Shameless cherry-picking, and you know it else you wouldn't be posting AC. Countries with a lower HDI have higher violent crime rates than first-world countries, hello?
Now you're arguing the fine points. What caught my eye first is that "homocidal killer whale" must be the pleonasm of the week. I mean, it's called a killer whale, WTF do you expect?
Just a "lab-grown meat will have a milkshake texture and taste like tofu" stereotype joke. In reality, I'm really all kinds of excited about this proof of concept because when it eventually becomes commercially viable, it will greatly diminish animal suffering and at the same time allow us to feed more people off the limited agricultural resources on the planet. And now some food experts say it doesn't taste half bad, what more do you want?!
Not if you believe the graph that comes on your screen when you scroll down on the BBC link.
Living organisms are incredibly inefficient at converting their feedstock into meat. Also, "essentially solar powered" is only true for pasture-raised cattle. Which is a tiny percentage of the cattle production in developed countries. But even when only considering pasture-raised cattle, you could feed 20 times as many people form the same area of pasture if you would grow, say, soy on it.
The MSNBC journalist is reading way, way too much from the Nature paper. All the latter (and its cited sources) say is that a large brain is thought to be a prerequisite for flight, and that the overall brain morphology found in birds is also found in dinosaurs. The journalist implicitly assumes that this brain morphology has evolved for flight, but this is not a given. Bats have a different brain morphology (though there are some similarities) and are quite nimble fliers. Also, feathers are useful for flight (though bats don't have them), but they're also great for keeping warm (anyone ever tried a feather comforter?), and non-flying dinosaurs had them possibly for that purpose. I'm chalking the present finding in the same column as the feathers: turns out having a large brain with strong and fast spatial visualization ability is useful for other things than flying (who'd have thought, right?), and that avians simply inherited this trait from dinosaurs along with their brain morphology (and undoubtedly fine-tuned it). If anything, the present research adds to the (bat-brain) evidence saying that the overall brain morphology found in birds didn't specifically evolve for the purpose of flight.
Depends on the field. It's not 100% clear from TFA what they mean with "JQ1's chemical recipe", but I took it to be a synthetic route. In organic chemistry, there exists a rigid standard format on how to report a synthetic method - has existed for many decades - and it's quite common to try to reproduce experiments from literature. True, it's a bit of a hit-and-miss thing, but if both the writer and the reproducer are competent, the success rate is substantially higher than the failure rate.
Now in bioscience, things get fuzzier. Organisms are more complex than chemical reagents, so more unexpected things happen with living matter than with dead matter.
Has been. Nowadays, most academic biomedical scientists will try to patent potentially promising new drugs, and most institutions strongly encourage this (it's called valorization). If you're a young researcher, not doing it may even harm your career. There do still exist granting agencies out there that require the results of their investment to become public domain, but in the biomedical field, they're becoming rare.
What's really sad is that the approach that used to be the norm has become so exceptional that one can slap a new label on it (yes, "new" - let's not forget the term "open source" only exists since 1998) and get invited to talk at TED.
Thanks for the link. Especially the bottom graph labeled "Ideology - Domestic questions" is quite interesting. There's a difference between having heard of conformation bias and seeing concrete statistic on just how badly people bock out facts that don't agree with their ideology.
I mainly see the fact that American society is acting like it's cold war as a (potentially crippling) problem for American society itself, more than for anyone else. For example, military spending is nowhere in proportion to the actual threats facing the US today, and is dragging the federal budget down. And the Totalitarianism = Socialism = Communism and the-free-market-is-aways-right all-regulation-is-Bad demagogic propaganda is still in full swing. If the general population is kept in irrational fear, and not allowed to get a more nuanced insight into economics, how'd you expect them to vote sensibly? Whatever became of "whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"?
Really, as an American citizen, I'd love to see the world stick it to my country to make a number of my fellow citizens wake the hell up, because it doesn't seem any inside actions will do that.
Haha, did you think for a second a Fox News-watching Joe Sixpack will even know about anything that happens outside his country? Unless it is really bad, then they'll just put a spin on it. Like when an overwhelming majority of the international community didn't buy the WMD fabricated casus belli, and dumbasses in the US suddenly came up with "freedom fries".
...while everyone knows fries really originate from Belgium. *rimshot*
This just in: the soviet union has fallen! The country whose capital is Moscow will henceforward be known as the Russian Federation, or just "Russia" for friends.
Oh wait, that was almost 22 years ago. Don't worry, I can understand the confusion, with American society still acting like it's cold war and things.
If you like Joe No-Name band that has sold all of 50 albums so far, good for you.
And there's a huge problem with precisely this type of thinking. You have no idea how many extremely talented and extremely good musicians there are out there. Only a few of them achieve celebrity status, and it doesn't necessarily happen because they're better than everyone else - just think of how one would define "better" - but because of arbitrary events, like the agent of a big record company liking you, or your breakthrough hit just coming out at the right time and gathering enough initial attention. Those lucky few catch a disproportionate amount of consumer spending, a majority of which goes to the pockets of the record industry, their shareholders, their lawyers, their politicians-for-hire and their yelling-contest-style promotion apparatus. Without the almighty record industry and their winner-picking one-size-fits-all promotion style, a bigger percentage of that money would be divided over a bigger and more diverse collection of artists.
Not disagreeing with the other 90% of your post, though. Radiohead does have an impressive track record of delivering consistent quality, they are trying hard to do the right thing, and ignoring this just because they're rich is unfair. I just really wanted to point out that having those attributes (except the "being rich" part) is hardly unique. The "Joe No-Name band" mentality represents the group think that keeps the current system in place and prevents the following lofty goal from becoming reality:
But at the very least, if someone is doing good work in a creative field, they should at least have some level of trust in the fact that they can circumvent the established system with its attendant bloodsucking leeches, and still feel like they are getting the same level of respect, exposure, and money. In fact, it should be a lot more.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next person, but how on earth is it Microsoft's fault that all these non-Microsoft sites do not invalidate the security token inside the session cookie when receiving a "Log out" command? All I can infer is that a number of Microsoft services (hotmail, outlook.com, office 365) were vulnerable in 2012, Microsoft was notified of it, and (if I interpret TFA correctly) didn't fix it. Is it now Microsoft's job to start probing other people's websites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay, WordPress, NetFlix) for the same type of vulnerabilty and somehow force them to fix the vulnerability it didn't find worth fixing itself?
Hur hur hur. History has proven France - together with most of western Europe - right in blocking UN intervention in Iraq. Get over it already.
As for the French and verbal abuse, I can assure you that if it comes to a verbal war between "the stereotypocal Frenchman" and "the stereotypocal American", it will be the American who will kill himself because the other side said something mean. No wait, he'll pull a large-magazine gun and kill everyone else.
Whine me a river. I wish I would have found a better reference for that concept, but I don't have all day. Since you already wasted 17 seconds on it, feel free to double down and google up a better reference and post it here.
Our benchmarks were done with a scientific workload that is not even representative for scientific workloads in general, so I think they will be all but useless to general users. That said, we did try Open64 (not sure if it's fair to call it "the AMD compiler"), and it came out pretty good. But... so did GCC 4.7.2. To my surprise, it was way faster than the GCC 4.5 we used before, and scored virtually on par with ICC, Open64 and Portland (aka. PGI). One important thing to note is that we gave gcc the -ffast-math flag, which makes a huge difference for some floating-point-heavy codes. I know the gcc documentation has a big fat warning against doing so, but ICC and PGI perform a similar set of optimizations by default, so not setting that flag would not be a fair comparison. And the numerical results were good.
Our observation that we got very similar performance with all 4 compilers may not transfer well to other softwares, though. The softwares I tested are written in C and Fortran, which are relatively low-level languages without garbage collection, and scientific software is already fairly optimized at the code level, so important differences between the compilers are may surface with programs that are written in a higher-level languages with less manual optimization.
Slashdot Mirror
Shameless cherry-picking, and you know it else you wouldn't be posting AC. Countries with a lower HDI have higher violent crime rates than first-world countries, hello?
Nope, no mercury in paint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_regulation_in_the_United_States#Product-related_restrictions
QED
So, what's the right way, then?
If every spammer would need a Watson-class supercomputer to stay in business, being a spammer suddenly doesn't seem very lucrative anymore...
Now you're arguing the fine points. What caught my eye first is that "homocidal killer whale" must be the pleonasm of the week. I mean, it's called a killer whale, WTF do you expect?
...violating his "don't be evil" motto.
Just a "lab-grown meat will have a milkshake texture and taste like tofu" stereotype joke. In reality, I'm really all kinds of excited about this proof of concept because when it eventually becomes commercially viable, it will greatly diminish animal suffering and at the same time allow us to feed more people off the limited agricultural resources on the planet. And now some food experts say it doesn't taste half bad, what more do you want?!
Not if you believe the graph that comes on your screen when you scroll down on the BBC link.
Living organisms are incredibly inefficient at converting their feedstock into meat. Also, "essentially solar powered" is only true for pasture-raised cattle. Which is a tiny percentage of the cattle production in developed countries. But even when only considering pasture-raised cattle, you could feed 20 times as many people form the same area of pasture if you would grow, say, soy on it.
The MSNBC journalist is reading way, way too much from the Nature paper. All the latter (and its cited sources) say is that a large brain is thought to be a prerequisite for flight, and that the overall brain morphology found in birds is also found in dinosaurs. The journalist implicitly assumes that this brain morphology has evolved for flight, but this is not a given. Bats have a different brain morphology (though there are some similarities) and are quite nimble fliers. Also, feathers are useful for flight (though bats don't have them), but they're also great for keeping warm (anyone ever tried a feather comforter?), and non-flying dinosaurs had them possibly for that purpose. I'm chalking the present finding in the same column as the feathers: turns out having a large brain with strong and fast spatial visualization ability is useful for other things than flying (who'd have thought, right?), and that avians simply inherited this trait from dinosaurs along with their brain morphology (and undoubtedly fine-tuned it). If anything, the present research adds to the (bat-brain) evidence saying that the overall brain morphology found in birds didn't specifically evolve for the purpose of flight.
Wouldn't a good shill be defined as someone who's able to convince people he's not a shill? :)
Depends on the field. It's not 100% clear from TFA what they mean with "JQ1's chemical recipe", but I took it to be a synthetic route. In organic chemistry, there exists a rigid standard format on how to report a synthetic method - has existed for many decades - and it's quite common to try to reproduce experiments from literature. True, it's a bit of a hit-and-miss thing, but if both the writer and the reproducer are competent, the success rate is substantially higher than the failure rate.
Now in bioscience, things get fuzzier. Organisms are more complex than chemical reagents, so more unexpected things happen with living matter than with dead matter.
Has been. Nowadays, most academic biomedical scientists will try to patent potentially promising new drugs, and most institutions strongly encourage this (it's called valorization). If you're a young researcher, not doing it may even harm your career. There do still exist granting agencies out there that require the results of their investment to become public domain, but in the biomedical field, they're becoming rare.
What's really sad is that the approach that used to be the norm has become so exceptional that one can slap a new label on it (yes, "new" - let's not forget the term "open source" only exists since 1998) and get invited to talk at TED.
http://xkcd.com/1174/
Thank you PBS.
Not in English. As for Russian, words do get connotations, tovarich.
Thanks for the link. Especially the bottom graph labeled "Ideology - Domestic questions" is quite interesting. There's a difference between having heard of conformation bias and seeing concrete statistic on just how badly people bock out facts that don't agree with their ideology.
I mainly see the fact that American society is acting like it's cold war as a (potentially crippling) problem for American society itself, more than for anyone else. For example, military spending is nowhere in proportion to the actual threats facing the US today, and is dragging the federal budget down. And the Totalitarianism = Socialism = Communism and the-free-market-is-aways-right all-regulation-is-Bad demagogic propaganda is still in full swing. If the general population is kept in irrational fear, and not allowed to get a more nuanced insight into economics, how'd you expect them to vote sensibly? Whatever became of "whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"?
Old habits die hard.
Really, as an American citizen, I'd love to see the world stick it to my country to make a number of my fellow citizens wake the hell up, because it doesn't seem any inside actions will do that.
Haha, did you think for a second a Fox News-watching Joe Sixpack will even know about anything that happens outside his country? Unless it is really bad, then they'll just put a spin on it. Like when an overwhelming majority of the international community didn't buy the WMD fabricated casus belli, and dumbasses in the US suddenly came up with "freedom fries".
...while everyone knows fries really originate from Belgium. *rimshot*
Soviet SOPA
This just in: the soviet union has fallen! The country whose capital is Moscow will henceforward be known as the Russian Federation, or just "Russia" for friends.
Oh wait, that was almost 22 years ago. Don't worry, I can understand the confusion, with American society still acting like it's cold war and things.
If you like Joe No-Name band that has sold all of 50 albums so far, good for you.
And there's a huge problem with precisely this type of thinking. You have no idea how many extremely talented and extremely good musicians there are out there. Only a few of them achieve celebrity status, and it doesn't necessarily happen because they're better than everyone else - just think of how one would define "better" - but because of arbitrary events, like the agent of a big record company liking you, or your breakthrough hit just coming out at the right time and gathering enough initial attention. Those lucky few catch a disproportionate amount of consumer spending, a majority of which goes to the pockets of the record industry, their shareholders, their lawyers, their politicians-for-hire and their yelling-contest-style promotion apparatus. Without the almighty record industry and their winner-picking one-size-fits-all promotion style, a bigger percentage of that money would be divided over a bigger and more diverse collection of artists.
Not disagreeing with the other 90% of your post, though. Radiohead does have an impressive track record of delivering consistent quality, they are trying hard to do the right thing, and ignoring this just because they're rich is unfair. I just really wanted to point out that having those attributes (except the "being rich" part) is hardly unique. The "Joe No-Name band" mentality represents the group think that keeps the current system in place and prevents the following lofty goal from becoming reality:
But at the very least, if someone is doing good work in a creative field, they should at least have some level of trust in the fact that they can circumvent the established system with its attendant bloodsucking leeches, and still feel like they are getting the same level of respect, exposure, and money. In fact, it should be a lot more.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next person, but how on earth is it Microsoft's fault that all these non-Microsoft sites do not invalidate the security token inside the session cookie when receiving a "Log out" command? All I can infer is that a number of Microsoft services (hotmail, outlook.com, office 365) were vulnerable in 2012, Microsoft was notified of it, and (if I interpret TFA correctly) didn't fix it. Is it now Microsoft's job to start probing other people's websites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay, WordPress, NetFlix) for the same type of vulnerabilty and somehow force them to fix the vulnerability it didn't find worth fixing itself?
Hur hur hur. History has proven France - together with most of western Europe - right in blocking UN intervention in Iraq. Get over it already.
As for the French and verbal abuse, I can assure you that if it comes to a verbal war between "the stereotypocal Frenchman" and "the stereotypocal American", it will be the American who will kill himself because the other side said something mean. No wait, he'll pull a large-magazine gun and kill everyone else.
Whine me a river. I wish I would have found a better reference for that concept, but I don't have all day. Since you already wasted 17 seconds on it, feel free to double down and google up a better reference and post it here.
Ahh, the quest for Uniformly Slow Code. Something the scientific programmer is deeply familiar with. Too bad there's so few people who understand.
Our benchmarks were done with a scientific workload that is not even representative for scientific workloads in general, so I think they will be all but useless to general users. That said, we did try Open64 (not sure if it's fair to call it "the AMD compiler"), and it came out pretty good. But... so did GCC 4.7.2. To my surprise, it was way faster than the GCC 4.5 we used before, and scored virtually on par with ICC, Open64 and Portland (aka. PGI). One important thing to note is that we gave gcc the -ffast-math flag, which makes a huge difference for some floating-point-heavy codes. I know the gcc documentation has a big fat warning against doing so, but ICC and PGI perform a similar set of optimizations by default, so not setting that flag would not be a fair comparison. And the numerical results were good.
Our observation that we got very similar performance with all 4 compilers may not transfer well to other softwares, though. The softwares I tested are written in C and Fortran, which are relatively low-level languages without garbage collection, and scientific software is already fairly optimized at the code level, so important differences between the compilers are may surface with programs that are written in a higher-level languages with less manual optimization.