"How has mathematics, statistics and other number driven aspects of life impacted you in the last decade?"
I think that while daily life these days is saturated with mathematics, most people don't even notice it.
When you Google, when Amazon makes a recommendation for you, when a credit card company decides to send you an offer, when you hear the latest economic/housing/employment/crime/you-name-it figures on the news, when your doctor suggests a particular treatment, when you take a picture with your digital camera, when you use your cell phone, when you enter your password on your computer, when your car controls engine timing and fuel mix, when you use your garage door opener... and a thousand other things.
These things are driven by statistical algorithms, compression algorithms, encryption algorithms, random number generator algorithms, and a host of other mathmatics. We utilized these math driven tools every day, and 98% of people don't even realize it. If you asked them they would say "math? stats? Booo-ring. Who needs it?"
I think you are missing the main point. The problem is the pollution of OT discussion regarding the submitter. Who cares about the pagerank of the submitter's lame-o site?
CmdrTaco said:
Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.
When he gets a good submission from a bad source, he has the choice of
Ditching it and missing out on a good story
Changing the story to remove some or all of the submitter's info, which creates and unfair system in which he censors specific users
Put the story up as is, and let half of the discussion be about the submitter instead of the topic.
My answer to him is to keep doing it the way they are. It is fair, and eventually the OT discussion will be relegated to the bottom of the barrel, when the moderators get bored with it. The moderation system works.
Keep doing what you are doing. It will work itself out. Just post the best submissions you get. Good is good, regardless of the source. We the readers are smart enough to figure this stuff out. And the moderators will tire of the OT ramblings and squash them. It's a good system.
I don't know about the rest, but a URL that starts with "xxx" and ends with ".gov" just plain freaks me out. (The URL for the "paper" link is "http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0507619") That ain't right, folks.
Maybe they already figured out which side their bread was
buttered on.
After all, they are pretty sharp.
They don't have to solve anything.
They made the smart move in trying to get cozy with the next economic superpower.
Now they can just ignore the complaining until it goes away.
God damn, near-suicidal work-induced bitterness is funny. You are killin me.
Just helped our CEO migrate to a new laptop. Got Outlook configured and then it started downloading from the server. Every time it did a "send and receive" it was trying to download 1239 messages and would grind for an hour or more. Turned out he had been set up to not delete from the server, so the new installation was trying to download all 39,000 messages, but Outlook must have some limit, so it would only try to grab 1239 at a time. Oh, we had good fun that day.
Why, it seems like just
yesterday
I was telling someone something similar.
I have actually talked to one of the handful of DARPA people who hatched this idea in the first place.
Interestingly, the primary motivation for this is for cargo and supply-line applications.
I am not saying that it couldn't be used for ground-based unmanned attack vehicles eventually, clearly it could. Eventually. But that kind of use would require a much smarter and more flexible maneuvering capability.
If you think about the requirements for a supply truck, they are pretty simple. Get from point A to point B, without getting stuck, or running over anyone. Requirements for an autonomous combat vehicle would be orders of magnitude more complex.
If you look at the situation in Iraq, a disproportionate number of people have been killed while driving trucks in supply convoys. It turns out that in the situation we have there truck driving is one of the most dangerous things a soldier can be doing.
Add to this the fact that you have long stretches of flat, uninhabited terrain, and you have a high-payoff "easy" starting point for automating supply vehicles.
As it turns out, about at least 80% of waging war is logistics. Figuring out not only how to get soldiers and equipment to a certain place, but also how to bring all the supporting parts, like food, fuel, ammunition, and establish a supply chain to continually bring more. All while the forces keep moving. In a location where you had no presence just days before, and where you now have forces spread out over hundreds of miles, this can be very difficult.
Automated supply vehicles could do a lot to help in this kind of situation. If you look at how the challenge is set up, it might look a bit similar to the challenges faced by a supply vehicle in Iraq.
I have actually talked to one of the handful of DARPA people who hatched this idea in the first place.
Interestingly, the primary motivation for this is for cargo and supply-line applications.
I am not saying that it couldn't be used for ground-based unmanned attack vehicles eventually, clearly it could. Eventually. But that kind of use would require a much smarter and more flexible maneuvering capability.
If you think about the requirements for a supply truck, they are pretty simple. Get from point A to point B, without getting stuck, or running over anyone. Requirements for an autonomous combat vehicle would be orders of magnitude more complex.
If you look at the situation in Iraq, a disproportionate number of people have been killed while driving trucks in supply convoys. It turns out that in the situation we have there truck driving is one of the most dangerous things a soldier can be doing.
Add to this the fact that you have long stretches of flat, uninhabited terrain, and you have a high-payoff "easy" starting point for automating supply vehicles.
As it turns out, about at least 80% of waging war is logistics. Figuring out not only how to get soldiers and equipment to a certain place, but also how to bring all the supporting parts, like food, fuel, ammunition, and establish a supply chain to continually bring more. All while the forces keep moving. In a location where you had no presence just days before, and where you now have forces spread out over hundreds of miles, this can be very difficult.
Automated supply vehicles could do a lot to help in this kind of situation. If you look at how the challenge is set up, it might look a bit similar to the challenges faced by a supply vehicle in Iraq.
Also, it is relevant that many establishments and individuals intentionally provide free WAPs as a public service.
So, if I am parked outside Starbucks and access their network it is ok, because they intended to share it, but if I am parked on this guy's street and access his network it is a felony? How am I supposed to know the difference?
I think it would be more akin to letting someone make a long distance call on your phone, if you have a plan that allows for unlimited long distance. I am sure the phone company would like to convince you that that is stealing.
Yes, but the drug companies will not test or mass-market those herbal remedies as-is.
Like you said, they are looking for starting points for drug research.
If they find an herbal remedy that is effective, they will keep it secret while they try to identify a chemical or gene from that plant/animal/whatever that they can patent. Otherwise there is no money in it.
since alternative medicine is alternative because science has shown that it doesn't really work
This is not true.
While there are certainly crackpots out there selling ineffective and even harmful snake-oil cures under the guise of alternative medicine, most alternative medicine practices have a long history and are probably effective to some degree.
The problem is that there is no money to be made in proving that they are effective, so no Big Pharma corp is going to spend money on real western medicine style drug trials.
Suppose that dandelion tea was an effective cure for cancer. Would Pfizer spend millions to do a ten year trial with thousands of patients? If they proved it worked then everyone would use the dandelions in their yard, or start cultivating them, and Pfizer would never make a penny from it. Multiply this by every naturally occuring substance on the planet.
Big Pharma has no motivation to prove the medicinal value of anything they cannot patent.
So chances are there are many treatments out there that are low cost, natural, and effective, but they will never be studied, put into JAMA, and introduced in your local doctor's office.
While I generally favor smaller government, this is one area where only government (well, possibly very well funded non-profits, too) can be effective. Gov't funded research in these topics could improve medicine, lower medical costs, and contribute to human knowledge.
Actually I believe this figure is accurate. Since it cost about $300M (+/- $100M) for Anakin to "restore balance to the force", the figure in the lawsuit is roughly the amount required to repair the damage.
But will she use it to make the repairs, or spend it on vodka, lottery tickets and incense?
> Lawrence Livermore National Labs have 12 of the top 500!
And nine of theirs are in the top 100. 7,13,34,35,42,44,49,78,79 Not a bad collection of toys. Maybe I should send them my resume. I'll get right on that after I buy a lottery ticket with my new numbers.
The parent post gets it right in the title, though I don't necessarily agree with the rest.
What the big entertainment companies either fail to get, or are trying to fools us on is the pricing. When you rent some media with DRM you are getting significantly less than when you buy an unrestricted version.
This is the basis of all rental companies: I don't want to pay for the whole thing, but I only need it for a little while, so if there are a bunch of people like me that adds up to enough to buy it, and on top of that enough profit to make it worthwhile for a company to provide that as a service. This works for everything from DVDs to power tools, to cars.
But the big media companies are trying to get us to pay the same amount we pay for unrestricted version. A dollar a song? I don't think so buddy. Add that up and for many CDs it comes out to more than you'd pay for it at Walmart.
Imagine if you went on vacation, wanted to rent a car for a week, and the rental place said, "Oh, you'd like to buy a car! Great! That will be $24,000. Just return it on saturday, and be sure to refill the gas tank."
Doesn't sound like a very good deal, does it? Well, that is what I think the record companies are trying to do. Sure it's a good deal for them, but people just ain't buying it.
I would love to rent music and other media, but the price has got to be appropriate for the service received.
Actually, I found that line in the article very puzzling.
"The specially designed turbine, which costs about Rs 200 to be developed inside a laboratory, is so small that it could be easily kept in a pocket, he said."
I think this is saying that it cost $4 to develop the product. I guess they really put a lot of work into it.
Well said.
Here is some supporting evidence for what you are saying:
this wired article
about the connection between Asperger's/autism and the tech world.
Duh! Of course! Just think how well my meager investments will be doing after they've had the chance to grow for 100 years! I'll be loaded!
Seriously, I think the money and class issues are the interesting side of this. If it happened there would be a clear class division between those that could afford it and those that couldn't. And for those that could, their wealth could grow without bounds. Our (in the US and most other western countries) society depends on inheritance and the associated taxes, dividing of estates, etc, to redistribute wealth, and this would immediately negate that effect. Anyone with an estate worth much could afford the technology to extend their life, and therefore not pass on the estate.
While it raises all kinds of social issues, on a personal level it means each of us has to try to accumulate enough wealth to get into the category of people that can afford it before the end of our natural lifespan. It's a race against time.
I disagree. I know the mass of my car and its location and elevation at home and at work with good accuracy. I also know the mass of the earth. That's all I need to calculate the change in rotation.
"...there's too much noise in the data/measurements to reliably attribute such changes to your daily commute."
Hey, no one said any thing about attributing measureable changes to anything. And that is exactly my point. No one in the article is explaining measured changes. They just did calculations and gave us the results, and said maybe someday they'll look at some measurements and see if it is detectable.
"this is news because it had measureable changes that can reasonably be attributed to the earthquake."
I saw nothing in the article about measured changes. All this talk has been about changes hypothesized based on calculations. They also hypothesize that some of the changes may be big enough to be detectable, and they say they may check on those some day, but then that noise you mentioned comes into play.
And I personally think scientific notation is very fancy. I can compute numbers that are at E -100 scale without writing down all those zeros. Neat!
Slashdot Mirror
I think that while daily life these days is saturated with mathematics, most people don't even notice it.
When you Google, when Amazon makes a recommendation for you, when a credit card company decides to send you an offer, when you hear the latest economic/housing/employment/crime/you-name-it figures on the news, when your doctor suggests a particular treatment, when you take a picture with your digital camera, when you use your cell phone, when you enter your password on your computer, when your car controls engine timing and fuel mix, when you use your garage door opener ... and a thousand other things.
These things are driven by statistical algorithms, compression algorithms, encryption algorithms, random number generator algorithms, and a host of other mathmatics. We utilized these math driven tools every day, and 98% of people don't even realize it. If you asked them they would say "math? stats? Booo-ring. Who needs it?"
CmdrTaco said: Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.
When he gets a good submission from a bad source, he has the choice of
My answer to him is to keep doing it the way they are. It is fair, and eventually the OT discussion will be relegated to the bottom of the barrel, when the moderators get bored with it. The moderation system works.
Keep doing what you are doing. It will work itself out. Just post the best submissions you get. Good is good, regardless of the source. We the readers are smart enough to figure this stuff out. And the moderators will tire of the OT ramblings and squash them. It's a good system.
I don't know about the rest, but a URL that starts with "xxx" and ends with ".gov" just plain freaks me out. (The URL for the "paper" link is "http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0507619")
That ain't right, folks.
Maybe they already figured out which side their bread was buttered on. After all, they are pretty sharp. They don't have to solve anything. They made the smart move in trying to get cozy with the next economic superpower. Now they can just ignore the complaining until it goes away.
God damn, near-suicidal work-induced bitterness is funny. You are killin me.
Just helped our CEO migrate to a new laptop. Got Outlook configured and then it started downloading from the server. Every time it did a "send and receive" it was trying to download 1239 messages and would grind for an hour or more. Turned out he had been set up to not delete from the server, so the new installation was trying to download all 39,000 messages, but Outlook must have some limit, so it would only try to grab 1239 at a time. Oh, we had good fun that day.
Article Moderation Totals:
-3 Unfunny
-2 Uninteresting
-1 Uninsightful
100% suckage.
Must be a slow news day.
I second the recommendation for "Winged Migration". Excellent film.
Why, it seems like just yesterday I was telling someone something similar.
I have actually talked to one of the handful of DARPA people who hatched this idea in the first place.
Interestingly, the primary motivation for this is for cargo and supply-line applications.
I am not saying that it couldn't be used for ground-based unmanned attack vehicles eventually, clearly it could. Eventually. But that kind of use would require a much smarter and more flexible maneuvering capability.
If you think about the requirements for a supply truck, they are pretty simple. Get from point A to point B, without getting stuck, or running over anyone. Requirements for an autonomous combat vehicle would be orders of magnitude more complex.
If you look at the situation in Iraq, a disproportionate number of people have been killed while driving trucks in supply convoys. It turns out that in the situation we have there truck driving is one of the most dangerous things a soldier can be doing.
Add to this the fact that you have long stretches of flat, uninhabited terrain, and you have a high-payoff "easy" starting point for automating supply vehicles.
As it turns out, about at least 80% of waging war is logistics. Figuring out not only how to get soldiers and equipment to a certain place, but also how to bring all the supporting parts, like food, fuel, ammunition, and establish a supply chain to continually bring more. All while the forces keep moving. In a location where you had no presence just days before, and where you now have forces spread out over hundreds of miles, this can be very difficult.
Automated supply vehicles could do a lot to help in this kind of situation. If you look at how the challenge is set up, it might look a bit similar to the challenges faced by a supply vehicle in Iraq.
Oh, if only you had been joking....
if only...
I have actually talked to one of the handful of DARPA people who hatched this idea in the first place.
Interestingly, the primary motivation for this is for cargo and supply-line applications.
I am not saying that it couldn't be used for ground-based unmanned attack vehicles eventually, clearly it could. Eventually. But that kind of use would require a much smarter and more flexible maneuvering capability.
If you think about the requirements for a supply truck, they are pretty simple. Get from point A to point B, without getting stuck, or running over anyone. Requirements for an autonomous combat vehicle would be orders of magnitude more complex.
If you look at the situation in Iraq, a disproportionate number of people have been killed while driving trucks in supply convoys. It turns out that in the situation we have there truck driving is one of the most dangerous things a soldier can be doing.
Add to this the fact that you have long stretches of flat, uninhabited terrain, and you have a high-payoff "easy" starting point for automating supply vehicles.
As it turns out, about at least 80% of waging war is logistics. Figuring out not only how to get soldiers and equipment to a certain place, but also how to bring all the supporting parts, like food, fuel, ammunition, and establish a supply chain to continually bring more. All while the forces keep moving. In a location where you had no presence just days before, and where you now have forces spread out over hundreds of miles, this can be very difficult.
Automated supply vehicles could do a lot to help in this kind of situation. If you look at how the challenge is set up, it might look a bit similar to the challenges faced by a supply vehicle in Iraq.
Let's ban DNA.
Clearly that was the root cause of the Chevy, the Acer, and both of the morons involved in this.
Well said.
Also, it is relevant that many establishments and individuals intentionally provide free WAPs as a public service.
So, if I am parked outside Starbucks and access their network it is ok, because they intended to share it, but if I am parked on this guy's street and access his network it is a felony? How am I supposed to know the difference?
I think it would be more akin to letting someone make a long distance call on your phone, if you have a plan that allows for unlimited long distance. I am sure the phone company would like to convince you that that is stealing.
Like you said, they are looking for starting points for drug research. If they find an herbal remedy that is effective, they will keep it secret while they try to identify a chemical or gene from that plant/animal/whatever that they can patent. Otherwise there is no money in it.
This is not true. While there are certainly crackpots out there selling ineffective and even harmful snake-oil cures under the guise of alternative medicine, most alternative medicine practices have a long history and are probably effective to some degree.
The problem is that there is no money to be made in proving that they are effective, so no Big Pharma corp is going to spend money on real western medicine style drug trials.
Suppose that dandelion tea was an effective cure for cancer. Would Pfizer spend millions to do a ten year trial with thousands of patients? If they proved it worked then everyone would use the dandelions in their yard, or start cultivating them, and Pfizer would never make a penny from it. Multiply this by every naturally occuring substance on the planet.
Big Pharma has no motivation to prove the medicinal value of anything they cannot patent.
So chances are there are many treatments out there that are low cost, natural, and effective, but they will never be studied, put into JAMA, and introduced in your local doctor's office.
While I generally favor smaller government, this is one area where only government (well, possibly very well funded non-profits, too) can be effective. Gov't funded research in these topics could improve medicine, lower medical costs, and contribute to human knowledge.
I am outraged!!!! You have perturbed my mojo by insinuating that I am a kook with crackpot principles. I am going to sue you.
Actually I believe this figure is accurate. Since it cost about $300M (+/- $100M) for Anakin to "restore balance to the force", the figure in the lawsuit is roughly the amount required to repair the damage.
But will she use it to make the repairs, or spend it on vodka, lottery tickets and incense?
> Lawrence Livermore National Labs have 12 of the top 500!
And nine of theirs are in the top 100.
7,13,34,35,42,44,49,78,79
Not a bad collection of toys.
Maybe I should send them my resume.
I'll get right on that after I buy a lottery ticket with my new numbers.
Starting Score: 0 points
Moderation
Funny HaHa +1
Funny Strange -1
Total Score: 0
The parent post gets it right in the title, though I don't necessarily agree with the rest.
What the big entertainment companies either fail to get, or are trying to fools us on is the pricing. When you rent some media with DRM you are getting significantly less than when you buy an unrestricted version.
This is the basis of all rental companies: I don't want to pay for the whole thing, but I only need it for a little while, so if there are a bunch of people like me that adds up to enough to buy it, and on top of that enough profit to make it worthwhile for a company to provide that as a service. This works for everything from DVDs to power tools, to cars.
But the big media companies are trying to get us to pay the same amount we pay for unrestricted version. A dollar a song? I don't think so buddy. Add that up and for many CDs it comes out to more than you'd pay for it at Walmart.
Imagine if you went on vacation, wanted to rent a car for a week, and the rental place said, "Oh, you'd like to buy a car! Great! That will be $24,000. Just return it on saturday, and be sure to refill the gas tank."
Doesn't sound like a very good deal, does it? Well, that is what I think the record companies are trying to do. Sure it's a good deal for them, but people just ain't buying it.
I would love to rent music and other media, but the price has got to be appropriate for the service received.
"The specially designed turbine, which costs about Rs 200 to be developed inside a laboratory, is so small that it could be easily kept in a pocket, he said."
I think this is saying that it cost $4 to develop the product. I guess they really put a lot of work into it.
Well said. Here is some supporting evidence for what you are saying: this wired article about the connection between Asperger's/autism and the tech world.
Duh! Of course!
Just think how well my meager investments will be doing after they've had the chance to grow for 100 years! I'll be loaded!
Seriously, I think the money and class issues are the interesting side of this. If it happened there would be a clear class division between those that could afford it and those that couldn't. And for those that could, their wealth could grow without bounds. Our (in the US and most other western countries) society depends on inheritance and the associated taxes, dividing of estates, etc, to redistribute wealth, and this would immediately negate that effect. Anyone with an estate worth much could afford the technology to extend their life, and therefore not pass on the estate.
While it raises all kinds of social issues, on a personal level it means each of us has to try to accumulate enough wealth to get into the category of people that can afford it before the end of our natural lifespan. It's a race against time.
"...there's too much noise in the data/measurements to reliably attribute such changes to your daily commute."
Hey, no one said any thing about attributing measureable changes to anything. And that is exactly my point. No one in the article is explaining measured changes. They just did calculations and gave us the results, and said maybe someday they'll look at some measurements and see if it is detectable.
"this is news because it had measureable changes that can reasonably be attributed to the earthquake."
I saw nothing in the article about measured changes. All this talk has been about changes hypothesized based on calculations. They also hypothesize that some of the changes may be big enough to be detectable, and they say they may check on those some day, but then that noise you mentioned comes into play.
And I personally think scientific notation is very fancy. I can compute numbers that are at E -100 scale without writing down all those zeros. Neat!