Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 1
But seriously, you can make statistics say anything.
Actually, you can't. There is nothing wrong with statistics in general, or even this guy's stats. The problem is the guy doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. He's taking a very specific, non-random sample, and fooling himself into thinking it is representative of the population as a whole. Thus, the only problem is in his boneheaded interpretation of the completely valid statistics he actually has.
I hate it when people rag on statistics -- statistics is not the problem: idiots that don't understand statistics are the problem.
(Your little anecdote, not to pick on you, is also fundamentally flawed for any purpose other than measuring the rate of employment of your friends in the CSI field -- can't relate it to the general graduate population, as it is not a random sample of graduates. It's a problem very much like the problem the author of the study makes.)
But your overall point, which seems to be not to trust statistics given to you, is correct, I would just much rather it was conveyed as: don't trust people who give you statistics unless you are confident they know what they are doing. The actual stats are rarely the problem.
The submitter of this story misses what is the biggest problem with nuclear power:
What to do with the waste?
A nation-wide nuclear system will generate hundreds of tons of the stuff. Yucca Mountain, should it be opened against the protests of the poor suckers who have it in their backyard, is already full with what waste we have waiting. As Yucca Mountain shows, it is rather difficult to bring new storage facility on line.
Without a comprehensive storage plan, we end up with stopgap measures and overfilled warehouses that lead to contamination.
I am certain there were old codgers (not saying your old) that were bemoaning the loss of inlfectional and declensional endings in Old English towards the end of the first millenium and beggining of the second. English used to inflect almost as much Latin. But the stress on the first syllable caused the inflections, at the end of the word, to be slowly obscured in the position of least stress.
Now, the loss of inflection is very big -- it changes a language form synthetic to analytic, which is quite a leap.
Guess what? English survived just fine. There is not a single living human that will chastise you for failing to properly decline your adjectives.
The fact that you must point out this who/whom distinction shows that the battle has already been lost. In 50-100 years there will be no distinction between them.
That's life. Langauges evolve.
(Mind you, I'm with you in spirit. I try very hard to use the right version of those words. But that is beside the point.)
Seriously folks, we're not just gonna wake up one day and find that all our favorite OS's have been outlawed.
Keep up the ostrich attitude and we will. Microsoft desires, and has purused before, exactly the scanrio that you outline. They thought they had what they wanted with the illegal, restrictive contracts with OEMs. But Linux/BSD et al. have still thrived. Microsoft has a lot of money -- with that money they can, and have, bought a lot of political friends.
They will try again.
That being said, I don't know enough about this initiative to have any idea if it is it.
I don't think your analysis is incorrect. SCO would own a copyright on their code. That would not mean they own the ideas -- that is exactly what copyright does not grant you. You get the right to make copies, but in exchange the ideas are given to the public (or at least that is how it was supposed to work, when the country was founded).
That is why SCO, MS, et al. keep their code a secret: if released to the public, the algorithms are fair game for all to use. Which is why SCO really has a hard time with their case, even if they don't know it -- since so much of the Unix kernel used to be wide open (if not free), the ideas contained therein are almost public domain. Copying the code verbatim would be wrong, but copying the algorithms and design would not.
We used to send paper files to Kodak to be put on spools of film (sort of like a spooled microfiche). What a PITA! But fairly durable. But the machine that read the films was old, there was not a replacement, and it always seemed like it was going to break down.
It was also pretty darn expensive to get the documents imaged.
I recently got laid off, and deciced to go back to school and finish my degree. In a painful bit of decision making, I decided I would turn my Computer Science work into a minor, and Major in Phyisics (which was my first choice, long ago, but I wimped out). It is stuff like this that makes me happy I did.
A really great Ask Slashdot. I will be buying Mr. Seife's book. It's the least I can do to reward the very nice effort that went into these insightful answers.
If I were to try one of these, and really liked it, then we would really have to begin a campaign to update or ditch the X Windows protocol. I think it is maxed out with three buttons, plus the two pretend buttons for vert. scrolling. It only allows for 5 buttons in the protocol.
Any way around it? I already have 6 buttons on a Logitech mouse, of which only 5 are useful
My problem with the smaller CCD isn't so much the quality. If I was flush in the money like I was a few years ago, I would have a D100 or D1X.
My problem is that if I were going to fork over the cash for a DSLR, I would be only getting a DSLR, no new lenses. I would thus be moving my wide-agle shooting (very important to me) from 24 to 36. That sucks.
I would also probably have to give up my F5, which most of the DSLR from Nikon have enough limitations that I am not yet fully comfortable so that I can do that.
Sony does not make SLRs for a the pro photographer, so they are nowhere near the same league as Nikon. Sony also uses the BS memory stick technology, which irks me. Lets reinvent a new proprietray solid state memory method, and ignore the existing open one! Yeah!
So this is news, to some degree, esp. given the range of WiFi. But it ain't big news, and it is not a holy grail for the great majority of would-be digital photographers.
I am mixed on the 4/3 stuff. It is really nice, and it would be cool to see it take off. OTOH, I have several grand in 35mm lenses that would become useless if I were to buy a Nikon 4/3 camera. That I really don't like.
I guess I would really like a full-frame CMOS sensor. But it may be just stupid expensive to produce, without enough technical benefit. Contax, or somebody, makes one, but it is a $10,000 camera. And the review I have read about it were underwhelming.
I have thousands of dollars invested in Nikon lenses and film SLRs. I have been waiting eagerly for their flagship successor to the D1, D1X and D1H, the D2.
Well, now it is here. The WiFi attachment is neat, but it is really for very niche market (sports photojournalists), and not something I would ever use in my photography. And knowing Nikon, it will cost another $300 to a $1000 to buy, in addition to a very expensive camera.
The other specs mentioned don't seem all that impressive, compared to the D1H or the latest digital Canon SLRs. I am saddened. I suspect this will be another $5000 dollar camera, like the previous D1s were. A bigger CMOS sensor, to eliminate the 'crop factor' with standard 35mm lenses would have been much more useful to me. Or a Sub $2000 price point.
Sigh. Looks like my digital change-over will have to wait even longer.
The real question becomes how much pollution/waste is created by using fossile fuel in a car, vs. how much is made per kilowatt/hour at an electrical power plant.
The efficiency of the elctrical engine in the car is quite high, I'm sure. But one also needs to take into account the ifficiency of the electrical power plant that is the true source of power.
This car is zero emission. But it is powered by an electrical power plant that is not zero emission. One also needs to take into account the entire life cycle of the energy (eg, pulling oil from the earth, refining, shiping, burning vs. pulling coal from the ground, shiping, burning, transmitting electrical byproduct).
So how do the emissions of the two compare? I would not be at all surprised if this car was the clear winner in the environment category, but we need to ask the question the right way. Sure, it beats a gas car, but so what? We need to know the whole picture.
So, they have a (quite possibly bogus) set of account info, and an IP address. My machine serves up internet access for 3 different machines, run by me, my wife, and my mother-in-law.
There is also the possibility that I have been cracked, and that someone degenerate from Buttrumpistan is using my machine, unbeknownst to me.
So how does the RIAA prove it was me, or my wife, or whomever, at the keyboard?
The short-sighted Supreme Court has just set a precedent, and I wonder if they even know it. And it has nothing to do with filters or porn.
We now have the precedent that a certain social, legal practice (in this case, no porn in libraries), has been mandated to be solved by a technology-based solution. As Lessig said (I have read second hand), we have relegated a criminial justice or exective branch type job to a piece of code.
They could have said: libraries must disallow porn on the internet. Instead, they said libraries must use porn filter software. Will this start a new legal trend on the 'net? Will it spill over into the real world? What about 'cars must not be allowed to exceed the speed limit' rather than 'speeding is illegal?'
It strikes me as a really dumb ruling, and one whose negative consequences we might still be living with decades hence.
Whats ironic is that Boltzmann first came up with this idea, and Planck was one of his primary detractors. Boltzmann, despondent that nobody found his description of a probabilistic interpretation of things interesting, killed himself.
Not long after, Planck came forward using Boltzmann's ideas. There is some evidence to show that Planck's true hope was that he would be proved wrong -- he didn't like the quanta or probability interpretation at all.
We don't ever 'throw a theory out the window' in physics unless it was completely useless and silly to begin with.
Newton was, conceptually, completely wrong on some important points when he came up with his ideas of gravity. Did we throw his theory out the window when Einstein came up with Relativity? Heck no! Any useful scientific theory predicts something. Things like Newtonian physics are extremely useful, and to a large degree, correct at describing every day phenomenon. It was a requirement on the theory of relativity that it in some way incorporate, or reduce to, Newtonian physics.
Any GUT theory will have to do this. We won't really be throwing anything out the window, just adding to our knowledge. In same cases (eg Newton), even though the older theory is wrong, it is still very widely used because at the velocities, masses, and energies of every day life on earth, it is quite accurate.
If we find some way to replace QM, or incorporate gravity and QM, then relativity and the Shroedinger equation will both have to somehow be a part of the new theory, because the both accurately describe the universe.
Am I the only one that found some of the article's tone, and the cooking analogies, a bit sexist? I don't think the oven stuff at the end would have made it into the article if this work was being done by a man.
As a student of physics, this is still a bit beyond me, but I'll be there soon. Things like this pop up occasionally -- most disappear. The theory has to make predictions that can be tested and verified. Just getting QM and gravity together mathematically is not enough.
I found it odd that NYT would publish what basically amounts to a sales pitch for this guy's software. I was thinking as I read the article, 'gee this guy is a bit out of touch with reality... oh, wait, he wrote software that does this! He is just trying to sell it!'
The last bit, about Windows being a good ol' monopoly, makes me laugh. I would like to see how benevolent he finds them if his idea is any good (which seems like a real long shot, his idea seems so like so much drivel). If it did turn out that his software was all the rage, would he still like the M$ monopoly when Gates and Co. create a knock-off of his stuff, bundle it free with Windows, and run him out of business?
Something tells me he would change his tune then...
The article is interesting, but really only to physcis students with a no budget for interesting experiments.
As for that "electrons usually travel at two thirds the speed of light" nonsense, who is the editor?
I have calculated the drift speed of electrons myself (you could too, it isn't hard). It depends on a couple factors, but the normal US 120V circuit humming along at maximum capacity (15 A) has an electron drift speed along the wire *orders of magnitude* lower that 2/3*c. I don't remember the exact number, but it was something likt 6 CM per hour! Eg, a snail moves faster.
The e/m field propation is at the speed of light, not the electron motion. Perhaps he didn't meant drift speed. Individual electrons can and do move much faster, but their paths are quite random, in all directions. The aggregate speed comes out very low.
n = (speed of light in vacuum)/(speed of light in medium),
or n = c/cmed
Now, convenctional wisdom and all modern science says c is always the bigger value, so n is always >= 1, but positive. How the heck does one get a negative refractivity? Niether of these quantities should be signed, let alone oppositely signed, right? What is meant by negative refractivity?
Cool story (of course, lucky you weren't on phone when that bolt came, you'd be dead).
But for posterity: VOLTS don't go anwhere, volts aren't dangerous. Voltage is just the electric potential difference between two points. The thing that you mean to talk about is *current* (measured in Amps). That is the actual amount of charge down the wire. That is what will kill you.
Slashdot Mirror
But seriously, you can make statistics say anything.
Actually, you can't. There is nothing wrong with statistics in general, or even this guy's stats. The problem is the guy doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. He's taking a very specific, non-random sample, and fooling himself into thinking it is representative of the population as a whole. Thus, the only problem is in his boneheaded interpretation of the completely valid statistics he actually has.
I hate it when people rag on statistics -- statistics is not the problem: idiots that don't understand statistics are the problem.
(Your little anecdote, not to pick on you, is also fundamentally flawed for any purpose other than measuring the rate of employment of your friends in the CSI field -- can't relate it to the general graduate population, as it is not a random sample of graduates. It's a problem very much like the problem the author of the study makes.)
But your overall point, which seems to be not to trust statistics given to you, is correct, I would just much rather it was conveyed as: don't trust people who give you statistics unless you are confident they know what they are doing. The actual stats are rarely the problem.
The submitter of this story misses what is the biggest problem with nuclear power:
What to do with the waste? A nation-wide nuclear system will generate hundreds of tons of the stuff. Yucca Mountain, should it be opened against the protests of the poor suckers who have it in their backyard, is already full with what waste we have waiting. As Yucca Mountain shows, it is rather difficult to bring new storage facility on line.
Without a comprehensive storage plan, we end up with stopgap measures and overfilled warehouses that lead to contamination.
It depends on how old your New York lock is. The new ones have the flat key.
Mine is 5+ years old, it has the tubular key. It is completely vulnerable. And it is most certainly a New York lock.
So you are right for the newer New Yorks, but not all of them.
Argh. Now I need a new lock.
I am certain there were old codgers (not saying your old) that were bemoaning the loss of inlfectional and declensional endings in Old English towards the end of the first millenium and beggining of the second. English used to inflect almost as much Latin. But the stress on the first syllable caused the inflections, at the end of the word, to be slowly obscured in the position of least stress.
Now, the loss of inflection is very big -- it changes a language form synthetic to analytic, which is quite a leap.
Guess what? English survived just fine. There is not a single living human that will chastise you for failing to properly decline your adjectives.
The fact that you must point out this who/whom distinction shows that the battle has already been lost. In 50-100 years there will be no distinction between them.
That's life. Langauges evolve.
(Mind you, I'm with you in spirit. I try very hard to use the right version of those words. But that is beside the point.)
Seriously folks, we're not just gonna wake up one day and find that all our favorite OS's have been outlawed.
Keep up the ostrich attitude and we will. Microsoft desires, and has purused before, exactly the scanrio that you outline. They thought they had what they wanted with the illegal, restrictive contracts with OEMs. But Linux/BSD et al. have still thrived. Microsoft has a lot of money -- with that money they can, and have, bought a lot of political friends.
They will try again.
That being said, I don't know enough about this initiative to have any idea if it is it.
I don't think your analysis is incorrect. SCO would own a copyright on their code. That would not mean they own the ideas -- that is exactly what copyright does not grant you. You get the right to make copies, but in exchange the ideas are given to the public (or at least that is how it was supposed to work, when the country was founded).
That is why SCO, MS, et al. keep their code a secret: if released to the public, the algorithms are fair game for all to use. Which is why SCO really has a hard time with their case, even if they don't know it -- since so much of the Unix kernel used to be wide open (if not free), the ideas contained therein are almost public domain. Copying the code verbatim would be wrong, but copying the algorithms and design would not.
Isn't this the same idea as using lex and yacc? Granted, most folks think of using those for compilers, but they can be used to do anything.
In fact, one of the chapters in Lex and Yacc from O'Reilly is a "menu generation language" to automate the tedious task of writing curses interfaces.
Am I missing something? Lex and Yacc have been around for decades.
We used to send paper files to Kodak to be put on spools of film (sort of like a spooled microfiche). What a PITA! But fairly durable. But the machine that read the films was old, there was not a replacement, and it always seemed like it was going to break down.
It was also pretty darn expensive to get the documents imaged.
I agree wholeheartedly.
I recently got laid off, and deciced to go back to school and finish my degree. In a painful bit of decision making, I decided I would turn my Computer Science work into a minor, and Major in Phyisics (which was my first choice, long ago, but I wimped out). It is stuff like this that makes me happy I did.
A really great Ask Slashdot. I will be buying Mr. Seife's book. It's the least I can do to reward the very nice effort that went into these insightful answers.
If I were to try one of these, and really liked it, then we would really have to begin a campaign to update or ditch the X Windows protocol. I think it is maxed out with three buttons, plus the two pretend buttons for vert. scrolling. It only allows for 5 buttons in the protocol.
Any way around it? I already have 6 buttons on a Logitech mouse, of which only 5 are useful
My problem with the smaller CCD isn't so much the quality. If I was flush in the money like I was a few years ago, I would have a D100 or D1X.
My problem is that if I were going to fork over the cash for a DSLR, I would be only getting a DSLR, no new lenses. I would thus be moving my wide-agle shooting (very important to me) from 24 to 36. That sucks.
I would also probably have to give up my F5, which most of the DSLR from Nikon have enough limitations that I am not yet fully comfortable so that I can do that.
Sony does not make SLRs for a the pro photographer, so they are nowhere near the same league as Nikon. Sony also uses the BS memory stick technology, which irks me. Lets reinvent a new proprietray solid state memory method, and ignore the existing open one! Yeah!
So this is news, to some degree, esp. given the range of WiFi. But it ain't big news, and it is not a holy grail for the great majority of would-be digital photographers.
I am mixed on the 4/3 stuff. It is really nice, and it would be cool to see it take off. OTOH, I have several grand in 35mm lenses that would become useless if I were to buy a Nikon 4/3 camera. That I really don't like.
I guess I would really like a full-frame CMOS sensor. But it may be just stupid expensive to produce, without enough technical benefit. Contax, or somebody, makes one, but it is a $10,000 camera. And the review I have read about it were underwhelming.
I have thousands of dollars invested in Nikon lenses and film SLRs. I have been waiting eagerly for their flagship successor to the D1, D1X and D1H, the D2.
Well, now it is here. The WiFi attachment is neat, but it is really for very niche market (sports photojournalists), and not something I would ever use in my photography. And knowing Nikon, it will cost another $300 to a $1000 to buy, in addition to a very expensive camera.
The other specs mentioned don't seem all that impressive, compared to the D1H or the latest digital Canon SLRs. I am saddened. I suspect this will be another $5000 dollar camera, like the previous D1s were. A bigger CMOS sensor, to eliminate the 'crop factor' with standard 35mm lenses would have been much more useful to me. Or a Sub $2000 price point.
Sigh. Looks like my digital change-over will have to wait even longer.
The real question becomes how much pollution/waste is created by using fossile fuel in a car, vs. how much is made per kilowatt/hour at an electrical power plant.
The efficiency of the elctrical engine in the car is quite high, I'm sure. But one also needs to take into account the ifficiency of the electrical power plant that is the true source of power.
This car is zero emission. But it is powered by an electrical power plant that is not zero emission. One also needs to take into account the entire life cycle of the energy (eg, pulling oil from the earth, refining, shiping, burning vs. pulling coal from the ground, shiping, burning, transmitting electrical byproduct).
So how do the emissions of the two compare? I would not be at all surprised if this car was the clear winner in the environment category, but we need to ask the question the right way. Sure, it beats a gas car, but so what? We need to know the whole picture.
So, they have a (quite possibly bogus) set of account info, and an IP address. My machine serves up internet access for 3 different machines, run by me, my wife, and my mother-in-law.
There is also the possibility that I have been cracked, and that someone degenerate from Buttrumpistan is using my machine, unbeknownst to me.
So how does the RIAA prove it was me, or my wife, or whomever, at the keyboard?
The short-sighted Supreme Court has just set a precedent, and I wonder if they even know it. And it has nothing to do with filters or porn.
We now have the precedent that a certain social, legal practice (in this case, no porn in libraries), has been mandated to be solved by a technology-based solution. As Lessig said (I have read second hand), we have relegated a criminial justice or exective branch type job to a piece of code.
They could have said: libraries must disallow porn on the internet. Instead, they said libraries must use porn filter software. Will this start a new legal trend on the 'net? Will it spill over into the real world? What about 'cars must not be allowed to exceed the speed limit' rather than 'speeding is illegal?'
It strikes me as a really dumb ruling, and one whose negative consequences we might still be living with decades hence.
Don't you hate that crap?
..."
"We can't trust technology, look how often Windows Crashes
Sure, Windows does crash a lot. But the software that flies the stealth fighter or the space shuttle rarely, if ever, crashes.
Darn Microsoft, and poor software engineering in general, gave the Luddites so much ammunition.
Tim
PS -> Although I am not saying this technology will be easy to implement, just that the computer crashing argument is silly.
Whats ironic is that Boltzmann first came up with this idea, and Planck was one of his primary detractors. Boltzmann, despondent that nobody found his description of a probabilistic interpretation of things interesting, killed himself.
Not long after, Planck came forward using Boltzmann's ideas. There is some evidence to show that Planck's true hope was that he would be proved wrong -- he didn't like the quanta or probability interpretation at all.
Tim
We don't ever 'throw a theory out the window' in physics unless it was completely useless and silly to begin with.
Newton was, conceptually, completely wrong on some important points when he came up with his ideas of gravity. Did we throw his theory out the window when Einstein came up with Relativity? Heck no! Any useful scientific theory predicts something. Things like Newtonian physics are extremely useful, and to a large degree, correct at describing every day phenomenon. It was a requirement on the theory of relativity that it in some way incorporate, or reduce to, Newtonian physics.
Any GUT theory will have to do this. We won't really be throwing anything out the window, just adding to our knowledge. In same cases (eg Newton), even though the older theory is wrong, it is still very widely used because at the velocities, masses, and energies of every day life on earth, it is quite accurate.
If we find some way to replace QM, or incorporate gravity and QM, then relativity and the Shroedinger equation will both have to somehow be a part of the new theory, because the both accurately describe the universe.
Tim
Am I the only one that found some of the article's tone, and the cooking analogies, a bit sexist? I don't think the oven stuff at the end would have made it into the article if this work was being done by a man.
As a student of physics, this is still a bit beyond me, but I'll be there soon. Things like this pop up occasionally -- most disappear. The theory has to make predictions that can be tested and verified. Just getting QM and gravity together mathematically is not enough.
Tim
I found it odd that NYT would publish what basically amounts to a sales pitch for this guy's software. I was thinking as I read the article, 'gee this guy is a bit out of touch with reality ... oh, wait, he wrote software that does this! He is just trying to sell it!'
...
The last bit, about Windows being a good ol' monopoly, makes me laugh. I would like to see how benevolent he finds them if his idea is any good (which seems like a real long shot, his idea seems so like so much drivel). If it did turn out that his software was all the rage, would he still like the M$ monopoly when Gates and Co. create a knock-off of his stuff, bundle it free with Windows, and run him out of business?
Something tells me he would change his tune then
Tim
The article is interesting, but really only to physcis students with a no budget for interesting experiments.
As for that "electrons usually travel at two thirds the speed of light" nonsense, who is the editor?
I have calculated the drift speed of electrons myself (you could too, it isn't hard). It depends on a couple factors, but the normal US 120V circuit humming along at maximum capacity (15 A) has an electron drift speed along the wire *orders of magnitude* lower that 2/3*c. I don't remember the exact number, but it was something likt 6 CM per hour! Eg, a snail moves faster.
The e/m field propation is at the speed of light, not the electron motion. Perhaps he didn't meant drift speed. Individual electrons can and do move much faster, but their paths are quite random, in all directions. The aggregate speed comes out very low.
Tim
I thought the index of refraction was defined as:
n = (speed of light in vacuum)/(speed of light in medium),
or n = c/cmed
Now, convenctional wisdom and all modern science says c is always the bigger value, so n is always >= 1, but positive. How the heck does one get a negative refractivity? Niether of these quantities should be signed, let alone oppositely signed, right? What is meant by negative refractivity?
Tim
Cool story (of course, lucky you weren't on
phone when that bolt came, you'd be dead).
But for posterity: VOLTS don't go anwhere, volts
aren't dangerous. Voltage is just the electric
potential difference between two points. The
thing that you mean to talk about is *current*
(measured in Amps). That is the actual amount of
charge down the wire. That is what will kill you.