The proposal is still not green. Increasing profit is not the same as reducing energy. So it sounds like your accounting method has self-induced delusion on this issue.
"The '3 days longer' statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart."
Why are you wasting time speculating on this when it's a 1-minute algebra problem? Looking only at the 85 cases that responded with dates, let x = average of the other 84 cases. So (84x+37)/85 = 3.03 --> 84x+37 = 257.55 --> 84x = 220.55 --> x = 2.62, which rounded to the nearest day, is still 3 days.
And this is actually generous, assuming that the non-branded packages were delivered in zero days; whatever the non-branded delivery time was, it reduces the effect of the Mississippi time even more.
"It's not as simple [wikipedia.org] as the forty minutes of instruction you had in high school would lead you to believe. But if you're in a hurry, here's a sign your sample size was small: you found only one of what you were looking for, e.g. one missing unlabeled package."
Yeah, you seriously don't know what you're talking about, and you need to stop. Here is the article on Fisher's Exact Test (used here to assess the significance of packages lost): "it is valid for all sample sizes". And, the sample sizes given in the Example hereunder are even smaller than those used for the shoe experiment (in the example, a grand total of 24 cases in the entire setup).
Among the mistakes you've made in your citation is that you ignored this detail (2nd paragraph in your link): "using a target for the power of a statistical test to be applied once the sample is collected". They knew the test to be used (Fisher's Exact Test), and used an appropriate sample size; in fact, a fairly generous one. If the difference in package treatment were closer, then potentially a larger sample size would be required to detect the difference; but in this case the difference is so overwhelmingly, comically huge that a sample size of n~100 is more than enough to demonstrate the problem.
Ha -- I got into a debate last night with both my girlfriend and my mother, who were aggrieved at the apparent lack of cursive instruction in schools today. But I'm with you.
"Computer science is not about programming/scripting languages."
They are not identical. But programming is a necessary requirement for computer science -- in the same way that the alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar are necessary requirements for literature.
I'm 2 years younger than you, and had the same experience. However, my sister is another 2 years younger, and actually between me and her, our high school had a major overhaul and indeed got rid of all those differentiated tracks. Under education-school dogma of the early/mid 90's "tracking" is considered to be a four-letter word and widely forbidden. I was just talking about this to my family last night -- my father was completely bewildered by it, but my mother who still works in a junior high school has had to intimately deal with this for about two decades now.
"Tracking was once popular in English-speaking countries, but is less used now. Strong tracking systems formed the basis of the Tripartite System in England and Wales until the 1970s, and in Northern Ireland until 2009."
I have a friend who's a former sex worker (now a PhD academic), who says her greatest joy came from that work, and her greatest regret is that it's not legal for her to open a brothel and expand the work. Read some of the stories at SWOP-NYC (Sex Worker's Outreach Program, NYC) and think carefully about whether that work should really be illegal to protect the "victims":
So to make a very long story short -- Demanding that some drugs be illegal makes it necessary that we inspect every action in your fantasy games. Along with a host other surveillance.
"Whups - we launched missiles into Libya, not Syria. Hard to keep these issues straight. I don't believe we launched missiles into Syria yet - have we?"
And that, kids, is American foreign policy in a nutshell, right there.
Is there an example of any U.S. government propaganda coming out, and Twitter ju-jitsuing it so that the media focus then become entirely the opposite? At any time? Because this is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, whereas I'm seeing zero evidence.
"According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war."
It wasn't the "voting with dollars" that did this (or rather non-voting), and I would continue to argue that individual purchases don't do dick. What made a difference here was PUBLIC SPEECH, outrageously bad reviews, blog posts, and forum discussions. This is what forced EA spokespersons to take up the issue publicly and make detailed responses; the wildfire of public condemnation. And communities organizing to protest and boycott in the future.
Probably more difference was made by people who DID buy the game, and reported honestly how wretched it was, then someone like myself, who never had any prospect of even possibly buying this game.
I disagree. In my experience of things political, questions don't do dick. We need assertions and declaratory statements, like: "No", "I will not do that", "This is bullshit", and "We will organize, resist, and defeat you". Questions in a political context are like farting in a windstorm.
Did you notice the section in the article that you linked there, titled "Possible End of Progression"? There's evidence that the increase ended in the mid-1990's (likely from an effective plateau in the factors you mention), and then started to go in the other direction in the last decade.
"Do you want politicians to be asked hard questions? Do you like accountability and transparency? Do you think it's important for the media to be skeptical of the government? Then you should vote Republican."
LOL. I was actually going to respond with something meaningful until I read this.
"Well, like the earlier post said, how's the hope and change working out for ya?"
Terribly. And yet, marginally better than what was promised by his opposition:
Romney on drone attacks -- "I support that entirely and feel the president was right to up the usage of that technology and believe that we should continue to use it to continue to go after the people who represent a threat to this nation and to our friends.” [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-05/why-drones-stayed-out-of-sight-in-the-2012-campaign.html]
Romney on military cuts -- "This is unacceptable. And the idea of shrinking our active duty personnel by 100,000 or 200,000 — I want to add 100,000 to active duty personnel." [http://cnsnews.com/news/article/romney-decries-military-cuts-obama-talking-jobs]
The CEO of the Fastenal company (someone posted a video above) does in fact call the corporate support structure for vending machines like these "the machine behind the machine".
"keep a stack of $2 dollar keyboards in a closet next to the receptionist or secretary"
Sure, because then the secretary gets to play gatekeeper with the key to the closet, and take out her aggression with power-plays against the higher-paid developers whose work she doesn't understand, refusing to open the closet for insane reasons or claiming it's empty or the key's missing to anyone who hasn't properly sucked up to her recently.
This is basically equivalent to the U.S. criminal system, in which the accused are routinely threatened with decades of jail time so as to coerce them into making a guilty plea for a few months or a year, without having any trial.
In principle, I agree -- But in practice it's exactly the opposite of our law-enforcement structure and culture. I've been told directly by an NYPD acquaintance that ticket-writing is referred to as "paying the rent" (i.e., you've gotta pay the rent for your fancy uniform, boots, car, motorcycle, etc., that you're using). And the current growth area is "asset seizure" to fund police departments, for which the victims don't have any right to appear in court as defendants, and the legal status is outside of any locality's ability to control.
Changing that culture would be so radical, I can't imagine it happening in my lifetime. Depressingly.
Slashdot Mirror
The proposal is still not green. Increasing profit is not the same as reducing energy. So it sounds like your accounting method has self-induced delusion on this issue.
He had faith that the study was done in a way that he could dismiss. So he didn't need to check the facts, as usual.
"The '3 days longer' statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart."
Why are you wasting time speculating on this when it's a 1-minute algebra problem? Looking only at the 85 cases that responded with dates, let x = average of the other 84 cases. So (84x+37)/85 = 3.03 --> 84x+37 = 257.55 --> 84x = 220.55 --> x = 2.62, which rounded to the nearest day, is still 3 days.
And this is actually generous, assuming that the non-branded packages were delivered in zero days; whatever the non-branded delivery time was, it reduces the effect of the Mississippi time even more.
"It's not as simple [wikipedia.org] as the forty minutes of instruction you had in high school would lead you to believe. But if you're in a hurry, here's a sign your sample size was small: you found only one of what you were looking for, e.g. one missing unlabeled package."
Yeah, you seriously don't know what you're talking about, and you need to stop. Here is the article on Fisher's Exact Test (used here to assess the significance of packages lost): "it is valid for all sample sizes". And, the sample sizes given in the Example hereunder are even smaller than those used for the shoe experiment (in the example, a grand total of 24 cases in the entire setup).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_exact_test
Among the mistakes you've made in your citation is that you ignored this detail (2nd paragraph in your link): "using a target for the power of a statistical test to be applied once the sample is collected". They knew the test to be used (Fisher's Exact Test), and used an appropriate sample size; in fact, a fairly generous one. If the difference in package treatment were closer, then potentially a larger sample size would be required to detect the difference; but in this case the difference is so overwhelmingly, comically huge that a sample size of n~100 is more than enough to demonstrate the problem.
Ha -- I got into a debate last night with both my girlfriend and my mother, who were aggrieved at the apparent lack of cursive instruction in schools today. But I'm with you.
"Computer science is not about programming/scripting languages."
They are not identical. But programming is a necessary requirement for computer science -- in the same way that the alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar are necessary requirements for literature.
I'm 2 years younger than you, and had the same experience. However, my sister is another 2 years younger, and actually between me and her, our high school had a major overhaul and indeed got rid of all those differentiated tracks. Under education-school dogma of the early/mid 90's "tracking" is considered to be a four-letter word and widely forbidden. I was just talking about this to my family last night -- my father was completely bewildered by it, but my mother who still works in a junior high school has had to intimately deal with this for about two decades now.
"Tracking was once popular in English-speaking countries, but is less used now. Strong tracking systems formed the basis of the Tripartite System in England and Wales until the 1970s, and in Northern Ireland until 2009."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28education%29
I have a friend who's a former sex worker (now a PhD academic), who says her greatest joy came from that work, and her greatest regret is that it's not legal for her to open a brothel and expand the work. Read some of the stories at SWOP-NYC (Sex Worker's Outreach Program, NYC) and think carefully about whether that work should really be illegal to protect the "victims":
http://swop-nyc.org/
So to make a very long story short -- Demanding that some drugs be illegal makes it necessary that we inspect every action in your fantasy games. Along with a host other surveillance.
"Whups - we launched missiles into Libya, not Syria. Hard to keep these issues straight. I don't believe we launched missiles into Syria yet - have we?"
And that, kids, is American foreign policy in a nutshell, right there.
Is there an example of any U.S. government propaganda coming out, and Twitter ju-jitsuing it so that the media focus then become entirely the opposite? At any time? Because this is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, whereas I'm seeing zero evidence.
Your memory must be seriously execrable.
"According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
It wasn't the "voting with dollars" that did this (or rather non-voting), and I would continue to argue that individual purchases don't do dick. What made a difference here was PUBLIC SPEECH, outrageously bad reviews, blog posts, and forum discussions. This is what forced EA spokespersons to take up the issue publicly and make detailed responses; the wildfire of public condemnation. And communities organizing to protest and boycott in the future.
Probably more difference was made by people who DID buy the game, and reported honestly how wretched it was, then someone like myself, who never had any prospect of even possibly buying this game.
"Nobody questioned things enough."
I disagree. In my experience of things political, questions don't do dick. We need assertions and declaratory statements, like: "No", "I will not do that", "This is bullshit", and "We will organize, resist, and defeat you". Questions in a political context are like farting in a windstorm.
"...and are continuing to improve."
Did you notice the section in the article that you linked there, titled "Possible End of Progression"? There's evidence that the increase ended in the mid-1990's (likely from an effective plateau in the factors you mention), and then started to go in the other direction in the last decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression
"Do you want politicians to be asked hard questions? Do you like accountability and transparency? Do you think it's important for the media to be skeptical of the government? Then you should vote Republican."
LOL. I was actually going to respond with something meaningful until I read this.
It's almost like you don't understand the math behind plurality-wins elections. Hate the game, not the players.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
"Well, like the earlier post said, how's the hope and change working out for ya?"
Terribly. And yet, marginally better than what was promised by his opposition:
Romney on drone attacks -- "I support that entirely and feel the president was right to up the usage of that technology and believe that we should continue to use it to continue to go after the people who represent a threat to this nation and to our friends.” [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-05/why-drones-stayed-out-of-sight-in-the-2012-campaign.html]
Romney on military cuts -- "This is unacceptable. And the idea of shrinking our active duty personnel by 100,000 or 200,000 — I want to add 100,000 to active duty personnel." [http://cnsnews.com/news/article/romney-decries-military-cuts-obama-talking-jobs]
The CEO of the Fastenal company (someone posted a video above) does in fact call the corporate support structure for vending machines like these "the machine behind the machine".
Interesting to see that Fastenal was rated as the 24th worst companies to work for in the country (by nonscientific employee survey).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastenal#Worker_satisfaction_survey
"keep a stack of $2 dollar keyboards in a closet next to the receptionist or secretary"
Sure, because then the secretary gets to play gatekeeper with the key to the closet, and take out her aggression with power-plays against the higher-paid developers whose work she doesn't understand, refusing to open the closet for insane reasons or claiming it's empty or the key's missing to anyone who hasn't properly sucked up to her recently.
Jittery ones. Really jittery, privacy-hating monkeys.
This is basically equivalent to the U.S. criminal system, in which the accused are routinely threatened with decades of jail time so as to coerce them into making a guilty plea for a few months or a year, without having any trial.
In principle, I agree -- But in practice it's exactly the opposite of our law-enforcement structure and culture. I've been told directly by an NYPD acquaintance that ticket-writing is referred to as "paying the rent" (i.e., you've gotta pay the rent for your fancy uniform, boots, car, motorcycle, etc., that you're using). And the current growth area is "asset seizure" to fund police departments, for which the victims don't have any right to appear in court as defendants, and the legal status is outside of any locality's ability to control.
Changing that culture would be so radical, I can't imagine it happening in my lifetime. Depressingly.
There's also the fact that the feds cracking down on doctors and pharmacies over prescription painkillers is the new growth area for the War on Drugs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/prescription-painkillers_b_1240722.html