Dear Spain,
I'm not sure if you meant what you said, given that you're about to default on your sovereign debt, but I appreciate it anyway. It's no secret that a lot of file sharing happens in college. It's as natural as young women having pillow fights in their underwear. However, if college bookstores are allowed to resell the same used textbooks over and over for an exorbitant profit (until the textbook author writes an unnecessary new edition to stop it), I think I should (at very least) be permitted to share an e-book with a fellow needy, underprivileged student for the benefit of our mutual education.
Sincerely,
SharingIsCaring@checkTheFascistNCAA_Machine.com.org
Awesome. If I were at gunpoint and had to condense your Slashdot advice into one profound snippet, I'd choose
"new short synth-style haircut, shaved, moisturized, slightly drunk and then just walk to the park where all high-school graduates end up when the bars has closed". As a wise man once said, "I keep gettin' older, but they keep stayin' the same age." Gimme some more, aliquis!
Exactly, AC, you win. In the olden days of Dot Matrix and Joan Rivers, DPI meant something. In my flawed memory, the first perpetrators of this scam were the scanner folks. They'd build a small chip with a high density of noisy pixels, put garbage optics on top of it, and advertise it as high DPI/resolution. Sure, the output resolution was lousy, but how many people were going to notice? And of the few who did, how many were they going to try to prove that the scanner was the weak link in their system? Even if they could prove such a thing with flawless logic, how likely is a victory in court, given the complexity of the issue? What's the cost? And if the perps lose in court, what island country won't want their stolen money? Not much downside to their ratinal strategy.
You make it sound like you can publish the same paper in two different journals, which (to my knowledge) you can't do in any field of research. I doubt that was your intent though, as your thoughts are indeed informative.
I disagree, pending clarification of your definition of 'slow'. There are still a lot of people who like to read print (in many professions) for the sweet love of not spending ALL day on the computer/microscope. Nature, for many scientists, is like the Wall Street Journal for the business and finance crowd. A lot of people read it, and provides useful, first-hand information that often can't be obtained elsewhere. A lot of academic labs buy it, because they have more money than they need, and if they don't use it all, they lose it. Lots of scientists order the print version of the journal, even though they have access to the electronic version, for which a quasi-separate bureaucratic agency usually pays. Until Depression 2.0 hits, it'll sell.
That being said, I wish scientists would rise up and tell Nature to eat a tarball. I like open source for many reasons, and I see no apolitical, scientific reason to publish in a Nature journal if you could publish in PLoS (Public Library of Sciences), PNAS, arXiv, etc. Peer review (both critical and editorial) is generally a key component of good scientific articles, and that's a service that Nature currently outsources very effectively. I recently went to a Q&A presentation with a Nature editor (whom I like), and most people (not me, but mostly professors) were angry. Not because the journal is expensive, but because they use their authority (or "impact factor") is used as an excuse to cost people a lot of time and effort, with little or no justification, and with substantial risk to their reputation and future funding. Some of it was typical academic whining, but there was a lot of substance that went unrefuted. Unnecessary bureacratic inefficiency has really wasted a lot. People walked out.
Nature and a few other big publishing houses enjoy an oligopoly on academic publishing, and that could lead to inefficiency. But who knows. Their antitrust solidarity may be the best thing to manage a group of generally disagreeable people, who are plenty inefficient themselves, and get them to produce more research for the good of humanity.
I wish I could just switch my brain on, and stop being mentally disabled. No such luck yet. To me, it seems that a manual would be nice. I'm a long time Mac OS and Linux user who just built a Windows 7 HTPC/gaming machine, and takes me a long time to figure out how to do anything. The help is often no help, and my internet connection comes and goes. So I thought, "If I could just read through a manual like this on an airplane, when I don't have anything better to do, then I might be able to save some time later." Now I know that I was was really stupid to think this way. Thanks Hurricane78.
Yeah, the US is firing up the printing presses and borrowing the value of all the gold in Fort Knox every few months. Gold must be in a bubble. The algos told me. Paper dollars backed by Ben Bernanke's good looks are better than the one thing that has functioned as currency throughout human civilization. The econophysicists have helped the financial elite and the central bankers create a rigged, casino-style market that systematically steals from the middle class, and you're congratulating them for gambling at a 50% success rate? Is this what passes for 'news for nerds' these days? This ought to make real nerds want to puke.
they don't hide the front running, or their quantitative easing policies. They do it publicly, but it's complex, so most people don't realize it's a hidden tax and/or a large scale theft from current and future middle/lower class. The mainstream media does nothing to contradict the impression they create, and congress is mostly controlled by the banks. The only way to really stop it is to AUDIT THE FED, which congress has always chosen avoid, and unfortunately, the public has never supported with sufficient enthusiasm.
I think reputable scientists fall in disrepute by establishment hit men far more often that most people realize. I've seen it happen a lot. It's too easy for a big lab to take the not-yet-published work of a good scientist, tack the results they like on to some paper they have in the pipeline, and then slam the paper in peer review. The good scientist starts over, or maybe gives up out of frustration and goes into another academic field or into industry, while the big lab's grants keep rolling in.
That is ideally how science is supposed to work, but if you'll excuse my cynicism, my point was that it doesn't always work that way in practice. To draw a real conclusion based on someone else's statistical tests, you need some information (which is often just a guess) about the reliability of the tester. The test itself is not sufficient. In many cases, I think a statistical test should be treated with the same skepticism as the factually unsupported personal opinion of a someone with a reputation for scientific accuracy and truth.
Scientists, etc. use statistical tests to get information about something they can measure, and how well that measurable quantity can be predicted from their data set. They form a hypothesis that variable X can be predicted from the data. They test their hypothesis, and calculate the probability that knowledge of the data set will lead to a correct prediction of X. If they get something like 68%, 99.9%, etc., they're happy and they write it up.
Perfect, but
Suppose in some parallel universe (that some string theorist might try to sell you) that similar scientists had been more diligent, and conducted statistical analyses on not just X, but on 10^10 other variables. Maybe X is global temperature or the price of oil, and the smart folks in this universe can measure a million things at a million time points that might potentially affect X. Same as in the other universe, they find that 99.9% of the variance in X can be predicted by the data set, but since they tested so many variables, they can't claim significance. By random chance, a lot of other variables did even better than X. Then what matters is whether the scientist tells you about all those other tests. That's not exactly conducive to getting published, or getting grant money, but who knows- it might be right.
It's not just how things are counted, but how many different things are counted, and in what parallel universe, that really counts.
I might ditch Matlab completely, especially given what I've read here, because I hate its license manager, it's expensive, and its performance on Macs is pretty sorry. Expenses can grow fast if you try to collaborate and nobody uses the same toolboxes. However, its syntax is intuitive to the mathematically inclined, it handles large arrays efficiently (!), and its GUI is really nice. I prefer Igor Pro for scientific graphing, but its syntax is a little more complex, it's limited to 4D arrays, and it's compiled. As long as someone else is buying, I'm glad to include Matlab in my work, but if I'm strapped for cash I might go with an octave/python/xmgrace combo.
One obstacle toward progress in this field is how to define an object. Are electrons, atoms, molecules, proteins, cells, leaves, trees, forests and planets all considered to be objects? And who gets to decide - a bunch of undergrad test subjects who draw lines around pictures and give names to each image segment? This algo separates objects and parts, but (from what I can tell, having read the article but not the paper), there's no big reason to say one thing is an object and another thing is a part. Seems pretty arbitrary from a philosophical standpoint, but no doubt its practical value is appreciable.
A a recent job fair, the patent office recruiter picked his nose the whole time he was talking to me. And he was really digging in there really deep - not a Seinfeld-style scratch. Even for a good salary, I didn't even consider applying. I'm not surprised that the people who work there can't rotate a document.
The move was stupid on one hand, since life sciences at OSU will suffer, but not quite so stupid on the other, since football, geology, and other Pickens-funded programs will be able to continue operating with their enhanced budgets. My guess is that OSU alumni care a lot more about having a good football team than having a respectable life sciences program. I find it personally unfortunate, since I am a NIH-funded researcher and and OSU alumnus. This pretty much eliminates any chance that I might return to OSU for health-related research, and now I must sadly recommend that any pre-college student that's even peripherally interested in life sciences should attend another university.
If they have no incentive to improve their speech, why are they clients of a speech pathologist? Whose money is being wasted? The person paying the pathologist should limit their computer use, and maybe talk to them more often.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Spain, I'm not sure if you meant what you said, given that you're about to default on your sovereign debt, but I appreciate it anyway. It's no secret that a lot of file sharing happens in college. It's as natural as young women having pillow fights in their underwear. However, if college bookstores are allowed to resell the same used textbooks over and over for an exorbitant profit (until the textbook author writes an unnecessary new edition to stop it), I think I should (at very least) be permitted to share an e-book with a fellow needy, underprivileged student for the benefit of our mutual education. Sincerely, SharingIsCaring@checkTheFascistNCAA_Machine.com.org
Awesome. If I were at gunpoint and had to condense your Slashdot advice into one profound snippet, I'd choose "new short synth-style haircut, shaved, moisturized, slightly drunk and then just walk to the park where all high-school graduates end up when the bars has closed". As a wise man once said, "I keep gettin' older, but they keep stayin' the same age." Gimme some more, aliquis!
Exactly, AC, you win. In the olden days of Dot Matrix and Joan Rivers, DPI meant something. In my flawed memory, the first perpetrators of this scam were the scanner folks. They'd build a small chip with a high density of noisy pixels, put garbage optics on top of it, and advertise it as high DPI/resolution. Sure, the output resolution was lousy, but how many people were going to notice? And of the few who did, how many were they going to try to prove that the scanner was the weak link in their system? Even if they could prove such a thing with flawless logic, how likely is a victory in court, given the complexity of the issue? What's the cost? And if the perps lose in court, what island country won't want their stolen money? Not much downside to their ratinal strategy.
Share your wisdom - what DID get you laid?
You make it sound like you can publish the same paper in two different journals, which (to my knowledge) you can't do in any field of research. I doubt that was your intent though, as your thoughts are indeed informative.
I disagree, pending clarification of your definition of 'slow'. There are still a lot of people who like to read print (in many professions) for the sweet love of not spending ALL day on the computer/microscope. Nature, for many scientists, is like the Wall Street Journal for the business and finance crowd. A lot of people read it, and provides useful, first-hand information that often can't be obtained elsewhere. A lot of academic labs buy it, because they have more money than they need, and if they don't use it all, they lose it. Lots of scientists order the print version of the journal, even though they have access to the electronic version, for which a quasi-separate bureaucratic agency usually pays. Until Depression 2.0 hits, it'll sell. That being said, I wish scientists would rise up and tell Nature to eat a tarball. I like open source for many reasons, and I see no apolitical, scientific reason to publish in a Nature journal if you could publish in PLoS (Public Library of Sciences), PNAS, arXiv, etc. Peer review (both critical and editorial) is generally a key component of good scientific articles, and that's a service that Nature currently outsources very effectively. I recently went to a Q&A presentation with a Nature editor (whom I like), and most people (not me, but mostly professors) were angry. Not because the journal is expensive, but because they use their authority (or "impact factor") is used as an excuse to cost people a lot of time and effort, with little or no justification, and with substantial risk to their reputation and future funding. Some of it was typical academic whining, but there was a lot of substance that went unrefuted. Unnecessary bureacratic inefficiency has really wasted a lot. People walked out. Nature and a few other big publishing houses enjoy an oligopoly on academic publishing, and that could lead to inefficiency. But who knows. Their antitrust solidarity may be the best thing to manage a group of generally disagreeable people, who are plenty inefficient themselves, and get them to produce more research for the good of humanity.
Yep, you got me. It sounds like you've had to watch my show at your grandparents house. Sorry. I was with you until you said 'undermedicated'
I wish I could just switch my brain on, and stop being mentally disabled. No such luck yet. To me, it seems that a manual would be nice. I'm a long time Mac OS and Linux user who just built a Windows 7 HTPC/gaming machine, and takes me a long time to figure out how to do anything. The help is often no help, and my internet connection comes and goes. So I thought, "If I could just read through a manual like this on an airplane, when I don't have anything better to do, then I might be able to save some time later." Now I know that I was was really stupid to think this way. Thanks Hurricane78.
A similar product already exists. Is this one supposed to be better? http://www.seeingwithsound.com/
Yeah, the US is firing up the printing presses and borrowing the value of all the gold in Fort Knox every few months. Gold must be in a bubble. The algos told me. Paper dollars backed by Ben Bernanke's good looks are better than the one thing that has functioned as currency throughout human civilization. The econophysicists have helped the financial elite and the central bankers create a rigged, casino-style market that systematically steals from the middle class, and you're congratulating them for gambling at a 50% success rate? Is this what passes for 'news for nerds' these days? This ought to make real nerds want to puke.
they don't hide the front running, or their quantitative easing policies. They do it publicly, but it's complex, so most people don't realize it's a hidden tax and/or a large scale theft from current and future middle/lower class. The mainstream media does nothing to contradict the impression they create, and congress is mostly controlled by the banks. The only way to really stop it is to AUDIT THE FED, which congress has always chosen avoid, and unfortunately, the public has never supported with sufficient enthusiasm.
I think reputable scientists fall in disrepute by establishment hit men far more often that most people realize. I've seen it happen a lot. It's too easy for a big lab to take the not-yet-published work of a good scientist, tack the results they like on to some paper they have in the pipeline, and then slam the paper in peer review. The good scientist starts over, or maybe gives up out of frustration and goes into another academic field or into industry, while the big lab's grants keep rolling in.
That is ideally how science is supposed to work, but if you'll excuse my cynicism, my point was that it doesn't always work that way in practice. To draw a real conclusion based on someone else's statistical tests, you need some information (which is often just a guess) about the reliability of the tester. The test itself is not sufficient. In many cases, I think a statistical test should be treated with the same skepticism as the factually unsupported personal opinion of a someone with a reputation for scientific accuracy and truth.
Scientists, etc. use statistical tests to get information about something they can measure, and how well that measurable quantity can be predicted from their data set. They form a hypothesis that variable X can be predicted from the data. They test their hypothesis, and calculate the probability that knowledge of the data set will lead to a correct prediction of X. If they get something like 68%, 99.9%, etc., they're happy and they write it up. Perfect, but Suppose in some parallel universe (that some string theorist might try to sell you) that similar scientists had been more diligent, and conducted statistical analyses on not just X, but on 10^10 other variables. Maybe X is global temperature or the price of oil, and the smart folks in this universe can measure a million things at a million time points that might potentially affect X. Same as in the other universe, they find that 99.9% of the variance in X can be predicted by the data set, but since they tested so many variables, they can't claim significance. By random chance, a lot of other variables did even better than X. Then what matters is whether the scientist tells you about all those other tests. That's not exactly conducive to getting published, or getting grant money, but who knows- it might be right. It's not just how things are counted, but how many different things are counted, and in what parallel universe, that really counts.
I bet Pakistan is behind this - shut down the site, and shut down the man.
I might ditch Matlab completely, especially given what I've read here, because I hate its license manager, it's expensive, and its performance on Macs is pretty sorry. Expenses can grow fast if you try to collaborate and nobody uses the same toolboxes. However, its syntax is intuitive to the mathematically inclined, it handles large arrays efficiently (!), and its GUI is really nice. I prefer Igor Pro for scientific graphing, but its syntax is a little more complex, it's limited to 4D arrays, and it's compiled. As long as someone else is buying, I'm glad to include Matlab in my work, but if I'm strapped for cash I might go with an octave/python/xmgrace combo.
One obstacle toward progress in this field is how to define an object. Are electrons, atoms, molecules, proteins, cells, leaves, trees, forests and planets all considered to be objects? And who gets to decide - a bunch of undergrad test subjects who draw lines around pictures and give names to each image segment? This algo separates objects and parts, but (from what I can tell, having read the article but not the paper), there's no big reason to say one thing is an object and another thing is a part. Seems pretty arbitrary from a philosophical standpoint, but no doubt its practical value is appreciable.
If it can, then we must conclude that women are objects.
Seriously, how much energy do they use? Why won't they tell us? Sounds evil.
I've never gotten tier 1 service for anything. But, for all intents and purposes, really, who cares?
A a recent job fair, the patent office recruiter picked his nose the whole time he was talking to me. And he was really digging in there really deep - not a Seinfeld-style scratch. Even for a good salary, I didn't even consider applying. I'm not surprised that the people who work there can't rotate a document.
Rejected names include iMaxi and iPon. Maybe when the 7 inch version comes out...
The move was stupid on one hand, since life sciences at OSU will suffer, but not quite so stupid on the other, since football, geology, and other Pickens-funded programs will be able to continue operating with their enhanced budgets. My guess is that OSU alumni care a lot more about having a good football team than having a respectable life sciences program. I find it personally unfortunate, since I am a NIH-funded researcher and and OSU alumnus. This pretty much eliminates any chance that I might return to OSU for health-related research, and now I must sadly recommend that any pre-college student that's even peripherally interested in life sciences should attend another university.
If they have no incentive to improve their speech, why are they clients of a speech pathologist? Whose money is being wasted? The person paying the pathologist should limit their computer use, and maybe talk to them more often.
Taxi to the dark side, or taxi to the DMV?