in Australia, the government has a Classification Board that rates books, TV, movies and games. The Board is supposed to represent the values of the community and it generally does a pretty good job. Very few movies are refused classification (eg: banned).
Not so with video games. Games are regularly refused classification in Australia, largely because the highest classification for games is MA15+ - so if a game is considered only suitable for adults, then it can't be classified.
Yes, this is ludicrous and there's been a huge response from the local industry and a lot of local gamers. You can read more about it here if you are interested.
The point I'm trying to make, though, is that games are not treated on the same level as other forms of media in Australia, because they're poorly understood by government as a medium - mainly because the people in government didn't grow up playing games. I'd bet there are similar issues to varying degrees in other countries.
Give it a decade or so and things will be different. Until then, we're going to have to keep putting up with emotive comments and costly ineffective legislation from politicians looking for cheap popularity amongst their ignorant and fearful dull-eyed constituents.
The Americans have elected a courageous, intelligent man who really knows the value of freedom and democracy. He has shown that anyone really can still be president in the USA. Kudos to everyone who voted for Obama and showed the world that those narrow-minded rednecks and neocons are just a stereotype. Welcome back, USA. We missed you.
The thing is, you seem to parse the words and glean some meaning, but the thing is, you miss the point entirely.
Not entirely unlike human genomic research :)
Space is actually a quite subtle difference in pressure from what we breath here on the surface, especially when you compare it the pressure difference to what you'd find a only a few thousand feet under the sea.
At only 10 meters (c. 30ft) beneath water you're exposed to twice the pressure you experience at sea level. It then increases by about 1 atmosphere per 10 meters. So, at one hundred meters it's an order of magnitude higher. You don't even need to go a few thousand feet under the sea to experience significantly higher pressure.
Agreed. Where I live there are large flocks of cockatoos. They are very social and can get to great ages. I've often seen them playing with street lights where they pull the rubber seal out so it dangles and they can muck about. I've seen them sit in two groups on either end of a pond and mercilessly chase ducks from one end to the other. The most startling thing I ever saw was a cockatoo that was in the middle of the road. I was coming one way at 90kph and another car was coming the other way at around the same speed. The bird saw us coming too late. Under these circumstances most animals bolt, with predictably messy consequences. This cockatoo stood its ground, moved right to the centre of the road and stood still while we passed. After we passed it carried on. This was not seem like an animal freezing in fear. My impression was that it was a carefully calculated strategy.
I know I'm posting late, but you can find the paper that was published in Pediatrics here:
http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/abstracts/2005-2009/08ASGISYNK.pdf
The researcher is Dr Craig A. Anderson from Iowa State University.
Have a look at the paper. You don't need to be an expert in behavioural psychology to see some significant problems. Here's four of them:
(in the largest group of some 1,000 Japanese students aged 13-18, students were asked what 'types' (ie: genres) of games were their favorites, and what were the three next most favorite. They were given a score between 0 and 5 based on how many genres they selected were deemed violent. Behavioural scientists define violence more broadly than most people would. The Sims contains violence, for example, because people can have brawls. This 0-5 score was then moderated by the number of hours each player spent playing video games. This was the base value that was used to define how much violent material each player was exposed to.
To determine violent behaviour in the largest sample, students were asked to fill out a survey based on the Buss-Perry scale, which you can find an example of here: http://www.yorku.ca/rokada/psyctest/aggress.pdf This told the researchers how aggressive/violent the student 'actually' was.
Now, I have serious concerns about behavioural psychology research at the best of times, but this study isn't even a good example of it.
I'd say the study's methods (and thus its results) are dubious at best. Do games or other media cause violence? Maybe. We just can't answer the question through studies like this. I would point out however that since the early 1990s violent crime in the United States has been declining:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
So, if games do in fact make people more aggressive or violent, it doesn't seem (yet) to have translated into actual physical violence.
We can add this study to the heap of dodgy behavioural psych research on media effects which lazy journalists or ideologues can wheel out whenever they want to make a statement like "xxxx causes violence, and there's a lot of research to support it".
Yeah, there is a lot of research out there - bad research. But a pile of shit doesn't smell any better just because there's a lot of it. Problem is, if you're preaching to the converted, your audience will all agree they're smelling roses, and if you say it with enough confidence and can slap a PhD on the end of your name, a lot of people will assume their noses are wrong.
Too bad more people aren't educated in the basic art of critically assessing what they see, hear and read.
The next big one could come any time and kill us all. If it was really the end of the world would they let us know?
"They" is a nebulous concept that in this case includes tens or hundreds of thousands of professional and amateur astronomers across the globe. A big asteroid on a collision course with Earth would be noticed by many people as it got close, so I'd expect we'd all know about it.
From wikipedia: a certain non-orientable surface, i.e., a surface ... with no distinct "inner" and "outer" sides
So, technically, he wasn't buried *in* it :)
Digital imaging equipment doesn't see the world in colour. In a digital camera light causes electric charge to build up in photoelectric elements (CMOS or CCD) inside the camera. Lots of light makes lots of charge, less light makes less charge. In other words, an image that the camera sees is translated into brightness values - black, grey and white to you and me.
To turn this back into a colour image you need to take more than one photo, and place a filter over the top of the camera so that only light at certain wavelengths is seen.
If you do this for red, green and blue light then you get three different black and white images like this:
red green blue
If you combine these together using a program like Photoshop or GIMP you get a a false colour composite. You can then tweak this to make it look how you want it.
Does it look like you'd really see it? I guess it depends on the person, but it's close enough for most of us.
* Note that I'm only guessing that the above Phoenix images were taken using red, green and blue filters - I have no information about them - but they seem to be pretty close.