Are you serious? Have you ever been to China? You can walk into an internet cafe and get high speed internet for a few yuan an hour. The younger generation (high school to around 35ish) are all on the internet, or did you fail to notice the news stories about how almost everyone in Chinese cities uses the internet now?
Also, raising the exemption to $5000 a year wouldn't matter a bit to the rich or the intellectuals, or are you saying that earning $30,000 a year in China makes someone rich?
Even assuming that only the rich and the intellectuals form policy decision in China, isn't that better than what we have in the USA where only the rich and/or the loud affect policy?
The only novel contribution the article has to scientific understanding seems to be this gem:
"We found that people differed greatly in terms of how cost-efficient the functioning of their brain networks were, and that over half of these differences could be explained by genes,” said Dr. Fornito.
Please note that the study "compared the brain scans of 38 identical and 26 non-identical twins from the Australian Twin Registry." That is to say, each twin is compared against the other, but not against unrelated people. These individuals had highly similar genetic makeups and likely very similar backgrounds/family environments.
The statement that half of these differences could be explained by genes is EXTREMELY misleading. It implies to the casual reader that half of the brain's efficiency is linked to genes. IT IS NOT THE CASE.
Lets use a real life example. Couple A goes shopping. The man always buys a suit for $1000. The woman buys a hat for $10 half the time, but nothing at other times. Couple B goes shopping. The man always buys a suit for $1000. The woman buys a hat for $10 every time.
Average cost of couple A: $1005. Average cost of couple B: $1010
The difference is $5, and all of it is driven by the behavior of the woman in couple A. However, it's blatantly obvious that the women in the couples don't account for anything close to a significant portion of the cost. It's just like how if 90% of the variance in height is explained by genes, it doesn't mean that genes control 90% of your height.
TLDR VERSION: Just because half the difference can be explained by genes doesn't mean that genes account for 50% of the brain efficiency. There is no substitute for raw talent nurtured by a stimulating and engaging environment.
It's really amazing how a drop in the bucket (for Google) can encourage so much innovation and foster so much enthusiasm in the next generation of programmers.
The stipend averages out to $5376 per student, which will surely go a long way to paying for rent between semesters and then some.
I'm fully aware that programming has lower fixed costs than say, recombinant organism research or semiconductor development, but I can't help but wonder how many STEM students we could encourage by redirecting just 1% of the U.S. national defense budget. The gains of such projects really isn't in the end result (though they're nice), but rather in the skills, connections, and confidence that the work inspires.
If the odd case that anyone thinks Jesse Jackson Jr. has anything close to a valid point:
1) Though jobs for some brick and mortar retailers are lost, the loss is due to a structural change in the market induced by increasing digitization rather than through any one product. Horse buggy makers went out of business when automobiles came out, and much the same rhetoric was spewed to attack the manufacturers of cars.
2) China makes the iPads. True, but manufacturing is no longer a $40+benefits job with enough seniority. Gone for the foreseeable future are high paying manufacturing jobs that we as a nation want to focus on. The success of the IPad has spurred other technology companies to push their own tablets onto market. What does that mean? The tech companies hire more mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineers, computer/materials scientists, programmers, designers, and production line developers. Those workers produce far more "value" to an economy than a factory worker in a mass production line. Ask a Foxxcomm worker (the guys who make iPads and iPods) if they'd rather be working in a Chinese factory or at the Apple headquarters, and guess what? They'd rather be an engineer.
3) Librarians aren't useful because the buildings they're in have information. They're highly useful because they can advise us where to find the relevant information. The librarians at my university aren't there to restock books or charge late fees. They're hired because they can help students track down critical papers, research vital bits of information, and educate them about how to find the right kind of sources. Brick and mortar stores are useful because they offer a tactile shopping experience that online systems can't seem to replicate yet. Same idea: physical locations and people offer have value added characteristics.
4) There are many things to blame for the job market pains in the United States. I don't think anyone is educated enough to really understand the "true" driving factors, but you know what? I sincerely doubt that stiffing innovation, creativity, and technological development is the way to go.
Actually sorry, I'm wrong. On behalf of the *IAA cabal and the Chinese Council for American Advisement, I suggest that we focus all of our governmental energy on stopping piracy of songs and movies instead of nurturing markets and funding basic science. If we can stop all illegal firesharing, we can save up to $13 trillion a year in damages!! That's several times more than the technology market makes in a year!
This is a seriously amazing time to live in, as multidisciplinary medical research teams are finding ways to give patients second chances at a relatively normal life. I can't imagine not being able to speak again for the rest of my life, (seriously, try taking a vow of silence for a single day) but I'm glad that the pool of "horribly life changing events without a cure" is getting whittled down bit by bit. Kudos to the research and operations team, and best of luck to the patient.
Starcraft micro is nearly useless without solid or good macro. Most people notice the flashy micro in the gameplay without really understanding the macrolevel strategy of what builds to use against a certain player, where and how to move the army, and so forth. The zerg aoe unit and the valkyries are almost never used, as they're bad.
The AI proved good versus other AIs, but it would get slaughtered versus human top level players due to the strategic inflexibility. (humans won't let you sit and build units for 15 minutes before harassing)
Actually, mass mutalisk use in competitive starcraft became popular only after clumping techniques were created. Without clumping, it was far too easy to pick apart mutalisks as they flew in one by one to start attacking. With a clump and the nearly continuous movement, a stack of mutalisks can dance in and out of range of enemy units and snipe targets at the edge of defenses.
From the freaking paper: "Some bacterial and viral DNA sequences have been found to induce low frequency electromagnetic waves in high aqueous dilutions. This phenomenon appears to be triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency. We discuss this phenomenon in the framework of quantum field theory."
In other words, scientists observed something that makes them say "hmm... that's strange," which leads them to say "hmm... I wonder what could be causing this?" These researchers tried to explain the phenomenon using the best tools that they thought that had: quantum mechanics. (classical EM theory is pretty useless for fields this weak) The linked article is behind a wall, but the title seems to start with "Scorn over claim of teleported DNA"
Again from the paper: "In this paper we have described the experiments showing a new property of DNA and the induction of electromagnetic waves in water dilutions. We have briefly depicted the theoretical scheme which can explain qualitatively the features observed in these experiments." Crazy observed phenomenon explained by theories that aren't fully accurate? No way!
The current scientific media seems to increasingly favor sensationalist titles that enable their readers to go "hah, those stupid eggheads, I know better than them that X/Y/Z is impossible! I are smarts!" and this seems to be no different. There is not, has not, and likely will not, be any claims that DNA teleports. However, there has been, is, and likely will be, evidence that DNA interacts with factors beyond easy and simple comprehension. These interactions seem to resemble "phase-locking regime[s]" observed in "two superconducting samples or in the arrays of Josephson junctions," which is pretty far from quack science./rantover
The article says that: "Animal welfare campaigners say that cloned animals and their surrogate mothers still suffer immensely."
The immune system argument is indeed the primary flaw of mass cloning, but our understanding of the role of genetics in forming an immune system is weak at best. However, we do know that immune systems aren't deterministic; genetic makeup X + environment Y doesn't always yield protection Z. As you said, the unsanitary conditions in factory farms induce tremendous suffering in the animals, but it also leads to a serious suppression of natural immune function. They are pretty much saturated in antibiotics from birth to slaughter to suppress infections; their natural immune system are essentially useless in those conditions. I'm purely speculating here, but what if a particular animal or animal line had an immune system that retained most of its function under terrible conditions? What if a particular animal displayed tremendous variability in initial antibody seeding?
It's tempting to think of animals as computer systems, where a single computer virus can easy take over identical systems with nearly identical ease. However, the immune system just doesn't work like that. To use a crude and somewhat misleading example, factory farms are like networks of computers running Windows XP with no service patch, no firewall, and no built in antivirus. However, every 4 hours, a godlike remote antivirus scan is run, and purges each system. If a virus or a bacterial strain is powerful enough to kill a line of Dollies, it's most likely strong enough to kill a line of sheep on the constant verge of death. Throw in antibiotic overuse, and it seems unlikely that there's a statistically significant risk increase between a factory full of Dollies and a factory full of randoms.
From the article, the original Dolly was put down after about 6 years due to all kinds of medical conditions (infections, arthritis, etc). However, these four sheep are 3.5 years old, and are apparently in perfect health. A major argument against the use of cloned animals in animal husbandry (either cloning particularly tasty animals or using clones to breed) is that cloned animals end up in constant agony due to their origin.
Since these cloned animals appear just as comfortable and pain free as your "run of the mill" farm animal, it seems as if cloned animals can be just as humane to farm as normal animals. In fact, since the meat yield from each animal is much higher (by definition of selective cloning as the pinnacle of selective breeding), I would argue that using more cloned animals would reduce the ecological impact of the meat industry.
Ye average American Joe might not want to eat cloned meat, but clones are already breeding like mad to produce more productive offspring. Perhaps this new longitudinal study will give more insights on the ethics and health impacts of cloned meat.
Fortunately, given the recent success of a movie-series-that-shall-not-be-named, there is now an abundant supply of natural predators: werewolves and vampires.
Once the werewolves and vampires have taken care of the lawyers, we can send in gorillas with silver stakes to take care of them. After that, we can wait until winter, and the gorillas will all freeze!
I would hope that the human rights abuses in China are well known enough that "Being an anti-government activist lands Chinese woman in labour camp" isn't shocking news to anyone here.
My point is that this is hardly front page news, as events like this happen all the time in China. They have a much different threshold for punishment than we have in the US or in the EU.
However, making jokes about threats of ANY kind is a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it is a tweet, a retweet, a blog post, a text message, a letter, etc. In this day an age, it doesn't matter where you are. Threats against the government or against entities the government cares about is a Bad Idea(tm).
Of course, many prefer to interpret my point as equating the two incidents, or otherwise as justifying either punishment.
What would happen if someone tweeted a "joke" about a bomb threat in the EU or the USA?
Oh that's right, they get a visit by their friendly neighborhood police officers. http://boingboing.net/2010/11/13/twitter-users-re-twe.html
This is probably front page news because we clearly all hate China, and Twitter is involved. In full seriousness, relying on the humor of law enforcement/secret police to keep you out of trouble is a bad bet. Relying on that sense of humor when seemingly inciting violence against a nation with whom ties are already strained is an even worse bet. Is this seriously anything new or surprising?
If your sale cost is less than (fixed cost)/(#of units sold)+marginal cost, you're making a loss. Fixed costs are pretty damn relevant for the price the product is sold at; look at the drug companies.
You're not paying for the price of production alone. You're paying for:
-the designers that made them look like something other than misshapen blobs -the designers and developers who make rules that allow you to play a balanced game with them -the writers who have lovingly crafted a vast, detailed, and epic galaxy of war, darkness, and SPACE MARINES -lawyers to defend IP, since pirated codices and miniatures actually reduces Game Workshop's ability and willingness to create more army lists/figure lines -marketers to make little kids want to play as SPACE MARINES, so people actually have others to play with -support staff, so when developers like THQ want to make a WH40k game, we get amazing games like Dawn of War instead of terrible spinoffs
and last but not least: -the Inquisition, who nobody in WH40k sees coming, because they're everywhere!
More seriously, I know we all like to rip on price tags that put a product out of our budget range, but can we please remember that if we don't want to buy a product because of price, we can choose not to?
Almost everything we see on shelves uses the product price to cross subsidize administrative, legal, and marketing costs. Seeing the price tag and holding it up to the cost of production is silly.
There seems to be a very wide range in the abilities of the winner and runner up bots that might not be noticed by someone unfamiliar with Starcraft. In order of appearance:
1) In the flying units versus flying units match, mutalisks (guys with wings) should have focused the scourges (little 'c' shaped guys) because scourges have about 1/5th the health of a mutalisk, but can suicide to take out 5/6ths of a mutalisk's health. Red ai focused scourges, the other ai didn't, with disastrous results for the other ai.
2) In the match with infantry, the players had medics, which heal other units but can't attack, and marines/ghosts, which can do damage but can't heal each other. One ai moved medics with ghosts such that the medics could actually heal. The other ai just left the medics a mile away from the combat, and got slaughtered. Furthermore, the AIs didn't bother with formations, which meant that half their units spent the entire fight trying to get into range. A precombat formation lets almost all the combat units start firing as soon as the fight begins.
3) The red zealots retreated in the face of numerically superior opponents, while the teal zealots just attack moved no matter how many they had. Teal zealots didn't focus fire, which meant that they lose units sooner, and thus had less damage output compared to red. In addition, red failed to kill the pylons (600hp) powering the buildings (a lot more than 600hp). Neither player built their bases to maximize the number of pylons powering their vital gateways; each pylon usually powered only one building.
4) In the fight with dragoons (orange spider things) versus tanks, the protoss (orange) could have frozen half the enemy tanks with a single stasis spell by sneaking the arbiter (flying spider thing) to the back of the tank formation. Furthermore, the protoss could have focused the science vessel (floating teal circle) that was preventing them from being invisible. It would have been a slaughter if the vessel had been focused, as teal would have had no real way to hit the orange units.
5) In the match between Overmind and Krasi0, the article talks about mutalisk clumping preventing some of the mutalisks from attacking. However, the point of the stack is that when one guy is in range, everyone else is. Also, the attack animation is so fast that for all practical purposes, the flyers can shoot while moving. They use their mobility to get out of range of infantry units, then zoom in to pick off outliers when their attack cooldown is finisihed. In actual competition, the terran player would usually rely on a strategic placement of static defenses and a highly mobile cluster. However, the terran (defending force) built tanks, vultures, and goliaths (mech guys that shot missiles) with the flaw that tanks and vultures can't shoot air, and are thus almost useless versus the mutalisks. The mutalisks spent the second half of the clip shooting tanks rather than focusing down the goliaths volleying missiles into them. The terran AI prioritized repairing tanks as much as goliaths, and didn't place tanks next to goliaths to soak up bounce damage from a mutalisk.
In general, the AI had problem with understanding the priority in a fight. That is to say, they often had no sense of what units are critical to a position or what units pose the most threat. They didn't arrange their units to maximize their effectiveness, and often failed to alter their behavior based on the other party. It's a fun contest, but I'm not sure the AIs could beat a moderately skilled player who understands tactics AND strategy.
Sociologists will wonder in vain why final exam grades in 2010 were so abnormally abysmal.
The obvious culprit according to the media
on
The Creativity Crisis
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
From the article:
"It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children."
One of the test questions was “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?”
If you went to the average TV viewer and asked them what could make their T.V. shows better, I sincerely doubt that they could give a succinct and "creative" set of ideas that would improve various shows. If you asked a video gamer for say an MMO like WoW or even a browser game like Farmville what suggestions they have to improve the games, you would probably have to gag them to get them to shut up. For video game fans, new ideas (some of them quite creative workarounds) are a dime a dozen, and the challenge is filtering them to find the best ideas for how to gear/play a character or how to run a farm.
Video games are almost perpetually linked with television by virtue of being activities in which one sits down in front of a glowing screen, but video games tend to be highly interactive with constant feedback/user response while television is nearly 100% passive. (American Idol voting doesn't count) I would agree that the increase of mindshare and time devoted to passive pursuits could decrease creativity, but I really wish that the media would, as a group, get a better idea of how different video games and television shows are. The difference between games and t.v. is the difference between using a kitchen knife to chop vegetables and using a kitchen knife to stab people, yet again, video games are taking more blame for making our kids less creative than the school systems' standardized tests and performance obsessed culture.
Americans aren't spoiled compared to most other Westerners? If you actually read the article, he said "The American public... just like your teenage kids, aren't acting in a way that they should act" with respect to climate change. He seems correct, and I would say that it's a welcome change from PR spinning and political doublespeak.
The foundation of economics is the same as the foundation of statistics. No economist can accurately predict how an individual game can turn out, just like no economist can accurately predict how an individual actor will choose. However, the law of large numbers means that given a sufficiently large population, mass scale behavior can be predicted. A simple example of this in action is that if I flip a coin and call it heads or tails, I'll be wrong roughly 50% of the time. However, if I say that 50% give or take 5% of a thousand coin flips will end up heads or tails, I'd probably be right.
Economics does not rely on perfect knowledge and perfect actors. It relies on modeling the real world as best as possible, and you know what? Models usually include abstract representations, and abstract representations include idealized actions.
With regard to the story, it's laughable to think that financial market predictions are anything like sports predictions. These teams are made up of players who don't play together during regular seasons; they're generally on different teams in Europe. How is it news that analyzing various productivity and growth forecasting statistics will fail to predict who wins a 1-0 soccer game?
There are very few markets where the products are near identical. Consumers are heavily influenced by brand name, societal perception of item status, and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you serious? Have you ever been to China? You can walk into an internet cafe and get high speed internet for a few yuan an hour. The younger generation (high school to around 35ish) are all on the internet, or did you fail to notice the news stories about how almost everyone in Chinese cities uses the internet now?
Also, raising the exemption to $5000 a year wouldn't matter a bit to the rich or the intellectuals, or are you saying that earning $30,000 a year in China makes someone rich?
Even assuming that only the rich and the intellectuals form policy decision in China, isn't that better than what we have in the USA where only the rich and/or the loud affect policy?
The only novel contribution the article has to scientific understanding seems to be this gem:
"We found that people differed greatly in terms of how cost-efficient the functioning of their brain networks were, and that over half of these differences could be explained by genes,” said Dr. Fornito.
Please note that the study "compared the brain scans of 38 identical and 26 non-identical twins from the Australian Twin Registry." That is to say, each twin is compared against the other, but not against unrelated people. These individuals had highly similar genetic makeups and likely very similar backgrounds/family environments.
The statement that half of these differences could be explained by genes is EXTREMELY misleading. It implies to the casual reader that half of the brain's efficiency is linked to genes. IT IS NOT THE CASE.
Lets use a real life example.
Couple A goes shopping. The man always buys a suit for $1000. The woman buys a hat for $10 half the time, but nothing at other times.
Couple B goes shopping. The man always buys a suit for $1000. The woman buys a hat for $10 every time.
Average cost of couple A: $1005. Average cost of couple B: $1010
The difference is $5, and all of it is driven by the behavior of the woman in couple A. However, it's blatantly obvious that the women in the couples don't account for anything close to a significant portion of the cost. It's just like how if 90% of the variance in height is explained by genes, it doesn't mean that genes control 90% of your height.
TLDR VERSION: Just because half the difference can be explained by genes doesn't mean that genes account for 50% of the brain efficiency. There is no substitute for raw talent nurtured by a stimulating and engaging environment.
It's really amazing how a drop in the bucket (for Google) can encourage so much innovation and foster so much enthusiasm in the next generation of programmers.
The stipend averages out to $5376 per student, which will surely go a long way to paying for rent between semesters and then some.
I'm fully aware that programming has lower fixed costs than say, recombinant organism research or semiconductor development, but I can't help but wonder how many STEM students we could encourage by redirecting just 1% of the U.S. national defense budget. The gains of such projects really isn't in the end result (though they're nice), but rather in the skills, connections, and confidence that the work inspires.
If the odd case that anyone thinks Jesse Jackson Jr. has anything close to a valid point:
1) Though jobs for some brick and mortar retailers are lost, the loss is due to a structural change in the market induced by increasing digitization rather than through any one product. Horse buggy makers went out of business when automobiles came out, and much the same rhetoric was spewed to attack the manufacturers of cars.
2) China makes the iPads. True, but manufacturing is no longer a $40+benefits job with enough seniority. Gone for the foreseeable future are high paying manufacturing jobs that we as a nation want to focus on. The success of the IPad has spurred other technology companies to push their own tablets onto market. What does that mean? The tech companies hire more mechanical/electrical/computer/systems engineers, computer/materials scientists, programmers, designers, and production line developers. Those workers produce far more "value" to an economy than a factory worker in a mass production line. Ask a Foxxcomm worker (the guys who make iPads and iPods) if they'd rather be working in a Chinese factory or at the Apple headquarters, and guess what? They'd rather be an engineer.
3) Librarians aren't useful because the buildings they're in have information. They're highly useful because they can advise us where to find the relevant information. The librarians at my university aren't there to restock books or charge late fees. They're hired because they can help students track down critical papers, research vital bits of information, and educate them about how to find the right kind of sources. Brick and mortar stores are useful because they offer a tactile shopping experience that online systems can't seem to replicate yet. Same idea: physical locations and people offer have value added characteristics.
4) There are many things to blame for the job market pains in the United States. I don't think anyone is educated enough to really understand the "true" driving factors, but you know what? I sincerely doubt that stiffing innovation, creativity, and technological development is the way to go.
Actually sorry, I'm wrong. On behalf of the *IAA cabal and the Chinese Council for American Advisement, I suggest that we focus all of our governmental energy on stopping piracy of songs and movies instead of nurturing markets and funding basic science. If we can stop all illegal firesharing, we can save up to $13 trillion a year in damages!! That's several times more than the technology market makes in a year!
This is a seriously amazing time to live in, as multidisciplinary medical research teams are finding ways to give patients second chances at a relatively normal life. I can't imagine not being able to speak again for the rest of my life, (seriously, try taking a vow of silence for a single day) but I'm glad that the pool of "horribly life changing events without a cure" is getting whittled down bit by bit. Kudos to the research and operations team, and best of luck to the patient.
Spoiler: Korean programers wipe the floor with "internationals"
Starcraft micro is nearly useless without solid or good macro. Most people notice the flashy micro in the gameplay without really understanding the macrolevel strategy of what builds to use against a certain player, where and how to move the army, and so forth. The zerg aoe unit and the valkyries are almost never used, as they're bad.
The AI proved good versus other AIs, but it would get slaughtered versus human top level players due to the strategic inflexibility. (humans won't let you sit and build units for 15 minutes before harassing)
Actually, mass mutalisk use in competitive starcraft became popular only after clumping techniques were created. Without clumping, it was far too easy to pick apart mutalisks as they flew in one by one to start attacking. With a clump and the nearly continuous movement, a stack of mutalisks can dance in and out of range of enemy units and snipe targets at the edge of defenses.
From the freaking paper: "Some bacterial and viral DNA sequences have been found to induce low frequency electromagnetic waves in high aqueous dilutions. This phenomenon appears to be triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency. We discuss this phenomenon in the framework of quantum field theory."
/rantover
In other words, scientists observed something that makes them say "hmm... that's strange," which leads them to say "hmm... I wonder what could be causing this?" These researchers tried to explain the phenomenon using the best tools that they thought that had: quantum mechanics. (classical EM theory is pretty useless for fields this weak) The linked article is behind a wall, but the title seems to start with "Scorn over claim of teleported DNA"
Again from the paper: "In this paper we have described the experiments showing a new property of DNA and the induction of electromagnetic waves in water dilutions. We have briefly depicted the theoretical scheme which can explain qualitatively the features observed in these experiments." Crazy observed phenomenon explained by theories that aren't fully accurate? No way!
The current scientific media seems to increasingly favor sensationalist titles that enable their readers to go "hah, those stupid eggheads, I know better than them that X/Y/Z is impossible! I are smarts!" and this seems to be no different. There is not, has not, and likely will not, be any claims that DNA teleports. However, there has been, is, and likely will be, evidence that DNA interacts with factors beyond easy and simple comprehension. These interactions seem to resemble "phase-locking regime[s]" observed in "two superconducting samples or in the arrays of Josephson junctions," which is pretty far from quack science.
The article says that: "Animal welfare campaigners say that cloned animals and their surrogate mothers still suffer immensely."
The immune system argument is indeed the primary flaw of mass cloning, but our understanding of the role of genetics in forming an immune system is weak at best. However, we do know that immune systems aren't deterministic; genetic makeup X + environment Y doesn't always yield protection Z. As you said, the unsanitary conditions in factory farms induce tremendous suffering in the animals, but it also leads to a serious suppression of natural immune function. They are pretty much saturated in antibiotics from birth to slaughter to suppress infections; their natural immune system are essentially useless in those conditions. I'm purely speculating here, but what if a particular animal or animal line had an immune system that retained most of its function under terrible conditions? What if a particular animal displayed tremendous variability in initial antibody seeding?
It's tempting to think of animals as computer systems, where a single computer virus can easy take over identical systems with nearly identical ease. However, the immune system just doesn't work like that. To use a crude and somewhat misleading example, factory farms are like networks of computers running Windows XP with no service patch, no firewall, and no built in antivirus. However, every 4 hours, a godlike remote antivirus scan is run, and purges each system. If a virus or a bacterial strain is powerful enough to kill a line of Dollies, it's most likely strong enough to kill a line of sheep on the constant verge of death. Throw in antibiotic overuse, and it seems unlikely that there's a statistically significant risk increase between a factory full of Dollies and a factory full of randoms.
From the article, the original Dolly was put down after about 6 years due to all kinds of medical conditions (infections, arthritis, etc). However, these four sheep are 3.5 years old, and are apparently in perfect health. A major argument against the use of cloned animals in animal husbandry (either cloning particularly tasty animals or using clones to breed) is that cloned animals end up in constant agony due to their origin.
Since these cloned animals appear just as comfortable and pain free as your "run of the mill" farm animal, it seems as if cloned animals can be just as humane to farm as normal animals. In fact, since the meat yield from each animal is much higher (by definition of selective cloning as the pinnacle of selective breeding), I would argue that using more cloned animals would reduce the ecological impact of the meat industry.
Ye average American Joe might not want to eat cloned meat, but clones are already breeding like mad to produce more productive offspring. Perhaps this new longitudinal study will give more insights on the ethics and health impacts of cloned meat.
Fortunately, given the recent success of a movie-series-that-shall-not-be-named, there is now an abundant supply of natural predators: werewolves and vampires.
Once the werewolves and vampires have taken care of the lawyers, we can send in gorillas with silver stakes to take care of them. After that, we can wait until winter, and the gorillas will all freeze!
I would hope that the human rights abuses in China are well known enough that "Being an anti-government activist lands Chinese woman in labour camp" isn't shocking news to anyone here.
My point is that this is hardly front page news, as events like this happen all the time in China. They have a much different threshold for punishment than we have in the US or in the EU.
However, making jokes about threats of ANY kind is a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it is a tweet, a retweet, a blog post, a text message, a letter, etc. In this day an age, it doesn't matter where you are. Threats against the government or against entities the government cares about is a Bad Idea(tm).
Of course, many prefer to interpret my point as equating the two incidents, or otherwise as justifying either punishment.
What would happen if someone tweeted a "joke" about a bomb threat in the EU or the USA?
Oh that's right, they get a visit by their friendly neighborhood police officers. http://boingboing.net/2010/11/13/twitter-users-re-twe.html
This is probably front page news because we clearly all hate China, and Twitter is involved. In full seriousness, relying on the humor of law enforcement/secret police to keep you out of trouble is a bad bet. Relying on that sense of humor when seemingly inciting violence against a nation with whom ties are already strained is an even worse bet. Is this seriously anything new or surprising?
If your sale cost is less than (fixed cost)/(#of units sold)+marginal cost, you're making a loss. Fixed costs are pretty damn relevant for the price the product is sold at; look at the drug companies.
You're not paying for the price of production alone. You're paying for:
-the designers that made them look like something other than misshapen blobs
-the designers and developers who make rules that allow you to play a balanced game with them
-the writers who have lovingly crafted a vast, detailed, and epic galaxy of war, darkness, and SPACE MARINES
-lawyers to defend IP, since pirated codices and miniatures actually reduces Game Workshop's ability and willingness to create more army lists/figure lines
-marketers to make little kids want to play as SPACE MARINES, so people actually have others to play with
-support staff, so when developers like THQ want to make a WH40k game, we get amazing games like Dawn of War instead of terrible spinoffs
and last but not least:
-the Inquisition, who nobody in WH40k sees coming, because they're everywhere!
More seriously, I know we all like to rip on price tags that put a product out of our budget range, but can we please remember that if we don't want to buy a product because of price, we can choose not to?
Almost everything we see on shelves uses the product price to cross subsidize administrative, legal, and marketing costs. Seeing the price tag and holding it up to the cost of production is silly.
There seems to be a very wide range in the abilities of the winner and runner up bots that might not be noticed by someone unfamiliar with Starcraft. In order of appearance:
1) In the flying units versus flying units match, mutalisks (guys with wings) should have focused the scourges (little 'c' shaped guys) because scourges have about 1/5th the health of a mutalisk, but can suicide to take out 5/6ths of a mutalisk's health. Red ai focused scourges, the other ai didn't, with disastrous results for the other ai.
2) In the match with infantry, the players had medics, which heal other units but can't attack, and marines/ghosts, which can do damage but can't heal each other. One ai moved medics with ghosts such that the medics could actually heal. The other ai just left the medics a mile away from the combat, and got slaughtered. Furthermore, the AIs didn't bother with formations, which meant that half their units spent the entire fight trying to get into range. A precombat formation lets almost all the combat units start firing as soon as the fight begins.
3) The red zealots retreated in the face of numerically superior opponents, while the teal zealots just attack moved no matter how many they had. Teal zealots didn't focus fire, which meant that they lose units sooner, and thus had less damage output compared to red. In addition, red failed to kill the pylons (600hp) powering the buildings (a lot more than 600hp). Neither player built their bases to maximize the number of pylons powering their vital gateways; each pylon usually powered only one building.
4) In the fight with dragoons (orange spider things) versus tanks, the protoss (orange) could have frozen half the enemy tanks with a single stasis spell by sneaking the arbiter (flying spider thing) to the back of the tank formation. Furthermore, the protoss could have focused the science vessel (floating teal circle) that was preventing them from being invisible. It would have been a slaughter if the vessel had been focused, as teal would have had no real way to hit the orange units.
5) In the match between Overmind and Krasi0, the article talks about mutalisk clumping preventing some of the mutalisks from attacking. However, the point of the stack is that when one guy is in range, everyone else is. Also, the attack animation is so fast that for all practical purposes, the flyers can shoot while moving. They use their mobility to get out of range of infantry units, then zoom in to pick off outliers when their attack cooldown is finisihed. In actual competition, the terran player would usually rely on a strategic placement of static defenses and a highly mobile cluster. However, the terran (defending force) built tanks, vultures, and goliaths (mech guys that shot missiles) with the flaw that tanks and vultures can't shoot air, and are thus almost useless versus the mutalisks. The mutalisks spent the second half of the clip shooting tanks rather than focusing down the goliaths volleying missiles into them. The terran AI prioritized repairing tanks as much as goliaths, and didn't place tanks next to goliaths to soak up bounce damage from a mutalisk.
In general, the AI had problem with understanding the priority in a fight. That is to say, they often had no sense of what units are critical to a position or what units pose the most threat. They didn't arrange their units to maximize their effectiveness, and often failed to alter their behavior based on the other party. It's a fun contest, but I'm not sure the AIs could beat a moderately skilled player who understands tactics AND strategy.
According to TFA US citizens spend 407 million hours a MONTH on online games, not 407 million hours a year. Slight difference.
Gaming is 10% of the time spend online now, and it's pretty obvious that the average American spends more than 4 hours a year online.
Sociologists will wonder in vain why final exam grades in 2010 were so abnormally abysmal.
From the article:
"It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children."
One of the test questions was “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?”
If you went to the average TV viewer and asked them what could make their T.V. shows better, I sincerely doubt that they could give a succinct and "creative" set of ideas that would improve various shows. If you asked a video gamer for say an MMO like WoW or even a browser game like Farmville what suggestions they have to improve the games, you would probably have to gag them to get them to shut up. For video game fans, new ideas (some of them quite creative workarounds) are a dime a dozen, and the challenge is filtering them to find the best ideas for how to gear/play a character or how to run a farm.
Video games are almost perpetually linked with television by virtue of being activities in which one sits down in front of a glowing screen, but video games tend to be highly interactive with constant feedback/user response while television is nearly 100% passive. (American Idol voting doesn't count) I would agree that the increase of mindshare and time devoted to passive pursuits could decrease creativity, but I really wish that the media would, as a group, get a better idea of how different video games and television shows are. The difference between games and t.v. is the difference between using a kitchen knife to chop vegetables and using a kitchen knife to stab people, yet again, video games are taking more blame for making our kids less creative than the school systems' standardized tests and performance obsessed culture.
Americans aren't spoiled compared to most other Westerners? If you actually read the article, he said "The American public ... just like your teenage kids, aren't acting in a way that they should act" with respect to climate change. He seems correct, and I would say that it's a welcome change from PR spinning and political doublespeak.
... of the 21st century.
The foundation of economics is the same as the foundation of statistics. No economist can accurately predict how an individual game can turn out, just like no economist can accurately predict how an individual actor will choose. However, the law of large numbers means that given a sufficiently large population, mass scale behavior can be predicted. A simple example of this in action is that if I flip a coin and call it heads or tails, I'll be wrong roughly 50% of the time. However, if I say that 50% give or take 5% of a thousand coin flips will end up heads or tails, I'd probably be right.
Economics does not rely on perfect knowledge and perfect actors. It relies on modeling the real world as best as possible, and you know what? Models usually include abstract representations, and abstract representations include idealized actions.
With regard to the story, it's laughable to think that financial market predictions are anything like sports predictions. These teams are made up of players who don't play together during regular seasons; they're generally on different teams in Europe. How is it news that analyzing various productivity and growth forecasting statistics will fail to predict who wins a 1-0 soccer game?
There are very few markets where the products are near identical. Consumers are heavily influenced by brand name, societal perception of item status, and so forth.