Except that what this guy's proposal requires is to track the differing length of a day (in some quasi-milliseconds) every day. Instead of 1 second every 6 months or a year.
I actually think there was an edgier/more interesting vibe in the days when the cover artist could use the game concept as an inspirational jumping-off point for a unique piece of art. You got things like "the coolest war ever" as per the article, and that ain't a bad thing.
Same thing for stand-up arcade game art -- I missed it when the cabinets changed from being their own independent art design. It gave a different filter on the proceedings, and sort of implied "you can imagine your own interpretation, too".
- Spelling of "aying" - Spelling of "doctionary" - Incorrectly closed italics tag - "My best understanding of this sort of thing is that any such explicit probability is pretty much meaningless."
I nominate you to write the interface between the physicists' Geiger-counter measuring "SI-seconds" in an experiment, and the computer software that works in "time-t-seconds", accounting for all the past & future history of changed time-t-seconds. Sounds so simple.
"Let's say you have evidence that matches 1 in a thousand people. You search through your database of all 1000 suspects and you get a single match. Did he do it? Logically you'd expect this to mean you can be 99.9% sure. You then search through the database of a million random people. You get 1000 matches. Does this mean there's only a 0.1% chance that your original suspect was guilty? Well, maybe there's some other compelling evidence that makes it most likely that one of those 1000 people were the culprits. But you have 10000 outliers. They're each a tenth as likely to have committed the crime. You get 10 matches. So, once again we're at the 50% probability of guilt, or something in that ballpark."
There's not a single sentence in this paragraph that makes a goddamn lick of sense. Speaking of statistics, I hope you don't seriously "use them al the time".
"FWIW, I'm not defending any of the statistics in TFA as good. I notice a complete absence of any error estimates."
Error estimates are something involved in interval estimation. These are hypothesis tests, which are in some sense the inverse of that. If I'm reading stuff correctly.
"This is actually the problem; being scientifically minded means you tend to miss the bugs that are exposed by someone doing something that makes you go 'what were they thinking to try that?"
That doesn't sound scientific-as-in-inquisitive to me, that just sounds like narrow-field-of-vision.
"Imagine that the guy who wrote the code is the royal, snobbish jerk who always thinks his code is better than anything else. Realize that, at some point, he's going to make a change that will change the way the component behaves, and will yet again break your code that uses that component. Don't let him get away with it. Let your fingers pound as you write code to check for the smallest fault. Let your lips curl in a snarl as you feed it poisoned data. Relish in the thought that you can catch him in every slightest mistake..."
"Software Engineers are not good at poking holes in their own work..."
This kind of statement perplexes me. My expectation would be that engineers are scientifically-minded and skeptical and desire good evidence that something is working.
At the last game-software job I had (now 10 years back), I was really troubled when I submitted a piece of work and the senior engineer came back pretty much astounded that, "It works, it doesn't have any bugs, and I can't even break it!". That was around the time I knew the job was not for me long-term.
"Math is about clear, concise communication of concepts..."
And that's the crux of it: communication requires specific, shared conventions. Learning to learn a specific vocabulary, and attention to detail, I think, is the most valuable takeaway from a remedial math class.
(Also, it repeats this specific requirement in boldface 20-point font on every assignment sheet, so if you can't do that, repeatedly, then you really you don't deserve to be in college. )
I quasi-agree. The critical issue is this: Well-formed problems require explicit directions. Like, a verb indicating what to do; I see this skipped over in a lot of half-formed testing materials.
Acceptable forms of this problem could be any of the following: - Solve for x: 4+3+2 = x+2 - Fill in the blank to make a true statement: 4+3+2 = ___+2 - Write a single number inside the parentheses to make a true statement: 4+3+2 = ( )+2
As another example, my skin kind of crawls from stuff on standardized tests at my school written like this: - (8x-7)+(-2x+3) = ?
I've noticed and written about this previously. I don't even blame the students that much; I don't think I was ever explicitly told what the symbol meant either. In standard curriculum you either have to pick it up inductively or you're crippled. Quoting myself:
But here's another way of looking at it: Each line of math is, effectively, a sentence. (A highly condensed sentence in specialized notation, but the same nonetheless. It can be re-hydrated back into normal English at any time.) And the equals sign is the verb "to be". It's the most important verb in any language! What if someone were in a writing class and submitted a paper without any verbs? What if they were entirely unable to say "you are", "I am", "he is" anything at all? Would an English teacher totally flip out? You bet they would.
Gonna disagree with that. The one quasi-positive lesson I take from the Bush years is how enormously much power the President actually has, if they go at it every single day with a bulldog-like intensity. A LOT changed under Bush.
It would have been a positive message and I wish Obama had taken it and used it for opposite ends. But modern Democrats just don't work that way, I guess. My main criticism for 20 years has been limp-wristedness in the cause of liberalism.
Long answer: Technically "not enough information", because the article doesn't specify details on what "increases with use" means. The company does not release details on its exact algorithm. But presumably, like any casino or insurance company, their calculations don't allow for any such thing.
Pithy answer: As I overheard the pizzeria guy say to the bum tonight asking for a free slice, "Yeah sure, sure -- 'cuz I'm in business to just give stuff away."
They want the people to hate and fear the government, because democratic government has a dangerous flaw -- it actually has the slight chance of becoming truly democratic. You see, corporations are perfect -- perfect tyrannies.
Crowdsourcing works nicely for things like open-source software and encyclopedias because the whole project is of limited scope, it's predicated on Samaritan-like communal giving, and generally no one can profit one way or the other from particular responses or pieces of writing. This probably breaks down and becomes unstable if participants can profit one way or the other from particular outcomes. i.e., Campbell's Law:
"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
"Why bother trying to out perform a competitor if you can find enough evidence of possible fraud (well founded or otherwise!) and subject them to a detailed investigation by the SEC or some other regulatory body?"
Totally amateur observation is that stocks in a particular industry tend to move together, and if one drops or gets investigated you tend to have a sympathy movement as people wonder if the problem is endemic to the whole industry. So that would be generally not something most businesses would want to trigger. Right?
Slashdot Mirror
"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Except that what this guy's proposal requires is to track the differing length of a day (in some quasi-milliseconds) every day. Instead of 1 second every 6 months or a year.
I actually think there was an edgier/more interesting vibe in the days when the cover artist could use the game concept as an inspirational jumping-off point for a unique piece of art. You got things like "the coolest war ever" as per the article, and that ain't a bad thing.
Same thing for stand-up arcade game art -- I missed it when the cabinets changed from being their own independent art design. It gave a different filter on the proceedings, and sort of implied "you can imagine your own interpretation, too".
Other new incorrect things:
- Spelling of "Yhis"
- "Why am I bothering though." requires a question mark.
"Yes, the 99.9% surety is incorrect."
Are you really saying that the 99.9% surety is correct!?
No, I am saying that it is incorrect. Try again.
Newly added incorrect things:
- Spelling of "aying"
- Spelling of "doctionary"
- Incorrectly closed italics tag
- "My best understanding of this sort of thing is that any such explicit probability is pretty much meaningless."
I nominate you to write the interface between the physicists' Geiger-counter measuring "SI-seconds" in an experiment, and the computer software that works in "time-t-seconds", accounting for all the past & future history of changed time-t-seconds. Sounds so simple.
Wrong on all counts. Try again.
"Did he do it? Logically you'd expect this to mean you can be 99.9% sure."
Here's the first. 99.9% surety is incorrect. Also, that's not what "logically" means. I'll let you fix that, then get back.
"In the end, it wasn't particularly relevant to the verdict though as the son had admitted to the crime anyway."
Because a son would never cop to something to save his old man, eh?
"Let's say you have evidence that matches 1 in a thousand people. You search through your database of all 1000 suspects and you get a single match. Did he do it? Logically you'd expect this to mean you can be 99.9% sure. You then search through the database of a million random people. You get 1000 matches. Does this mean there's only a 0.1% chance that your original suspect was guilty? Well, maybe there's some other compelling evidence that makes it most likely that one of those 1000 people were the culprits. But you have 10000 outliers. They're each a tenth as likely to have committed the crime. You get 10 matches. So, once again we're at the 50% probability of guilt, or something in that ballpark."
There's not a single sentence in this paragraph that makes a goddamn lick of sense. Speaking of statistics, I hope you don't seriously "use them al the time".
"FWIW, I'm not defending any of the statistics in TFA as good. I notice a complete absence of any error estimates."
Error estimates are something involved in interval estimation. These are hypothesis tests, which are in some sense the inverse of that. If I'm reading stuff correctly.
I abstain from that. Nonreligious.
"This is actually the problem; being scientifically minded means you tend to miss the bugs that are exposed by someone doing something that makes you go 'what were they thinking to try that?"
That doesn't sound scientific-as-in-inquisitive to me, that just sounds like narrow-field-of-vision.
"Imagine that the guy who wrote the code is the royal, snobbish jerk who always thinks his code is better than anything else. Realize that, at some point, he's going to make a change that will change the way the component behaves, and will yet again break your code that uses that component. Don't let him get away with it. Let your fingers pound as you write code to check for the smallest fault. Let your lips curl in a snarl as you feed it poisoned data. Relish in the thought that you can catch him in every slightest mistake..."
It's Science!
"Software Engineers are not good at poking holes in their own work..."
This kind of statement perplexes me. My expectation would be that engineers are scientifically-minded and skeptical and desire good evidence that something is working.
At the last game-software job I had (now 10 years back), I was really troubled when I submitted a piece of work and the senior engineer came back pretty much astounded that, "It works, it doesn't have any bugs, and I can't even break it!". That was around the time I knew the job was not for me long-term.
Yes, absolutely.
"Math is about clear, concise communication of concepts..."
And that's the crux of it: communication requires specific, shared conventions. Learning to learn a specific vocabulary, and attention to detail, I think, is the most valuable takeaway from a remedial math class.
(Also, it repeats this specific requirement in boldface 20-point font on every assignment sheet, so if you can't do that, repeatedly, then you really you don't deserve to be in college. )
More on philosophy of a class like this: http://angrymath.blogspot.com/2009/02/basic-teaching-motivation.html
I quasi-agree. The critical issue is this: Well-formed problems require explicit directions. Like, a verb indicating what to do; I see this skipped over in a lot of half-formed testing materials.
Acceptable forms of this problem could be any of the following:
- Solve for x: 4+3+2 = x+2
- Fill in the blank to make a true statement: 4+3+2 = ___+2
- Write a single number inside the parentheses to make a true statement: 4+3+2 = ( )+2
As another example, my skin kind of crawls from stuff on standardized tests at my school written like this:
- (8x-7)+(-2x+3) = ?
I've noticed and written about this previously. I don't even blame the students that much; I don't think I was ever explicitly told what the symbol meant either. In standard curriculum you either have to pick it up inductively or you're crippled. Quoting myself:
But here's another way of looking at it: Each line of math is, effectively, a sentence. (A highly condensed sentence in specialized notation, but the same nonetheless. It can be re-hydrated back into normal English at any time.) And the equals sign is the verb "to be". It's the most important verb in any language! What if someone were in a writing class and submitted a paper without any verbs? What if they were entirely unable to say "you are", "I am", "he is" anything at all? Would an English teacher totally flip out? You bet they would.
http://angrymath.blogspot.com/2010/03/equals-signs.html
Gonna disagree with that. The one quasi-positive lesson I take from the Bush years is how enormously much power the President actually has, if they go at it every single day with a bulldog-like intensity. A LOT changed under Bush.
It would have been a positive message and I wish Obama had taken it and used it for opposite ends. But modern Democrats just don't work that way, I guess. My main criticism for 20 years has been limp-wristedness in the cause of liberalism.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Technically "not enough information", because the article doesn't specify details on what "increases with use" means. The company does not release details on its exact algorithm. But presumably, like any casino or insurance company, their calculations don't allow for any such thing.
Pithy answer: As I overheard the pizzeria guy say to the bum tonight asking for a free slice, "Yeah sure, sure -- 'cuz I'm in business to just give stuff away."
"Game the system. If there are not [sic] betting limits, heres [sic] what you do..."
FTA: "The student decides how much to wager up to a cap that starts at $25 and increases with use."
What's that quote from Chomsky?
They want the people to hate and fear the government, because democratic government has a dangerous flaw -- it actually has the slight chance of becoming truly democratic. You see, corporations are perfect -- perfect tyrannies.
http://www.ebook3000.com/politics/Noam-Chomsky---Class-War---Audiobook_49792.html
Crowdsourcing works nicely for things like open-source software and encyclopedias because the whole project is of limited scope, it's predicated on Samaritan-like communal giving, and generally no one can profit one way or the other from particular responses or pieces of writing. This probably breaks down and becomes unstable if participants can profit one way or the other from particular outcomes. i.e., Campbell's Law:
"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Law
"Why bother trying to out perform a competitor if you can find enough evidence of possible fraud (well founded or otherwise!) and subject them to a detailed investigation by the SEC or some other regulatory body?"
Totally amateur observation is that stocks in a particular industry tend to move together, and if one drops or gets investigated you tend to have a sympathy movement as people wonder if the problem is endemic to the whole industry. So that would be generally not something most businesses would want to trigger. Right?
I enjoyed that greatly. Here's either 1 or 3 grapes for the effort.