Wow, this is an amazingly good way of putting it. Still, there is some question as to whether or not the "axioms => theorems" relationship claimed in math is itself an absolute truth of the universe. Many mathematicians would probably say yes, and it's very hard to imagine how it might not be true. After all, everyone can see that 1+1=2! And if it is true, that's kind of amazing (which is why people get excited about cool things like the structure of prime numbers, or homomorphisms of groups you wouldn't expect, etc). But still, there is good reason to doubt it...
Okay, car analogy. On a dark night out in the country, look at a distant piece of road and watch for a car. From a mile or two off, its 21W brake light bulb seems pretty tiny and faint. Voyager 1's microwave link puts out about 20W, too.
Now I want you to imagine looking for that brake light when it is 11.3 thousand million miles away.
Fucking mindblowing... Thanks for the analogy. It's beyond amazing that it's even theoretically possible to detect something like that, let alone practically.
Put simply, because it is the wrong tool. Frequentist methods for problems like hypothesis testing and confidence set estimation were designed based on some simple assumptions that probably never really hold in the real world, but probably aren't very far from the truth. Bayesian methods rely on assumptions (and definitions of what kind of error is to be avoided) that are not suitable for many problems in science and medicine. E.g. Bayesian confidence interval estimation will tell you that "on average" over the random distribution of the unknown parameter you're estimating (i.e. the prior distribution that you pulled out of your ass) you won't be off by more than a certain amount. But clearly if what you're estimating is, for example, the safe dose of radiation for workers at a nuclear power plant, there is no random distribution over that amount. There is just a single maximal amount that is safe. Hence, the guarantee you need is that in the worst case over all possible unknown values of the quantity to estimate, you won't be off by more than some amount. This is exactly the kind of guarantee that frequentist methods give you.
Hope that explanation isn't complete gibberish to you...
For simple non-critical things like web design what parent describes is all well and good, but please don't use any similar method for a problem with serious consequences, be it in medicine or science or anything like that. There are statistically sound ways of doing experimental design, e.g. for deciding when to stop an experiment, and they are not Bayesian (usually).
Can someone explain to me the challenges and state of the art in creating artificial sensors capable of replicating, e.g., dog's amazing sniffing abilities, even if only for specific compounds (I imagine replicating the amazing generality of canine sniffers is for now "very sci-fi").
"integrated communication stream"? Is this the latest in manager-speak bullshit? That being said, there are some needs that today's email, even with great interfaces like gmail, either doesn't meet or meets awkwardly and with annoying hacks. Group discussions still have the tendency to turn into a clusterfuck, even with gmail-style nice thread view. And it would be nice if I could, say, create a category of "XXX class homework 4 submissions" and give some way for my students to submit directly to that category so I don't have to manually assign labels to all 45 submissions, and maybe share all submissions with the other TA's (the only alternative for me being blackboard, and I refuse to rely on that pile of bloated rotting carcasses)...
The word "hero" is just another victim of the rampant rhetoric inflation in the US political discourse. When and why it started I cannot say, but I really don't think it has anywhere to go but down at this point. I mean, how much more exaggerated and ridiculous can the language of congress and Fox News and MSNBC get, right?! (Said he, knowing full well it can always get worse...)
A while back Nokia had some concept wrist phones which I thought were pretty cool, but they don't seem to be going anywhere with the idea. To be honest ever since I saw Predator I wished for something like that, until I realized that the whole one-handed thing is a pretty big limitation... Unless it's somehow very easy to quickly remove (but also safe against falling off), I don't see anything more advanced than what you've linked to taking off.
You do know that there are an infinite number of planar graphs, yes? You do also know that the (first) proof of the 4-coloring problem involved exhaustive search over a finite number of sub-problems, yes? So what's your point? (If it was just a joke, then my apologies)
Actually there doesn't need to be an independent arm of any kind. All you need to do is get the government to allocate funding for grants dedicated to verification, of course with strict criteria regarding competence of the researcher in experimental protocol and statistics. And publish verification results in university or government run open-access journals.
Finally. Had to scroll to the bottom of the page to see by far the most important relevant problem mentioned. You are absolutely correct, there is a serious need to increase statistical competence in all scientific fields. Statistics is, in a way, the foundation of science (since science depends entirely on empirical verification, which, as you point out, always includes uncertainty). And yet, a statistics professor I know who used to collaborate with CERN tells horror stories of them using some kind of bullshit Bayesian methods or something for estimation... An embarrassment, if you ask me.
My point was general, not about this virus story specifically. And I wasn't saying I think publishing this is a good idea (haven't completely made up my mind either way, yet).
I will never take anyone seriously who brings up the possibility of personal loss in a discussion like this. That is an argument that can be used in many contexts, to argue both sides of the issue. It is non-informative, and intellectually dishonest. Stop it.
English majors have no business judging the quality of technical writing, as they are not remotely qualified to do so. The top priority in technical writing is technical clarity, which trumps everything else. That's not to say that there is no room for optimizing ease of parsing and general aesthetics -- on the contrary, good style for readability is important. But especially when describing the specifics of experimental or analysis methodology, which was the purpose of the sentence you cited, it is well worth ignoring all the good writing guidelines your high school writing professor taught you for the sake of precision, and to avoid any possible ambiguity.
Problem is, that transition to steady state would require a fairly large-scale overhaul of the world financial/economic model, that would go against the interests of a many powerful entities that highly benefit from the current (seemingly doomed) model. What are the chances of something like that getting done before the pain sets in, meaning global economic collapse putting the working classes under extreme pressure, probably resulting in civil unrest, violence, war, etc.? I really don't see any other way this is going to play out, given three simple conjectures:
1) changes that go against the interests of the powers-that-be only occur under extreme circumstances (suffering of the masses);
2) the current financial system is only stable given continued exponential growth of some minimal rate; and
3) such growth cannot continue indefinitely (uninterrupted); meaning that it is highly likely that long before a fundamental limit is reached (e.g. colonization of the entire universe or some such fictional notion), there will be a period of recession which will be long enough to snowball into a global depression that would make the current recession look like a mild case of the sniffles.
And an even bigger worry for me is that if (when) that happens, it will only result in short-term "patches", followed by business as usual (similar to what happened in the 1910-40's). And the cycle will repeat itself with just enough time in between collapses that no single generation has had enough to say "that's it, let's make some real changes this time so this doesn't happen again." Countless cycles of broken dreams and broken people, again, and again, and again....
Slashdot Mirror
So now we know how the universe ends: in a patent infringement lawsuit between Apple v. God.
Wow, this is an amazingly good way of putting it. Still, there is some question as to whether or not the "axioms => theorems" relationship claimed in math is itself an absolute truth of the universe. Many mathematicians would probably say yes, and it's very hard to imagine how it might not be true. After all, everyone can see that 1+1=2! And if it is true, that's kind of amazing (which is why people get excited about cool things like the structure of prime numbers, or homomorphisms of groups you wouldn't expect, etc). But still, there is good reason to doubt it...
Doesn't mean I can't whine about it on a slashdot thread, does it, now?
Yes, just like "near-death" means "he died, but almost didn't", right?
Okay, car analogy. On a dark night out in the country, look at a distant piece of road and watch for a car. From a mile or two off, its 21W brake light bulb seems pretty tiny and faint. Voyager 1's microwave link puts out about 20W, too.
Now I want you to imagine looking for that brake light when it is 11.3 thousand million miles away.
Fucking mindblowing... Thanks for the analogy. It's beyond amazing that it's even theoretically possible to detect something like that, let alone practically.
Carlin, is that you?
Put simply, because it is the wrong tool. Frequentist methods for problems like hypothesis testing and confidence set estimation were designed based on some simple assumptions that probably never really hold in the real world, but probably aren't very far from the truth. Bayesian methods rely on assumptions (and definitions of what kind of error is to be avoided) that are not suitable for many problems in science and medicine. E.g. Bayesian confidence interval estimation will tell you that "on average" over the random distribution of the unknown parameter you're estimating (i.e. the prior distribution that you pulled out of your ass) you won't be off by more than a certain amount. But clearly if what you're estimating is, for example, the safe dose of radiation for workers at a nuclear power plant, there is no random distribution over that amount. There is just a single maximal amount that is safe. Hence, the guarantee you need is that in the worst case over all possible unknown values of the quantity to estimate, you won't be off by more than some amount. This is exactly the kind of guarantee that frequentist methods give you.
Hope that explanation isn't complete gibberish to you...
For simple non-critical things like web design what parent describes is all well and good, but please don't use any similar method for a problem with serious consequences, be it in medicine or science or anything like that. There are statistically sound ways of doing experimental design, e.g. for deciding when to stop an experiment, and they are not Bayesian (usually).
Can someone explain to me the challenges and state of the art in creating artificial sensors capable of replicating, e.g., dog's amazing sniffing abilities, even if only for specific compounds (I imagine replicating the amazing generality of canine sniffers is for now "very sci-fi").
Maybe you two should just give up and pretend to be the same person? Twice the productivity, for free!
"integrated communication stream"? Is this the latest in manager-speak bullshit? That being said, there are some needs that today's email, even with great interfaces like gmail, either doesn't meet or meets awkwardly and with annoying hacks. Group discussions still have the tendency to turn into a clusterfuck, even with gmail-style nice thread view. And it would be nice if I could, say, create a category of "XXX class homework 4 submissions" and give some way for my students to submit directly to that category so I don't have to manually assign labels to all 45 submissions, and maybe share all submissions with the other TA's (the only alternative for me being blackboard, and I refuse to rely on that pile of bloated rotting carcasses)...
The word "hero" is just another victim of the rampant rhetoric inflation in the US political discourse. When and why it started I cannot say, but I really don't think it has anywhere to go but down at this point. I mean, how much more exaggerated and ridiculous can the language of congress and Fox News and MSNBC get, right?! (Said he, knowing full well it can always get worse...)
Guys, guys, chill, the first paragraph is a quote from GP! He just screwed up his hypertext tag.
A while back Nokia had some concept wrist phones which I thought were pretty cool, but they don't seem to be going anywhere with the idea. To be honest ever since I saw Predator I wished for something like that, until I realized that the whole one-handed thing is a pretty big limitation... Unless it's somehow very easy to quickly remove (but also safe against falling off), I don't see anything more advanced than what you've linked to taking off.
It actually checks out... How the hell did you do that?
You do know that there are an infinite number of planar graphs, yes? You do also know that the (first) proof of the 4-coloring problem involved exhaustive search over a finite number of sub-problems, yes? So what's your point? (If it was just a joke, then my apologies)
Actually there doesn't need to be an independent arm of any kind. All you need to do is get the government to allocate funding for grants dedicated to verification, of course with strict criteria regarding competence of the researcher in experimental protocol and statistics. And publish verification results in university or government run open-access journals.
Finally. Had to scroll to the bottom of the page to see by far the most important relevant problem mentioned. You are absolutely correct, there is a serious need to increase statistical competence in all scientific fields. Statistics is, in a way, the foundation of science (since science depends entirely on empirical verification, which, as you point out, always includes uncertainty). And yet, a statistics professor I know who used to collaborate with CERN tells horror stories of them using some kind of bullshit Bayesian methods or something for estimation... An embarrassment, if you ask me.
Johnny Depp as Kim Jong-un...?
I was about to write a long-winded, detailed reply, then suddenly... Iseewhatyoudidthere.
My point was general, not about this virus story specifically. And I wasn't saying I think publishing this is a good idea (haven't completely made up my mind either way, yet).
And if said virus killed your family?
I will never take anyone seriously who brings up the possibility of personal loss in a discussion like this. That is an argument that can be used in many contexts, to argue both sides of the issue. It is non-informative, and intellectually dishonest. Stop it.
English majors have no business judging the quality of technical writing, as they are not remotely qualified to do so. The top priority in technical writing is technical clarity, which trumps everything else. That's not to say that there is no room for optimizing ease of parsing and general aesthetics -- on the contrary, good style for readability is important. But especially when describing the specifics of experimental or analysis methodology, which was the purpose of the sentence you cited, it is well worth ignoring all the good writing guidelines your high school writing professor taught you for the sake of precision, and to avoid any possible ambiguity.
Problem is, that transition to steady state would require a fairly large-scale overhaul of the world financial/economic model, that would go against the interests of a many powerful entities that highly benefit from the current (seemingly doomed) model. What are the chances of something like that getting done before the pain sets in, meaning global economic collapse putting the working classes under extreme pressure, probably resulting in civil unrest, violence, war, etc.? I really don't see any other way this is going to play out, given three simple conjectures:
1) changes that go against the interests of the powers-that-be only occur under extreme circumstances (suffering of the masses);
2) the current financial system is only stable given continued exponential growth of some minimal rate; and
3) such growth cannot continue indefinitely (uninterrupted); meaning that it is highly likely that long before a fundamental limit is reached (e.g. colonization of the entire universe or some such fictional notion), there will be a period of recession which will be long enough to snowball into a global depression that would make the current recession look like a mild case of the sniffles.
And an even bigger worry for me is that if (when) that happens, it will only result in short-term "patches", followed by business as usual (similar to what happened in the 1910-40's). And the cycle will repeat itself with just enough time in between collapses that no single generation has had enough to say "that's it, let's make some real changes this time so this doesn't happen again." Countless cycles of broken dreams and broken people, again, and again, and again....
And waiting for 4 hours for ubuntu to boot solved that? ;)
Interesting project, BTW.