BINOM(8,10;0.5)=0.04. Small enough to conclude that the listeners could tell the difference with the Apple headphones.
Similarly, BINOM(6,10;0.5)=0.20. Too large to conclude that the listeners could tell the difference with the Shure headphones.
Thank you for summarizing the results in a more standard fashion.:)
Although something seems fishy about their conclusion that people can identify the difference between the two bitrates with the Apple headphones because they are inferior headphones. I've never tried either of these headphones, but generally it takes higher quality headphones to differentiate bitrates, and it's the inferior headphones for which bitrate is irrelevant.
First, get caller ID at your incoming switchboard so you can log the numbers for all incoming calls. Second, contact the phone company and ask them if they can start blocking a list of phone numbers that you give them. (Everything should be available for a price.) Failing that, have your IT folks find a way to setup your own switchboard for incoming calls, and have it block calls from the offending locations. Any phone calls with caller ID blocked could be either blocked automatically, sent to a recording, or automatically redirected to a secretary who filters them.
I have never worked with such systems, but in the era of IP phones and other such solutions, there has to be a way to have a customized software featureset on a switchboard if these features are not already commercially available.
I think the only app I've installed on this XP box that actually NEEDED the reboot in order to work, was daemon tools.
What really pisses me off is the dialogue box that says a reboot is necessary, and then gives only two options, "Reboot now" and "Remind me in 5 minutes," and if you don't push anything for 60 seconds it automatically reboots. Once that thing comes up after a Windows update, it's very difficult to get anything done until you close everything and placate its obsession with rebooting.
Will somebody please explain to me why every time some new way to do anything that would involve identifying people, it's an invasion of privacy? I mean honestly, why are you so afraid?
The freedom of assembly is what's at stake, and it in turn is essential for a free democracy. If the government can track the movements of innocent people, then it can monitor the organizations and associations (including political) that one is associated with. And if the government has the power to document the members of every rival political movement as it is forming, including all the other activities of the members, then they have the power to intimidate and crush it. (Don't believe me? Find a history book.)
Privacy from the government is a key component of freedom, because it places serious constraints on the government's power over the people. Without this, you can very easily become a subject rather than a free citizen.
I put a tape in the VCR, setup the time I want it to start recording, the time I want it to stop, the channel, and let the thing do its magic trick.
I don't put a tape in my mythtv box, I don't setup the times for it to record or the time for it to stop, and it automatically records the shows that I told it I like, while I'm off worrying about other things in my life. I'll take that over my old VCR any day. It completely changes the way you watch TV.
I spent a good 6 hours and read about a dozen howtos and couldn't get lirc running my pvr150 remote and blaster.
I feel your pain. This happened to me as well for a time, and it's compounded by the fact that some of the pvr150 boards have defective hardware. This page has what you need to set it up. If you get all that in place, and it's still not working, try a few cold boots. Sometimes the hardware to process the IR locks itself in an anomalous state, and the only cure is to completely power off.
And what were the odds that a non-intelligent species would be able to form a sentence like that? There is a 0% chance that you would be able to claim that no planet with intelligent life has been found.
You are correct, but you missed a third possibility. If intelligent life were very rare, then there would be a very large chance that I would be unable to claim that there is or is not intelligent life, by virtue of not existing. I think, therefore intelligent life evolves. Think about it. It's a bet worth putting money on.
The physics geniuses on Slashdot, not to mention the cell phone industry, keep saying that electromagnetic radiation is non-ionizing, so it can't affect the brain!
I'm not putting high-voltage machinery next to my BRAIN. That'll cause...oh wait.
You laugh (and you should perhaps, because it's funny), but there's a deeper underlying truth. This is clear evidence that we cannot haphazardly dismiss all concerns about electromagnetic interaction with biological systems as "obvious hogwash", like is so frequently done on Slashdot. If you watch the field, you'll see that there are a large number of non-thermal non-ionizing mechanisms for biological effects like this.
what they are saying is people are only generous because it feels good.
People have evolved to feel good being generous because it has proven helpful for people and for society as a whole in the past. Therefore, by transitive logic, people are generous because it is helpful and promotes the wellbeing of society.:)
That it makes them feel good is simply an intermediate step, mechanism, or bonus.
Habitable planets mean just that: there's probably life on them, but not life you would ever think twice about.
I don't know about that. Every single planet we've ever found life on so far has also evolved intelligent life. Coincidence, perhaps, but that's a pretty good hit ratio.
The catch is that perhaps 50% of that intelligent life will take billions of years to evolve, and the other 50% of that intelligent life evolved intelligence billions of years before we did.
Given the quantity of habitable planets out there, it's probably a safe bet that the universe has a good quantity of intelligent life that's been around very very much longer than us.
I refuse to use Google News ever since I noticed that they use Xinhua(The PRC's state newspaper agency) as a source.
So don't click on it if it offends your sensibilities so greatly. Personally I like being able to see a variety of perspectives, even propaganda laced ones. You have to pay attention to propaganda so you know what information other people are being fed.
Google news does not present you with truth. It presents you with a distribution of news.
Occam's razor states that you should avoid multiplying entities, or take the simplest explanation. Occam's razor *does* imply that you should ignore crackpots, as by definition there is a simpler explanation than what they spew: they're full of shit.
The simplest explanation for someone saying something is not the same as the simplest explanation which explains evidence. Attempting to apply Occam's razor to the former would always allow you to say someone is full of shit, regardless of their correctness, and you will end up with a lack of any explanation about the world, because all evidence will have been discarded. Admittedly that is quite a simple result, but it's a mass denial of information, not an explanation.
and given we've not actually detected any harm from wifi it covers all the data
But we have. You just chose to dismiss it as "shit" rather than data. Using a selection bias on your data is a very unwise way to do science, but a very good way to be wrong.
There are categories of pseudoscience, and if a claim readily falls into a certain category there is pretty good reason to not only consider it undecided, but suspect it is improbable.
To dismiss a claim or an experimental result just because it sounds similar to something which was found false before is neither scientific nor logical. As a form of associative reasoning, it's a very human thing to do, but it is also a logical fallacy and will eventually result in scientific errors.
Ah yes, aspartame, the health bugaboo du jour among internet users.
Problems with aspartame, and serious concerns about it, have existed for longer than the modern internet era. Try reading some medical data about it OFF of the internet, and you will see the legitimacy of the concerns.
sodium benzoate is an additive that's been used since the early 1900's
But in significantly lower concentrations than in the modern food supply. The average daily intake of sodium benzoate as an additive has skyrocketed by many orders of magnitude, so it cannot be said that its use has been at all constant over this time period.
If it were dangerous, there are plenty of scientists out there who'd have figured it out long before now.
There have been. Calling their work "bugaboo" is neither productive nor reasonable.
Even if you don't believe that, you have to at least agree that over 100 years of use of this additive, we'd have seen at least some these alleged effects by now in the general populace, yes?
Yes. We have. Notice the diabetes and obesity rates lately? Animal studies predict that increased diabetes and obesity rates will occur from a significant increase in sodium benzoate consumption.
Yet people continue to live longer, healthier lives even as we use more products containing these additives.
Not exactly. People in poorer regions of the U.S., where food is more likely to be manufactured in a factory and contain ingredients such as sodium benzoate, live shorter and less healthy lives, with higher rates of diabetes and obesity.
Obesity directly kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year, yet we are constantly looking for ways to mentally justify continuing on that path.
That we are. And defending sodium benzoate and aspartame is part of that mental justification.
But, if I eat a burger and fries from McDonalds, Burger King, or Wendys, I just don't feel well. They used to taste good, but now they don't even do that. I think the craving that leads me there is from some kind of nostalgia from my youth.
Unless you are still quite young, it's probably a safe bet that the food in those particular fast food joints actually had significantly different ingredient lists when you were young. They have never been pillars of health, but they used to be much better than they are now.
Are you seriously suggesting that substituting a non-caloric substance for a high-calorie substance in one's diet, without changing the diet otherwise, will not result in lower average weight?
Yes, I am suggesting that it will not in this case. The caloric model is naively simplified, and does not take into account the side-effects that the other substances would have on the body's metabolism. Metabolism has far more to do with one's weight than 30 grams of sugar in a can of soda.
It's entirely reasonable to reject out of hand crackpot rantings.
Occam's razor does not translate, logically, philosophically, or linguistically, as "reject crackpots", even though people insist upon misusing it. I suggest looking it up.
Occam's razor is the principle that the explanation which requires the fewest assumptions is the best one. So in general, Occam's razor cannot be used to accept or dismiss an experimental result. It can only be used to select or dismiss a model to explain a result (even though it is not guaranteed to choose the correct one if one has insufficient evidence).
Since there are several known mechanisms by which Wi-Fi wavelengths can affect biological tissue (despite these not being known by the typical geek crowd on Slashdot), if there are genuine negative health effects, this does not require any new assumptions.
Therefore Occam's razor cannot properly be used here.
I do agree that the next stage after switching to diet sodas is to drop them altogether, but I don't want to catch you running up to waddly mcfatfat and screaming "don't switch to diet soda, it'll kill you!".
Show me a study which shows that in the long term, consumption of diet soda with aspartame and sodium benzoate results in lower average weight than consumption of equivalent amounts of, say, standard coke or pepsi (which both have neither).
The entire justification for switching to diet sodas is based on this presumption, yet it might actually be the opposite. These additives seem to have much more of a biological impact than a few calories.
You get more benzene exposure from car exhaust while driving then you'll ever get from soda. It's everywhere. You get doses of it just breathing every day.
Why do people instantly buy into scaremongering stories like this? Look how there's already several posts crying "Why not the FDA doooooo something!"
I have a better question. Why do you call it scaremongering when you clearly haven't even read the article? It's not the benzene byproduct that is the problem, it's the benzoate itself which was found to be damaging DNA (and not for the first time). And a drinker of soda containing benzoate is certainly intaking more benzoate from the soda than from car exhaust.
Not to mention sodium benzoate causes headaches in a good percentage of humans, and over the long term has been found to trigger obesity and diabetes in lab rats. (It might do this in humans too over the long term, but it's hard to get humans to sign up for such studies.)
It would be funny if it weren't so sad that people drink diet sodas that are loaded with this, and they think they are doing their body a favor.
It's generally a good idea to maintain scepticism until it's put to a controlled test.
It's generally a good idea to consider things undecided until they are put to a controlled test. It's generally a stupid idea to exert a blanket dismissal of a specific thing just because it hasn't been put to a controlled test yet. Unfortunately, many people have started believing that scientific skepticism means the second of these two, and in doing so they are painfully and ignorantly misrepresenting the principles of science.
Slashdot Mirror
Right up there with accuracy?
Thank you for summarizing the results in a more standard fashion.
Although something seems fishy about their conclusion that people can identify the difference between the two bitrates with the Apple headphones because they are inferior headphones. I've never tried either of these headphones, but generally it takes higher quality headphones to differentiate bitrates, and it's the inferior headphones for which bitrate is irrelevant.
First, get caller ID at your incoming switchboard so you can log the numbers for all incoming calls. Second, contact the phone company and ask them if they can start blocking a list of phone numbers that you give them. (Everything should be available for a price.) Failing that, have your IT folks find a way to setup your own switchboard for incoming calls, and have it block calls from the offending locations. Any phone calls with caller ID blocked could be either blocked automatically, sent to a recording, or automatically redirected to a secretary who filters them.
I have never worked with such systems, but in the era of IP phones and other such solutions, there has to be a way to have a customized software featureset on a switchboard if these features are not already commercially available.
What really pisses me off is the dialogue box that says a reboot is necessary, and then gives only two options, "Reboot now" and "Remind me in 5 minutes," and if you don't push anything for 60 seconds it automatically reboots. Once that thing comes up after a Windows update, it's very difficult to get anything done until you close everything and placate its obsession with rebooting.
The freedom of assembly is what's at stake, and it in turn is essential for a free democracy. If the government can track the movements of innocent people, then it can monitor the organizations and associations (including political) that one is associated with. And if the government has the power to document the members of every rival political movement as it is forming, including all the other activities of the members, then they have the power to intimidate and crush it. (Don't believe me? Find a history book.)
Privacy from the government is a key component of freedom, because it places serious constraints on the government's power over the people. Without this, you can very easily become a subject rather than a free citizen.
I don't put a tape in my mythtv box, I don't setup the times for it to record or the time for it to stop, and it automatically records the shows that I told it I like, while I'm off worrying about other things in my life. I'll take that over my old VCR any day. It completely changes the way you watch TV.
I feel your pain. This happened to me as well for a time, and it's compounded by the fact that some of the pvr150 boards have defective hardware. This page has what you need to set it up. If you get all that in place, and it's still not working, try a few cold boots. Sometimes the hardware to process the IR locks itself in an anomalous state, and the only cure is to completely power off.
Good luck.
You are correct, but you missed a third possibility. If intelligent life were very rare, then there would be a very large chance that I would be unable to claim that there is or is not intelligent life, by virtue of not existing. I think, therefore intelligent life evolves. Think about it. It's a bet worth putting money on.
One is greater than zero, therefore it has meaning. Think about it.
And cows are spherical too.
You laugh (and you should perhaps, because it's funny), but there's a deeper underlying truth. This is clear evidence that we cannot haphazardly dismiss all concerns about electromagnetic interaction with biological systems as "obvious hogwash", like is so frequently done on Slashdot. If you watch the field, you'll see that there are a large number of non-thermal non-ionizing mechanisms for biological effects like this.
People have evolved to feel good being generous because it has proven helpful for people and for society as a whole in the past. Therefore, by transitive logic, people are generous because it is helpful and promotes the wellbeing of society.
That it makes them feel good is simply an intermediate step, mechanism, or bonus.
I don't know about that. Every single planet we've ever found life on so far has also evolved intelligent life. Coincidence, perhaps, but that's a pretty good hit ratio.
The catch is that perhaps 50% of that intelligent life will take billions of years to evolve, and the other 50% of that intelligent life evolved intelligence billions of years before we did.
Given the quantity of habitable planets out there, it's probably a safe bet that the universe has a good quantity of intelligent life that's been around very very much longer than us.
I have about 10% body fat, and I don't even like soda. I'm simply discussing the science.
So don't click on it if it offends your sensibilities so greatly. Personally I like being able to see a variety of perspectives, even propaganda laced ones. You have to pay attention to propaganda so you know what information other people are being fed.
Google news does not present you with truth. It presents you with a distribution of news.
The simplest explanation for someone saying something is not the same as the simplest explanation which explains evidence. Attempting to apply Occam's razor to the former would always allow you to say someone is full of shit, regardless of their correctness, and you will end up with a lack of any explanation about the world, because all evidence will have been discarded. Admittedly that is quite a simple result, but it's a mass denial of information, not an explanation.
But we have. You just chose to dismiss it as "shit" rather than data. Using a selection bias on your data is a very unwise way to do science, but a very good way to be wrong.
To dismiss a claim or an experimental result just because it sounds similar to something which was found false before is neither scientific nor logical. As a form of associative reasoning, it's a very human thing to do, but it is also a logical fallacy and will eventually result in scientific errors.
Problems with aspartame, and serious concerns about it, have existed for longer than the modern internet era. Try reading some medical data about it OFF of the internet, and you will see the legitimacy of the concerns.
But in significantly lower concentrations than in the modern food supply. The average daily intake of sodium benzoate as an additive has skyrocketed by many orders of magnitude, so it cannot be said that its use has been at all constant over this time period.
There have been. Calling their work "bugaboo" is neither productive nor reasonable.
Yes. We have. Notice the diabetes and obesity rates lately? Animal studies predict that increased diabetes and obesity rates will occur from a significant increase in sodium benzoate consumption.
Not exactly. People in poorer regions of the U.S., where food is more likely to be manufactured in a factory and contain ingredients such as sodium benzoate, live shorter and less healthy lives, with higher rates of diabetes and obesity.
That we are. And defending sodium benzoate and aspartame is part of that mental justification.
Unless you are still quite young, it's probably a safe bet that the food in those particular fast food joints actually had significantly different ingredient lists when you were young. They have never been pillars of health, but they used to be much better than they are now.
Yes, I am suggesting that it will not in this case. The caloric model is naively simplified, and does not take into account the side-effects that the other substances would have on the body's metabolism. Metabolism has far more to do with one's weight than 30 grams of sugar in a can of soda.
Occam's razor does not translate, logically, philosophically, or linguistically, as "reject crackpots", even though people insist upon misusing it. I suggest looking it up.
Occam's razor is the principle that the explanation which requires the fewest assumptions is the best one. So in general, Occam's razor cannot be used to accept or dismiss an experimental result. It can only be used to select or dismiss a model to explain a result (even though it is not guaranteed to choose the correct one if one has insufficient evidence).
Since there are several known mechanisms by which Wi-Fi wavelengths can affect biological tissue (despite these not being known by the typical geek crowd on Slashdot), if there are genuine negative health effects, this does not require any new assumptions.
Therefore Occam's razor cannot properly be used here.
Show me a study which shows that in the long term, consumption of diet soda with aspartame and sodium benzoate results in lower average weight than consumption of equivalent amounts of, say, standard coke or pepsi (which both have neither).
The entire justification for switching to diet sodas is based on this presumption, yet it might actually be the opposite. These additives seem to have much more of a biological impact than a few calories.
I have a better question. Why do you call it scaremongering when you clearly haven't even read the article? It's not the benzene byproduct that is the problem, it's the benzoate itself which was found to be damaging DNA (and not for the first time). And a drinker of soda containing benzoate is certainly intaking more benzoate from the soda than from car exhaust.
Not to mention sodium benzoate causes headaches in a good percentage of humans, and over the long term has been found to trigger obesity and diabetes in lab rats. (It might do this in humans too over the long term, but it's hard to get humans to sign up for such studies.)
It would be funny if it weren't so sad that people drink diet sodas that are loaded with this, and they think they are doing their body a favor.
It's generally a good idea to consider things undecided until they are put to a controlled test. It's generally a stupid idea to exert a blanket dismissal of a specific thing just because it hasn't been put to a controlled test yet. Unfortunately, many people have started believing that scientific skepticism means the second of these two, and in doing so they are painfully and ignorantly misrepresenting the principles of science.