>>Right, because you really need reference counting and all that jazz all the time. Face it, if you can't write code that doesn't leak in languages that don't have garbage collection, you'll have leaking programs in Java as well.
Quoted for truth.
Garbage collection only fixes certain types of garbage coding.
This is wrong. Many, if not most, Chinese characters give an indication to both meaning and pronunciation. For instance the Mandarin word for "same" is pronounced "tong". The Mandarin word for copper is also "tong", and the ideogram for copper contains two radicals: the "metal" radical, which indicates meaning, and the "same" radical, which indicates pronunciation.
Once you learn the basic radicals, learning Chinese characters is not that hard. I can read Chinese much better than I can speak it.
Flash cards work well. Some computer programs work well too. "Rosetta Stone" works really well, but it is expensive.
Yeah, most people new to Chinese think the characters are arbitrary, but they're really not. I highly highly recommend the zipu (Character Chart) dictionary off Zhongwen.com. It breaks down every character to tell you why it's written that way. It's the best dictionary I've ever bought, for any language.
I can't recommend Rosetta Stone, though. It just doesn't work for learning Chinese, since grammer is so important to the language, and it doesn't teach you grammar. I'd recommend the Fluenz software over that first. Failing that, buying a couple different books could be a good way to go. I like the Shaum's books on Chinese, as well as a green book called Essential Chinese Grammar, which ROCKS.
I'm actually working on a grant right now that's teaching Mandarin to kids in San Diego. Would be kind of cool if the OP was the father of one of these guys.
Then that should have been posted in the summary instead. Whenever I read self-written claims of a model's accuracy, my bullshit meter goes off.
In related news, Miss Cleo predicts ongoing instability in the Middle East, conflicts over water rights, and people being unhappy with those jokers in government.
Oh, yeah. I got another one for you: environmentalist who would complain and complain about carbon being released in the atmosphere, claim it's literally the end of the world, and then *still* oppose nuclear power in any form.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves! It drives me insane - I was listening to progressive radio the other day and global warming activists were actually protesting outside a nuclear plant, because of... I don't know why. The CO2 emissions, I guess? But they were handcuffing themselves to the chain link fence around the place.
Anyhow, it's been good talking with you - refreshing to have an actually intelligent conversation on Slashdot for once. =)
>>If the data in question was really classified, I think the word you're after is "arrested"
There's different levels of classified data. I think this was just fired-level stuff. All the crazy stuff in his building took place behind a sealed and guarded portal-type thing at the end of the hallway. I saw it, looked like something out of a prison.
He was a Palestinian college student intern... don't think they were giving him nuclear weapon designs to work on.
>>So I really didn't have a need for a pharmacist, although that is usually my first source when I have a question about what it going on with a medication.
Fair enough!
Most people have never heard of clinical pharmacists, and since I'm friends with several of them, I thought I'd get the word out. They're pretty bad ass when it comes to drugs.
>>Physics (yes, Physics, THE hardest of hard sciences) is full of terrible mathematics, absolutely terrible, shockingly bad stuff. The good ones know it, some will say it doesn't matter because their butchery comes up with "accurate" results.
>>if you want real fun, take the average master's degree idiot and start having them manually add fractions without changing them to decimals. such as adding a bunch of measurements off a tape measure together.
My question is, what kind of idiot uses fractions these days?
Just use decimals for everything.
I tend to keep running totals in my head when doing stats or budgets, just to make sure the excel spreadsheet hasn't auto-adjusted itself to miss a row. But adding 13/16 + 78/11 + 4 3/2 without converting to decimal? Pfft. You never do that once you leave elementary school. (Mixed fractions, lol.)
I agree with your concerns. Being a chemical engineer and a physical scientist, I have often found medical doctors understanding of chemistry and other sciences lacking. I once had an argument about chemical kinetics involved in a prescription drug I was taking, he basically told me I didn't know what I was talking about and blew me off. After another run in with him over another issue I fired him. But that's just one of my personal issues with a doctor.
That's because you're talking to a doctor when you should be talking to a pharmacist. Preferably a clinical pharmacist, if it's important. The reason hospitals hire clinical pharmacists is because doctors know just enough about drugs to be able to prescribe them correctly, but when they get into trouble (try dosing a renally insufficient diabetic kid some time) they call in the big guns for advice.
Clinical pharmacists are more common on the west coast than the east coast (having originated in large part at UC San Francisco), but most major hospitals should have them if you have a question.
You could always pose a question to your community pharmacist or the person shoving drugs at you through the window at the hospital, but depending on how long they've been out of college, they might have forgotten their PK and physical chemistry and such.
>>An EB employee that does not toe the company line, does not write to please their editor, and has no opinion of their own which will inevitably creep into their work.... strange people EB employ, they appear not to be human?
They're employed to give as neutral an account as they can. Wikipedians have no such illusions, and so you'll see things like the NPR article attacking Fox News by using a fake study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Public_Radio#Defenders.27_rebuttals) or the Sacco and Vanzetti case, which has had its lead rewritten who knows how many times because of bias.
>>The power of Wikipedia is that it averages opinion/bias out of articles (mostly)
I guess. Indeed the Sacco and Vanzetti article, the lead now just says that "people disagree on their innocence", when it used to tilt more toward their innocence the last time I checked it.
I think more accurately, the bias represents whatever group cares most about the topic.
That's a good insight. I'm a statistics professor, and some of the problems I see are a) people generally get exposed to a single course in statistics; b) they're usually mathematically unprepared for it; c) so much gets squeezed into that one opportunity that heads are exploding; d) because of (a) - (c), everybody wants you to "just give 'em the formula"; e) since statistics is so widely used, there's a plethora of courses that are being taught by people who themselves are victims/products of (a) - (d), and are very happy to "just give 'em the formula"; and so e) most people plug and chug data through a stats package with no idea of the applicability, limitations, and interpretation of the results.
I work as an evaluator, doing data analysis of reams of data for school districts, and I won't pretend to be a "stats wizard" - my background is in computer science, though I have a fair bit of stats background - but I get appalled at what I see other evaluators doing.
On guy, who was presenting at the Federal Department of Education conference had his experimental group of teachers write a test, which they then took. Amazingly enough, they did better than the control group of teachers who took the same test. Other evaluators have teachers listen to a lecture and take a quiz based on the subjects covered on the lecture, and then give the same quiz to a control group. They also do better! Weird, huh? And this is probably the most common methodology used to demonstrate program success in DOE-funded programs today.
In other words, it is more methodology that appalls me than the stats - in part, because I believe all statistics are somewhat suspect. Do you think that the distribution of people that take tests really fall on a Gaussian? And yet most of the common statistical tests assume Gaussian distributions. Teachers will post the standard deviation of a test result (and use that to "grade on the curve") when the distribution doesn't resemble a bell curve at all.
Education, in general, doesn't work like administering a drug to the population.
So I'm not even worried yet about trying to convince you that we should spend $X over the next Y years to build public transportation. I'm just trying to convince you that "everyone owns their own car" is actually not a very good model for transportation infrastructure, and that building public transportation is not inherently foolish, evil, or communist. If you agree with me that far, then I'm happy.
I'm not (really) disagreeing with you. I just think that the economics of implementing mass transit over suburbs doesn't make sense; in an inner city, it does. When people are spread out, the costs of tunneling et cetera fall behind on the cost benefit ratio than with cars.
I do think the California High Speed Rail network is a good idea, and has the potential for getting a lot of cars off the road. Ironically enough, it's environmentalists that pose the biggest risk to the project, even though the impact of running a rail line through Pacheco Pass is going to be minimal compared with the impact of the number of cars they take off the road. It's paradoxical, and you see this kind of stuff everywhere - the Sierra Club shutting down Solar PV plants in the desert, for example, or Teddy Kennedy killing off-shore wind farms near his mansion.
I may be biased, as someone who drives between northern and southern California on a weekly basis, but I think high-speed rail should be quite viable, if managed correctly. And the HSR Committee does seem to be doing a good job. It may all turn out to be a pipe dream - mass transit is kind of one of those things that requires a lot of political will to make happen, even if the numbers are all working out right.
>>As is, I think this is really not very popular (all the people I know have a canon camera, none have installed CHDK vs. 25% of them have an iPhone and quite a few jailbroke them), so they have no reason to waste resources in fighting it.
You must have a different group of friends. Once when I was hiking, a friend of mine started talking about his awesome hacked firmware, and all three of us whipped out our Canons and had CHDK installed. =)
Well, I agree with you on most of your points. I'm just not sure that we can change out of a car-based city design now that we've had so much money, as you point out, invested into it. When I gave my talk on global warming, I asked the students what it would take to get them to take public transportation instead of using their cars, and something along the lines of "out of my cold dead hands" was given back. Cars are still too optimal for most people, even with a functioning mass transit system in place.
I agree with you that in places like Manhattan, there's really nothing else you can do with the roads, but places like the LA/OC metropolitan zone have plenty of land - if you place the region over England, you'll see it covers a region from London out to the sea to the east and south - which is also the problem. I think that lower population densities like that are (as you say) designed for cars, but also transitioning to mass transit systems are not practical.
>>Well I didn't come up with the term "tea baggers". They came up with the name themselves and talked about "tea bagging" people.
Uh, no. Tea Baggers was a term that Rachel Maddow / Keith Olberman and such came up for them. It's not complementary. I know a lot of people in the Tea Party movement, and they all think the term is somewhere between derogatory and silly.
>>The "movement" covers everything from tax reform to Libertarian policies to anti-Obama racism to incoherent anti-government paranoia.
I haven't seen any racism in the movement. In fact, I saw a bunch of Tea Partiers (who are quite anti-immigration through and through) marching alongside Mexican farm workers in Sacramento, fighting for water rights. In general, you could classify the movement as being Libertarian.
>>Public health care = evil, but I'm on Medicare so Medicare is fine. Public infrastructure = evil, but I like to drive so Interstate highways are fine.
Yeah. Watching Senator McCain attack public health care because it would cut Medicare was priceless.
>>In almost all encyclopedias, and other information sources each article is written by one person, and edited by one person.... is this not *more* likely to be biased ?
An EB employee or a random freeper or huffpo troll? I think the EB employee is probably going to be less biased.
>>In independent reviews the accuracy was on an equal level as other encyclopedias (Britannica)
Sure, but the real problem with wikipedia is with editor bias, not factual accuracy. In any vaguely politicized article on wikipedia, you'll see long running edit wars, which only get kinda/sorta resolved when they take a majority rules vote on it, which basically means that the majority of whoever is monitoring a page gets their bias put in.
If you don't agree with the groupthink, then your voice is excluded. This means that wikipedia, in a certain and very real sense, controls the cultural gestalt for, well, most of the civilized world. You'd almost expect more people to be fighting over controlling it.
>>I don't have a link or a literature reference for you. I don't know whether he published an unclassified paper about it, but if he did it shouldn't be hard to dig up.
Sounds kind of like a transputer. I think they even used it to run Conway's game of life.
No, the user deciding that he was too important to follow the rules resulted in all their classified source code being put onto what was a lot less secure box. Maybe the app process approval was Byzantine, but if you don't like the rules you find another internship.
I'm not arguing what he did was right, or even ethical.
What I'm saying is that overly strict security policies often have paradoxical effects which lower their security. Have a 60 digit password? Someone is writing that shit down next to their monitor, company policy to the contrary notwithstanding.
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>>Right, because you really need reference counting and all that jazz all the time. Face it, if you can't write code that doesn't leak in languages that don't have garbage collection, you'll have leaking programs in Java as well.
Quoted for truth.
Garbage collection only fixes certain types of garbage coding.
Yeah, most people new to Chinese think the characters are arbitrary, but they're really not. I highly highly recommend the zipu (Character Chart) dictionary off Zhongwen.com. It breaks down every character to tell you why it's written that way. It's the best dictionary I've ever bought, for any language.
I can't recommend Rosetta Stone, though. It just doesn't work for learning Chinese, since grammer is so important to the language, and it doesn't teach you grammar. I'd recommend the Fluenz software over that first. Failing that, buying a couple different books could be a good way to go. I like the Shaum's books on Chinese, as well as a green book called Essential Chinese Grammar, which ROCKS.
I'm actually working on a grant right now that's teaching Mandarin to kids in San Diego. Would be kind of cool if the OP was the father of one of these guys.
>>I'm surprised I haven't seen PS3 fanboys laughing about this before.. it's even worse than not being able to watch DVDs on your Wii's DVD drive..
Or, uh, PC gamer fanboys, who have been able to use USB drives with their gaming boxes since ~1998.
>>In even more related news, you made a false assumption and are trying to justify it.
No, my point was that if you make easy predictions, then it's easy to get a high success rate.
>>Is that independent enough for you?
Then that should have been posted in the summary instead. Whenever I read self-written claims of a model's accuracy, my bullshit meter goes off.
In related news, Miss Cleo predicts ongoing instability in the Middle East, conflicts over water rights, and people being unhappy with those jokers in government.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves! It drives me insane - I was listening to progressive radio the other day and global warming activists were actually protesting outside a nuclear plant, because of... I don't know why. The CO2 emissions, I guess? But they were handcuffing themselves to the chain link fence around the place.
Anyhow, it's been good talking with you - refreshing to have an actually intelligent conversation on Slashdot for once. =)
>>If the data in question was really classified, I think the word you're after is "arrested"
There's different levels of classified data. I think this was just fired-level stuff. All the crazy stuff in his building took place behind a sealed and guarded portal-type thing at the end of the hallway. I saw it, looked like something out of a prison.
He was a Palestinian college student intern... don't think they were giving him nuclear weapon designs to work on.
>>So I really didn't have a need for a pharmacist, although that is usually my first source when I have a question about what it going on with a medication.
Fair enough!
Most people have never heard of clinical pharmacists, and since I'm friends with several of them, I thought I'd get the word out. They're pretty bad ass when it comes to drugs.
Ok, he claims he has 90% accuracy.
What do, you know, independent evaluators of his claims say?
>>Physics (yes, Physics, THE hardest of hard sciences) is full of terrible mathematics, absolutely terrible, shockingly bad stuff. The good ones know it, some will say it doesn't matter because their butchery comes up with "accurate" results.
Are you talking about things like normalization?
Or are people fudging lab results and such?
>>I wish I could remember the interview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
>>if you want real fun, take the average master's degree idiot and start having them manually add fractions without changing them to decimals. such as adding a bunch of measurements off a tape measure together.
My question is, what kind of idiot uses fractions these days?
Just use decimals for everything.
I tend to keep running totals in my head when doing stats or budgets, just to make sure the excel spreadsheet hasn't auto-adjusted itself to miss a row. But adding 13/16 + 78/11 + 4 3/2 without converting to decimal? Pfft. You never do that once you leave elementary school. (Mixed fractions, lol.)
That's because you're talking to a doctor when you should be talking to a pharmacist. Preferably a clinical pharmacist, if it's important. The reason hospitals hire clinical pharmacists is because doctors know just enough about drugs to be able to prescribe them correctly, but when they get into trouble (try dosing a renally insufficient diabetic kid some time) they call in the big guns for advice.
Clinical pharmacists are more common on the west coast than the east coast (having originated in large part at UC San Francisco), but most major hospitals should have them if you have a question.
You could always pose a question to your community pharmacist or the person shoving drugs at you through the window at the hospital, but depending on how long they've been out of college, they might have forgotten their PK and physical chemistry and such.
>>An EB employee that does not toe the company line, does not write to please their editor, and has no opinion of their own which will inevitably creep into their work.... strange people EB employ, they appear not to be human?
They're employed to give as neutral an account as they can. Wikipedians have no such illusions, and so you'll see things like the NPR article attacking Fox News by using a fake study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Public_Radio#Defenders.27_rebuttals) or the Sacco and Vanzetti case, which has had its lead rewritten who knows how many times because of bias.
>>The power of Wikipedia is that it averages opinion/bias out of articles (mostly)
I guess. Indeed the Sacco and Vanzetti article, the lead now just says that "people disagree on their innocence", when it used to tilt more toward their innocence the last time I checked it.
I think more accurately, the bias represents whatever group cares most about the topic.
I work as an evaluator, doing data analysis of reams of data for school districts, and I won't pretend to be a "stats wizard" - my background is in computer science, though I have a fair bit of stats background - but I get appalled at what I see other evaluators doing.
On guy, who was presenting at the Federal Department of Education conference had his experimental group of teachers write a test, which they then took. Amazingly enough, they did better than the control group of teachers who took the same test. Other evaluators have teachers listen to a lecture and take a quiz based on the subjects covered on the lecture, and then give the same quiz to a control group. They also do better! Weird, huh? And this is probably the most common methodology used to demonstrate program success in DOE-funded programs today.
In other words, it is more methodology that appalls me than the stats - in part, because I believe all statistics are somewhat suspect. Do you think that the distribution of people that take tests really fall on a Gaussian? And yet most of the common statistical tests assume Gaussian distributions. Teachers will post the standard deviation of a test result (and use that to "grade on the curve") when the distribution doesn't resemble a bell curve at all.
Education, in general, doesn't work like administering a drug to the population.
I'm not (really) disagreeing with you. I just think that the economics of implementing mass transit over suburbs doesn't make sense; in an inner city, it does. When people are spread out, the costs of tunneling et cetera fall behind on the cost benefit ratio than with cars.
I do think the California High Speed Rail network is a good idea, and has the potential for getting a lot of cars off the road. Ironically enough, it's environmentalists that pose the biggest risk to the project, even though the impact of running a rail line through Pacheco Pass is going to be minimal compared with the impact of the number of cars they take off the road. It's paradoxical, and you see this kind of stuff everywhere - the Sierra Club shutting down Solar PV plants in the desert, for example, or Teddy Kennedy killing off-shore wind farms near his mansion.
I may be biased, as someone who drives between northern and southern California on a weekly basis, but I think high-speed rail should be quite viable, if managed correctly. And the HSR Committee does seem to be doing a good job. It may all turn out to be a pipe dream - mass transit is kind of one of those things that requires a lot of political will to make happen, even if the numbers are all working out right.
>>There is also a huge discrepancy between statistical significance and effectiveness, which the entire industry seems to not understand.
Or that the severity of atypicals is often worse than the problems it solves.
Not always, but often enough that people will refuse to take their anti-psych meds.
>>As is, I think this is really not very popular (all the people I know have a canon camera, none have installed CHDK vs. 25% of them have an iPhone and quite a few jailbroke them), so they have no reason to waste resources in fighting it.
You must have a different group of friends. Once when I was hiking, a friend of mine started talking about his awesome hacked firmware, and all three of us whipped out our Canons and had CHDK installed. =)
>>I use CHDK on my own Canon PowerShot. Good stuff.
Ditto. When I get bored waiting for an animal to do something, I play Daleks on my camera. It's awesome.
Well, I agree with you on most of your points. I'm just not sure that we can change out of a car-based city design now that we've had so much money, as you point out, invested into it. When I gave my talk on global warming, I asked the students what it would take to get them to take public transportation instead of using their cars, and something along the lines of "out of my cold dead hands" was given back. Cars are still too optimal for most people, even with a functioning mass transit system in place.
I agree with you that in places like Manhattan, there's really nothing else you can do with the roads, but places like the LA/OC metropolitan zone have plenty of land - if you place the region over England, you'll see it covers a region from London out to the sea to the east and south - which is also the problem. I think that lower population densities like that are (as you say) designed for cars, but also transitioning to mass transit systems are not practical.
>>Well I didn't come up with the term "tea baggers". They came up with the name themselves and talked about "tea bagging" people.
Uh, no. Tea Baggers was a term that Rachel Maddow / Keith Olberman and such came up for them. It's not complementary. I know a lot of people in the Tea Party movement, and they all think the term is somewhere between derogatory and silly.
>>The "movement" covers everything from tax reform to Libertarian policies to anti-Obama racism to incoherent anti-government paranoia.
I haven't seen any racism in the movement. In fact, I saw a bunch of Tea Partiers (who are quite anti-immigration through and through) marching alongside Mexican farm workers in Sacramento, fighting for water rights. In general, you could classify the movement as being Libertarian.
>>Public health care = evil, but I'm on Medicare so Medicare is fine. Public infrastructure = evil, but I like to drive so Interstate highways are fine.
Yeah. Watching Senator McCain attack public health care because it would cut Medicare was priceless.
>>In almost all encyclopedias, and other information sources each article is written by one person, and edited by one person.... is this not *more* likely to be biased ?
An EB employee or a random freeper or huffpo troll? I think the EB employee is probably going to be less biased.
>>In independent reviews the accuracy was on an equal level as other encyclopedias (Britannica)
Sure, but the real problem with wikipedia is with editor bias, not factual accuracy. In any vaguely politicized article on wikipedia, you'll see long running edit wars, which only get kinda/sorta resolved when they take a majority rules vote on it, which basically means that the majority of whoever is monitoring a page gets their bias put in.
If you don't agree with the groupthink, then your voice is excluded. This means that wikipedia, in a certain and very real sense, controls the cultural gestalt for, well, most of the civilized world. You'd almost expect more people to be fighting over controlling it.
>>Depending on how the rules for "world's fastest car" are written, how the aero is done determines how impressive this really is.
I guess. Even the world's fastest car will be doing between 0 and 10MPH in Los Angeles traffic if it can't fly.
I just don't see the point to taking an airplane, putting it on wheels, and spending effort trying to get it not to fly when it's doing 1000MPH.
Why not just get a supersonic fighter and have it tow a little unicycle along the salt flats?
>>I don't have a link or a literature reference for you. I don't know whether he published an unclassified paper about it, but if he did it shouldn't be hard to dig up.
Sounds kind of like a transputer. I think they even used it to run Conway's game of life.
I'm not arguing what he did was right, or even ethical.
What I'm saying is that overly strict security policies often have paradoxical effects which lower their security. Have a 60 digit password? Someone is writing that shit down next to their monitor, company policy to the contrary notwithstanding.