Now you have to say "I have no need to look up directions, reviews, navigate, use maps, communicate with my friends, take pictures, travel, reference information, access the portal of all accumulated knowledge of mankind and the greatest invention of all time or participate in modern day life in any other conceivable way."
look up directions, navigate, use maps: I do that before I leave home.
look up reviews, travel, reference information, access the portal of all accumulated knowledge of mankind and the greatest invention of all time or participate in modern day life in any other conceivable way: I do that on a desktop computer.
travel, communicate with my friends: I don't need a cell phone to do that.
I don't feel any need to own a cell phone, smart or dumb. I have a landline at home. I have a landline at work. I don't need to talk to people on the phone when I'm in my car (and I don't want to endanger myself or others by doing it when I'm driving). I don't need to talk to people on the phone when I'm walking down the street, or shopping, or hiking or riding my bike.
This seems utterly inconsequential to me. Who in the world sets out to find information about John Smith by typing johnsmith.com into the URL bar of a browser? Yes, there are plenty of people who don't really understand what a search engine is or how to use one effectively, and, yes, browsers' GUIs have recently started blurring the conceptual line between URLs and search terms. But is there really any likely path for users to get to newtgingrich.com other than having someone else say to them, "Hey, go to newtgingrich.com?"
The subject line of your post was "price..." The subject line of my reply is "profit..."
Say that on a TV game show you're asked to name as many luxury cars as possible in 60 seconds. It's easy: Cadillac, Rolls-Royce, Lexus, Porsche,... Notice how almost all of those have been on the market for a really, really long time. Now try the same thing with low-end cars. Uh,... Chevette, Hyundai Excel, VW Bug, AMC Gremlin,... Notice how most of those are no longer on the market.
The similar tension, uncertainty, and chaos at the bottom end of the PC price spectrum is not a new phenomenon. The computer analogs of the Chevette et al. are machines like the Great Quality (ca. 1997), and the Everex GPC (ca. 2008). Notice how those are no longer on the market.
It's really, really hard to stay in business when your profit margin is low.
Basically the only way to make a $200 computer (desktop or netbook) is something like this. You produce them in Asia, where labor costs are low. You avoid R&D like the plague. You have nobody working for you who has the slightest expertise in software. You don't write documentation. You don't do support. You have a web site that's only in Chinese, and it has no useful content. You make your hardware specs so low that it takes 30 or 45 seconds for a browser to start up.
Why would it be a surprise that users then fail to beat a path to your door? Your sales are low, and your profits are low. You go out of business.
Here is the scientific paper. It makes no claim whatsoever about the mass of IGR J17091-3624. On p. 6, they say:
Figure 5 implies that if IGR J17091-3624 emits at Eddington, then either it harbors the lowest mass black hole
known today (< 3Msolar for distances lower than 17 kpc),
or, it is very distant. Such a large distance, together with
its b ~2.2deg Galactic latitude, would imply a significant,
but not necessarily implausible, altitude above the disk
Here is the NASA press release summarizing the paper for people who aren't scientists. It quotes the lead author as saying:
Just as the heart rate of a mouse is faster than an elephant's, the heartbeat signals from these black holes scale according to their masses
The Forbes article morphs this into "NASA Satellite May Have Found The Smallest Known Black Hole," and says, "An international team of astronomers utilizing NASA's Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), believe that they've identified a candidate for the smallest known black hole[...]"
The slashdot summary says:
The black hole itself is only about three times the mass of the Sun[...]
This is completely incorrect. It's a candidate for a very low mass black hole. What that means is that they're suggesting that astronomers do follow-up observations on this object and actually determine its mass, which may be unusually low.
It is of very great interest to relativists and astronomers to find the smallest black holes. There is a limit called the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit on the largest mass that a neutron star can have. There are big theoretical uncertainties in this number, but it is probably around three solar masses. However, we don't know for sure whether anything too massive to be a stable neutron star necessarily becomes a black hole. There have been all kinds of goofy objects hypothesized by theorists that might be intermediate between neutron stars and black holes, including black stars, gravastars, fuzzballs, quark stars, boson stars, and electroweak stars. Observing a low-mass black hole narrows the gap in mass between the heaviest stable neutron star and the lightest black hole, leaving less wiggle room to believe in these exotic objects.
As a motorcycist, I would encourage people to not talk or text on their phones while driving. Whenever someone tries to kill me, it's always the same: a woman fiddling with her phone.
That's very self-centered of you. The supply of donated organs is critically short. If we don't have people yakking on their phones and killing donorcyclists, where are we going to get all those fresh, healthy young hearts and corneas?
After a multi-car pileup involving two school buses, the NTSB is urging states to ban all cellphones and personal electronic devices in cars, even hands-free phones.
This particular accident is not the reason why the NTSB is proposing this. The NTSB is proposing this because there is a huge amount of incontrovertible evidence that when people talk on their cell phones while driving (regardless of whether the phone is hands-free), the become distracted and drive badly.
Why is the NTSB targeting gadgets instead of bad drivers?
The NTSB isn't targeting gadges. The NTSB is targeting bad drivers. You can put your cell phone in your car while driving, and nobody will target it. But if you talk on your cell phone while driving, you are a bad driver, and you should be targeted.
It makes me sad that Amazon don't support it natively.
It is at least a good sign to see that they're improving the kindle format. That shows that they're feeling a need to stay competitive with epub. It's actually a much better situation than what we ended up with on the web with technologies like mathml. It's pretty pathetic that Wikipedia articles still don't use mathml because IE doesn't support it except through kludgy workarounds. Epub 3 supports mathml (although I doubt that any actual devices support it yet). Math and science textbooks are a very lucrative market, and if a kindle user notices that the equations in the kindle version look like crap compared to the version on their friend's epub-based device, that's going to create a strong competitive disadvantage for amazon.
I listened to the whole interview, and I thought it was a kick. He's obviously very insecure, and he's projecting a manufactured persona, but he's also pretty funny.
...and why are women suddenly doing better than men?
It's not sudden. In fact, I'm not aware of any evidence that there has been any change over time at all in the male-female gap in college success. Women simply do better in school than men in general. Probably always have and always will.
Women enter college with about the same critical thinking and writing skills as men (Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, p. 40). They don't choose easier majors than men ( http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/womcolge.htm ). But: "Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college[...]" ( http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html ) "[...] in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates." ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?pagewanted=all )
So it absolutely makes sense that women do better than men in most departments at my school, and, yes, it would be a sign that something was wrong if they did worse in one particular department. Women simply do better because they work harder.
You can see the judge's logic on p. 5 of the order. He says users had the option to refuse the software update, keep running Linux, and stop using PSN. "Nothing in plaintiffs' factual allegations or their arguments is sufficient to support a conclusion that Sony has any obligation to maintain the PSN in operation indefinitely." This seems strange to me. When you buy a PlayStation, part of what you're paying for is access to PSN. Of course nobody expects PSN to be operational in 100 years, but neither does anyone expect PSN to be permanently shut down one hour after they buy their PlayStation.
They claim that all but #2 are ruled out by their data. What I can't figure out is the distinction between 2 and 3. 3 is that the gap is "due to differences in opportunities available to males versus females." 2 is defined in their reference [2] http://www.jstor.org/pss/2112795 as being about access to jobs and higher education. I don't understand the distinction.
I got interested in this stuff recently because I teach physics, and our statistics showed that women had a lower success rate in our classes than men. This was kind of worrisome, since women generally do better than men in college, and women do better than men at our school in math, and in the other sciences besides physics. Turned out that if we controlled for what class they were taking, the effect vanished. Lots of women were taking the physics class for biology majors, which has a low success rate. Almost no women take the physics class fo engineering majors, which has a higher success rate. In the class for biology majors, women actually did better than men. It impressed me with how subtle this kind of thing can be.
Unless things have changed since yesterday, the LHC cannot disprove the HB.
It can show that it isn't within certain energy ranges, but it does not have the capability of emphatically disproving it's existence over the entire predicted spectrum.
That's literally true but misleading. Here is a paper that explains how non-LHC data constrain the standard-model Higgs to have a mass between 115 and 148 GeV. The LHC can't test whether there's a Higgs with a very high mass, but that's irrelevant because we know it has to be below 148 GeV based on non-LHC data. Based on the combination of non-LHC and LHC data, we know that if there's a standard-model Higgs, then it has a mass of about 115-127 GeV. The LHC is absolutely capable of disproving the existence of a standard-model Higgs within that mass range, if it doesn't actually exist. If there is no SM Higgs, we will know that within a couple of years based on LHC data.
The real reason there may be a lot of uncertainty for years to come is that there are many different ways of making a model with a Higgs in it. The standard model is only one of them. Some of the non-SM Higgses could be very difficult to detect. Here is a nice discussion of that. There are scenarios where the SM Higgs is ruled out by 2014, but by 2022 we still will not have detected or ruled out a non-SM Higgs.
Duck and Cover is one of these. It is definitely in the public domain. The claim against it is definitely fraudulent.
What is the evidence for that statement? Do we know that it wasn't produced by a contractor? Do we know that no audio or video in it was licensed from a commercial source?
Well, that's what's happened with the famous Duck and Cover educational video. It's public domain, but Image Entertainment (whoever that is) has claimed copyright of it and are blocking it from being seen in all countries except the United States. This is described in the report which Cory mentions.
That's a great example. P. 9 of the report discusses the Duck and Cover film, and then says this:
Not all of the copyright assertions are necessarily false. There may be instances where
the government licensed use of music or footage from commercial sources. However,
as explained in the next section, we have no way of determining where in a video an
assertion occurs or what restrictions the government may have agreed to.
This is exactly the problem. We actually don't know whether these films are public domain or not. Products of the US government are not automatically public domain. Wikipedia has a nice explanation of this. For instance, these films may have been produced by contractors.
How would you feel if someone claimed ownership on your Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse footage you assembled and chose to block it worldwide?
There are two problems with this analogy. (1) You assume that the claims of ownership are unjustified, as Doctorow claims. As the FedFlix report admits, that hasn't been established. (2) The FedFlix videos have not been blocked world-wide. Here is the Duck and Cover film you refer to, on an archive.org page that is available, as far as I know, in every country. FedFlix is complaining that Duck and Cover isn't available world-wide on YouTube, but YouTube is under no obligation to make it available at all.
The real problem is that we don't know the copyright status of old films and audio. There are no records that are organized in digital form in any useful way.
Take a look at WP's article on Robert Heinlein and then at SFE's. Both have useful material. The WP article has photos, which the SFE article lacks. The WP article has many of the problems common to WP articles, including a dopey list at the end ("Inventions presaged" include the hand dryer!). The SFE article is more useful if you're looking for critical commentary, since POV (point of view) is verboten on Wikipedia. A big difference, of course, is that WP is free information, whereas SFE is only free-as-in-speech.
We've actually come a long way in the last decade in terms of being able to make public use of the public domain in the U.S. The vast majority of works that are PD in the US are ones that were copyrighted after 1922 but reverted to the public domain because their copyrights were not renewed. It used to be that if you came across a book from 1927, you could be almost certain that it was PD (simply because, statistically, few books had their copyrights renewed), but you wouldn't have any way of making sure, because the renewal records weren't online. But the good folks at Carnegie Mellon, Project Gutenberg, and Distributed Proofreaders did all the hard, dreary work of digitizing the records and putting them online in searchable form. So for example, a creative-commons-licensed physics textbook that I wrote includes a drawing of a boy hanging by his arms from a bar. The drawing is from a 1927 physics textbook, which I know is PD because I was able to check online that the copyright was not renewed. Another great thing about living in the US is that our law says that a faithful reproduction of a PD work can't be copyrighted (Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 1999). I have a portrait of Isaac Newton in my book that is a photo of a 17th-century oil painting. I got a nastygram once from the museum in the UK that owns the painting, saying I was violating their copyright. Sent them back an email saying, "Sorry, not copyrightable in the country where I live," and that was the end of that.
It gets a lot harder when you're dealing with sound recordings and moving pictures. The records aren't digitized by the government, and even if they were to be digitized, it would not necessarily be easy to index and search them. Unlike a book, a sound recording doesn't always have any clear labeling as to its title. Indexing sound and movies is a hard problem. It requires a ton of computing power to do well. What we really need is someone with a super-huge CPU farm who is willing to put tons of computational effort into indexing these things. I wonder who has the facilities necessary for that? Uh, Google, that's who. Google owns YouTube.
Here is a PD video I put together of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing -- a classic staple of American physics education for three generations. About 10 years ago, you could only get this by paying a ton of money to an educational video company. I found two newsreels about the bridge at archive.org, one silent and one with music and narration. I spliced them together. Since the first one was silent, I found a recording of some vintage jazz that fit, and voila, I had a PD replacement for the laserdisc that my college had bought for hundreds of dollars.
About a year later, I got an email from YouTube saying that the jazz tune I'd used in the video (Boot It, by Bennie Moten) actually wasn't PD. I was originally annoyed and sure they were wrong. But I looked into it, and it looked like sure enough, it was still in copyright. Archive.org had apparently not realized that a certain percentage of Bennie Moten's work was still in copyright. The rights holder is selling the recording online. And you know what? YouTube didn't try to crush me. They didn't sue me. They didn't send me a DMCA notice. They didn't take down the video or make me take it down. They simply started pulling revenue from it and giving some of that revenue to the copyright owner. Really not a problem.
So although it sounds like FedFlix has a problem, my own experience with YouTube was that they performed a service for me that nobody else was willing to perform: they figured out whether an old piece of music was actually PD. The end result is that it's a big win for everyone.
And I can't help feeling that Cory Doctorow, as in many of his hand-wringing advocacy pieces, is being a little overwrought. The problem here is not that FedFlix is being su
First, their method only works when the probability of winning is >0.5, which never happens in any real casino.
This is not quite true. In blackjack, there are times when you have p>0.5. That's the point of counting cards. Some games, like poker, are really games of skill. Others, like horse racing, involve non-random aspects.
Another problem is that they assume that the probability is constant with each round. That's true for some games (roulette), but not for others (blackjack).
Another thing that makes the paper not really applicable to real life is that it assumes you can choose to bet any amount. In reality, if you're in a casino playing blackjack, one of the most common ways for the management to detect that you're counting cards and throw you out is that they notice that you're varying your bets according to a certain pattern.
It would be interesting to see a realistic plan for winning money by gambling. Poker is probably the best game, but there are some realistic issues with finding a game in which (a) the other players have large amounts of money, (b) the other players are worse than you are, (c) there is no money being raked off by the house, and (d) there is no possibility of collusion (which I believe is quite hard to guard against in online poker).
Yeah, what you're describing is an example of how hard it is to infer animals' mental states based on their behavior. Just because an animal's behavior X is analogous to the behavior Y that we do when we have mental state Z, that doesn't mean that the animal's mental state is at all analogous to Z. Chimps do all kinds of behaviors, including social behaviors and even deception, that would make you think that they must have a theory of mind, but Povinelli did some classic studies where he showed that chimps would beg for food from people who couldn't see them, suggesting that the chimps simply learn by rote that begging produces food. Same thing for tool use. Chimps use tools, and even invent new uses for tools (as opposed to, say, sea otters, which use rocks as tools but don't innovate), but they use a lot more trial and error than a human would -- even a 1.5-year-old human child, who in many ways is not as smart as an adult chimp. E.g., there's a famous experiment where chimps learned to stack boxes to get at a banana on the ceiling, but those chimps tried all kinds of things that no human would ever try, like pushing a box against a wall, high up, and expecting it to stay there without anything underneath to support it.
An agent is not mandatory in order to sell a novel. Typically (at least in the genre I work in, which is SF), the steps to selling a novel are (1) build your chops with short fiction until you get to the point where you are regularly selling your work, (2) write a novel and submit it directly to publishers, (3) get offered a contract by a publisher and then use the offer of a contract to get an agent, who then helps you negotiate any changes you are hoping for in the contract. I'm not saying this is the only way to do it. Some people do these steps in order 1-3-2, or 3-2, like you've been trying to do. Others start selling novels without ever bothering with an agent. You can also send queries to agents simultaneously with submitting a novel to publishers.
You seem to feel that it's an injustice that 90% of agents didn't read your ms or sample chapters. I would actually take it as a very good sign that 10% did. Many of them probably have full client lists and are busy making a living by representing and promoting those clients.
The trouble with your idea of using Amazon to bypass slush piles and acquisitions editors is that being a slush reader or acquisitions editor is a hard, miserable, boring job that nobody will do without being paid money. If you want to bypass them, then you're essentially asking the reader to pay money for the privilege of doing the job of the slush reader, which is to figure out whether your writing is any good. Readers don't want to have to do the job of filtering out the crap. Remember Sturgeon's law, which is that 90% of everything is crap.
There's a version-control system called darcs (written by the son of a colleague of mine) that incorporates some interesting ideas along these lines. For example, say you have a program with 100,000 lines of code, and there's a function in it called Foo, which is called thousands and thousands of times. You want to change the name of the function to Bar. In a traditional diff-based system, this results in thousands of differences. Darcs is supposed to be able to handle changes like this and recognize that it's only *one* change. It's also supposed to be able to handle the case where programmer A makes this change and checks it in, and then programmer B, who has simultaneously been doing lots of other work on the code, checks in his own changes -- with the old name for the function.
At the school where I teach, whenever there's a discussion of how much it costs us to run our own email, someone suggests outsourcing (e.g., to gmail), and then someone else says, "No, we can't do that because of privacy laws." Am I right in guessing that privacy laws don't in fact prevent outsourcing to google? I suspect the argument is basically a way for IT folks to have job security. There are certainly laws that say, e.g., that we can't give students' grades to third parties. But it's hard to believe that letting google keyword-index emails and serve ads based on the keywords would violate these laws. (Whether google creeps you out is a different issue -- a moral/political one, not a legal one. It may also be an issue, but it's not an issue that can automatically end the discussion the way the legal issue can.) Does anyone know of any colleges or universities that do outsource to google or someone else?
Slashdot Mirror
It's tax deductible.
To donate by sending a check: 454 Shotwell St, SF, CA 94110
Donate online.
Good things they've done.
Now you have to say "I have no need to look up directions, reviews, navigate, use maps, communicate with my friends, take pictures, travel, reference information, access the portal of all accumulated knowledge of mankind and the greatest invention of all time or participate in modern day life in any other conceivable way."
look up directions, navigate, use maps: I do that before I leave home.
look up reviews, travel, reference information, access the portal of all accumulated knowledge of mankind and the greatest invention of all time or participate in modern day life in any other conceivable way: I do that on a desktop computer.
travel, communicate with my friends: I don't need a cell phone to do that.
take pictures: I use a camera for that.
I don't feel any need to own a cell phone, smart or dumb. I have a landline at home. I have a landline at work. I don't need to talk to people on the phone when I'm in my car (and I don't want to endanger myself or others by doing it when I'm driving). I don't need to talk to people on the phone when I'm walking down the street, or shopping, or hiking or riding my bike.
This seems utterly inconsequential to me. Who in the world sets out to find information about John Smith by typing johnsmith.com into the URL bar of a browser? Yes, there are plenty of people who don't really understand what a search engine is or how to use one effectively, and, yes, browsers' GUIs have recently started blurring the conceptual line between URLs and search terms. But is there really any likely path for users to get to newtgingrich.com other than having someone else say to them, "Hey, go to newtgingrich.com?"
The subject line of your post was "price..." The subject line of my reply is "profit..."
Say that on a TV game show you're asked to name as many luxury cars as possible in 60 seconds. It's easy: Cadillac, Rolls-Royce, Lexus, Porsche, ... Notice how almost all of those have been on the market for a really, really long time. Now try the same thing with low-end cars. Uh, ... Chevette, Hyundai Excel, VW Bug, AMC Gremlin, ... Notice how most of those are no longer on the market.
The similar tension, uncertainty, and chaos at the bottom end of the PC price spectrum is not a new phenomenon. The computer analogs of the Chevette et al. are machines like the Great Quality (ca. 1997), and the Everex GPC (ca. 2008). Notice how those are no longer on the market.
It's really, really hard to stay in business when your profit margin is low.
Basically the only way to make a $200 computer (desktop or netbook) is something like this. You produce them in Asia, where labor costs are low. You avoid R&D like the plague. You have nobody working for you who has the slightest expertise in software. You don't write documentation. You don't do support. You have a web site that's only in Chinese, and it has no useful content. You make your hardware specs so low that it takes 30 or 45 seconds for a browser to start up.
Why would it be a surprise that users then fail to beat a path to your door? Your sales are low, and your profits are low. You go out of business.
Here is the scientific paper. It makes no claim whatsoever about the mass of IGR J17091-3624. On p. 6, they say:
Figure 5 implies that if IGR J17091-3624 emits at Eddington, then either it harbors the lowest mass black hole known today (< 3Msolar for distances lower than 17 kpc), or, it is very distant. Such a large distance, together with its b ~2.2deg Galactic latitude, would imply a significant, but not necessarily implausible, altitude above the disk
Here is the NASA press release summarizing the paper for people who aren't scientists. It quotes the lead author as saying:
Just as the heart rate of a mouse is faster than an elephant's, the heartbeat signals from these black holes scale according to their masses
The Forbes article morphs this into "NASA Satellite May Have Found The Smallest Known Black Hole," and says, "An international team of astronomers utilizing NASA's Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), believe that they've identified a candidate for the smallest known black hole[...]"
The slashdot summary says:
The black hole itself is only about three times the mass of the Sun[...]
This is completely incorrect. It's a candidate for a very low mass black hole. What that means is that they're suggesting that astronomers do follow-up observations on this object and actually determine its mass, which may be unusually low.
It is of very great interest to relativists and astronomers to find the smallest black holes. There is a limit called the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit on the largest mass that a neutron star can have. There are big theoretical uncertainties in this number, but it is probably around three solar masses. However, we don't know for sure whether anything too massive to be a stable neutron star necessarily becomes a black hole. There have been all kinds of goofy objects hypothesized by theorists that might be intermediate between neutron stars and black holes, including black stars, gravastars, fuzzballs, quark stars, boson stars, and electroweak stars. Observing a low-mass black hole narrows the gap in mass between the heaviest stable neutron star and the lightest black hole, leaving less wiggle room to believe in these exotic objects.
As a motorcycist, I would encourage people to not talk or text on their phones while driving. Whenever someone tries to kill me, it's always the same: a woman fiddling with her phone.
That's very self-centered of you. The supply of donated organs is critically short. If we don't have people yakking on their phones and killing donorcyclists, where are we going to get all those fresh, healthy young hearts and corneas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safety
The WP article has copious references.
After a multi-car pileup involving two school buses, the NTSB is urging states to ban all cellphones and personal electronic devices in cars, even hands-free phones.
This particular accident is not the reason why the NTSB is proposing this. The NTSB is proposing this because there is a huge amount of incontrovertible evidence that when people talk on their cell phones while driving (regardless of whether the phone is hands-free), the become distracted and drive badly.
Why is the NTSB targeting gadgets instead of bad drivers?
The NTSB isn't targeting gadges. The NTSB is targeting bad drivers. You can put your cell phone in your car while driving, and nobody will target it. But if you talk on your cell phone while driving, you are a bad driver, and you should be targeted.
It makes me sad that Amazon don't support it natively.
It is at least a good sign to see that they're improving the kindle format. That shows that they're feeling a need to stay competitive with epub. It's actually a much better situation than what we ended up with on the web with technologies like mathml. It's pretty pathetic that Wikipedia articles still don't use mathml because IE doesn't support it except through kludgy workarounds. Epub 3 supports mathml (although I doubt that any actual devices support it yet). Math and science textbooks are a very lucrative market, and if a kindle user notices that the equations in the kindle version look like crap compared to the version on their friend's epub-based device, that's going to create a strong competitive disadvantage for amazon.
I listened to the whole interview, and I thought it was a kick. He's obviously very insecure, and he's projecting a manufactured persona, but he's also pretty funny.
...and why are women suddenly doing better than men?
It's not sudden. In fact, I'm not aware of any evidence that there has been any change over time at all in the male-female gap in college success. Women simply do better in school than men in general. Probably always have and always will.
Women enter college with about the same critical thinking and writing skills as men (Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, p. 40). They don't choose easier majors than men ( http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/womcolge.htm ). But: "Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college[...]" ( http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html ) "[...] in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates." ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?pagewanted=all )
So it absolutely makes sense that women do better than men in most departments at my school, and, yes, it would be a sign that something was wrong if they did worse in one particular department. Women simply do better because they work harder.
You can see the judge's logic on p. 5 of the order. He says users had the option to refuse the software update, keep running Linux, and stop using PSN. "Nothing in plaintiffs' factual allegations or their arguments is sufficient to support a conclusion that Sony has any obligation to maintain the PSN in operation indefinitely." This seems strange to me. When you buy a PlayStation, part of what you're paying for is access to PSN. Of course nobody expects PSN to be operational in 100 years, but neither does anyone expect PSN to be permanently shut down one hour after they buy their PlayStation.
The article lists five hypotheses:
They claim that all but #2 are ruled out by their data. What I can't figure out is the distinction between 2 and 3. 3 is that the gap is "due to differences in opportunities available to males versus females." 2 is defined in their reference [2] http://www.jstor.org/pss/2112795 as being about access to jobs and higher education. I don't understand the distinction.
I got interested in this stuff recently because I teach physics, and our statistics showed that women had a lower success rate in our classes than men. This was kind of worrisome, since women generally do better than men in college, and women do better than men at our school in math, and in the other sciences besides physics. Turned out that if we controlled for what class they were taking, the effect vanished. Lots of women were taking the physics class for biology majors, which has a low success rate. Almost no women take the physics class fo engineering majors, which has a higher success rate. In the class for biology majors, women actually did better than men. It impressed me with how subtle this kind of thing can be.
Unless things have changed since yesterday, the LHC cannot disprove the HB. It can show that it isn't within certain energy ranges, but it does not have the capability of emphatically disproving it's existence over the entire predicted spectrum.
That's literally true but misleading. Here is a paper that explains how non-LHC data constrain the standard-model Higgs to have a mass between 115 and 148 GeV. The LHC can't test whether there's a Higgs with a very high mass, but that's irrelevant because we know it has to be below 148 GeV based on non-LHC data. Based on the combination of non-LHC and LHC data, we know that if there's a standard-model Higgs, then it has a mass of about 115-127 GeV. The LHC is absolutely capable of disproving the existence of a standard-model Higgs within that mass range, if it doesn't actually exist. If there is no SM Higgs, we will know that within a couple of years based on LHC data.
The real reason there may be a lot of uncertainty for years to come is that there are many different ways of making a model with a Higgs in it. The standard model is only one of them. Some of the non-SM Higgses could be very difficult to detect. Here is a nice discussion of that. There are scenarios where the SM Higgs is ruled out by 2014, but by 2022 we still will not have detected or ruled out a non-SM Higgs.
Duck and Cover is one of these. It is definitely in the public domain. The claim against it is definitely fraudulent.
What is the evidence for that statement? Do we know that it wasn't produced by a contractor? Do we know that no audio or video in it was licensed from a commercial source?
Well, that's what's happened with the famous Duck and Cover educational video. It's public domain, but Image Entertainment (whoever that is) has claimed copyright of it and are blocking it from being seen in all countries except the United States. This is described in the report which Cory mentions.
That's a great example. P. 9 of the report discusses the Duck and Cover film, and then says this:
Not all of the copyright assertions are necessarily false. There may be instances where the government licensed use of music or footage from commercial sources. However, as explained in the next section, we have no way of determining where in a video an assertion occurs or what restrictions the government may have agreed to.
This is exactly the problem. We actually don't know whether these films are public domain or not. Products of the US government are not automatically public domain. Wikipedia has a nice explanation of this. For instance, these films may have been produced by contractors.
How would you feel if someone claimed ownership on your Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse footage you assembled and chose to block it worldwide?
There are two problems with this analogy. (1) You assume that the claims of ownership are unjustified, as Doctorow claims. As the FedFlix report admits, that hasn't been established. (2) The FedFlix videos have not been blocked world-wide. Here is the Duck and Cover film you refer to, on an archive.org page that is available, as far as I know, in every country. FedFlix is complaining that Duck and Cover isn't available world-wide on YouTube, but YouTube is under no obligation to make it available at all.
The real problem is that we don't know the copyright status of old films and audio. There are no records that are organized in digital form in any useful way.
Take a look at WP's article on Robert Heinlein and then at SFE's. Both have useful material. The WP article has photos, which the SFE article lacks. The WP article has many of the problems common to WP articles, including a dopey list at the end ("Inventions presaged" include the hand dryer!). The SFE article is more useful if you're looking for critical commentary, since POV (point of view) is verboten on Wikipedia. A big difference, of course, is that WP is free information, whereas SFE is only free-as-in-speech.
There's also ISFDB. It's just a database of fiction, but it seems to be very complete.
We've actually come a long way in the last decade in terms of being able to make public use of the public domain in the U.S. The vast majority of works that are PD in the US are ones that were copyrighted after 1922 but reverted to the public domain because their copyrights were not renewed. It used to be that if you came across a book from 1927, you could be almost certain that it was PD (simply because, statistically, few books had their copyrights renewed), but you wouldn't have any way of making sure, because the renewal records weren't online. But the good folks at Carnegie Mellon, Project Gutenberg, and Distributed Proofreaders did all the hard, dreary work of digitizing the records and putting them online in searchable form. So for example, a creative-commons-licensed physics textbook that I wrote includes a drawing of a boy hanging by his arms from a bar. The drawing is from a 1927 physics textbook, which I know is PD because I was able to check online that the copyright was not renewed. Another great thing about living in the US is that our law says that a faithful reproduction of a PD work can't be copyrighted (Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 1999). I have a portrait of Isaac Newton in my book that is a photo of a 17th-century oil painting. I got a nastygram once from the museum in the UK that owns the painting, saying I was violating their copyright. Sent them back an email saying, "Sorry, not copyrightable in the country where I live," and that was the end of that.
It gets a lot harder when you're dealing with sound recordings and moving pictures. The records aren't digitized by the government, and even if they were to be digitized, it would not necessarily be easy to index and search them. Unlike a book, a sound recording doesn't always have any clear labeling as to its title. Indexing sound and movies is a hard problem. It requires a ton of computing power to do well. What we really need is someone with a super-huge CPU farm who is willing to put tons of computational effort into indexing these things. I wonder who has the facilities necessary for that? Uh, Google, that's who. Google owns YouTube.
Here is a PD video I put together of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing -- a classic staple of American physics education for three generations. About 10 years ago, you could only get this by paying a ton of money to an educational video company. I found two newsreels about the bridge at archive.org, one silent and one with music and narration. I spliced them together. Since the first one was silent, I found a recording of some vintage jazz that fit, and voila, I had a PD replacement for the laserdisc that my college had bought for hundreds of dollars.
About a year later, I got an email from YouTube saying that the jazz tune I'd used in the video (Boot It, by Bennie Moten) actually wasn't PD. I was originally annoyed and sure they were wrong. But I looked into it, and it looked like sure enough, it was still in copyright. Archive.org had apparently not realized that a certain percentage of Bennie Moten's work was still in copyright. The rights holder is selling the recording online. And you know what? YouTube didn't try to crush me. They didn't sue me. They didn't send me a DMCA notice. They didn't take down the video or make me take it down. They simply started pulling revenue from it and giving some of that revenue to the copyright owner. Really not a problem.
So although it sounds like FedFlix has a problem, my own experience with YouTube was that they performed a service for me that nobody else was willing to perform: they figured out whether an old piece of music was actually PD. The end result is that it's a big win for everyone.
And I can't help feeling that Cory Doctorow, as in many of his hand-wringing advocacy pieces, is being a little overwrought. The problem here is not that FedFlix is being su
Mod parent up.
First, their method only works when the probability of winning is >0.5, which never happens in any real casino.
This is not quite true. In blackjack, there are times when you have p>0.5. That's the point of counting cards. Some games, like poker, are really games of skill. Others, like horse racing, involve non-random aspects.
Another problem is that they assume that the probability is constant with each round. That's true for some games (roulette), but not for others (blackjack).
Another thing that makes the paper not really applicable to real life is that it assumes you can choose to bet any amount. In reality, if you're in a casino playing blackjack, one of the most common ways for the management to detect that you're counting cards and throw you out is that they notice that you're varying your bets according to a certain pattern.
It would be interesting to see a realistic plan for winning money by gambling. Poker is probably the best game, but there are some realistic issues with finding a game in which (a) the other players have large amounts of money, (b) the other players are worse than you are, (c) there is no money being raked off by the house, and (d) there is no possibility of collusion (which I believe is quite hard to guard against in online poker).
Yeah, what you're describing is an example of how hard it is to infer animals' mental states based on their behavior. Just because an animal's behavior X is analogous to the behavior Y that we do when we have mental state Z, that doesn't mean that the animal's mental state is at all analogous to Z. Chimps do all kinds of behaviors, including social behaviors and even deception, that would make you think that they must have a theory of mind, but Povinelli did some classic studies where he showed that chimps would beg for food from people who couldn't see them, suggesting that the chimps simply learn by rote that begging produces food. Same thing for tool use. Chimps use tools, and even invent new uses for tools (as opposed to, say, sea otters, which use rocks as tools but don't innovate), but they use a lot more trial and error than a human would -- even a 1.5-year-old human child, who in many ways is not as smart as an adult chimp. E.g., there's a famous experiment where chimps learned to stack boxes to get at a banana on the ceiling, but those chimps tried all kinds of things that no human would ever try, like pushing a box against a wall, high up, and expecting it to stay there without anything underneath to support it.
An agent is not mandatory in order to sell a novel. Typically (at least in the genre I work in, which is SF), the steps to selling a novel are (1) build your chops with short fiction until you get to the point where you are regularly selling your work, (2) write a novel and submit it directly to publishers, (3) get offered a contract by a publisher and then use the offer of a contract to get an agent, who then helps you negotiate any changes you are hoping for in the contract. I'm not saying this is the only way to do it. Some people do these steps in order 1-3-2, or 3-2, like you've been trying to do. Others start selling novels without ever bothering with an agent. You can also send queries to agents simultaneously with submitting a novel to publishers.
You seem to feel that it's an injustice that 90% of agents didn't read your ms or sample chapters. I would actually take it as a very good sign that 10% did. Many of them probably have full client lists and are busy making a living by representing and promoting those clients.
The trouble with your idea of using Amazon to bypass slush piles and acquisitions editors is that being a slush reader or acquisitions editor is a hard, miserable, boring job that nobody will do without being paid money. If you want to bypass them, then you're essentially asking the reader to pay money for the privilege of doing the job of the slush reader, which is to figure out whether your writing is any good. Readers don't want to have to do the job of filtering out the crap. Remember Sturgeon's law, which is that 90% of everything is crap.
There's a version-control system called darcs (written by the son of a colleague of mine) that incorporates some interesting ideas along these lines. For example, say you have a program with 100,000 lines of code, and there's a function in it called Foo, which is called thousands and thousands of times. You want to change the name of the function to Bar. In a traditional diff-based system, this results in thousands of differences. Darcs is supposed to be able to handle changes like this and recognize that it's only *one* change. It's also supposed to be able to handle the case where programmer A makes this change and checks it in, and then programmer B, who has simultaneously been doing lots of other work on the code, checks in his own changes -- with the old name for the function.
At the school where I teach, whenever there's a discussion of how much it costs us to run our own email, someone suggests outsourcing (e.g., to gmail), and then someone else says, "No, we can't do that because of privacy laws." Am I right in guessing that privacy laws don't in fact prevent outsourcing to google? I suspect the argument is basically a way for IT folks to have job security. There are certainly laws that say, e.g., that we can't give students' grades to third parties. But it's hard to believe that letting google keyword-index emails and serve ads based on the keywords would violate these laws. (Whether google creeps you out is a different issue -- a moral/political one, not a legal one. It may also be an issue, but it's not an issue that can automatically end the discussion the way the legal issue can.) Does anyone know of any colleges or universities that do outsource to google or someone else?