Google "ring species". A parent species hits a geographic barrier and populations move in a ring around it. Opposite sex members of any two neighboring populations can breed true, until you get to the far side of the ring. The last population at the end of the "clockwise" arc cannot breed (even to produce sterile hybrids) with the last population at the end of the "counterclockwise" arc.
Bookmarked that, that's actually a pretty cool resource. But digging into the facts presented, it does say that 60% of people who have contracted H5N1 have died. That's different than saying it will kill 60% of the people who get it. The higher initial mortality rate is to be expected given that it arose in an area where extreme poverty and poor sanitary conditions are common, and given the time necessary to develop appropriate treatments. Fortunately our treatments are getting better, and H5N1 is difficult to transmit to humans. But given that we've seen animal flu viruses mutate to be more contagious to humans, and that H5N1 is pretty nasty, it makes sense that health agencies spend a lot on awareness and research.
I'll admit I haven't followed news on vaccine manufacturers, but it seems like the companies are still doing a good job. New vaccines still come out, and existing vaccines are produced in sufficient quantity. There may be an occasional screw up, but that seems unavoidable with such a complex problem: analyzing all the different mutations of the various flu viruses, modeling transmission and mortality characteristics, and using predictions from that data to reformulate serum such that it will hopefully do the most good.
True, people probably did think the model of the universe was settled. And yes, egos and the establishment delayed acceptance of a new, better model. That's human nature, unfortunately. But eventually science wins out. I don't see the connection to AGW here, though. Unlike with Galileo or Pasteur, we don't have observations disagreeing with predictions, and we don't have substantially different alternative models that explain and predict phenomena better than the established models. We have theoretical and experimental data on the mechanism of greenhouse gases, we have a variety of sensor data monitoring atmospheric, surface, and ocean temperatures, we have multitudes of temperature proxy techniques (all using very different physical properties) to establish and cross-check historical temperature trends. No doubt there are those in the environmentalism movement who accept the consensus science without understanding that science, and I suppose that could be called "faith". But the science itself is supported by an incredible amount of evidence.
But the tools do appear to work, except for a very particular subset in one particular physical area and during one particular time period, and work is being done to explain why the divergence occurs in that very limited subset. Just as we don't throw out Newtonian physics just because it needs tweaks at relativistic speeds, it doesn't make sense to throw out good data just because it has certain limitations. Now, it's always possible that new research will come out that shows that there is no correlation between tree ring widths and temperature, and that the current technique is based on coincidence, but given all the cross checking among instrumentation and alternative proxy methods, that seems very unlikely at this point.
I'm interested in why you think hiding the decline was boneheaded. I agree, the phrase taken out of context is certainly jarring and worth investigating, and investigating it yields a very interesting slice of the work being done in climatology.
Since accurate instrumentation is a modern tool, climatologists have researched several different temperature proxies to reconstruct (with appropriate error bars) historical data. Tree rings, dendrochronology, provides one such tool. In general, over the sample of time and areas where we have both tree ring data and temperature data, the width of each ring is well correlated to the temperature, and has been checked both with instrumented values and with other proxy techniques. However, there is a subset of tree ring data where the correlation declines: high-northern latitude forests after 1950-1960. This is the "divergence problem", and was well published and studied in the literature.
Certainly we would like to know what caused this divergence for a subset of the dendrochronology data, and various hypotheses are being investigated (temperature stress, dimming, etc.). And the divergence problem does have an impact on the error bars associated with the tree ring data. But just because a model is incomplete doesn't mean it isn't useful (Newtonian physics vs. relativity, for example). Graphing the combined results of temperature proxies and, for the time period where they are available, instrumentation data, seems a very reasonable way to help analyze climatological trends. Yes, this "hide[s] the declin[ing]" correlation of high-northern forest tree rings from after 1950, but given that that specific issues seems to be an outlier in the data I don't see the analytic technique as unreasonable.
Can you dig up some links to the scientific journals that claimed to demonstrate that bird flu will kill everyone; it would be really interesting to see what kind of arguments they presented. The things I remember reading about bird flu discussed it as a dangerous pathogen but focused on methods to defeat it: vaccines, anti-virals, social behavior, etc., so I'm curious why some researchers thought those methods would be insufficent to prevent an extinction event.
Relativity certain showed that that Newtonian physics was incomplete. But that's different from saying Newtonian physics was wrong. D=RT is still a really good approximation, over the majority of scenarios a human would encounter. It may get tweaked at bit at the extremes, but you can still get a lot of useful results from it.
Earth as the center of the universe also wasn't a bad first stab at things given the most easily observed data, though as the science of astronomy evolved obviously it quickly became apparent that its predictions weren't matching results. Sure, sometimes when the predictions don't match the observations it's the observations at fault (insufficient tools, contaminations, etc.), but it's perfectly reasonable to start doubting the orthodoxy then. If prediction and observation agree, though, then it makes sense to follow the orthodoxy. Certainly there's nothing wrong with designing new experiments and gathering new data to re-check those predictions, but there's only a limited amount of person-hours. Eventually everyone moves on, accepts the orthodoxy as a base, and starts new research on top of that framework. And this is OK, becaue if there are errors in that framework, they will eventually be reveled when the new research mispredicts observations.
The alternative is to say nothing is true. Certainly a lot of post-modernists can carry that water to some extent. And there is a fantastical or child-like pleasure in that philosophy (I always think of the scene in So Long and Thanks for all the Fish where the old woman from Boston is glad to learn that everything she was ever taught was wrong), but it doesn't seem that useful for everyday life.
Cutting scenes and merging characters is one thing, making arbitrary changes in the material you've kept is another. And even worse is wasting the removal of canon by adding stupid new material.
If the U.S. is creating the Palantir, then the U.S. is Feanor. Prideful, arrogant, greedily in love with his own work. But a strong, charismatic genius none-the-less. His arrogance leads him to commit evil acts, but he does lead the fight against the greater evil, and the world would have been poorer without his actions.
Your understanding of "first to file" is incorrect. The concept of prior art still exists, and can still be used to overturn a patent or prevent it from being granted. It does eliminate the (difficult and often arbitrary) process of determining who "really" came up with and acted on something "first" when two entities attempt to patent the same invention.
LCD forms images when the crystals align in a particular way to block the backlight. Now in addition to forming an image, those crystals blocking photos are tapped to recoup a charge.
Utter nonsense. Small business, the ones whose owners file on their personal tax returns, may bring in bring in revenue that, by itself, would be taxed at the highest bracket. But this tired reasoning always seems to ignore that small businesses have substantial expenditures. The net income of small businesses is rarely enough to trigger the top tax bracket.
Drop the GOP propaganda. We have 50 years economic theory and real-life proof that cutting taxes is not the best way to stimulate the economy. If you're serious about wanting the best bang-for-the-buck stimulus investment, rally for increased food stamp benefits.
That is completely incorrect. Photosynthesis is about 98% efficient. It was a big to-do a year or two ago when some group figured out a unique quantum property of biological photosynthesis that contributed to its fantastic efficiency. It even made it to/.
This is not flame bait, this is my honest opinion: you are an idiot. You just showed how the Theory of Evolution is falsifiable, and ergo scientific. ID is NOT falsifiable and NOT scientific, because if you're claiming that an all powerful creator made everything, then no matter what data you uncover, proponents can wave it away with "God put it there." So you can "believe" that God created everything, because some moldy book and funny dressed guy said so, or you can "believe" in Evolution because its predicted transitory fossils are frequently found and its predicted genetic changes are observed in organisms all the time. It's just that the first belief is inane while the second is well-founded, so don't equate the two.
Given that Moore's Law is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months, no. Even if the gigahertz / number of cores war stops for laptops, there's lots of components that can be put on chip. But apparently it's too much to ask from a rag like CNet to get their basic definitions correct.
If Google wins the auction, why would they need the Government to makes some rules about who can access it? If Google owns the spectrum, don't -they- get to set the rules?
The Jurassic Park-esque cloning talk is definitely going to be the focus of most of the discussion, but have any of the articles mentioned how well the tissues, organs, and fluids are preserved? This seems like an extraordinary chance to find hard evidence on what caused their extinction.
As I said, that advice is for people intending to work in game development. Basically all the development houses use DirectX. "DirectX is the standard now" should mean something to you, if you're intending to market your skills or market to the largest installed base. But yes, if OpenGL works for your particular need, use it. The other responder to your post misunderstood my point as well. DirectX didn't surpass OpenGL while the committee squabbled, DirectX -caught up- with OpenGL. In terms of technology, both are pretty damn great right now. The focus on DirectX is for business, not technical, reasons. If a student doesn't want to work for a place like EA (and really, who would?), intending to go off and do his or her own thing, OpenGL's great. It obviously worked for those iD folks.
Cool. There's definitely tons of places where Java graphics is either the best choice or at least acceptable. Static or dynamic analysis, design tools, or any kind of scientific visualizers (molecule analysis, etc.) would be perfect for a Java-based systems. The reviewer mentions undergraduate classes though, and from my experience undergrads taking a computer graphics class are either already thinking "video games" or will best learn through a game-centric syllabus, keeping their interest with fun material they can relate to.
First of all, I've used Liang's introductory Java book in classes I've TAed, he is quite good.
As for Java graphics programming itself, it's definitely a mixed bag, but in general more good than bad. Back in my undergraduate days I took two courses for Java graphics and Java game programming. If you're already familiar with the language, it's a great tool for learning the basics and mid-level game-oriented 2D and 3D programming. Java has a lot of great tools for all kinds of design, and the speed-issues are not a concern with JIT and APIs that take advantage of hardware acceleration. And Java's easy network programming lets you build some interesting projects.
That said, people seriously thinking about futures in game development should be learning DirectX and C++ as soon as possible. OpenGL is great, and if you're doing cross-platform work it's obviously the right choice. But DirectX is the standard now; even Carmack hasn't been too hard on it lately. It's managed to make great strides while the OpenGL committee squabbled.
The big question is: will these cutting-edge graphics still be cutting-edge on newer PS3s that, under Sony's cost-cutting measures, have had hardware components removed in favor of software emulation? Do any of the review sites have these versions of the console?
Slashdot Mirror
Google "ring species". A parent species hits a geographic barrier and populations move in a ring around it. Opposite sex members of any two neighboring populations can breed true, until you get to the far side of the ring. The last population at the end of the "clockwise" arc cannot breed (even to produce sterile hybrids) with the last population at the end of the "counterclockwise" arc.
Bookmarked that, that's actually a pretty cool resource. But digging into the facts presented, it does say that 60% of people who have contracted H5N1 have died. That's different than saying it will kill 60% of the people who get it. The higher initial mortality rate is to be expected given that it arose in an area where extreme poverty and poor sanitary conditions are common, and given the time necessary to develop appropriate treatments. Fortunately our treatments are getting better, and H5N1 is difficult to transmit to humans. But given that we've seen animal flu viruses mutate to be more contagious to humans, and that H5N1 is pretty nasty, it makes sense that health agencies spend a lot on awareness and research.
I'll admit I haven't followed news on vaccine manufacturers, but it seems like the companies are still doing a good job. New vaccines still come out, and existing vaccines are produced in sufficient quantity. There may be an occasional screw up, but that seems unavoidable with such a complex problem: analyzing all the different mutations of the various flu viruses, modeling transmission and mortality characteristics, and using predictions from that data to reformulate serum such that it will hopefully do the most good.
True, people probably did think the model of the universe was settled. And yes, egos and the establishment delayed acceptance of a new, better model. That's human nature, unfortunately. But eventually science wins out. I don't see the connection to AGW here, though. Unlike with Galileo or Pasteur, we don't have observations disagreeing with predictions, and we don't have substantially different alternative models that explain and predict phenomena better than the established models. We have theoretical and experimental data on the mechanism of greenhouse gases, we have a variety of sensor data monitoring atmospheric, surface, and ocean temperatures, we have multitudes of temperature proxy techniques (all using very different physical properties) to establish and cross-check historical temperature trends. No doubt there are those in the environmentalism movement who accept the consensus science without understanding that science, and I suppose that could be called "faith". But the science itself is supported by an incredible amount of evidence.
But the tools do appear to work, except for a very particular subset in one particular physical area and during one particular time period, and work is being done to explain why the divergence occurs in that very limited subset. Just as we don't throw out Newtonian physics just because it needs tweaks at relativistic speeds, it doesn't make sense to throw out good data just because it has certain limitations. Now, it's always possible that new research will come out that shows that there is no correlation between tree ring widths and temperature, and that the current technique is based on coincidence, but given all the cross checking among instrumentation and alternative proxy methods, that seems very unlikely at this point.
I'm interested in why you think hiding the decline was boneheaded. I agree, the phrase taken out of context is certainly jarring and worth investigating, and investigating it yields a very interesting slice of the work being done in climatology.
Since accurate instrumentation is a modern tool, climatologists have researched several different temperature proxies to reconstruct (with appropriate error bars) historical data. Tree rings, dendrochronology, provides one such tool. In general, over the sample of time and areas where we have both tree ring data and temperature data, the width of each ring is well correlated to the temperature, and has been checked both with instrumented values and with other proxy techniques. However, there is a subset of tree ring data where the correlation declines: high-northern latitude forests after 1950-1960. This is the "divergence problem", and was well published and studied in the literature.
Certainly we would like to know what caused this divergence for a subset of the dendrochronology data, and various hypotheses are being investigated (temperature stress, dimming, etc.). And the divergence problem does have an impact on the error bars associated with the tree ring data. But just because a model is incomplete doesn't mean it isn't useful (Newtonian physics vs. relativity, for example). Graphing the combined results of temperature proxies and, for the time period where they are available, instrumentation data, seems a very reasonable way to help analyze climatological trends. Yes, this "hide[s] the declin[ing]" correlation of high-northern forest tree rings from after 1950, but given that that specific issues seems to be an outlier in the data I don't see the analytic technique as unreasonable.
Can you dig up some links to the scientific journals that claimed to demonstrate that bird flu will kill everyone; it would be really interesting to see what kind of arguments they presented. The things I remember reading about bird flu discussed it as a dangerous pathogen but focused on methods to defeat it: vaccines, anti-virals, social behavior, etc., so I'm curious why some researchers thought those methods would be insufficent to prevent an extinction event.
Relativity certain showed that that Newtonian physics was incomplete. But that's different from saying Newtonian physics was wrong. D=RT is still a really good approximation, over the majority of scenarios a human would encounter. It may get tweaked at bit at the extremes, but you can still get a lot of useful results from it.
Earth as the center of the universe also wasn't a bad first stab at things given the most easily observed data, though as the science of astronomy evolved obviously it quickly became apparent that its predictions weren't matching results. Sure, sometimes when the predictions don't match the observations it's the observations at fault (insufficient tools, contaminations, etc.), but it's perfectly reasonable to start doubting the orthodoxy then. If prediction and observation agree, though, then it makes sense to follow the orthodoxy. Certainly there's nothing wrong with designing new experiments and gathering new data to re-check those predictions, but there's only a limited amount of person-hours. Eventually everyone moves on, accepts the orthodoxy as a base, and starts new research on top of that framework. And this is OK, becaue if there are errors in that framework, they will eventually be reveled when the new research mispredicts observations.
The alternative is to say nothing is true. Certainly a lot of post-modernists can carry that water to some extent. And there is a fantastical or child-like pleasure in that philosophy (I always think of the scene in So Long and Thanks for all the Fish where the old woman from Boston is glad to learn that everything she was ever taught was wrong), but it doesn't seem that useful for everyday life.
I'll probably go with "continue to not use twitter".
Cutting scenes and merging characters is one thing, making arbitrary changes in the material you've kept is another. And even worse is wasting the removal of canon by adding stupid new material.
If the U.S. is creating the Palantir, then the U.S. is Feanor. Prideful, arrogant, greedily in love with his own work. But a strong, charismatic genius none-the-less. His arrogance leads him to commit evil acts, but he does lead the fight against the greater evil, and the world would have been poorer without his actions.
Sounds like an even better analogy.
Your understanding of "first to file" is incorrect. The concept of prior art still exists, and can still be used to overturn a patent or prevent it from being granted. It does eliminate the (difficult and often arbitrary) process of determining who "really" came up with and acted on something "first" when two entities attempt to patent the same invention.
LCD forms images when the crystals align in a particular way to block the backlight. Now in addition to forming an image, those crystals blocking photos are tapped to recoup a charge.
Obligatory Leisuretown
http://www.leisuretown.com/library/qac/28.html
Yes, we had someone at work do this, and yes, from that day on we referenced him as F.B. (in polite company).
Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual.
Utter nonsense. Small business, the ones whose owners file on their personal tax returns, may bring in bring in revenue that, by itself, would be taxed at the highest bracket. But this tired reasoning always seems to ignore that small businesses have substantial expenditures. The net income of small businesses is rarely enough to trigger the top tax bracket.
Drop the GOP propaganda. We have 50 years economic theory and real-life proof that cutting taxes is not the best way to stimulate the economy. If you're serious about wanting the best bang-for-the-buck stimulus investment, rally for increased food stamp benefits.
I believe this is the paper, from Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7137/full/nature05678.html
Subscription required, but it should be accessible from most university networks.
That is completely incorrect. Photosynthesis is about 98% efficient. It was a big to-do a year or two ago when some group figured out a unique quantum property of biological photosynthesis that contributed to its fantastic efficiency. It even made it to /.
This is not flame bait, this is my honest opinion: you are an idiot. You just showed how the Theory of Evolution is falsifiable, and ergo scientific. ID is NOT falsifiable and NOT scientific, because if you're claiming that an all powerful creator made everything, then no matter what data you uncover, proponents can wave it away with "God put it there." So you can "believe" that God created everything, because some moldy book and funny dressed guy said so, or you can "believe" in Evolution because its predicted transitory fossils are frequently found and its predicted genetic changes are observed in organisms all the time. It's just that the first belief is inane while the second is well-founded, so don't equate the two.
Given that Moore's Law is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months, no. Even if the gigahertz / number of cores war stops for laptops, there's lots of components that can be put on chip. But apparently it's too much to ask from a rag like CNet to get their basic definitions correct.
If Google wins the auction, why would they need the Government to makes some rules about who can access it? If Google owns the spectrum, don't -they- get to set the rules?
The Jurassic Park-esque cloning talk is definitely going to be the focus of most of the discussion, but have any of the articles mentioned how well the tissues, organs, and fluids are preserved? This seems like an extraordinary chance to find hard evidence on what caused their extinction.
it was revealed that Metallica will play a heavy hand in the game's lineup
And after the whole Napster deal, we know how heavy-handed Metallica can be.
As I said, that advice is for people intending to work in game development. Basically all the development houses use DirectX. "DirectX is the standard now" should mean something to you, if you're intending to market your skills or market to the largest installed base. But yes, if OpenGL works for your particular need, use it. The other responder to your post misunderstood my point as well. DirectX didn't surpass OpenGL while the committee squabbled, DirectX -caught up- with OpenGL. In terms of technology, both are pretty damn great right now. The focus on DirectX is for business, not technical, reasons. If a student doesn't want to work for a place like EA (and really, who would?), intending to go off and do his or her own thing, OpenGL's great. It obviously worked for those iD folks.
Cool. There's definitely tons of places where Java graphics is either the best choice or at least acceptable. Static or dynamic analysis, design tools, or any kind of scientific visualizers (molecule analysis, etc.) would be perfect for a Java-based systems. The reviewer mentions undergraduate classes though, and from my experience undergrads taking a computer graphics class are either already thinking "video games" or will best learn through a game-centric syllabus, keeping their interest with fun material they can relate to.
First of all, I've used Liang's introductory Java book in classes I've TAed, he is quite good.
As for Java graphics programming itself, it's definitely a mixed bag, but in general more good than bad. Back in my undergraduate days I took two courses for Java graphics and Java game programming. If you're already familiar with the language, it's a great tool for learning the basics and mid-level game-oriented 2D and 3D programming. Java has a lot of great tools for all kinds of design, and the speed-issues are not a concern with JIT and APIs that take advantage of hardware acceleration. And Java's easy network programming lets you build some interesting projects.
That said, people seriously thinking about futures in game development should be learning DirectX and C++ as soon as possible. OpenGL is great, and if you're doing cross-platform work it's obviously the right choice. But DirectX is the standard now; even Carmack hasn't been too hard on it lately. It's managed to make great strides while the OpenGL committee squabbled.
Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the clarification!
The big question is: will these cutting-edge graphics still be cutting-edge on newer PS3s that, under Sony's cost-cutting measures, have had hardware components removed in favor of software emulation? Do any of the review sites have these versions of the console?