"And for people suffering from constant headaches... the most common cause of headaches is dehydration. Drink water, get better"
I'd like to know where you think you got this information; it is incorrect. From the NY Times Health article on the subject, the top causes of headaches are: Tension, migraines, overuse of medication, infections and other health problems. Hydration is only mentioned as a precaution after you've vomited from a migraine.
On a more personal note, I've suffered from headaches for a long time. The most common pieces of advice I'd get were: (a) you're dehydrated, or (b) you're addicted to caffeine, both of which were false and useless. For me, I had to learn that my headaches were from sinus congestion and the only solution was to take a decongestant. There are many different causes for many people (although dehydration is not one of them). Personally, I suffered for years listening to spurious explanations like that.
You must not be familiar with the recent expansion of the drug war to crack down on doctors who deal with prescription pain medication. Here's the start of a very nice series by Radley Balko at the Huffington Post:
"Law enforcement agencies send undercover agents and informants into doctors' offices to lure suspected physicians into writing bad prescriptions. Doctors have then been conditioned to be suspicious of patients, to see them as potential addicts or drug dealers... The high-profile prosecution of Virginia pain specialist William Hurwitz is a good example. Federal investigators found that of Hurwitz's hundreds of patients, 15 had resold the the drugs he prescribed to them. There was no evidence that Hurwitz was complicit in or knew about the sales. At worst, he was duped by a small percentage of his patients. But instead of working with Hurwitz to catch the dealers posing as patients, investigators cut bargains with the dealers to implicate Hurwitz. Hurwitz was eventually convicted on 15 counts of distributing narcotics. In 2007, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema sentenced Hurwitz to 57 months in prison, far less than what prosecutors were asking. Brinkema acknowledged that Hurwitz was a well-intentioned doctor who had made some mistakes, not the drug pusher prosecutors portrayed him to be."
My favorite class to teach for the last 8 years or so has been sophomore-level statistics to psychology, sociology, occupational therapy, physician assistant (etc.) students at a CUNY community college. Statistics is directly and immediately applicable to those fields. (I have a research psychologist friend who says "all I do all day long is regression, regression, regression"). So I find a great thirst and relief that this may be the first math class these students have seen that's actually crystal-clearly relevant to their chosen professions; in some cases it's the first math class they "get" (for some of them). Early on I get a research article from JAMA and look at the one-page abstract for a preview of confidence intervals (C.I.'s) and hypothesis tests (P-values), and say that those are the ultimate goals of the course. (My mother's a school nurse who's asked me for help on those issues for her continuing education in the past, which has in turn informed how I teach the class.)
You still get some "why are you proving this/ is that something we have to do?" unclarity, but at the same time it may be their first or only "real college" math class, so I try to be forgiving over that. Careful writing, decimals and rounding are usually an issue (potentially all their prior classes have presented solutions as exact fractions).
I don't know if you can pick your own book, but I've been very happy with Neil Weiss' Introductory Statistics. If you want more, feel free to email me at my homepage.
"We were talking about confidence intervals... and confidence interval of 0.05 meant you were 95% sure."
As an instructor of basic statistics: That's not even right in the first place. It's mangling together how confidence intervals are presented with how hypothesis tests are presented (two closely related, but complementary concepts).
Confidence intervals have a "confidence level" presented as a percentage which is customarily 95%. In a standard scientific journal it will look like, "mean 3.5 (95% C.I. 3.2-3.8)". This indicates that the sample mean (average) was 3.5, the population mean is likely between 3.2 and 3.8, and if we run this process many times, 95% of the time the population mean will in fact be in the interval that gets constructed at the end.
Hypothesis tests, in contrast, have a "significance level", in some sense the chance of being wrong about your new/alternative hypothesis, which is customarily 0.05 = 5%. This indicates that if the hypothesis were false (i.e., the null hypothesis true), and we ran the experiment many times, we would observe the statistical result or something more severe less than 5% of the time. You could turn that around and say, "If the new/alternative hypothesis were not true, and we ran the experiment many times, then 95% of the time you'd get a result which did not match what we saw or something more severe", but I've never seen it expressed like that in practice.
I'm coming around to the opinion that we've got to teach logic at a very young age, as was done in classical education. Ultimately it's the foundation to all of math and the scientific method. If the first time you study basic logic is in college, then your entire education is built on shifting sand.
For what it's worth, the VC in TFA seems to say the opposite. The quality of the idea is not discussed; it's whether you're fidgeting in your chair when you present it.
Wikipedia > Internet censorship by country > Pervasive censorship (the highest level) in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and of course, Iran.
Nice ideas, but the senator in question doesn't control any of those things. Nor do I see 24 hours (item #2) as allowing discussion forums, snail-mail submissions, and town-hall meetings.
An added problem: This discussion seems to presume an arbitrarily large amount of time to get voter feedback on proposed legislation (esp., including discussion forums, switching votes, snail mail and in-person town hall meetings). I don't believe that legislatures always work that way; sometimes bills are drafted on short notice (or modified in negotiations) and then voted on in partly-surprise "midnight sessions". (Actually, I've even been called into a midnight session of a college student senate during particular machinations.) So what happens in that case, when there's maybe a few hours elapsed between bill presentation and voting?
Mod this up! This is precisely my operating plan -- particularly in terms of financial services like banks and insurance. Expressly stay away from anyone advertising on TV (the more, the worse).
"If we get more precise systems then we should be able to bring conflicts to a quicker end..."
Explain this in the context of the nation's longest-ever war (Afghanistan), still ongoing. More generally, consider the trend of U.S. wars by length: top 3 are (1) Afghanistan (2001-present), (2) Iraq War (2003-2011), (3) Vietnam (1964-1973).
Counter-theory: By making war sufficiently low-cost and inhuman and invisible to our side, we've enabled aggressive and expansionist force to be applied permanently and on an ongoing basis by our leaders.
Fifteen years ago I was happy to be in the games industry and saying, "Isn't it nice to have a job for smart technical people that can't possibly be of any use to the military", but now even that's not the case. Plus the industry is wildly volatile and not great or long-term working conditions.
They're just taking the Federal CIO seriously -- "Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel quipped, 'I'm recruiting COBOL developers, any out there?,' sending Federal CTO Todd Park into fits of laughter (video)... So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators — the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.'"
I'm pretty happy teaching college math classes, usually part-time -- not perfect, but far more hands-off by administration than in primary school. (Got this idea called "academic freedom" that helps some.) Most college courses nowadays are taught by part-time adjuncts -- at much lower pay than full-time, usually no benefits, but it's an option. The education degree won't be relevant -- depending on where you are, possibly a B.A. is enough for adjunct work, or you might need to get an M.A. (which is what I have).
Other option I hear a lot is private tutoring. Good luck.
Sometimes we have a fairly small window for effective actions in favor of freedom, before vested powers realize they have a vulnerability that needs to be shut down. For example: Last year's Arab Spring using social-networking tools. In the future, this particular court case may go in the other direction -- wouldn't be surprised if it were prohibited that a judge know anything about a given industry (as currently happens in practice with jury selection).
Another example in a fine history of mindless government bigger-dick wagging. Pretty close to being up there with: "Mission Accomplished" and "Bring 'Em On".
Slashdot Mirror
"And for people suffering from constant headaches... the most common cause of headaches is dehydration. Drink water, get better"
I'd like to know where you think you got this information; it is incorrect. From the NY Times Health article on the subject, the top causes of headaches are: Tension, migraines, overuse of medication, infections and other health problems. Hydration is only mentioned as a precaution after you've vomited from a migraine.
On a more personal note, I've suffered from headaches for a long time. The most common pieces of advice I'd get were: (a) you're dehydrated, or (b) you're addicted to caffeine, both of which were false and useless. For me, I had to learn that my headaches were from sinus congestion and the only solution was to take a decongestant. There are many different causes for many people (although dehydration is not one of them). Personally, I suffered for years listening to spurious explanations like that.
http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/headache/overview.html
You must not be familiar with the recent expansion of the drug war to crack down on doctors who deal with prescription pain medication. Here's the start of a very nice series by Radley Balko at the Huffington Post:
"Law enforcement agencies send undercover agents and informants into doctors' offices to lure suspected physicians into writing bad prescriptions. Doctors have then been conditioned to be suspicious of patients, to see them as potential addicts or drug dealers... The high-profile prosecution of Virginia pain specialist William Hurwitz is a good example. Federal investigators found that of Hurwitz's hundreds of patients, 15 had resold the the drugs he prescribed to them. There was no evidence that Hurwitz was complicit in or knew about the sales. At worst, he was duped by a small percentage of his patients. But instead of working with Hurwitz to catch the dealers posing as patients, investigators cut bargains with the dealers to implicate Hurwitz. Hurwitz was eventually convicted on 15 counts of distributing narcotics. In 2007, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema sentenced Hurwitz to 57 months in prison, far less than what prosecutors were asking. Brinkema acknowledged that Hurwitz was a well-intentioned doctor who had made some mistakes, not the drug pusher prosecutors portrayed him to be."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/prescription-painkillers_b_1240722.html
My favorite class to teach for the last 8 years or so has been sophomore-level statistics to psychology, sociology, occupational therapy, physician assistant (etc.) students at a CUNY community college. Statistics is directly and immediately applicable to those fields. (I have a research psychologist friend who says "all I do all day long is regression, regression, regression"). So I find a great thirst and relief that this may be the first math class these students have seen that's actually crystal-clearly relevant to their chosen professions; in some cases it's the first math class they "get" (for some of them). Early on I get a research article from JAMA and look at the one-page abstract for a preview of confidence intervals (C.I.'s) and hypothesis tests (P-values), and say that those are the ultimate goals of the course. (My mother's a school nurse who's asked me for help on those issues for her continuing education in the past, which has in turn informed how I teach the class.)
You still get some "why are you proving this/ is that something we have to do?" unclarity, but at the same time it may be their first or only "real college" math class, so I try to be forgiving over that. Careful writing, decimals and rounding are usually an issue (potentially all their prior classes have presented solutions as exact fractions).
I don't know if you can pick your own book, but I've been very happy with Neil Weiss' Introductory Statistics. If you want more, feel free to email me at my homepage.
You've very much misunderstood Godel's incompleteness theorem(s). It's almost the exact opposite of what you just wrote.
"We were talking about confidence intervals ... and confidence interval of 0.05 meant you were 95% sure."
As an instructor of basic statistics: That's not even right in the first place. It's mangling together how confidence intervals are presented with how hypothesis tests are presented (two closely related, but complementary concepts).
Confidence intervals have a "confidence level" presented as a percentage which is customarily 95%. In a standard scientific journal it will look like, "mean 3.5 (95% C.I. 3.2-3.8)". This indicates that the sample mean (average) was 3.5, the population mean is likely between 3.2 and 3.8, and if we run this process many times, 95% of the time the population mean will in fact be in the interval that gets constructed at the end.
Hypothesis tests, in contrast, have a "significance level", in some sense the chance of being wrong about your new/alternative hypothesis, which is customarily 0.05 = 5%. This indicates that if the hypothesis were false (i.e., the null hypothesis true), and we ran the experiment many times, we would observe the statistical result or something more severe less than 5% of the time. You could turn that around and say, "If the new/alternative hypothesis were not true, and we ran the experiment many times, then 95% of the time you'd get a result which did not match what we saw or something more severe", but I've never seen it expressed like that in practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significance_level
I'm coming around to the opinion that we've got to teach logic at a very young age, as was done in classical education. Ultimately it's the foundation to all of math and the scientific method. If the first time you study basic logic is in college, then your entire education is built on shifting sand.
"I think ownership is access, you don't have to have music on your local hard drive to own it," he said.
Also: I think that Freedom is Slavery.
Great anecdote, thanks for that.
For what it's worth, the VC in TFA seems to say the opposite. The quality of the idea is not discussed; it's whether you're fidgeting in your chair when you present it.
Slashdot > mapkinase
http://slashdot.org/~mapkinase/journal/
Wkipedia > "No true Scotsman" fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman_fallacy
Wikipedia > Internet censorship by country > Pervasive censorship (the highest level) in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and of course, Iran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country
Nice ideas, but the senator in question doesn't control any of those things. Nor do I see 24 hours (item #2) as allowing discussion forums, snail-mail submissions, and town-hall meetings.
An added problem: This discussion seems to presume an arbitrarily large amount of time to get voter feedback on proposed legislation (esp., including discussion forums, switching votes, snail mail and in-person town hall meetings). I don't believe that legislatures always work that way; sometimes bills are drafted on short notice (or modified in negotiations) and then voted on in partly-surprise "midnight sessions". (Actually, I've even been called into a midnight session of a college student senate during particular machinations.) So what happens in that case, when there's maybe a few hours elapsed between bill presentation and voting?
Perhaps it is most like a collectible like fine art, or limited-edition baseball cards (except more convenient).
I'm even more glad they didn't waste any time in advertising.
Mod this up! This is precisely my operating plan -- particularly in terms of financial services like banks and insurance. Expressly stay away from anyone advertising on TV (the more, the worse).
"If we get more precise systems then we should be able to bring conflicts to a quicker end..."
Explain this in the context of the nation's longest-ever war (Afghanistan), still ongoing. More generally, consider the trend of U.S. wars by length: top 3 are (1) Afghanistan (2001-present), (2) Iraq War (2003-2011), (3) Vietnam (1964-1973).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_of_U.S._participation_in_major_wars
Counter-theory: By making war sufficiently low-cost and inhuman and invisible to our side, we've enabled aggressive and expansionist force to be applied permanently and on an ongoing basis by our leaders.
Fifteen years ago I was happy to be in the games industry and saying, "Isn't it nice to have a job for smart technical people that can't possibly be of any use to the military", but now even that's not the case. Plus the industry is wildly volatile and not great or long-term working conditions.
Even better: Circular backronyms!
FILE -- FILE Input Listing Element
EDIT -- EDIT Document Interface Tool
VIEW -- VIEW Interface Element Window
etc.
They're just taking the Federal CIO seriously -- "Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel quipped, 'I'm recruiting COBOL developers, any out there?,' sending Federal CTO Todd Park into fits of laughter (video)... So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators — the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.'"
BAD A**!!!!!!
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/26/1658227/us-ciocto-idea-of-hiring-cobol-coders-laughable
"Yeah, but which infinity? There's a lot of them."
Please be more specific -- exactly how many?
I'm pretty happy teaching college math classes, usually part-time -- not perfect, but far more hands-off by administration than in primary school. (Got this idea called "academic freedom" that helps some.) Most college courses nowadays are taught by part-time adjuncts -- at much lower pay than full-time, usually no benefits, but it's an option. The education degree won't be relevant -- depending on where you are, possibly a B.A. is enough for adjunct work, or you might need to get an M.A. (which is what I have).
Other option I hear a lot is private tutoring. Good luck.
Sometimes we have a fairly small window for effective actions in favor of freedom, before vested powers realize they have a vulnerability that needs to be shut down. For example: Last year's Arab Spring using social-networking tools. In the future, this particular court case may go in the other direction -- wouldn't be surprised if it were prohibited that a judge know anything about a given industry (as currently happens in practice with jury selection).
Another example in a fine history of mindless government bigger-dick wagging. Pretty close to being up there with: "Mission Accomplished" and "Bring 'Em On".