Matlab is great, but my god the language is cumbersome. More so than R, though less than SAS. Also, it costs money, and I'm cheap. So, I'm wondering if this could be worked into R somehow. Since R seems to execute code in a single tread sort of manner (I say, knowing just enough to be dangerous about these matters), each wee bit of speed is a godsent.
How many Football Fields per television season(Germany) did it move? And could they provide the concrete surface in upper-east side Manhattan apartment floor equivalents? Inquiring minds want to know. I know the calculations are difficult, but with modern computers able to handle thousands of Libraries of Congress per commercial flight from New York to L.A., I'm sure they could have managed it.
That's fine, because I did RTFA to find out, except no where in the article did they say what it was for. All we know is that they dug a very big hole, and they used a load of cheesy metrics to compare.
Well, my first response would be to say `who says badgers don't have morality?` We know dogs have something approximating a sense of fairness. There's a lot of middle ground between extreme anthropomorphizing and assuming all other animals are thoughtless, emotionless meat machines.
And it's worth noting that natural selection can work on ideas just as well as other replicators. Look up the literature on `Memes` if you'd like to know more.
If all are bastards, it generally doesn't lead to the species dying - instead it merely leads to the species being non-social. And being non-social isn't a terrible thing evolutionarily, since the overwhelming majority of species across time have probably been a-social. The selection never really becomes against the species or clade, but instead against the underlying trait.
As for your political extension, I've little comment beyond the fact that natural selection applies to ideas as well as other traits, such as genetics.
This is a surprisingly pervasive idea, but one that's critically flawed. What you described is commonly called group selection, and aside from a few nutters hanging on, the concensus is that while group selection can happen, its strength is far less than that of selection on the individual, or more appropriately, their genes. It's now trivially easy to do the formal mathematical analysis to show that group selection must be weaker than selection on the individual, and it's something I've seen graduate students do as part of their course work. But a thought experiment can be equally convincing.
Consider you have a population of individuals who sacrifice for the greater good of the species - the spotted weevil lemming. Each so often, individuals must hurl themselves off a cliff ala the urban legend to keep their habitat from being too degraded. Their offspring may benefit, but they benefit far less than the cost to the individual, so kin selection isn't at play here. That situation is only stable so long as there is no mutation. The moment one mutant pops up who doesn't jump off the cliff, the whole thing will fall apart. That cheater will reap massive benefits, and its fitness will be greatly increased. In turn, it will have loads of mutant offspring, who carry the cheating trait. Rapidly, the strategy goes to to crap because selection favours the cheaters.
There are some folks out there who still cling to group selection (I'm looking at you, DS Wilson), but largely it's considered a non-controversy now. The consensus among evolutionary biologists and behavioural ecologists is that group selection (now re-branded `clade selection`) is weak to non-existent compared to lower levels of selection. You need but look at the massive blowback E.O. Wilson got on his recent pile of faec^H^H^H^Hpublication in Nature to see damaged group selection is as an idea.
Your objection is laughable. Without even going back a million years, I can give you fossil series from old world savanna Alces gallicus, and from Alces latifrons to Alces alces. I know equus (horses) can boast a similarly robust fossil series. So can a number of other taxa. But you know what? Even if we never found a single fossil, ever, the evidence for evolution would be robust - There's biogeography, there's genetics, there's morphometics, there's observed natural selection in the modern world, and so on. One need but google "Evidence for evolution" to be bombarded with so much rigorous scientific evidence as to simply overwhelm any braying to the contrary.
But it'll never be enough. We could find every fossil, sequence every genome, and compile so much evidence it would collapse a library, and people are still going to reject evolution. It's rarely a rational thing, and more often than not it's predicated on misinformation and other beliefs. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, just for a moment, that your objection isn't born out of religious fervor, but that would mean that you're instead woefully misinformed.
Topgear is entertainment mixed with factual information. The problem is that the two aren't clearly delineated. Are the challenges scripted as hell? Yes. But other segments can be far more ambiguous. Apparently, I'm crazy for thinking the power-laps and the car reviews weren't scripted in advance, and any problems that crop up legitimately crop up. What Tesla is alleging is no matter how wonderful the car was, Top Gear was going to say it broke. To me, as a viewer, it was definitely not clear the Tesla review was entertainment and not factual.
That said, I still like Top Gear. I'm just going to be way more skeptical about anything they say about a car, ever. Maybe the Morris Marinas is a great car, afterall.
Creationists (and other ill minded ilk) seem to miss that this was the big revolution not just for abiogenesis. Suddenly organic compounds were in easy reach of inorganic reactions. This was really relevant for both biologists interested in the origin of life, but also people interested in organic chemistry basic research at the time. I was 'introduced' to this experiment twice in college - the first time was in biology, where you'd expect. But the second time was in organic chemistry.
If creationists followed any research at all, they wouldn't be creationists. Instead, they have a selective filter on the knowledge they gain, and cling to objections that were answered in the 1800s.
But yes. The Miller experiment didn't get the atmosphere right (probably - there are labs that still debate this). But that doesn't do much to lessen the impact of the experiment - organic compounds still form easily under a variety of conditions. Later work has shown that the universe has quite a bit of them hanging around on the odd comet and so on. Even if the atmosphere was wrong (which it probably is, but again, there are some labs that debate this) organics formed much easier than anyone thought before that point.
That is, without a doubt, the worst business card I've ever seen. Maybe he does well for himself, but if someone handed me that - be it a vendor or whoever - I would toss it. I'm not carrying around your billboard. And that card makes him look like a giant, pompous jerk with an ego the size of Jupiter.
Science fail. The nearest star to our sun is a 'mere' 4 light years away. There are 25 on this list that are less than 11.7 Light years away. Still a hell of a trip, but once you're up to some appreciable % of C, it starts looking like you could fit in a trip within a human's lifespan. In fact, if you get up to a high % of C, time dilation kicks in and you could see most of the observable universe within a life-time (says Michio Kaku - YMMV)
I've talked to a number of Canadian researchers, and they've also commented on this. I personally never had to do textbook questions in the US (At least not for graded work), but I'm told it's become quite common. Which is laziness, pure and simple.
One other thing I've heard Canucks comment on is extra-credit - apparently it's far more common in the US than Canada. I'm curious if you've seen differences between the US and UK about the amount of "Extra Credit" work available in an average class?
Most lab reports should also be impossible to pass off as anyone but your own - the results are too unique for each person. Someone tried to make up their own values for the lab report in a lab I took back in my undergrad, and they were easily caught when the TA looked at the distribution of the results. And if you're required to report raw data too? The time you'll spend trying to cheat on the lab report, you might as well have done it yourself. And any time you ask a student to explain their work (especially verbally) you can really separate those who know the material and those who c/p-ing.
#2 must be c/p'ed code or something similar. I can believe that - it's too easy to find code that way. I really can't see how people are cheating on engineering work unless lecturers have become phenomenally lazy in the last decade. Most of the stuff I ended up doing was "Here is unique problem X. Students need to come up with a solution or a method to produce a solution." sort of work. Aside from working with another student (which isn't effective, but often isn't forbidden) how the heck could you i-E-Cyber-Web-Cheat-Net on that?
+1. Do we need a new word for each technology? When people invented the Xerox machine, did people start talking about "Photo-cheating?"
In any event, most of the 'cheating' measures are only useful in the more vacuous subjects. In most most of the hard topics, it's easy enough to see if student know material in short form ("Finish in the following: Glucose 6-phosephate is rearranged into Fructose 6-phosphate by _____") and in long form, slightly trickier, but you can generally filter the bulk of cheats by simply asking students some intelligent questions about their papers verbally. It's just that many people have got horribly lazy, or have been forced to lecture unreasonably large classrooms, or both.
This is exactly why I feel so divided about Wikileaks. On one hand, corruption needs the full light of day, and this provides whistleblowers with everything they need to expose things that shouldn't be kept secret. I like that. I like the idea that information wants to be free.
But on the other hand, this cables leak has not really exposed anything for anyone. Nothing of real consequence, anyhow. And instead, its cast a pall on the whole process of whistle blowing, and in a few cases - such as this - actively made things worse for freedom. People who argue that Mugabe is just acting in his nature are missing the point. Let's say some thug is on the street. He's prone to starting fights. You walk up and say another guy he doesn't already like talked smack about his mama. Yes, the thug is acting in his nature, but it doesn't change the fact that you instigated the fight that quite possibly wouldn't have happened absent your actions. Except instead of a street brawl, we're talking about political reforms in Zimbabwe. Things that have the possibility of effecting tons of people in the process.
Given the stated sizes of his classes, the professor has quite the data set to work with. Having around 1,000 students a year for 10 years gives you a very good set of priors for comparing normal student behaviour. From there, all he needs to do is look at performance over time, coupled by the student's ability to reproduce their work in the replacement midterm. With the sorts of numbers involved, I'd imagine you could probably assign students to cheater or non-cheater categories with a very high likelihood.Yes, you'd never have 100% certainty, but you don't need 100% certainty in a court of law, nor do you need it for dropkicking a cheating bastard out of your course so hard their head spins.
If I have to explain how circulating a what's basically a copy of the test before the test without the professor's permission is cheating, I might break down crying.
If you listen to Iron Man 2's commentary, the director(?) also comments on this at length. At the lower resolution, you can get by with a lot less than you can with the greater resolution where things' artificial nature really stands out. Additionally, the director was pointing out things from production that only stood out like a sore thumb at the greater resolution.
This. Before I went into science, I did automation engineering (think factories with robots). A lot of that is fluid power. And any person working with hydraulics worth their salt would tell you that depending on factors, most hydraulic system fluids will compress between.5 and 1 percent per thousand PSI. So, when I took physics, and they told me that fluids aren't compressible, I objected. The instructor told me that sure, fluids change volume, but only in weird pressures like near vacuums and absurd pressures. To which I pointed out most of the universe is a very low pressure, dotted with spots of exceptionally high pressures. STP ain't standard for anyone but people on the top of the crust of moderate mass rocky planets (and even then, not all of them).
I've been doing work in one of those 'embarrassingly parallel' problems, using the previous iteration of the mac pro, and I know that a number of other people in my department are as well. As a pure guess, I'd figure the department buys at least one to one and a half mac pro a year; if you were to multiply that across all universities of comparable size, you would have something larger than a niche market (though, obviously graphic artists and the like probably outnumber us).
But otherwise, yes, your point is a good one - this is not a computer for Jane-Computer-User, unless she's working on some non-trivial calculations. And I would suspect how many people underestimate the number of problems there are like that outside the home computing niche.
I think the problem is that Republicans (I speak as if they're a vague monolithic organization) feel they have to go gangbusters on the war, no matter what. Because it started under their tenure as president. Democrats (generalization!) feel like that they have to support it, or else risk alienating voters by appearing 'soft' on security.
And the public is very distractable, is the problem. It seems like political views are more hereditary now, instead of come to through introspection. I think you got a good point about there being nothing to we little people can do to decrease foreign intervetion. But I guess what I'd say is that maybe we can try to lessen the effects of foreign intervention. Give money to try and help the people who's country/lives have gone to hell in a hand-basket. I'm not sure what NPOs are doing work in Afganistan and Iraq...
I find this all sorts of appalling. As someone else who started watching it said, "That's really screwed up." But that said, I have almost no hope that this will ever go anywhere. We've seen a seemingly never ending parade of illegal and barbaric behaviour come to light in both Iraq and Afghanistan, on the part of US forces, but each time nothing ever happens because of it. We all seem to just shrug our shoulders and go on with our lives.
Wikileaks is just peeing into the wind. Nothing will probably come of this, because outrage is dead.
I'm really hoping someone proves my cynical attitude wrong.
By that logic, we should expose people's germ-line to ionizing radiation radiation to `open up search space.`
No, colour blindness is a broken trait, which are expected to exist under natural selection, because purging them is devilishly tricky. And they keep popping up because the mutation rate for us deuterostomes is sufficiently high.
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Matlab is great, but my god the language is cumbersome. More so than R, though less than SAS. Also, it costs money, and I'm cheap. So, I'm wondering if this could be worked into R somehow. Since R seems to execute code in a single tread sort of manner (I say, knowing just enough to be dangerous about these matters), each wee bit of speed is a godsent.
How many Football Fields per television season(Germany) did it move? And could they provide the concrete surface in upper-east side Manhattan apartment floor equivalents? Inquiring minds want to know. I know the calculations are difficult, but with modern computers able to handle thousands of Libraries of Congress per commercial flight from New York to L.A., I'm sure they could have managed it.
That's fine, because I did RTFA to find out, except no where in the article did they say what it was for. All we know is that they dug a very big hole, and they used a load of cheesy metrics to compare.
Well, my first response would be to say `who says badgers don't have morality?` We know dogs have something approximating a sense of fairness. There's a lot of middle ground between extreme anthropomorphizing and assuming all other animals are thoughtless, emotionless meat machines.
And it's worth noting that natural selection can work on ideas just as well as other replicators. Look up the literature on `Memes` if you'd like to know more.
If all are bastards, it generally doesn't lead to the species dying - instead it merely leads to the species being non-social. And being non-social isn't a terrible thing evolutionarily, since the overwhelming majority of species across time have probably been a-social. The selection never really becomes against the species or clade, but instead against the underlying trait.
As for your political extension, I've little comment beyond the fact that natural selection applies to ideas as well as other traits, such as genetics.
This is a surprisingly pervasive idea, but one that's critically flawed. What you described is commonly called group selection, and aside from a few nutters hanging on, the concensus is that while group selection can happen, its strength is far less than that of selection on the individual, or more appropriately, their genes. It's now trivially easy to do the formal mathematical analysis to show that group selection must be weaker than selection on the individual, and it's something I've seen graduate students do as part of their course work. But a thought experiment can be equally convincing.
Consider you have a population of individuals who sacrifice for the greater good of the species - the spotted weevil lemming. Each so often, individuals must hurl themselves off a cliff ala the urban legend to keep their habitat from being too degraded. Their offspring may benefit, but they benefit far less than the cost to the individual, so kin selection isn't at play here. That situation is only stable so long as there is no mutation. The moment one mutant pops up who doesn't jump off the cliff, the whole thing will fall apart. That cheater will reap massive benefits, and its fitness will be greatly increased. In turn, it will have loads of mutant offspring, who carry the cheating trait. Rapidly, the strategy goes to to crap because selection favours the cheaters.
There are some folks out there who still cling to group selection (I'm looking at you, DS Wilson), but largely it's considered a non-controversy now. The consensus among evolutionary biologists and behavioural ecologists is that group selection (now re-branded `clade selection`) is weak to non-existent compared to lower levels of selection. You need but look at the massive blowback E.O. Wilson got on his recent pile of faec^H^H^H^Hpublication in Nature to see damaged group selection is as an idea.
Your objection is laughable. Without even going back a million years, I can give you fossil series from old world savanna Alces gallicus, and from Alces latifrons to Alces alces. I know equus (horses) can boast a similarly robust fossil series. So can a number of other taxa. But you know what? Even if we never found a single fossil, ever, the evidence for evolution would be robust - There's biogeography, there's genetics, there's morphometics, there's observed natural selection in the modern world, and so on. One need but google "Evidence for evolution" to be bombarded with so much rigorous scientific evidence as to simply overwhelm any braying to the contrary.
But it'll never be enough. We could find every fossil, sequence every genome, and compile so much evidence it would collapse a library, and people are still going to reject evolution. It's rarely a rational thing, and more often than not it's predicated on misinformation and other beliefs. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, just for a moment, that your objection isn't born out of religious fervor, but that would mean that you're instead woefully misinformed.
Evolution is a theory, and a fact.Faith, to be blunt, doesn't enter into it.
Topgear is entertainment mixed with factual information. The problem is that the two aren't clearly delineated. Are the challenges scripted as hell? Yes. But other segments can be far more ambiguous. Apparently, I'm crazy for thinking the power-laps and the car reviews weren't scripted in advance, and any problems that crop up legitimately crop up. What Tesla is alleging is no matter how wonderful the car was, Top Gear was going to say it broke. To me, as a viewer, it was definitely not clear the Tesla review was entertainment and not factual.
That said, I still like Top Gear. I'm just going to be way more skeptical about anything they say about a car, ever. Maybe the Morris Marinas is a great car, afterall.
People need to Mod this up.
Creationists (and other ill minded ilk) seem to miss that this was the big revolution not just for abiogenesis. Suddenly organic compounds were in easy reach of inorganic reactions. This was really relevant for both biologists interested in the origin of life, but also people interested in organic chemistry basic research at the time. I was 'introduced' to this experiment twice in college - the first time was in biology, where you'd expect. But the second time was in organic chemistry.
If creationists followed any research at all, they wouldn't be creationists. Instead, they have a selective filter on the knowledge they gain, and cling to objections that were answered in the 1800s.
But yes. The Miller experiment didn't get the atmosphere right (probably - there are labs that still debate this). But that doesn't do much to lessen the impact of the experiment - organic compounds still form easily under a variety of conditions. Later work has shown that the universe has quite a bit of them hanging around on the odd comet and so on. Even if the atmosphere was wrong (which it probably is, but again, there are some labs that debate this) organics formed much easier than anyone thought before that point.
That is, without a doubt, the worst business card I've ever seen. Maybe he does well for himself, but if someone handed me that - be it a vendor or whoever - I would toss it. I'm not carrying around your billboard. And that card makes him look like a giant, pompous jerk with an ego the size of Jupiter.
Science fail. The nearest star to our sun is a 'mere' 4 light years away. There are 25 on this list that are less than 11.7 Light years away. Still a hell of a trip, but once you're up to some appreciable % of C, it starts looking like you could fit in a trip within a human's lifespan. In fact, if you get up to a high % of C, time dilation kicks in and you could see most of the observable universe within a life-time (says Michio Kaku - YMMV)
I've talked to a number of Canadian researchers, and they've also commented on this. I personally never had to do textbook questions in the US (At least not for graded work), but I'm told it's become quite common. Which is laziness, pure and simple.
One other thing I've heard Canucks comment on is extra-credit - apparently it's far more common in the US than Canada. I'm curious if you've seen differences between the US and UK about the amount of "Extra Credit" work available in an average class?
Most lab reports should also be impossible to pass off as anyone but your own - the results are too unique for each person. Someone tried to make up their own values for the lab report in a lab I took back in my undergrad, and they were easily caught when the TA looked at the distribution of the results. And if you're required to report raw data too? The time you'll spend trying to cheat on the lab report, you might as well have done it yourself. And any time you ask a student to explain their work (especially verbally) you can really separate those who know the material and those who c/p-ing.
#2 must be c/p'ed code or something similar. I can believe that - it's too easy to find code that way. I really can't see how people are cheating on engineering work unless lecturers have become phenomenally lazy in the last decade. Most of the stuff I ended up doing was "Here is unique problem X. Students need to come up with a solution or a method to produce a solution." sort of work. Aside from working with another student (which isn't effective, but often isn't forbidden) how the heck could you i-E-Cyber-Web-Cheat-Net on that?
+1. Do we need a new word for each technology? When people invented the Xerox machine, did people start talking about "Photo-cheating?"
In any event, most of the 'cheating' measures are only useful in the more vacuous subjects. In most most of the hard topics, it's easy enough to see if student know material in short form ("Finish in the following: Glucose 6-phosephate is rearranged into Fructose 6-phosphate by _____") and in long form, slightly trickier, but you can generally filter the bulk of cheats by simply asking students some intelligent questions about their papers verbally. It's just that many people have got horribly lazy, or have been forced to lecture unreasonably large classrooms, or both.
This is exactly why I feel so divided about Wikileaks. On one hand, corruption needs the full light of day, and this provides whistleblowers with everything they need to expose things that shouldn't be kept secret. I like that. I like the idea that information wants to be free.
But on the other hand, this cables leak has not really exposed anything for anyone. Nothing of real consequence, anyhow. And instead, its cast a pall on the whole process of whistle blowing, and in a few cases - such as this - actively made things worse for freedom. People who argue that Mugabe is just acting in his nature are missing the point. Let's say some thug is on the street. He's prone to starting fights. You walk up and say another guy he doesn't already like talked smack about his mama. Yes, the thug is acting in his nature, but it doesn't change the fact that you instigated the fight that quite possibly wouldn't have happened absent your actions.
Except instead of a street brawl, we're talking about political reforms in Zimbabwe. Things that have the possibility of effecting tons of people in the process.
Given the stated sizes of his classes, the professor has quite the data set to work with. Having around 1,000 students a year for 10 years gives you a very good set of priors for comparing normal student behaviour. From there, all he needs to do is look at performance over time, coupled by the student's ability to reproduce their work in the replacement midterm. With the sorts of numbers involved, I'd imagine you could probably assign students to cheater or non-cheater categories with a very high likelihood.Yes, you'd never have 100% certainty, but you don't need 100% certainty in a court of law, nor do you need it for dropkicking a cheating bastard out of your course so hard their head spins.
If I have to explain how circulating a what's basically a copy of the test before the test without the professor's permission is cheating, I might break down crying.
You're not the only one who thinks so.
If you listen to Iron Man 2's commentary, the director(?) also comments on this at length. At the lower resolution, you can get by with a lot less than you can with the greater resolution where things' artificial nature really stands out. Additionally, the director was pointing out things from production that only stood out like a sore thumb at the greater resolution.
This. .5 and 1 percent per thousand PSI.
Before I went into science, I did automation engineering (think factories with robots). A lot of that is fluid power. And any person working with hydraulics worth their salt would tell you that depending on factors, most hydraulic system fluids will compress between
So, when I took physics, and they told me that fluids aren't compressible, I objected. The instructor told me that sure, fluids change volume, but only in weird pressures like near vacuums and absurd pressures. To which I pointed out most of the universe is a very low pressure, dotted with spots of exceptionally high pressures. STP ain't standard for anyone but people on the top of the crust of moderate mass rocky planets (and even then, not all of them).
I've been doing work in one of those 'embarrassingly parallel' problems, using the previous iteration of the mac pro, and I know that a number of other people in my department are as well. As a pure guess, I'd figure the department buys at least one to one and a half mac pro a year; if you were to multiply that across all universities of comparable size, you would have something larger than a niche market (though, obviously graphic artists and the like probably outnumber us).
But otherwise, yes, your point is a good one - this is not a computer for Jane-Computer-User, unless she's working on some non-trivial calculations. And I would suspect how many people underestimate the number of problems there are like that outside the home computing niche.
I think the problem is that Republicans (I speak as if they're a vague monolithic organization) feel they have to go gangbusters on the war, no matter what. Because it started under their tenure as president.
Democrats (generalization!) feel like that they have to support it, or else risk alienating voters by appearing 'soft' on security.
And the public is very distractable, is the problem. It seems like political views are more hereditary now, instead of come to through introspection.
I think you got a good point about there being nothing to we little people can do to decrease foreign intervetion. But I guess what I'd say is that maybe we can try to lessen the effects of foreign intervention. Give money to try and help the people who's country/lives have gone to hell in a hand-basket. I'm not sure what NPOs are doing work in Afganistan and Iraq...
I find this all sorts of appalling. As someone else who started watching it said, "That's really screwed up." But that said, I have almost no hope that this will ever go anywhere. We've seen a seemingly never ending parade of illegal and barbaric behaviour come to light in both Iraq and Afghanistan, on the part of US forces, but each time nothing ever happens because of it. We all seem to just shrug our shoulders and go on with our lives.
Wikileaks is just peeing into the wind. Nothing will probably come of this, because outrage is dead.
I'm really hoping someone proves my cynical attitude wrong.
By that logic, we should expose people's germ-line to ionizing radiation radiation to `open up search space.`
No, colour blindness is a broken trait, which are expected to exist under natural selection, because purging them is devilishly tricky. And they keep popping up because the mutation rate for us deuterostomes is sufficiently high.
I forget who said history doesn't repeat, but it seems to rhyme. But whomever said that forgot to add that History is a bawdy limerick. ;)