I feel the parent poster is being unfair in his assumption that the market's preference for the Toyota Prius over the Honda Civic Hybrid is mainly due to customers' desire to be instantly perceived as driving a hybrid. Why? The Prius is a better car, at least from a strictly utilitarian perspective: it's a midsize car by EPA interior volume (as opposed to the Civic's subcompact interior iirc), it is a hatchback, and its options make it appeal to a wide range of consumers. By the last I mean that one can get it in a base $20k configuration or one can gussy it up to compete on some level with "mid-luxury" cars by adding leather, HID headlights, nav, Bluetooth integration for the stereo, etc. My parents are over 60 and generally would not consider a Civic, but they bought a Prius and absolutely love it.
For the record I drive a Mazda RX-8. While a prototype variant does have the distinction of being able to run on hydrogen it's generally a resource hog in many ways, but it drives oh so beautifully...
Thanks for the link to the study. For the record I am a 2nd year medical student, have taken (and passed!) coursework on epidemiology, and have been published as first author in a reputable journal, the point being that I am a bit more qualified than Joe Sixpack to comment on the study. Reply to this post if you want a link to my study, but be warned that it is of limited general interest (cardiology).
First off, in response to another poster in this thread, the choice of controls is correct. In case control studies you look at groups with and without an outcome, in this study various brain tumors, and then examine whether the rate of exposure, cell or cordless usage here, differs between the two groups. Having other cancers is an entirely different outcome, and case control studies do not allow one to examine multiple outcomes by definition. A cohort study would allow for examination of multiple outcomes, but is inappropriate here since the incidence of brain tumors is so low as to make a cohort study prohibitively large and expensive.
Second, from reading the actual study as opposed to the news summaries I believe the results to be valid. Why? The results meet many criteria for causality and are strong statistically. Read on for what I mean by this.
The case for causality: First off there is biologic plausibility. Read the second full paragraph on page 9 of the pdf for discussion of this issue by the authors. Incidentally the assertion by other posters that these results are invalid because they show roughly similar odds ratios for analog, digital, and cordless phones is addressed and shown to be untrue in the first full paragraph on page 9 (as well as in the discussion of frequencies used in the introduction).
Next there is a clear dose-response relationship, as the odds ratio increases with greater cumulative wireless phone usage. This also partly addresses the issue of temporal relationship, as long term cell phone usage would necessarily predate the onset of recently diagnosed tumors.
Finally, the results seem statistically sound. By this I mean that the 95% confidence intervals do not cross 1.0, and that the relationship between exposure and outcome persists after correction for age and socioeconomic class. (Sex wasn't corrected for since the controls were already matched by the study design.)
Does this mean that I'm going to immediately stop using my cell phone? No. However, I'm going to keep on using it because I value its convenience more than the possibility of developing brain cancer at some multiple of a low rate.
In U.S. parlance being a "medic" is being an Emergency Medical Technician, the guys who ride around on ambulances and resuscitate grandmothers who have fallen into puddles and such. To be an Ob/Gyn would require being a _doctor_, an entirely different proposition (and unlikely if he's described as a "medic").
From time to time we hear about such brilliant minds. But what happens when they grow up? Was anyone from here a child prodigy?
I was almost a child prodigy, but I decided to be "normal".
Say what? Thanks to good performances on the SAT at age 10 and 11, in both 7th and 8th grade (age 11, 12 -- I'd already skipped) I had the choice to continue with the typical schooling path or to jump directly to classes at the University of Washington. The Early Entrance Program is still around if you want to read about it, and has a year of transition, essentially to finish up the loose ends that high school would have tied up.
However, as other posters have picked up, this transition program doesn't magically make kids grow up, especially socially. At some level back then even I knew that being the "cute little kid" in class, having the girls pet my hair and go back to their own, completely incomprehensible lives, would not be what I wanted. For better or worse, I wanted to be normal.
So I went to high school, by choice. I was still always somewhat the odd one out due to being in different classes, but probably not more so than the average Slashdot reader. I was a "normal nerd" if you will. Playing sports, music, and generally learning how to be a social animal were where the true benefit of high school.
Skip forward several years and the interesting bit is that the things that I value most in my life these days _aren't_ what I displayed precocious abilities in. In particular music wouldn't have been such a large part of my life were it not for my experiences in the "normal" schooling system.
It is also true that many pursuits in life, such as my chosen path, require a level of social/emotional/personal stability and maturity that young kids simply don't have. I'm 24 now, and a second year medical student instead of the math post-doc I might have been had I chosen differently, and medicine is one of those areas where being young would have worked against me. Because of all this I feel that I made the right choice way back when.
Actually, exposure to sunlight is good for things other than making programmers look a little less pasty-white: vitamin D absorption and staving off seasonal affective disorder, just to name two off the top of my head.
I can just see it - telling you it doesn't have the right drivers for your heart and disabling your pulmonary functions.
Perhaps you're being cute with the phrase "right drivers" in that the right side of the heart sends blood out to the lungs (pulmonary system) but you probably were searching for "cardiac function"...
You note that the iCal widget is useless. I recommend trying iCalViewer, which, although not Tiger-specific, is an excellent app for displaying the next X hours' events on your desktop. Combine this with the Exposé keyboard shortcut to reveal desktop and your next few days' events are always at hand.
My Cingular plan is 1000 rollover minutes + unlimited on after-9pm nights and weekends. $40. (Which turns into $54 after the taxes and other junk, but that's a different discussion and the plan itself is $39.99).
And it also happens in the current Canon lineup (Canon EOS-1Ds, EOS-1D MkII, EOS 20D as per this magazine). On my 20D it's under "Custom Function 18: Add original decision data." The Canon Data Verification Kit DVK-E2 (Windows only, sadly) is used to verify such images.
Why would you need a "DV capture device"? Isn't the whole deal with DV cameras that you plug in the device via Firewire (or whatever pleases you/your platform of choice) and the DV stream is simply booted across the cable without molestation to your computer? I'm pretty sure my FW cable isn't doing any encoding on its own...
Apple keyboards have had the bumps on F and J for at least 5 years now. My Power Mac 6100 (about 10 years old now) had D and K bumps, my Powerbook G3 (1999) had bumps on F and J and all our Macs since have been F and J as well.
Agreed. Good bandwidth (thanks for the mirror) but the acting looks horrid. Also it looks like it was shot in DV -- in particular the infinite depth of field bugs my eye and looks very non-cinematic.
Actually not: there's a online filing fee. What you could do is fill out the paper form (or electronic using the dreaded Acrobat reader and print it out) and mail it in, saving all of the cash.
This is already here in some sense: search on the query "define [term]" (or "d [term]" on Google SMS, all without the brackets and quotes of course) and you'll get a definition as the first hit assuming you spelled the word correctly.
I have a really high-end handheld (the iPaq 5550), with a 1GB SD card. Bluetooth, 802.11b, fingerprint scan, autobackup, swappable battery pack, etc. I use it with a keyboard and recorder at meetings. I sync all of my work on it at 30 minute intervals all day long. Wirelessly, of course. And by all of my work, I mean it literally. It contains every line of code, every document, every script, and every "critical" tool I have ever used.
Uh, so "all of your work", including DBs, tools, etc. fits within 1 GB?
Nowhere have I been able to find a citation or clear reference to the paper that Snyder presumably was (going to?) publish about this TMS-creativity connection. The closest I find is his own page. This page is somewhat telling in my mind of the level of "seriousness" of this research. One would think from the "Autistic genius? Nature, 1 April 2004, by Allan Snyder" pseudo-citation that Mr. Snyder had an article published in Nature, but closer examination shows it to be a book review (follow the link to the pdf on the page above and see for yourself).
Finally, in reference to the Guardian article, I find the parroting of autistic savant folklore such as the tale of the savant able to play Tchaik 1 without having taken a piano lesson (or touched a piano depending on the retelling) extremely galling. Playing a piano concerto depends on technique, muscle memory, and many other things besides pure mental contortion. To think that someone who has never played scales would be able to wrap their untrained fingers around a concerto of non-negligible complexity is positively ridiculous in my mind. I suspect that the story arose as a vast but innocent exaggeration initially and has taken up a life of its own through repeated retellings by reporters too lazy to check the source material of their stories.
I am the target audience. I bought an 1G iPod within 4 months of its release, I switch cell phones and providers every year to take advantage of the rebates, and my Mac is indispensible to me due to the synchronization of my calendar and contacts via iSync over Bluetooth to whatever cellphone is flavor-of-the-year.
And this phone will almost definitely become my next pick: my 1G iPod just died (not of battery issues -- I replaced that with a Newer Tech high capacity unit a while ago), my phone contract only has a few months left on it, and this advice would therefore let me slim down my pockets by cutting a theoretical iPod Shuffle out of the loop.
With so many phones on the market -- just browse through the US, GSM Nokia lineup sometime if you want to make your head spin -- there needs to be differentiation. All phones are reasonably small, and smaller yet is not worth $400 to me. All phones that I'd consider use Bluetooth and furthermore have adequate to excellent RF reception for all the neo-Luddites out there clamoring for "just a phone. sheesh". iTunes syncing is just the ticket for those like me on the fence.
It happened to me. I let a domain expire since I didn't want it anymore, and it was immediately snatched up by a miscreant who set up a referral redirect to a porn site. At this time I complained to my registrar about this but was unsuccessful in persuading them that anything was wrong with this practice.
However, the next month the domain-snatcher made a mistake by putting up a text version of my real page, with all links stripped except for three referrals at the bottom. At this point I was able to successfully petition my registrar to return control of the domain to me since he was clearly violating my copyright on my site's text and layout.
As it turns out he was doing this to many people. From an email from the registrar:
If it is any consolation, this does not appear to have been directed at
you specifically, and rather appears to be a pattern that this individual was grabbing hosts as they expired and using them to increase search engine rankings of their linked pages. You helped key us in to that, and we have freed up a large number of hosts that they were using to this end.
No one knows for sure, but the implication of those links is that among the settled claims at the time of the $150 million Microsoft purchase of Apple stock was one involving Quicktime and WMP.
"Both Apple and Microsoft executives denied that the Microsoft investment represents a path to converging the companies' operating systems. However, they said they had agreed to work out a settlement to a long-standing dispute over whether Microsoft's Windows operating system infringes on any of Apple's patents."
And academic endevours are free from stress how? The stresses of problem set due dates and tests are real. I certainly felt more stress from them during my undergrad years than I did by anything that came up during my brief stint at work (I am now back in school again, thus past tense).
Stryker saws, used for cutting bones in autospy or anatomy lab, also won't cut soft tissue. I'm in no hurry to try this out myself, but I know people who have tested it on their hands without ill effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel the parent poster is being unfair in his assumption that the market's preference for the Toyota Prius over the Honda Civic Hybrid is mainly due to customers' desire to be instantly perceived as driving a hybrid. Why? The Prius is a better car, at least from a strictly utilitarian perspective: it's a midsize car by EPA interior volume (as opposed to the Civic's subcompact interior iirc), it is a hatchback, and its options make it appeal to a wide range of consumers. By the last I mean that one can get it in a base $20k configuration or one can gussy it up to compete on some level with "mid-luxury" cars by adding leather, HID headlights, nav, Bluetooth integration for the stereo, etc. My parents are over 60 and generally would not consider a Civic, but they bought a Prius and absolutely love it.
For the record I drive a Mazda RX-8. While a prototype variant does have the distinction of being able to run on hydrogen it's generally a resource hog in many ways, but it drives oh so beautifully...
Thanks for the link to the study. For the record I am a 2nd year medical student, have taken (and passed!) coursework on epidemiology, and have been published as first author in a reputable journal, the point being that I am a bit more qualified than Joe Sixpack to comment on the study. Reply to this post if you want a link to my study, but be warned that it is of limited general interest (cardiology).
First off, in response to another poster in this thread, the choice of controls is correct. In case control studies you look at groups with and without an outcome, in this study various brain tumors, and then examine whether the rate of exposure, cell or cordless usage here, differs between the two groups. Having other cancers is an entirely different outcome, and case control studies do not allow one to examine multiple outcomes by definition. A cohort study would allow for examination of multiple outcomes, but is inappropriate here since the incidence of brain tumors is so low as to make a cohort study prohibitively large and expensive.
Second, from reading the actual study as opposed to the news summaries I believe the results to be valid. Why? The results meet many criteria for causality and are strong statistically. Read on for what I mean by this.
The case for causality: First off there is biologic plausibility. Read the second full paragraph on page 9 of the pdf for discussion of this issue by the authors. Incidentally the assertion by other posters that these results are invalid because they show roughly similar odds ratios for analog, digital, and cordless phones is addressed and shown to be untrue in the first full paragraph on page 9 (as well as in the discussion of frequencies used in the introduction).
Next there is a clear dose-response relationship, as the odds ratio increases with greater cumulative wireless phone usage. This also partly addresses the issue of temporal relationship, as long term cell phone usage would necessarily predate the onset of recently diagnosed tumors.
Finally, the results seem statistically sound. By this I mean that the 95% confidence intervals do not cross 1.0, and that the relationship between exposure and outcome persists after correction for age and socioeconomic class. (Sex wasn't corrected for since the controls were already matched by the study design.)
Does this mean that I'm going to immediately stop using my cell phone? No. However, I'm going to keep on using it because I value its convenience more than the possibility of developing brain cancer at some multiple of a low rate.
In U.S. parlance being a "medic" is being an Emergency Medical Technician, the guys who ride around on ambulances and resuscitate grandmothers who have fallen into puddles and such. To be an Ob/Gyn would require being a _doctor_, an entirely different proposition (and unlikely if he's described as a "medic").
I was almost a child prodigy, but I decided to be "normal".
Say what? Thanks to good performances on the SAT at age 10 and 11, in both 7th and 8th grade (age 11, 12 -- I'd already skipped) I had the choice to continue with the typical schooling path or to jump directly to classes at the University of Washington. The Early Entrance Program is still around if you want to read about it, and has a year of transition, essentially to finish up the loose ends that high school would have tied up.
However, as other posters have picked up, this transition program doesn't magically make kids grow up, especially socially. At some level back then even I knew that being the "cute little kid" in class, having the girls pet my hair and go back to their own, completely incomprehensible lives, would not be what I wanted. For better or worse, I wanted to be normal.
So I went to high school, by choice. I was still always somewhat the odd one out due to being in different classes, but probably not more so than the average Slashdot reader. I was a "normal nerd" if you will. Playing sports, music, and generally learning how to be a social animal were where the true benefit of high school.
Skip forward several years and the interesting bit is that the things that I value most in my life these days _aren't_ what I displayed precocious abilities in. In particular music wouldn't have been such a large part of my life were it not for my experiences in the "normal" schooling system.
It is also true that many pursuits in life, such as my chosen path, require a level of social/emotional/personal stability and maturity that young kids simply don't have. I'm 24 now, and a second year medical student instead of the math post-doc I might have been had I chosen differently, and medicine is one of those areas where being young would have worked against me. Because of all this I feel that I made the right choice way back when.
Actually, exposure to sunlight is good for things other than making programmers look a little less pasty-white: vitamin D absorption and staving off seasonal affective disorder, just to name two off the top of my head.
Perhaps you're being cute with the phrase "right drivers" in that the right side of the heart sends blood out to the lungs (pulmonary system) but you probably were searching for "cardiac function"...
Anyone know where to find a sound clip of the two Toyota trumpet-playing robots whose video link can be found in the parent post?
You note that the iCal widget is useless. I recommend trying iCalViewer, which, although not Tiger-specific, is an excellent app for displaying the next X hours' events on your desktop. Combine this with the Exposé keyboard shortcut to reveal desktop and your next few days' events are always at hand.
My Cingular plan is 1000 rollover minutes + unlimited on after-9pm nights and weekends. $40. (Which turns into $54 after the taxes and other junk, but that's a different discussion and the plan itself is $39.99).
And it also happens in the current Canon lineup (Canon EOS-1Ds, EOS-1D MkII, EOS 20D as per this magazine). On my 20D it's under "Custom Function 18: Add original decision data." The Canon Data Verification Kit DVK-E2 (Windows only, sadly) is used to verify such images.
Why would you need a "DV capture device"? Isn't the whole deal with DV cameras that you plug in the device via Firewire (or whatever pleases you/your platform of choice) and the DV stream is simply booted across the cable without molestation to your computer? I'm pretty sure my FW cable isn't doing any encoding on its own...
Apple keyboards have had the bumps on F and J for at least 5 years now. My Power Mac 6100 (about 10 years old now) had D and K bumps, my Powerbook G3 (1999) had bumps on F and J and all our Macs since have been F and J as well.
You're thinking of a capacitor, not a "very large batter[y]".
Agreed. Good bandwidth (thanks for the mirror) but the acting looks horrid. Also it looks like it was shot in DV -- in particular the infinite depth of field bugs my eye and looks very non-cinematic.
Actually not: there's a online filing fee. What you could do is fill out the paper form (or electronic using the dreaded Acrobat reader and print it out) and mail it in, saving all of the cash.
This is already here in some sense: search on the query "define [term]" (or "d [term]" on Google SMS, all without the brackets and quotes of course) and you'll get a definition as the first hit assuming you spelled the word correctly.
Uh, so "all of your work", including DBs, tools, etc. fits within 1 GB?
Me, too. I'm interested in what the referenced "extreme sand castles" might be.
Nowhere have I been able to find a citation or clear reference to the paper that Snyder presumably was (going to?) publish about this TMS-creativity connection. The closest I find is his own page. This page is somewhat telling in my mind of the level of "seriousness" of this research. One would think from the "Autistic genius? Nature, 1 April 2004, by Allan Snyder" pseudo-citation that Mr. Snyder had an article published in Nature, but closer examination shows it to be a book review (follow the link to the pdf on the page above and see for yourself).
/ apr/01_snyder.shtml.
On the other hand it appears that he at least exists, and that his story is not fabricated from whole cloth: http://www.usyd.edu/news/newsevents/articles/2004
Finally, in reference to the Guardian article, I find the parroting of autistic savant folklore such as the tale of the savant able to play Tchaik 1 without having taken a piano lesson (or touched a piano depending on the retelling) extremely galling. Playing a piano concerto depends on technique, muscle memory, and many other things besides pure mental contortion. To think that someone who has never played scales would be able to wrap their untrained fingers around a concerto of non-negligible complexity is positively ridiculous in my mind. I suspect that the story arose as a vast but innocent exaggeration initially and has taken up a life of its own through repeated retellings by reporters too lazy to check the source material of their stories.
I am the target audience. I bought an 1G iPod within 4 months of its release, I switch cell phones and providers every year to take advantage of the rebates, and my Mac is indispensible to me due to the synchronization of my calendar and contacts via iSync over Bluetooth to whatever cellphone is flavor-of-the-year.
And this phone will almost definitely become my next pick: my 1G iPod just died (not of battery issues -- I replaced that with a Newer Tech high capacity unit a while ago), my phone contract only has a few months left on it, and this advice would therefore let me slim down my pockets by cutting a theoretical iPod Shuffle out of the loop.
With so many phones on the market -- just browse through the US, GSM Nokia lineup sometime if you want to make your head spin -- there needs to be differentiation. All phones are reasonably small, and smaller yet is not worth $400 to me. All phones that I'd consider use Bluetooth and furthermore have adequate to excellent RF reception for all the neo-Luddites out there clamoring for "just a phone. sheesh". iTunes syncing is just the ticket for those like me on the fence.
However, the next month the domain-snatcher made a mistake by putting up a text version of my real page, with all links stripped except for three referrals at the bottom. At this point I was able to successfully petition my registrar to return control of the domain to me since he was clearly violating my copyright on my site's text and layout.
As it turns out he was doing this to many people. From an email from the registrar:
No one knows for sure, but the implication of those links is that among the settled claims at the time of the $150 million Microsoft purchase of Apple stock was one involving Quicktime and WMP.
http://imprint.uwaterloo.ca/issues/100298/3Science /science01.shtml p ple/2100-1001_3-202143.html
http://news.com.com/MS+to+invest+150+million+in+A
"Both Apple and Microsoft executives denied that the Microsoft investment represents a path to converging the companies' operating systems. However, they said they had agreed to work out a settlement to a long-standing dispute over whether Microsoft's Windows operating system infringes on any of Apple's patents."
http://www.jmusheneaux.com/index02.htm#Major
From the last link it's clear that Xerox lost, so the only FUD here is that of Xerox deserving credit.
And academic endevours are free from stress how? The stresses of problem set due dates and tests are real. I certainly felt more stress from them during my undergrad years than I did by anything that came up during my brief stint at work (I am now back in school again, thus past tense).
Stryker saws, used for cutting bones in autospy or anatomy lab, also won't cut soft tissue. I'm in no hurry to try this out myself, but I know people who have tested it on their hands without ill effect.