But as a man, my help to any person's attempt to succeed depends upon her abandonment of submissive underperformance and adoption of confident, successful attitudes.
I agree to a point. But as the article I cited demonstrates, it's often contrary to human nature to remain cofident and successfull when oppressed. Therefore, you have to do more than just say "pony up and I'll treat you as an equal." Since the playing field is already uneven, you need to make it uneven in the other direction to achieve equality.
I guess I just explained the scientific principle behind affirmative action without intending to.
One of the hallmarks of enlightened discourse is precision in language.
Try "decades". Besides, that's an utterly idiotic statement--"acting" one way or another never made anyone exempt to the rules of segregation. However, the blacks who succeeded to overcome segregation and racism didn't act like the oppressed, concilatory, submissive blacks that predominated during most of our racist past. They acted with the confidence that they by all rights possessed the same rights as any white man. In that sense, they did "act white". And, over time, it's becoming more and more typical for blacks to be confident in their rights, so "to act white" no longer has that meaning to them.
Decades is indeed what I meant. I don't imagine they had busses at the founding of this country.
In reference to the rest of that paragraph -- I'm not sure where you get this from. The reason blacks were "oppressed, concilatory, [and] submissive" is because they were whipped, beaten, and murdered if they weren't. It was merely an attempt at survival in an unbelievably oppressive system. That Rosa Parks and the abolitionists did what they did is not something to expect -- it's heroically out of the norm.
As for the rest of your comment -- you're implying that men aren't responsible for enlightening their attitudes because women should know to stand up for themselves? In my opinion, it was both the white AND black activists who were the heroes of the abolition movement. Small minded people like you simply got in the way. Maybe you should take responsibility for your actions and attitudes rather than putting the burden solely on the oppressed to fix the system.
As an aside, it's human nature to underperform when negatively stereotyped. Women who are primed to be aware of the fact that women are "worse" in math score lower on difficult math tests than when they're not primed (O'Brian and Crandall, PSPB:29, 6). Before you get all worked up about how this shows how "womanly" they are and need to "act like a man and just score better", be aware that the exact same result has been demonstrated when race is negatively primed.
So it should be apparent that asking somebody to just "suck it up" is inherently unfair, as men would do just as poorly if the tables were turned.
Actually, I think that's the definition of "success".
My apologies. I meant "social and professional advancement." If you were interested in enlightened discourse rather than small-minded ad hominem attacks, you'd have known this.
Just because there are people who have adapted to inequity doesn't mean that inequity a) doesn't exist, and b) shouldn't be abolished.
Perhaps if you'd lived a few centuries ago you'd be saying "look, if you want to get on the white section of the bus, ACT white!"
Thankfully, your comment is being moderated as "interesting" more than "insightful", but this viewpoint still infuriates me. Honestly, if _I_ were a woman I wouldn't want to enter a profession where attitudes like yours predominate.
Try to remember that success is not the end goal, and so the rules of competition are not necessarily the correct ethical rules. The goal is the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of humanity, and as such, it is the responsibility of men to create an environment that fosters the advancement of these goals.
From what I saw while at college, if you come to class with makeup on I can't help but not take you seriously. Sorry, thems the breaks. And no guy and their biggoted ways made them dress in tight shirts, wear makeup and drop the math courses. They did that because it was the popular thing todo.
and then...
But to suggest that it's gender specific is really lame and very 1950s'ish.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in this?
Jesus, man.
Do you not understand that the "social pressures" you referenced are in fact the ones that decide what's "popular", whether that's wearing makeup or dropping math?
Re:Education no longer matters
on
Who Needs Harvard?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You can be both a legacy AND work hard. As you can tell from my lame nick, I went to an Ivy League school, and this was the case for me. But I also went to public school, so I didn't have the socioeconomic boost that often comes with being a legacy.
As a side note, I was one of 22 hires to Microsoft my year (/~100 CS majors). MIT had something like 29. So I'm not sure what the article is talking about.
(For those interested, I quit after a year because I hated it. I'm applying to grad school now. And I use Firefox.)
I just picked a popular drug to illustrate that the field of molecular biology sometimes knows an impressive (to me) level of detail about some things.
But, to address what you say -- I wholeheartedly agree, contrary to what it may seem like in my initial post, that drugs are often misused. But sometimes they're not. Yes, CRP should've been the focus of more research, but in the meantime, statins are not as awful as you make them sound. My uncle recently had a stent inserted into a major artery -- he had very high cholesterol levels and artery blockage. Without surgery, he would have been dead within a year. And yes, statins have negative side effects like every drug, but I'm not unhappy that he's taking them. His cholesterol levels have significantly reduced, his heart is much healthier, and he's being monitored for the problems you mention by his doctor.
As a side note, I refuse to take even Tylenol, since I don't want to mess up my body as long as it's mostly working. Seeing what's happening with Aleve reinforces this decision. But that doesn't mean that biology is in the dark ages, or even that it's "overblown". Even though medicine isn't perfect yet, I'm very encouraged by the rate of progress in molecular biology, and I have strong hopes for the future.
I see I should've done my homework first, but hoo the linked article sure mangled and overhyped the message. This is a very cool example of a complex network of transcriptional regulation.
Is it too much to ask from the editors of a major website like Slashdot to point us to scholarly sources of this information? Or at least something better than the crap we got this time?
While I am involved in biology, I've never personally encountered temporal transcription regulation. A quick Google Scholar search shows that quite a few examples have been demonstrated: "temporal transcription regulation" search".
The first result, this paper, shows a pretty cool example of a protein changing behavior depending on whether it's exposed in a pulsatile or continuous manner to growth hormone. That's from 1997, so not too recently.
There's nothing in that press release to convince me that a "major signaling pathway" has been discovered. There was just an overblown analogy; no science was explained.
And maybe you think biology is "oversold" because you don't know anything about it. Does anybody in your family take a statin (for lowering cholesterol levels)? If so, you should know that amazingly little details have been worked out about why those drugs work, down to the proteins that sit on the endoplasmic reticulum that are involved in cholesterol metabolism regulation, and the enzymes that interact with them. We know how that regulatory pathway eventually trickles down to interaction with DNA via transcription factors.
Maybe you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you out of ignorance.
The number of 'dots and dashes' being used by each signal could have different purposes, all of which could be modified by a drug.
Alright, I work in a chemical biology lab, and I don't know wtf this is supposed to mean. It's common for proteins to have their localization controlled by phosphorylation (i.e., a transcription factor, which is a protein that turns a gene on when bound to DNA, can only get into the nucleus to do its job depending on whether it's been phosphorylated or not). But what does "signal" mean in this context? The press release doesn't offer any scientific details.
This is really just all hype until they can make a claim beyond vague analogies. So why does this make the front page of Slashdot?
Fourth Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to The Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days The Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore The Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
Re:This won't please YHWH/Allah/insert deity here
on
New Calendar Proposal
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you RTFW, he has large font that explains:
the C&T Calendar Fully Respects the Fourth Commandment of the Bible
It is among the most unreactive, inert molecules in the biological world
The backbone of DNA is very stable, but the bases definitely do not fit your description (indeed, I smell troll). Bases can be oxidized (drink your anti-oxidants), thymines can be fused (UV light causes this), etc. The reason DNA retains such high fidelity over such a long time is because there are enzymes in the nucleus that are specifically designed to repair these unwanted changes (for example, 8-oxoguanine is repaired to guanine via a specially designed glycosylase). Somehow I doubt they're going to be including these in a chip, but you never know.
Hm, you're right. What I said about Overture's editorial policy vs. Google's is still true, though...came straight from Search Engine Strategies (conference that covers search engines, advertising, etc.).
I went to a panel discussion on this topic, and one of the lawyers on the panel mentioned that Google has already incurred fines in France and Germany for this practice.
As a result of the ruling, searches under 'bourse de vols' will only generate search results linking to Mr Dariot's site. Google is looking to appeal the decision.
So as happy as we are about this ruling in the States, it looks like France isn't so keen on letting companies bid on their competitors' trademarks.
I don't know how this influences broad-match type scenarios, though. What happens if somebody searches for "(trademark term) cars", and a competitor buys "cars" rather than the trademarked term? This seems like it would be prohibitively difficult to stop.
Overture is significantly more hands-on with ad copy and keyword selection than Google is. They routinely reject ads that might potentially violate copyright because they're "not relevant". For example, Overture probably won't let a competitor bid on the term "Geico" because "Geico" isn't relevant to an ad for "ACME Insurance" (or say they'll say). What they do explicitly allow is comparative advertising, where an ad explicitly identifies the company as a competitor and offers an alternative.
For example, if you search for "Geico" on Yahoo you see that the ad text says things like "instant quotes from insurance companies that compete with Geico." This is an example of comparative advertising that Overture allows.
Google, on the other hand, is much looser with what they'll allow in ads, to some degree because they have less human editor intervention and more algorithmic relevance scoring. Their business philosophy is more free marketplace/large volume oriented.
So this is one reason you'll see companies go after Google rather than Overture. They're lower-hanging fruit.
Do me a favor and go to Overture.com and click on "advertiser center" toward the top of the page. Now click on the "View bids tool" in the middle-right. Search for the bids on "mesothelioma" and enter the CAPTCHA.
Look at the top bid. $160. That's not a mistake. That's highly targeted advertising. If somebody is searching for "mesothelioma," chances are much higher than normal (say, in an impression-based model) that they or somebody they know could use a lawyer to deal with this disease (which is the cancer caused by asbestos inhalation). And if somebody CLICKS on the ad? That's worth $160 to somebody.
This is an extreme example, but the point is still a good one: impression-based advertising has its place for branders and whatnot, but performance-based advertising makes much more sense as a business model for many advertisers. Why would you want to spend money on impressions that have less to do with your target sector when you can spend them on people who care about your product, and have expressed this in an action?
So do you really think that a 2 billion dollar market (which has been projected to grow to 4 billion in the next few years) is just a "fad"? If anything, it's only a step in the direction of paying for conversions (actual purchases resulting from a click) where every move we make, from impression, to click, to conversion, is monitored and optimized for.
The Slashdot crowd tends to underestimate the amount of brain power going into these technologies in the private sector. I have some personal experience with this market, so let me point something out: this is a multi-billion dollar market that Google's stock price is heavily based upon. Private companies have VERY smart people thinking about this issue. They already track user IP and the time of each click. They track a lot more, even, and do very sophisticated statistical analyses to filter out fraud.
The problem is that the people committing the "fraud" are also extremely sophisticated, since, as I said, billions of dollars are on the line. Check out this article, for example, which explains one form of fraud:
A growing alternative employs low-cost workers who are hired in China, India and other countries to click on text links and other ads.
You can't catch a highly distributed, highly random army of low-wage people in India and China without generally filtering out clicks from those places. But then what about ads that are highly popular in those areas (say, for the India Times?)? They get a free ride.
Bottom line is, when you involve billions of dollars in an industry that's as open to gaming as this one, you're going to get people who go to extreme lengths to defraud your system. They'll write adware that randomly distributes clicks around the globe that is indistinguishable from real traffic. They'll hire armies of underpaid workers around the globe to do it manually.... So this is a lot more complicated than doing simple time and IP analysis of the clicks coming in.
Of course, it also means "Of, relating to, or derived from living organisms". But this wasn't what I was thinking...forgive me, I'm a systems biologist and I was pissed.
I agree with other responses to this post. You sound all too like many doctors I've come across. Rather than listen sympathetically and try to find an honest answer, you jump to the conclusion that the patient's problem is in his/her head.
I've personally never had a serious disagreement with a physician, but my girlfriend spent the last three years (!) getting a proper diagnosis. The first two doctors told her that everything was in her head and didn't do any serious testing. Crying and frustrated by the opinions of doctors like yourself, she decided they were right and decided to "deal" with the problem herself.
A year later, the problem continued unabated, and she decided (at my pushing) to see another doctor, despite how scared she was to be told that she was a mental case again.
To make a long story short, they found that her amenorrhea (she doesn't have her period) and extreme hunger weren't caused by a mental illness or an eating disorder as previously believed (we both knew neither was possible), but she rather has polycystic ovaries, insulin intolerance, and extremely low leptin levels (as well as having the strange female hormone levels that go along with all that). She even took part in a clinical trial for active women with problems like these where she took leptin, and it was like night and day (FYI, she's not overweight but rather very active...apparently both can cause similar problems, but I don't know much about it). So it's pretty clear that none of this was in her head.
And my father was a doctor, FYI, so it's not like I have a problem with them. He agreed with me (before he passed away) that doctors are all too often dismissive of people's problems.
Also, in regard to "If Volkerding is expectorating, stuff can be cultured" -- if you took him at his word (which I've noted is difficult for you to do), then you'd know that he has retrieved what he thinks is a sulfur nugget from his throat, and he'll probably get it analyzed when he sees the specialist. I don't know why you even mention culturing, he never said what he retrieved from his throat was organic.
Re:I've never understood the obsession with Halo
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think Halo's Quake-like draw is only for newbies.
I was an old school Quake player (clan Deimos rules!), and I was in college when Halo came out. Halo had that same spark that Quake did: you could play it with your friends over a network and have a crapload of fun doing it. Except this time around, people could do it on their couches with a console.
Seriously, IMHO that opened up a whole new dimension to things, since non-nerds are much more likely to get into a long-ass CTF match together on a couch rather than holed up with their own box. None of my non-nerd friends (including an ec major, a gov major, and a jock) have a machine even close to being able to handle HLII right now.
I'm not even planning on spending the $1000 I'd need to to play HLII/QuakeDoom on my machine since my need for a fun networked game is satisfied by Halo. So for some of us, Halo is the next Quake even more so than Quake itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Touché.
Since I'm feeling like an asshole today, I'd like to point out, in my defense, that "success" has more than one definition:
- The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted: attributed their success in business to hard work.
- a. The gaining of fame or prosperity: an artist spoiled by success.
So my original statement was a correct expression of what I wanted to convey. But, alas, it wasn't perfectly precise, since it was ambiguous.But as a man, my help to any person's attempt to succeed depends upon her abandonment of submissive underperformance and adoption of confident, successful attitudes.
I agree to a point. But as the article I cited demonstrates, it's often contrary to human nature to remain cofident and successfull when oppressed. Therefore, you have to do more than just say "pony up and I'll treat you as an equal." Since the playing field is already uneven, you need to make it uneven in the other direction to achieve equality.
I guess I just explained the scientific principle behind affirmative action without intending to.
One of the hallmarks of enlightened discourse is precision in language.
Touché.
Try "decades". Besides, that's an utterly idiotic statement--"acting" one way or another never made anyone exempt to the rules of segregation. However, the blacks who succeeded to overcome segregation and racism didn't act like the oppressed, concilatory, submissive blacks that predominated during most of our racist past. They acted with the confidence that they by all rights possessed the same rights as any white man. In that sense, they did "act white". And, over time, it's becoming more and more typical for blacks to be confident in their rights, so "to act white" no longer has that meaning to them.
Decades is indeed what I meant. I don't imagine they had busses at the founding of this country.
In reference to the rest of that paragraph -- I'm not sure where you get this from. The reason blacks were "oppressed, concilatory, [and] submissive" is because they were whipped, beaten, and murdered if they weren't. It was merely an attempt at survival in an unbelievably oppressive system. That Rosa Parks and the abolitionists did what they did is not something to expect -- it's heroically out of the norm.
As for the rest of your comment -- you're implying that men aren't responsible for enlightening their attitudes because women should know to stand up for themselves? In my opinion, it was both the white AND black activists who were the heroes of the abolition movement. Small minded people like you simply got in the way. Maybe you should take responsibility for your actions and attitudes rather than putting the burden solely on the oppressed to fix the system.
As an aside, it's human nature to underperform when negatively stereotyped. Women who are primed to be aware of the fact that women are "worse" in math score lower on difficult math tests than when they're not primed (O'Brian and Crandall, PSPB:29, 6). Before you get all worked up about how this shows how "womanly" they are and need to "act like a man and just score better", be aware that the exact same result has been demonstrated when race is negatively primed.
So it should be apparent that asking somebody to just "suck it up" is inherently unfair, as men would do just as poorly if the tables were turned.
Actually, I think that's the definition of "success".
My apologies. I meant "social and professional advancement." If you were interested in enlightened discourse rather than small-minded ad hominem attacks, you'd have known this.
Your comment is extremely bigoted.
Just because there are people who have adapted to inequity doesn't mean that inequity a) doesn't exist, and b) shouldn't be abolished.
Perhaps if you'd lived a few centuries ago you'd be saying "look, if you want to get on the white section of the bus, ACT white!"
Thankfully, your comment is being moderated as "interesting" more than "insightful", but this viewpoint still infuriates me. Honestly, if _I_ were a woman I wouldn't want to enter a profession where attitudes like yours predominate.
Try to remember that success is not the end goal, and so the rules of competition are not necessarily the correct ethical rules. The goal is the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of humanity, and as such, it is the responsibility of men to create an environment that fosters the advancement of these goals.
From what I saw while at college, if you come to class with makeup on I can't help but not take you seriously. Sorry, thems the breaks. And no guy and their biggoted ways made them dress in tight shirts, wear makeup and drop the math courses. They did that because it was the popular thing todo.
and then...
But to suggest that it's gender specific is really lame and very 1950s'ish.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in this?
Jesus, man.
Do you not understand that the "social pressures" you referenced are in fact the ones that decide what's "popular", whether that's wearing makeup or dropping math?
You can be both a legacy AND work hard. As you can tell from my lame nick, I went to an Ivy League school, and this was the case for me. But I also went to public school, so I didn't have the socioeconomic boost that often comes with being a legacy.
As a side note, I was one of 22 hires to Microsoft my year (/~100 CS majors). MIT had something like 29. So I'm not sure what the article is talking about.
(For those interested, I quit after a year because I hated it. I'm applying to grad school now. And I use Firefox.)
I just picked a popular drug to illustrate that the field of molecular biology sometimes knows an impressive (to me) level of detail about some things.
But, to address what you say -- I wholeheartedly agree, contrary to what it may seem like in my initial post, that drugs are often misused. But sometimes they're not. Yes, CRP should've been the focus of more research, but in the meantime, statins are not as awful as you make them sound. My uncle recently had a stent inserted into a major artery -- he had very high cholesterol levels and artery blockage. Without surgery, he would have been dead within a year. And yes, statins have negative side effects like every drug, but I'm not unhappy that he's taking them. His cholesterol levels have significantly reduced, his heart is much healthier, and he's being monitored for the problems you mention by his doctor.
As a side note, I refuse to take even Tylenol, since I don't want to mess up my body as long as it's mostly working. Seeing what's happening with Aleve reinforces this decision. But that doesn't mean that biology is in the dark ages, or even that it's "overblown". Even though medicine isn't perfect yet, I'm very encouraged by the rate of progress in molecular biology, and I have strong hopes for the future.
I see I should've done my homework first, but hoo the linked article sure mangled and overhyped the message. This is a very cool example of a complex network of transcriptional regulation.
Is it too much to ask from the editors of a major website like Slashdot to point us to scholarly sources of this information? Or at least something better than the crap we got this time?
While I am involved in biology, I've never personally encountered temporal transcription regulation. A quick Google Scholar search shows that quite a few examples have been demonstrated: "temporal transcription regulation" search".
The first result, this paper, shows a pretty cool example of a protein changing behavior depending on whether it's exposed in a pulsatile or continuous manner to growth hormone. That's from 1997, so not too recently.
I agree with you on that. I just felt you were giving my profession a cheap shot based on a very shoddy press release, and had to say something.
There's nothing in that press release to convince me that a "major signaling pathway" has been discovered. There was just an overblown analogy; no science was explained.
And maybe you think biology is "oversold" because you don't know anything about it. Does anybody in your family take a statin (for lowering cholesterol levels)? If so, you should know that amazingly little details have been worked out about why those drugs work, down to the proteins that sit on the endoplasmic reticulum that are involved in cholesterol metabolism regulation, and the enzymes that interact with them. We know how that regulatory pathway eventually trickles down to interaction with DNA via transcription factors.
Maybe you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you out of ignorance.
The number of 'dots and dashes' being used by each signal could have different purposes, all of which could be modified by a drug.
Alright, I work in a chemical biology lab, and I don't know wtf this is supposed to mean. It's common for proteins to have their localization controlled by phosphorylation (i.e., a transcription factor, which is a protein that turns a gene on when bound to DNA, can only get into the nucleus to do its job depending on whether it's been phosphorylated or not). But what does "signal" mean in this context? The press release doesn't offer any scientific details.
This is really just all hype until they can make a claim beyond vague analogies. So why does this make the front page of Slashdot?
4) moving the mouse around in order to locate the cursor itself.
Hell, I do that myself sometimes. A mouse has a lot of places to hide in 1600 x 1200 pixels.
Actually:
Fourth
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to The Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days The Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore The Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
It is among the most unreactive, inert molecules in the biological world
The backbone of DNA is very stable, but the bases definitely do not fit your description (indeed, I smell troll). Bases can be oxidized (drink your anti-oxidants), thymines can be fused (UV light causes this), etc. The reason DNA retains such high fidelity over such a long time is because there are enzymes in the nucleus that are specifically designed to repair these unwanted changes (for example, 8-oxoguanine is repaired to guanine via a specially designed glycosylase). Somehow I doubt they're going to be including these in a chip, but you never know.
Hm, you're right. What I said about Overture's editorial policy vs. Google's is still true, though...came straight from Search Engine Strategies (conference that covers search engines, advertising, etc.).
For example: this story
So as happy as we are about this ruling in the States, it looks like France isn't so keen on letting companies bid on their competitors' trademarks.
I don't know how this influences broad-match type scenarios, though. What happens if somebody searches for "(trademark term) cars", and a competitor buys "cars" rather than the trademarked term? This seems like it would be prohibitively difficult to stop.
Overture is significantly more hands-on with ad copy and keyword selection than Google is. They routinely reject ads that might potentially violate copyright because they're "not relevant". For example, Overture probably won't let a competitor bid on the term "Geico" because "Geico" isn't relevant to an ad for "ACME Insurance" (or say they'll say). What they do explicitly allow is comparative advertising, where an ad explicitly identifies the company as a competitor and offers an alternative.
For example, if you search for "Geico" on Yahoo you see that the ad text says things like "instant quotes from insurance companies that compete with Geico." This is an example of comparative advertising that Overture allows.
Google, on the other hand, is much looser with what they'll allow in ads, to some degree because they have less human editor intervention and more algorithmic relevance scoring. Their business philosophy is more free marketplace/large volume oriented.
So this is one reason you'll see companies go after Google rather than Overture. They're lower-hanging fruit.
Do me a favor and go to Overture.com and click on "advertiser center" toward the top of the page. Now click on the "View bids tool" in the middle-right. Search for the bids on "mesothelioma" and enter the CAPTCHA.
Look at the top bid. $160. That's not a mistake. That's highly targeted advertising. If somebody is searching for "mesothelioma," chances are much higher than normal (say, in an impression-based model) that they or somebody they know could use a lawyer to deal with this disease (which is the cancer caused by asbestos inhalation). And if somebody CLICKS on the ad? That's worth $160 to somebody.
This is an extreme example, but the point is still a good one: impression-based advertising has its place for branders and whatnot, but performance-based advertising makes much more sense as a business model for many advertisers. Why would you want to spend money on impressions that have less to do with your target sector when you can spend them on people who care about your product, and have expressed this in an action?
So do you really think that a 2 billion dollar market (which has been projected to grow to 4 billion in the next few years) is just a "fad"? If anything, it's only a step in the direction of paying for conversions (actual purchases resulting from a click) where every move we make, from impression, to click, to conversion, is monitored and optimized for.
The problem is that the people committing the "fraud" are also extremely sophisticated, since, as I said, billions of dollars are on the line. Check out this article, for example, which explains one form of fraud:
You can't catch a highly distributed, highly random army of low-wage people in India and China without generally filtering out clicks from those places. But then what about ads that are highly popular in those areas (say, for the India Times?)? They get a free ride.
Bottom line is, when you involve billions of dollars in an industry that's as open to gaming as this one, you're going to get people who go to extreme lengths to defraud your system. They'll write adware that randomly distributes clicks around the globe that is indistinguishable from real traffic. They'll hire armies of underpaid workers around the globe to do it manually.
The probability that the results weren't due to chance is actually 99.9%, not 99% (if I remember my stats correctly). The p-value was .001.
I'd still like to have seen religiosity included in the analysis, though, in addition to hispanic population.
From dictionary.com:
Chemistry. Of or designating carbon compounds.
Of course, it also means "Of, relating to, or derived from living organisms". But this wasn't what I was thinking...forgive me, I'm a systems biologist and I was pissed.
I agree with other responses to this post. You sound all too like many doctors I've come across. Rather than listen sympathetically and try to find an honest answer, you jump to the conclusion that the patient's problem is in his/her head.
I've personally never had a serious disagreement with a physician, but my girlfriend spent the last three years (!) getting a proper diagnosis. The first two doctors told her that everything was in her head and didn't do any serious testing. Crying and frustrated by the opinions of doctors like yourself, she decided they were right and decided to "deal" with the problem herself.
A year later, the problem continued unabated, and she decided (at my pushing) to see another doctor, despite how scared she was to be told that she was a mental case again.
To make a long story short, they found that her amenorrhea (she doesn't have her period) and extreme hunger weren't caused by a mental illness or an eating disorder as previously believed (we both knew neither was possible), but she rather has polycystic ovaries, insulin intolerance, and extremely low leptin levels (as well as having the strange female hormone levels that go along with all that). She even took part in a clinical trial for active women with problems like these where she took leptin, and it was like night and day (FYI, she's not overweight but rather very active...apparently both can cause similar problems, but I don't know much about it). So it's pretty clear that none of this was in her head.
And my father was a doctor, FYI, so it's not like I have a problem with them. He agreed with me (before he passed away) that doctors are all too often dismissive of people's problems.
Also, in regard to "If Volkerding is expectorating, stuff can be cultured" -- if you took him at his word (which I've noted is difficult for you to do), then you'd know that he has retrieved what he thinks is a sulfur nugget from his throat, and he'll probably get it analyzed when he sees the specialist. I don't know why you even mention culturing, he never said what he retrieved from his throat was organic.
I don't think Halo's Quake-like draw is only for newbies.
I was an old school Quake player (clan Deimos rules!), and I was in college when Halo came out. Halo had that same spark that Quake did: you could play it with your friends over a network and have a crapload of fun doing it. Except this time around, people could do it on their couches with a console.
Seriously, IMHO that opened up a whole new dimension to things, since non-nerds are much more likely to get into a long-ass CTF match together on a couch rather than holed up with their own box. None of my non-nerd friends (including an ec major, a gov major, and a jock) have a machine even close to being able to handle HLII right now.
I'm not even planning on spending the $1000 I'd need to to play HLII/QuakeDoom on my machine since my need for a fun networked game is satisfied by Halo. So for some of us, Halo is the next Quake even more so than Quake itself.