"You read the book Outliers? Supposedly a Colombian flight [wikipedia.org] crashed in New York and killed everyone on board partly because the pilots were intimidated by the brusk manners of the air traffic controllers."
First paragraph from the article you link:
8 of 9 crew members and 65 of 149 passengers on board were killed.
What part of "Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting..." did you fail to understand? Great idea, fire the technicians for the stupid ideas from the people who do the hiring/firing/marching orders.
"Did we have these people when cards were first used. Oh you are just conditioning them to produce a card to check out a book. Where is the problem there?"
Consider this a "Give unto Caesar those things which are Caesar's" type situation. If you want to track library books or student attendance or whatever, you have a responsibility to generate a User ID, give it to me, and expect to get it back on request. Same for IRS taxation or Social Security or whatever. If it is stolen or mis-identified then you have the capacity and responsibility to provide a new one that works.
My biometrics (skin, blood type, fingerprints, iris scans) are personal and private information, existed prior to any government institution, and should not be required to be turned over to said institutions.
"...Scientists where shown to be just as and in some cases more likely to fail a given puzzle due to reluctance to let go of a given premise and try another one. So we should be careful to equate "scientist" with "right." Facts are facts as we know them. That isn't to say they should be ignored either but skepticism is just as healthy where science is concerned as it is where religion, philosophy, politics, or anything else is."
You did some nice linguistic ju-jitsu by changing "science" to "scientist" as if they're the same thing. They are not.
As I was just lecturing to my statistics class the other day: You can't ever prove anything in science; if anything, science works by disproving ideas. (This is classic Popperian stuff, and Einstein said the same thing.)
In effect: Science advances by two scientists getting in an argument and getting pissed at each other until one guy does some research convincing everyone else what an asshole the second guy was. The fact that most scientists are confident in their own hypotheses is immaterial to the discipline in the long term, once everyone else can replicate the same concrete tests of the natural world.
"The 'high tech' map doesn't make the crime worse. It just serves as circumstantial evidence that it was premeditated. The harsher sentence should be imposed because the crime was planned, not because high tech was used."
"Premeditated" is an adjective only used when talking about murder, and used to distinguish different types of said act (as opposed to a crime of inflamed passion, for example). It is not used when talking about other types of crime.
Seriously -- How do you perform burglary without planning it?
"Put another way, do you as a/. reader think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot? He's an idiot who is almost certainly worth about a million times what you are..."
Do you think Heracles was a great warrior? He killed the centaur Nessus with a poisoned arrow, but that same poison later infected him and caused his own death (thus making him a tragic hero).
All the business-owners I've known have been highly driven, but sort of half-educated, and with enormous glaring blind spots in their knowledge and personality. From what I understand, Murdoch has a passion for print newspapers that served him very well in a particular time and place -- when news on paper is profitable, being king-conqueror of newspapers works great. Times have changed and I think Murdoch's lust to see profitable news-on-paper is making him take self-destructive acts.
"Of course, you can exercise the one opt-out system that works - don't use their services. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. It is like buying a car, but not wanting to pay the price. The price of working with Google and Facebook is not dollars, but your data... Google's price/benefit is right for me, so I use it. Facebook's is not, so I don't."
So, basically a free-market argument. However, the free market only works based on an assumption of full information on behalf of all parties. So inasmuch as companies such as these withhold information, or obscure what they're doing, or drown the client in a deluge of fine print, many people will be kept ignorant of the true cost (whether in dollars or data or anything else).
This is enormously similar to how credit-card companies, EULA writers, shady mortgage lenders, etc., all operate. When free-market assumptions break down, the only remaining solution is organized political action.
"It is somewhat of a consolation in a perverse way to find out what most former bullies do now that we're all adults. A great many can hardly hold down a minimum wage job, and blow all their money on alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. In theory, I wish them the best. But, yeah..."
Or as my college political science professor said, "I went back home and found out that all the high school bullies had become local cops."
"Anyone else can destroy a major city, but that is going to bring retribution of a biblical scale from the entire rest of the world if the true source of the attack can be determined."
Common thinking, and I disagree with it completely. It's a bit similar to "pound you in the ass prison" arguments, it's mostly just macho posturing.
Example: Group of 50 terrorists launch a nuke from the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan (population 7 million, and directly on the border with India). We annihilate the whole region in response. Really?
"Advocate group publishes report that promotes/detracts from whatever the group promotes/detracts from."
Things that do not constitute an "advocacy group": A pair of physics professors at MIT and Cornell. One of whom used to work at the Pentagon as a science adviser.
These guys are doing their job of basic science research, and you're picking up some minor journalistic shorthand and turning into a smear campaign. I'm sure there's a cushy job at Fox news awaiting you shortly.
Agreed. I propose that Slashdot start scanning for people tagging stories with "correlation!=causation", and automatically insert "I'm a fucking moron!" into their signature line. Or the like.
Agreed, and on top of this, the research in question was a designed experiment with control & experimental groups, which does in fact establish causation. The Slashdot "correlation != causation" crowd is almost uniformly ignorant about what they're saying.
A quote from Neil A. Weiss, Introductory Statistics, 7E, p. 22: "In an *observational study*, researchers simply observe characteristics and take measurements, as in a sample survey. In a *designed experiment*, researchers impose treatments and controls and then observe characteristics and take measurements. Observational studies can only reveal _association_, whereas designed experiments can help establish _causation_."
For christ's sake, the way inferential statistics works the size of the population is fundamentally irrelevant. If anything, larger is a bit better. Stop being a dumbass.
"I'm quite certain math geeks are beavering away at new compression algorithms in corporate labs. Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents."
I'm guessing that a larger share of such work is being done at research universities, by math or CS people looking to publish academic papers.
"This is why it is important to realize that everyone has multiple lives: private, public, serious, fun, sexual, intimate, bigoted, religious, etc. It is not enough to inquire about a person's character. People have many characters. The characters or personae overlap somewhat, but not greatly."
Maybe, for a psychotic person. Myself, I've always found that line of thinking to be total bullshit.
There is "being diplomatic" and then there is "having multiple lives". The first is strategically useful; the second is, like your philosophical key interest, mental masturbation. In fact, it's the "multiple lives" theory that gives cover to the most corrupt of our politicians.
There's a smidgin of truth to what you say, but you could say nearly the same thing about buying lottery tickets. All I can say is that the people I personally know with a Harvard degree in things like English are now a stay-at-home housewife, a second-in-command software scripter with lots of debt, etc.
Yes, people with a specific plan are much better off (which is what I was saying to begin with). But I'd assert that the majority of people going to Ivy schools are more in the starry-eyed "me too!" camp and do not have a specific career plan that it fits into.
"Most of the issues addressed in the summary actually result from the fact that top US universities are insanely expensive. Harvard is about thirty thousand dollars [per year] for an undergraduate degree whereas Cambridge is about three thousand Stirling."
I agree with this. Too many students with stars in their eyes, and not given the tools, information, or motivation to make an informed decision about the value of the school they're permanently indebting themselves for.
I was accepted to Harvard, but after considering the expense with my family, opted instead to attend a state school on full scholarship. Some of the Harvard grads I'd work with in the Boston area thought I was insane, but my level of freedom in life is much greater as a result.
ways –noun (used with a singular verb) way (defs. 7, 14, 20a).
Usage Note:... In American English ways is often used as an equivalent of way in phrases such as a long ways to go. The usage is acceptable but is usually considered informal.
"I would assume (read: HOPE) that Rockstar had the brains to test the hell out of this binary before saying 'Well, let's just release it and see what happens...'"
As a former game company employee, I say this to your hope/assumption: No freakin' way.
A test gauntlet (requires a whole department of people for weeks) would be so much more labor-intensive than figuring out how to recompile your own code (requires one developer, maybe some days?) that it's completely nonsensical to think that the former happened when the latter did not.
Slashdot Mirror
"You read the book Outliers? Supposedly a Colombian flight [wikipedia.org] crashed in New York and killed everyone on board partly because the pilots were intimidated by the brusk manners of the air traffic controllers."
First paragraph from the article you link:
8 of 9 crew members and 65 of 149 passengers on board were killed.
Good job with the reading comprehension.
What part of "Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting..." did you fail to understand? Great idea, fire the technicians for the stupid ideas from the people who do the hiring/firing/marching orders.
"As far as I'm concerned, that's enough to move this project from 'appalling' to 'kinda awesome'."
Does that not smell like total and complete bullshit to you? I'd challenge someone to ask about actually verifying that by auditing the system.
"Did we have these people when cards were first used. Oh you are just conditioning them to produce a card to check out a book. Where is the problem there?"
Consider this a "Give unto Caesar those things which are Caesar's" type situation. If you want to track library books or student attendance or whatever, you have a responsibility to generate a User ID, give it to me, and expect to get it back on request. Same for IRS taxation or Social Security or whatever. If it is stolen or mis-identified then you have the capacity and responsibility to provide a new one that works.
My biometrics (skin, blood type, fingerprints, iris scans) are personal and private information, existed prior to any government institution, and should not be required to be turned over to said institutions.
I quote SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=584
Totally agree! Thanks for writing what I would have otherwise.
"...Scientists where shown to be just as and in some cases more likely to fail a given puzzle due to reluctance to let go of a given premise and try another one. So we should be careful to equate "scientist" with "right." Facts are facts as we know them. That isn't to say they should be ignored either but skepticism is just as healthy where science is concerned as it is where religion, philosophy, politics, or anything else is."
You did some nice linguistic ju-jitsu by changing "science" to "scientist" as if they're the same thing. They are not.
As I was just lecturing to my statistics class the other day: You can't ever prove anything in science; if anything, science works by disproving ideas. (This is classic Popperian stuff, and Einstein said the same thing.)
In effect: Science advances by two scientists getting in an argument and getting pissed at each other until one guy does some research convincing everyone else what an asshole the second guy was. The fact that most scientists are confident in their own hypotheses is immaterial to the discipline in the long term, once everyone else can replicate the same concrete tests of the natural world.
"The 'high tech' map doesn't make the crime worse. It just serves as circumstantial evidence that it was premeditated. The harsher sentence should be imposed because the crime was planned, not because high tech was used."
"Premeditated" is an adjective only used when talking about murder, and used to distinguish different types of said act (as opposed to a crime of inflamed passion, for example). It is not used when talking about other types of crime.
Seriously -- How do you perform burglary without planning it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premeditated
"Put another way, do you as a /. reader think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot? He's an idiot who is almost certainly worth about a million times what you are..."
Do you think Heracles was a great warrior? He killed the centaur Nessus with a poisoned arrow, but that same poison later infected him and caused his own death (thus making him a tragic hero).
All the business-owners I've known have been highly driven, but sort of half-educated, and with enormous glaring blind spots in their knowledge and personality. From what I understand, Murdoch has a passion for print newspapers that served him very well in a particular time and place -- when news on paper is profitable, being king-conqueror of newspapers works great. Times have changed and I think Murdoch's lust to see profitable news-on-paper is making him take self-destructive acts.
"Of course, you can exercise the one opt-out system that works - don't use their services. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. It is like buying a car, but not wanting to pay the price. The price of working with Google and Facebook is not dollars, but your data... Google's price/benefit is right for me, so I use it. Facebook's is not, so I don't."
So, basically a free-market argument. However, the free market only works based on an assumption of full information on behalf of all parties. So inasmuch as companies such as these withhold information, or obscure what they're doing, or drown the client in a deluge of fine print, many people will be kept ignorant of the true cost (whether in dollars or data or anything else).
This is enormously similar to how credit-card companies, EULA writers, shady mortgage lenders, etc., all operate. When free-market assumptions break down, the only remaining solution is organized political action.
"It is somewhat of a consolation in a perverse way to find out what most former bullies do now that we're all adults. A great many can hardly hold down a minimum wage job, and blow all their money on alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. In theory, I wish them the best. But, yeah..."
Or as my college political science professor said, "I went back home and found out that all the high school bullies had become local cops."
Even regular New Yorkers walk too slow for me. "Fast moving NY" my ass.
With one single exception -- The 6-foot-tall fashion models who are about 2/3 legs walking around during Fashion Week. They're crazy fast.
"Anyone else can destroy a major city, but that is going to bring retribution of a biblical scale from the entire rest of the world if the true source of the attack can be determined."
Common thinking, and I disagree with it completely. It's a bit similar to "pound you in the ass prison" arguments, it's mostly just macho posturing.
Example: Group of 50 terrorists launch a nuke from the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan (population 7 million, and directly on the border with India). We annihilate the whole region in response. Really?
"Advocate group publishes report that promotes/detracts from whatever the group promotes/detracts from."
Things that do not constitute an "advocacy group": A pair of physics professors at MIT and Cornell. One of whom used to work at the Pentagon as a science adviser.
These guys are doing their job of basic science research, and you're picking up some minor journalistic shorthand and turning into a smear campaign. I'm sure there's a cushy job at Fox news awaiting you shortly.
Agreed. I propose that Slashdot start scanning for people tagging stories with "correlation!=causation", and automatically insert "I'm a fucking moron!" into their signature line. Or the like.
Agreed, and on top of this, the research in question was a designed experiment with control & experimental groups, which does in fact establish causation. The Slashdot "correlation != causation" crowd is almost uniformly ignorant about what they're saying.
A quote from Neil A. Weiss, Introductory Statistics, 7E, p. 22: "In an *observational study*, researchers simply observe characteristics and take measurements, as in a sample survey. In a *designed experiment*, researchers impose treatments and controls and then observe characteristics and take measurements. Observational studies can only reveal _association_, whereas designed experiments can help establish _causation_."
For christ's sake, the way inferential statistics works the size of the population is fundamentally irrelevant. If anything, larger is a bit better. Stop being a dumbass.
One more time -- "That's the single dumbest thing you can say about polling results." http://angrymath.blogspot.com/2009/02/interpreting-polls-angrymath-meditation.html
"I'm quite certain math geeks are beavering away at new compression algorithms in corporate labs. Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents."
I'm guessing that a larger share of such work is being done at research universities, by math or CS people looking to publish academic papers.
"This is why it is important to realize that everyone has multiple lives: private, public, serious, fun, sexual, intimate, bigoted, religious, etc. It is not enough to inquire about a person's character. People have many characters. The characters or personae overlap somewhat, but not greatly."
Maybe, for a psychotic person. Myself, I've always found that line of thinking to be total bullshit.
There is "being diplomatic" and then there is "having multiple lives". The first is strategically useful; the second is, like your philosophical key interest, mental masturbation. In fact, it's the "multiple lives" theory that gives cover to the most corrupt of our politicians.
Who knows what unit of measure the Futurama "atmosphere" is? Maybe it's based on the highest-pressure known planet!
There's a smidgin of truth to what you say, but you could say nearly the same thing about buying lottery tickets. All I can say is that the people I personally know with a Harvard degree in things like English are now a stay-at-home housewife, a second-in-command software scripter with lots of debt, etc.
Yes, people with a specific plan are much better off (which is what I was saying to begin with). But I'd assert that the majority of people going to Ivy schools are more in the starry-eyed "me too!" camp and do not have a specific career plan that it fits into.
Not a chance that that happened.
"Most of the issues addressed in the summary actually result from the fact that top US universities are insanely expensive. Harvard is about thirty thousand dollars [per year] for an undergraduate degree whereas Cambridge is about three thousand Stirling."
I agree with this. Too many students with stars in their eyes, and not given the tools, information, or motivation to make an informed decision about the value of the school they're permanently indebting themselves for.
I was accepted to Harvard, but after considering the expense with my family, opted instead to attend a state school on full scholarship. Some of the Harvard grads I'd work with in the Boston area thought I was insane, but my level of freedom in life is much greater as a result.
Colloquial/idiomatic.
ways
–noun (used with a singular verb)
way (defs. 7, 14, 20a).
Usage Note: ... In American English ways is often used as an equivalent of way in phrases such as a long ways to go. The usage is acceptable but is usually considered informal.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ways
"I would assume (read: HOPE) that Rockstar had the brains to test the hell out of this binary before saying 'Well, let's just release it and see what happens...'"
As a former game company employee, I say this to your hope/assumption: No freakin' way.
A test gauntlet (requires a whole department of people for weeks) would be so much more labor-intensive than figuring out how to recompile your own code (requires one developer, maybe some days?) that it's completely nonsensical to think that the former happened when the latter did not.