Bush keeps saying he wants everyone to work in a bipartisan fashion, but I don't think "bipartisan" means what he thinks it does. Rather bipartisan appears to mean to him "do it my way" or "because I say so" and "I'm the decider".
Seriously though, and back on topic: Even the American Bar Association has described the use of signing statements to modify the meaning of duly enacted laws as "contrary to the rule of law and our Constitutional system of separation of powers". When is the American public going to wake up on both sides of the isle here? From a Republican standpoint, this administration has gone so far off from Republican ideals, that it is not even funny. Republicans used to be the ones who were for a strong military, smaller government, less government intrusion into our lives and lower taxes and what we have is a military that is weaker and smaller now than it has been in decades, we have the largest federal bureaucracy in the history of the world, fewer Constitutional rights and lower taxes are only for large corporations. From the Democratic side, well..... those guys just got hosed for the last few years and they do not appear smart enough to position anyone capable enough to compete with someone even as unappealing and dangerous to our lives as Bush and Co.
I worry for our future as we have signed away many of our Constitutional rights and protections, we have alienated many foreign countries and allies after squandering perhaps the most support we've ever had in history after 9/11, we are entrenched in a combat zone that has very little positive outcome potential, we are signing away our financial future through one of the largest deficits in history and Cheney is on record as saying deficit spending does not matter.
Did it ever occur to you that net neutrality legislation is also a power grab and is being done in the name of fear?
Please explain to me how legislation to protect equal access and prevent multi-tier implementations that favor big business and big government are a un-Constitutional power grab. After all, conceptually, net neutrality goes far back in US history to the mid 1800's to preserve equal access to telegraph lines with the only exception being made for war or emergency purposes. The purpose was to encourage impartial use of the new resource and promote economic development in a democratic manner. I think that perhaps you are confused about the status of the current proposal to break up limits on net neutrality.
From TFA from Lessig: "Radical" changes in Washington always have this Charlie Brown/Lucy-like character (remember Lucy holding the football?): it doesn't take long before you realize how little really ever changes in DC. The latest example is the Dems and IP issues as they affect the Net. Message to the Net from the newly Democratic House? Go to hell.
This balance of power of course is really what we want to happen in DC, and is just what has been out of whack since the Gingrich led Congress felt they had a mandate. Too much has been done in the name of fear and un-Constitutional powergrabs over the last little while and we need a re-balancing of power.
Years ago, when I grew up in Texas, our legislature only met every other year because every time they met, new laws got passed. This was what the state leadership was like at least under Ann Richards, and we did not have as many professional politicians, but I bugged out before the turn of the tide towards Bush and Co. so I don't really know if that is currently the system in our Great State.
It's strange how these ideas had a strong influence on Anti-Semitism and the rise of Hitler as a response to a fear of Communism and its corresponding ideas of an ideal state which went beyond nationalism to a sort of universal Order...
Note that I never said that scientists should "rule". I believe in balance to government, so that all sides are equally represented through models of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, with strong separation of powers and healthy checks on those separations. Anti-Semitism and the rise of the Nazis partly came about because there was no system of checks and balances and unequal representation (and participation). It was a party of thugs that grabbed and assassinated their way to power by marginalizing one minority after another until there was nobody left strong enough to resist them.
Did you go to Yale and go through a challenging politics curriculum, plus a minor in international relations? If not, I would ask you to refrain from saying anything here on Slashdot about politics, since you are not qualified for it.
What does Yale or formally studying politics or international relations have to do with those vast hordes of politicians who come by that career path by way of being a lawyer, acting, being born with a silver spoon in their mouth, or coming from a political dynasty? Furthermore, most of my friends who have formally studied politics or international relations do not end up in politics per se. Rather they have ended up in jobs with the CIA, the State Department or academia. Certainly I am not saying that political science does not have to be a pre-requisite for being a politician, but if one is going to invoke science to make a political statement or form policy, then one should have to know a little bit about the subject matter.
I'll make you a deal though. Since I have no formal political theory training as of now, I will refrain from commenting in those areas that touch on political theory or rely on formal didactic instruction to make a point. However, because I have been trained to think and question, and because I have certain Constitutionally mandated rights (for now) who I vote for or discuss with friends (or other Slashdotters) is none of your business. Deal?:-)
Not being nasty there, and I do not intend to offend. I'm just making a point.
Now, I am not completely sure on this concept, but I'll throw it out there for others to comment on and vet that know:
Famine typically happens in areas of low education, high poverty and unstable governments and monetary valuation, right? Also, as education levels go up, the number of children people have decreases..... So, the concept is that we invest more time and effort in fewer numbers of children that ultimately have less of an impact on the environment. If we maintain proper stewardship, this is possible. For an example, look at Japan who while maintaining one of the highest population densities of any developed nation, still possesses the highest percentage of old growth forest coverage.
I have no problem with you calling me out. In fact, I welcome it.
You have read all of those things into what I said. I never said "don't act without consulting a scientist" or any of the other things you suggest. What I said was "I would very much like to see a return to using scientists expertise in more areas of society and policy, perhaps even increasing the numbers of consultants for politicians, and the entertainment industry, not just as a reality check, which so many seem to be mis-using scientists for, but also as a means to spur inquiry and progress in both the arts and sciences." which is very far away from anything you inferred. My position is that when we make decisions that can benefit from science and individuals who are trained to think and question, we are better off for it. That does not mean that religion gets pushed away, nor does it mean that science always does "good". What it does mean is that we become more careful about some of the things we do, especially as technology and power become more available. It also means that if we introduce more science into our daily lives, we become less reliant on small groups of powerful people to vet what we think, do and believe and we become less vulnerable to temporal vanities or trends.
I gotta say as a scientist and professor that I agree completely with this position of reserving comment in the public spotlight until you have done a little homework. All too often we have celebrities and politicians using their status to manipulate science to bend to a political whim or will, or simply to just espouse a misunderstanding. Fundamentally, the problem is that we have a very poor science education curriculum in many schools in the US and internationally and we get individuals who are high school dropouts become actors and are now capable of garnering much attention towards their issue of the moment. That is not intended to be insulting nor does it minimize their position or status, it is simply asking them to refrain from doing a job they are not qualified for.
We have minimized the importance of science in our lives and it is now biting us collectively in the ass in terms of environment, medicine, technological progress, and education. Rather than hamstringing scientists, and only allowing them to speak when it serves the political climate of the moment, I would very much like to see a return to using scientists expertise in more areas of society and policy, perhaps even increasing the numbers of consultants for politicians, and the entertainment industry, not just as a reality check, which so many seem to be mis-using scientists for, but also as a means to spur inquiry and progress in both the arts and sciences. The model of using scientists as regulators of policy and such is as old as 1950's Sci-Fi, but it has been no accident that during the most progressive periods in history, we have relied on scientists and others who are trained to think and inquire to make some of our biggest technological advancements. These advancements include great strides in medicine, prolonging life-spans and improving the quality of life as well as ending global wars and in the absence of political influences, ending famine and disease.
Have no fear as "betting pools" work *has* continued and they are proving themselves to be very effective. Also, you are quite correct about your assessment of "odd-seeming areas of research", as they often, particularly in a basic research sense turn out to be incredibly valuable. One classic case was a member of congress bitching about the NIH funding studies to examine bird songs without knowing or understanding some of the neuroscience implications of that work.
I am surprised it took them this long to implement as a similar project was implemented at select federal intelligence agencies through DARPA funding back in early 2002 to evaluate possible intelligence leads and threats to national security. Unfortunately the Total Information Awareness program developed out of this work and the true benefits of predictive networks using human intelligence have not really panned out due to an almost pathological reliance and worship of technology supplanting human intelligence rather then supplementing it. Only more recently have projects based on simple, yet tremendously technologies such as wikis been gaining more traction.
You are focusing on the number when I should have put the emphasis on how the sample was selected. how about "did you *really* think that a sample size of just over 1000 purchases on credit cards obtained through a back channel source is a reliable sample size for the number of iTunes purchases?..."
As one professor to another I am sure you also teach sampling error and experimental design, right? Additionally, it should be noted that the actual samples used for the analysis out of the total records pulled was less than 200. What does that do to power?
Ah, but if you read what I wrote, you would note that I said "In my business......If you present data or a theory with the suspicion that it is incorrect, that is fraud in my line of work. Note that I said "in my line of work". So, I stand by what I said. If one were to conclude that they did not have the appropriate data, then why would they report it in the first place?
Perfect example... I had a friend at a little company called Bungie. Bungie was developing this really cool little application called Halo that they were planning on releasing for MacOS, Linux and Windows. Microsoft came along, made them an offer they could not refuse and they bought the company so Halo could be a "halo" game for the Xbox platform. This of course meant that all development of Halo for the Macintosh and Linux were cancelled and Windows development was significantly delayed. It was almost a couple of years before I was asked to help with the development of the Macintosh port of Halo. So, I and many, many other users of the Macintosh and Linux (and Windows for that matter) were negatively impacted by this very common business practice of Microsoft.
Oh, I don't *hate* Microsoft. In fact, I have friends who work there and have made money off of Microsoft stock. I still use Word (although Pages is coming on strong and if I could get EndNote compatibility, I'd switch entirely) and Excel and root for the company on occasion. Where I object to Microsoft is in their shoddy products. Almost every product I've used of theirs that came out at version 1.0 has royally sucked. Their whole concept of bringing products to market is date/deadline driven rather than quality or product driven, much less consumer driven. Classic cases of abysmal products were Windows v1-3, Win-98 and ME, the Zune, Bob, that first tablets and the ultra portable systems I've previewed (error messages that were too big for the display for instance), and of course their always changing interface standards and poor security issues.
Saying all that, I actually had a pretty good Micron PC running Win 95 that was remarkably stable. Of course upgrading it to Win98 was a unmitigated disaster. Win NT was a very stable OS, that was just cryptic to use and administer. Win2000 was pretty decent, and it almost made me switch my home system from MacOS to Win200, but like most products they have simply used their monopoly status to make the right changes very late in the game if ever. How long did it take them to adopt all characters for file names?
Where I really started getting disgusted with their business was after I saw company after company run out of business due to business practices that bordered on illegal and in some cases blatantly crossed the legal line. I always tended to prefer the MacOS, but was fairly platform agnostic (using Windows, Solaris, Linux, Irix, MacOS) for whichever task needed the appropriate platform, but with the advent of OS X, I've become a strong advocate for the Macintosh platform which brings up another issue entirely.... Microsoft has for decades now used Apple as their R&D lab. It's an obvious and well known joke, but if you are familiar with OS X, just wait until you get to play with Vista. Come on now, there are some very smart folks at Microsoft, so why can't they come up with ideas and products on their own? My take on it is that it is an efficiency issue combined with a management issue with too much oversight at the early and mid stages of the game. For instance, how many programmers are there on the Windows development team? Its in the thousands for sure, perhaps tens of thousands all told. For OS X, the number of full on programmers numbers in the hundreds. Under 300 for sure last time I checked a couple of years ago. The whole Quicktime team numbers around 30-40 whereas the Microsoft Media Player team is well into the hundreds. We could go on and on here, but to answer your question, this scientist at least does not hate Microsoft. I've just watched the company for years, purchased some of their products and have found a product from another company (Apple) that meets my needs and does not get in the way of my work the way Microsoft products tend to do.
Meanwhile the author of the Forrester report, Josh Bernoff, noted in his blog yesterday that they shouldn't be pummeled just because everyone took what he wrote and ran with it."
Well, that is why people should be responsible for their reporting. In my business, when you report something, you stand by it. If you present data or a theory with the suspicion that it is incorrect, that is fraud in my line of work. Seriously though, did you *really* think that a sample size of just over 1000 purchases on credit cards obtained through a back channel source is a reliable sample size for the number of iTunes purchases? If I correctly recall, Apple announced back in February that they were selling about 3 million songs/day and if the current estimates of increases on the order of 84% are correct, your sample size is woefully under-representative. Thats just high school statistics by the way...
I am not saying that you should lose your job over this one, but this should be a tacit reminder of how important good reporting is and if you are beyond your means or competence on a particular story or analysis, go find some help before you publish it, do some fact checking and be more careful with stories that can have a significant impact on companies and individuals.
Yeah, well there are lots of blogs that do better than a number of businesses and organizations for whatever reasons Google assigns ranking. I get a number of amused emails from people that find Google ranks my blog higher than their dedicated sites for a shocking number of items. They want to know how I've engineered it, and I have to say I honestly don't know. But if they want to pay Google to increase their ranking above mine, go for it.
I suspect part of the reason is my selective use of links in articles I post to supplement the content I post with targeted information, as well as my hosting it from my office in an educational institution. Occasionally getting linked from places like Slashdot, BoingBoing and Digg can't hurt either....
OK rhombic. Look up Karl Landsteiner, who won the Nobel in 1930 for his work discovering the major blood groups and the development of the ABO system of blood typing. If you were remotely familiar with your science or history, you might suspect that immunology just *might* be part of this work. Specifically, he discovered that agglutination was an immunological reaction and that specificity of the antigen is so good, that one can discriminate racemic molecules. Of course this work was the most medically pressing at the time, but his greatest work is considered to be his work in antigen-antibody reactions.
As for confusing glycine and alanine, I confused the two in a quick fit of slashdot posting. The difference is a methyl group rather than a hydrogen atom in one carbon position. Biochem was over a decade ago, so sue me and go back to your little rock.
Dammit! Mad props to you as I was thinking alanine. That of course is exactly why Slashdot gets you in trouble. You type stuff in off the top of your head to get your entry in and sometimes you get it wrong. The cool thing is that there are folks on Slashdot that will catch you.
One might make an argument for this, but I am not quite so sure this is the "demise of the professional photojournalist" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the ability to effectively communicate. Sure a picture can tell a thousand words, but that photograph needs to be placed in context. I take lots of photos that describe what I see, do and where I go, but I would never think of myself as a professional journalist. These images for me are a means to communicate and keep in touch with family and friends (a blog, right?), not to disseminate the news to the rest of the world. The fact that sometimes images from my site do resonate with news agencies/institutions or individuals around the world is cool, but it is a rarity that I get requests for re-publication (one every three months or so) and it is not how I make my living.
Additionally, there is also the issue of ethics that most professional publications usually get right, but there are the admitted occasional screw-ups. Usually however, there are issues of image/video provenance to deal with that may not always reflect reality ("I found it on the Internets, so it must be true!") that editorial boards put through a vetting process to filter out much of the fakery/deceipt.
The Internet has enabled the ability to democratically (small "d") reach huge masses of people with relatively few resources and I expect that we will see more citizen reporting as the years go on. It may in some cases also challenge the mainstream media for particular stories, but the reality is that most folks have other jobs/things that keep them busy and they do not have the resources or time to become professional journalists. When they do obtain the appropriate resources/time/credibility, they have just crossed over into the world of the professional journalist.
Technology will cause things to change and serve as a destabilizing influence for many established institutions, but I think we will always have and pay people who relate the news to us, bring us the wider world and tell stories. This will become especially more important as increasing percentages of societies become more specialized and fragment their time into narrowly defined regions of interest/study.
I am going to be very skeptical of this and would not be tossing any money into a private company to study this just yet. The olfactory system is well capable of distinguishing many small molecules, even those that are very similar using a variety of well known and well understood processes just as in the immune system. Look, a Nobel prize was awarded back in the 30's for the discovery that IGGs can recognize even racemic molecules such as L and D forms of glycine even and the olfactory literature is just as rich. The biggest problem however, with the UCL approach is that it completely ignores years of cortical, subcortical and psychophysics data. Furthermore, there is no effort or model in their work that might explain how the signals would be transduced into cortical/subcortical signals or how they account for potential noise in the system. Their claim that signals can be translated through tunneling in a biological system which likely swamps those potential signals with noise is what really troubles me.
I am not saying that they should not do it, or that they are absolutely wrong, as it is possibly interesting. Rather all I am saying is my eyebrows are raised at their claims.
Hi. Like the man said, 'from my cold dead hands.' Guns aren't just for the military, cops, and gang-bangers -- we have 'em to make sure that our government doesn't herd us into cattle-cars, and send us off to the thermal depolymerizor en masse. We've already got Extrordinary Rendition, what's after that?
It's a little melodramatic, and trite, don't you think? But I suppose that coming from an actor, it was intended to be a sound bite. That said, a stable government is rarely going to suddenly and massively reverse course on an issue like this, but you make a good point with rendition and I suspect you intended to invoke the revocation of Habeus Corpus. The change happens over years where rights are slowly eroded from both the whako far left and from the extreme neo-cons that have held our government for the last few years. The left wants to take away gun rights because "guns are bad, m'kay?" and the right will cave to big business and slowly erode personal freedoms to further their goals and to keep those who are without down to enable cheap labor. I personally just see guns as a tool that far too many people attach some sort of mystical power to, handguns in particular. After all, most people who own handguns simply do not have enough training and someone with even a knife can do much more damage than a gun can deliver. What's next? Doing something totally absurd like banning knives as they are doing in the UK?
Look, what people need to realize is that in any society where you have vast numbers of people, there is *always* going to be some sort of violence. However, violence can be mitigated through a stable government with flat economic pyramids where the gap between those that have everything and those that have nothing is reduced. Access to healthcare, housing and a job combined with supporting our Constitutional rights through separation of powers and a strong military is what our government needs to be focusing on. All of this other garbage to induce fear, make more needless laws and marginalize those rights that the founding fathers of this country worked so hard to establish is not remotely patriotic. In fact, one might make an argument for sedition given some of the rights that have been passed by lawmakers, whether they realize it or not....
Seriously though, as I understand it, this is simply another mathematical structure that allows a different scalar much like a real projective line, right? If that is the case, then there is nothing really new here and there can be no application or definition with real numbers or integers. Alternatively by interpreting this as a commutative ring, one might be able to extend this to where division by zero does not always get you in trouble, but the precise interpretation of "division" is fundamentally altered. This too is not a new concept.
However, all of that said, I am a bioscientist and my math skills are not as strong as a formally trained mathematician, so I will defer to those here who are stronger mathematicians than I if this interpretation is incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush keeps saying he wants everyone to work in a bipartisan fashion, but I don't think "bipartisan" means what he thinks it does. Rather bipartisan appears to mean to him "do it my way" or "because I say so" and "I'm the decider".
Seriously though, and back on topic: Even the American Bar Association has described the use of signing statements to modify the meaning of duly enacted laws as "contrary to the rule of law and our Constitutional system of separation of powers". When is the American public going to wake up on both sides of the isle here? From a Republican standpoint, this administration has gone so far off from Republican ideals, that it is not even funny. Republicans used to be the ones who were for a strong military, smaller government, less government intrusion into our lives and lower taxes and what we have is a military that is weaker and smaller now than it has been in decades, we have the largest federal bureaucracy in the history of the world, fewer Constitutional rights and lower taxes are only for large corporations. From the Democratic side, well..... those guys just got hosed for the last few years and they do not appear smart enough to position anyone capable enough to compete with someone even as unappealing and dangerous to our lives as Bush and Co.
I worry for our future as we have signed away many of our Constitutional rights and protections, we have alienated many foreign countries and allies after squandering perhaps the most support we've ever had in history after 9/11, we are entrenched in a combat zone that has very little positive outcome potential, we are signing away our financial future through one of the largest deficits in history and Cheney is on record as saying deficit spending does not matter.
Did it ever occur to you that net neutrality legislation is also a power grab and is being done in the name of fear?
Please explain to me how legislation to protect equal access and prevent multi-tier implementations that favor big business and big government are a un-Constitutional power grab. After all, conceptually, net neutrality goes far back in US history to the mid 1800's to preserve equal access to telegraph lines with the only exception being made for war or emergency purposes. The purpose was to encourage impartial use of the new resource and promote economic development in a democratic manner. I think that perhaps you are confused about the status of the current proposal to break up limits on net neutrality.
From TFA from Lessig: "Radical" changes in Washington always have this Charlie Brown/Lucy-like character (remember Lucy holding the football?): it doesn't take long before you realize how little really ever changes in DC. The latest example is the Dems and IP issues as they affect the Net. Message to the Net from the newly Democratic House? Go to hell.
This balance of power of course is really what we want to happen in DC, and is just what has been out of whack since the Gingrich led Congress felt they had a mandate. Too much has been done in the name of fear and un-Constitutional powergrabs over the last little while and we need a re-balancing of power.
Years ago, when I grew up in Texas, our legislature only met every other year because every time they met, new laws got passed. This was what the state leadership was like at least under Ann Richards, and we did not have as many professional politicians, but I bugged out before the turn of the tide towards Bush and Co. so I don't really know if that is currently the system in our Great State.
It's strange how these ideas had a strong influence on Anti-Semitism and the rise of Hitler as a response to a fear of Communism and its corresponding ideas of an ideal state which went beyond nationalism to a sort of universal Order...
Note that I never said that scientists should "rule". I believe in balance to government, so that all sides are equally represented through models of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, with strong separation of powers and healthy checks on those separations. Anti-Semitism and the rise of the Nazis partly came about because there was no system of checks and balances and unequal representation (and participation). It was a party of thugs that grabbed and assassinated their way to power by marginalizing one minority after another until there was nobody left strong enough to resist them.
Did you go to Yale and go through a challenging politics curriculum, plus a minor in international relations? If not, I would ask you to refrain from saying anything here on Slashdot about politics, since you are not qualified for it.
:-)
What does Yale or formally studying politics or international relations have to do with those vast hordes of politicians who come by that career path by way of being a lawyer, acting, being born with a silver spoon in their mouth, or coming from a political dynasty? Furthermore, most of my friends who have formally studied politics or international relations do not end up in politics per se. Rather they have ended up in jobs with the CIA, the State Department or academia. Certainly I am not saying that political science does not have to be a pre-requisite for being a politician, but if one is going to invoke science to make a political statement or form policy, then one should have to know a little bit about the subject matter.
I'll make you a deal though. Since I have no formal political theory training as of now, I will refrain from commenting in those areas that touch on political theory or rely on formal didactic instruction to make a point. However, because I have been trained to think and question, and because I have certain Constitutionally mandated rights (for now) who I vote for or discuss with friends (or other Slashdotters) is none of your business. Deal?
Not being nasty there, and I do not intend to offend. I'm just making a point.
Now, I am not completely sure on this concept, but I'll throw it out there for others to comment on and vet that know:
Famine typically happens in areas of low education, high poverty and unstable governments and monetary valuation, right? Also, as education levels go up, the number of children people have decreases..... So, the concept is that we invest more time and effort in fewer numbers of children that ultimately have less of an impact on the environment. If we maintain proper stewardship, this is possible. For an example, look at Japan who while maintaining one of the highest population densities of any developed nation, still possesses the highest percentage of old growth forest coverage.
I have no problem with you calling me out. In fact, I welcome it.
You have read all of those things into what I said. I never said "don't act without consulting a scientist" or any of the other things you suggest. What I said was "I would very much like to see a return to using scientists expertise in more areas of society and policy, perhaps even increasing the numbers of consultants for politicians, and the entertainment industry, not just as a reality check, which so many seem to be mis-using scientists for, but also as a means to spur inquiry and progress in both the arts and sciences." which is very far away from anything you inferred. My position is that when we make decisions that can benefit from science and individuals who are trained to think and question, we are better off for it. That does not mean that religion gets pushed away, nor does it mean that science always does "good". What it does mean is that we become more careful about some of the things we do, especially as technology and power become more available. It also means that if we introduce more science into our daily lives, we become less reliant on small groups of powerful people to vet what we think, do and believe and we become less vulnerable to temporal vanities or trends.
I gotta say as a scientist and professor that I agree completely with this position of reserving comment in the public spotlight until you have done a little homework. All too often we have celebrities and politicians using their status to manipulate science to bend to a political whim or will, or simply to just espouse a misunderstanding. Fundamentally, the problem is that we have a very poor science education curriculum in many schools in the US and internationally and we get individuals who are high school dropouts become actors and are now capable of garnering much attention towards their issue of the moment. That is not intended to be insulting nor does it minimize their position or status, it is simply asking them to refrain from doing a job they are not qualified for.
We have minimized the importance of science in our lives and it is now biting us collectively in the ass in terms of environment, medicine, technological progress, and education. Rather than hamstringing scientists, and only allowing them to speak when it serves the political climate of the moment, I would very much like to see a return to using scientists expertise in more areas of society and policy, perhaps even increasing the numbers of consultants for politicians, and the entertainment industry, not just as a reality check, which so many seem to be mis-using scientists for, but also as a means to spur inquiry and progress in both the arts and sciences. The model of using scientists as regulators of policy and such is as old as 1950's Sci-Fi, but it has been no accident that during the most progressive periods in history, we have relied on scientists and others who are trained to think and inquire to make some of our biggest technological advancements. These advancements include great strides in medicine, prolonging life-spans and improving the quality of life as well as ending global wars and in the absence of political influences, ending famine and disease.
Have no fear as "betting pools" work *has* continued and they are proving themselves to be very effective. Also, you are quite correct about your assessment of "odd-seeming areas of research", as they often, particularly in a basic research sense turn out to be incredibly valuable. One classic case was a member of congress bitching about the NIH funding studies to examine bird songs without knowing or understanding some of the neuroscience implications of that work.
I am surprised it took them this long to implement as a similar project was implemented at select federal intelligence agencies through DARPA funding back in early 2002 to evaluate possible intelligence leads and threats to national security. Unfortunately the Total Information Awareness program developed out of this work and the true benefits of predictive networks using human intelligence have not really panned out due to an almost pathological reliance and worship of technology supplanting human intelligence rather then supplementing it. Only more recently have projects based on simple, yet tremendously technologies such as wikis been gaining more traction.
You are focusing on the number when I should have put the emphasis on how the sample was selected. how about "did you *really* think that a sample size of just over 1000 purchases on credit cards obtained through a back channel source is a reliable sample size for the number of iTunes purchases?..."
As one professor to another I am sure you also teach sampling error and experimental design, right? Additionally, it should be noted that the actual samples used for the analysis out of the total records pulled was less than 200. What does that do to power?
Ah, but if you read what I wrote, you would note that I said "In my business......If you present data or a theory with the suspicion that it is incorrect, that is fraud in my line of work. Note that I said "in my line of work". So, I stand by what I said. If one were to conclude that they did not have the appropriate data, then why would they report it in the first place?
Perfect example... I had a friend at a little company called Bungie. Bungie was developing this really cool little application called Halo that they were planning on releasing for MacOS, Linux and Windows. Microsoft came along, made them an offer they could not refuse and they bought the company so Halo could be a "halo" game for the Xbox platform. This of course meant that all development of Halo for the Macintosh and Linux were cancelled and Windows development was significantly delayed. It was almost a couple of years before I was asked to help with the development of the Macintosh port of Halo. So, I and many, many other users of the Macintosh and Linux (and Windows for that matter) were negatively impacted by this very common business practice of Microsoft.
How the hell did you write all that ...in less than a minute!?
:-)
I can type just over 543 words/minute.
Seriously though, I am a subscriber and I can see the stories a few minutes before the unwashed masses.
Oh, I don't *hate* Microsoft. In fact, I have friends who work there and have made money off of Microsoft stock. I still use Word (although Pages is coming on strong and if I could get EndNote compatibility, I'd switch entirely) and Excel and root for the company on occasion. Where I object to Microsoft is in their shoddy products. Almost every product I've used of theirs that came out at version 1.0 has royally sucked. Their whole concept of bringing products to market is date/deadline driven rather than quality or product driven, much less consumer driven. Classic cases of abysmal products were Windows v1-3, Win-98 and ME, the Zune, Bob, that first tablets and the ultra portable systems I've previewed (error messages that were too big for the display for instance), and of course their always changing interface standards and poor security issues.
Saying all that, I actually had a pretty good Micron PC running Win 95 that was remarkably stable. Of course upgrading it to Win98 was a unmitigated disaster. Win NT was a very stable OS, that was just cryptic to use and administer. Win2000 was pretty decent, and it almost made me switch my home system from MacOS to Win200, but like most products they have simply used their monopoly status to make the right changes very late in the game if ever. How long did it take them to adopt all characters for file names?
Where I really started getting disgusted with their business was after I saw company after company run out of business due to business practices that bordered on illegal and in some cases blatantly crossed the legal line. I always tended to prefer the MacOS, but was fairly platform agnostic (using Windows, Solaris, Linux, Irix, MacOS) for whichever task needed the appropriate platform, but with the advent of OS X, I've become a strong advocate for the Macintosh platform which brings up another issue entirely.... Microsoft has for decades now used Apple as their R&D lab. It's an obvious and well known joke, but if you are familiar with OS X, just wait until you get to play with Vista. Come on now, there are some very smart folks at Microsoft, so why can't they come up with ideas and products on their own? My take on it is that it is an efficiency issue combined with a management issue with too much oversight at the early and mid stages of the game. For instance, how many programmers are there on the Windows development team? Its in the thousands for sure, perhaps tens of thousands all told. For OS X, the number of full on programmers numbers in the hundreds. Under 300 for sure last time I checked a couple of years ago. The whole Quicktime team numbers around 30-40 whereas the Microsoft Media Player team is well into the hundreds. We could go on and on here, but to answer your question, this scientist at least does not hate Microsoft. I've just watched the company for years, purchased some of their products and have found a product from another company (Apple) that meets my needs and does not get in the way of my work the way Microsoft products tend to do.
Meanwhile the author of the Forrester report, Josh Bernoff, noted in his blog yesterday that they shouldn't be pummeled just because everyone took what he wrote and ran with it."
Well, that is why people should be responsible for their reporting. In my business, when you report something, you stand by it. If you present data or a theory with the suspicion that it is incorrect, that is fraud in my line of work. Seriously though, did you *really* think that a sample size of just over 1000 purchases on credit cards obtained through a back channel source is a reliable sample size for the number of iTunes purchases? If I correctly recall, Apple announced back in February that they were selling about 3 million songs/day and if the current estimates of increases on the order of 84% are correct, your sample size is woefully under-representative. Thats just high school statistics by the way...
I am not saying that you should lose your job over this one, but this should be a tacit reminder of how important good reporting is and if you are beyond your means or competence on a particular story or analysis, go find some help before you publish it, do some fact checking and be more careful with stories that can have a significant impact on companies and individuals.
LOL, yes indeed. You are probably right about that. Thanks for the laugh.
Or maybe because you embed the link into every slashdot post?
Absolutely as it is part of my sig. Why would I not do that as Slashdot ranking has its advantages.
Yeah, well there are lots of blogs that do better than a number of businesses and organizations for whatever reasons Google assigns ranking. I get a number of amused emails from people that find Google ranks my blog higher than their dedicated sites for a shocking number of items. They want to know how I've engineered it, and I have to say I honestly don't know. But if they want to pay Google to increase their ranking above mine, go for it.
I suspect part of the reason is my selective use of links in articles I post to supplement the content I post with targeted information, as well as my hosting it from my office in an educational institution. Occasionally getting linked from places like Slashdot, BoingBoing and Digg can't hurt either....
OK rhombic. Look up Karl Landsteiner, who won the Nobel in 1930 for his work discovering the major blood groups and the development of the ABO system of blood typing. If you were remotely familiar with your science or history, you might suspect that immunology just *might* be part of this work. Specifically, he discovered that agglutination was an immunological reaction and that specificity of the antigen is so good, that one can discriminate racemic molecules. Of course this work was the most medically pressing at the time, but his greatest work is considered to be his work in antigen-antibody reactions.
As for confusing glycine and alanine, I confused the two in a quick fit of slashdot posting. The difference is a methyl group rather than a hydrogen atom in one carbon position. Biochem was over a decade ago, so sue me and go back to your little rock.
Dammit! Mad props to you as I was thinking alanine. That of course is exactly why Slashdot gets you in trouble. You type stuff in off the top of your head to get your entry in and sometimes you get it wrong. The cool thing is that there are folks on Slashdot that will catch you.
One might make an argument for this, but I am not quite so sure this is the "demise of the professional photojournalist" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the ability to effectively communicate. Sure a picture can tell a thousand words, but that photograph needs to be placed in context. I take lots of photos that describe what I see, do and where I go, but I would never think of myself as a professional journalist. These images for me are a means to communicate and keep in touch with family and friends (a blog, right?), not to disseminate the news to the rest of the world. The fact that sometimes images from my site do resonate with news agencies/institutions or individuals around the world is cool, but it is a rarity that I get requests for re-publication (one every three months or so) and it is not how I make my living.
Additionally, there is also the issue of ethics that most professional publications usually get right, but there are the admitted occasional screw-ups. Usually however, there are issues of image/video provenance to deal with that may not always reflect reality ("I found it on the Internets, so it must be true!") that editorial boards put through a vetting process to filter out much of the fakery/deceipt.
The Internet has enabled the ability to democratically (small "d") reach huge masses of people with relatively few resources and I expect that we will see more citizen reporting as the years go on. It may in some cases also challenge the mainstream media for particular stories, but the reality is that most folks have other jobs/things that keep them busy and they do not have the resources or time to become professional journalists. When they do obtain the appropriate resources/time/credibility, they have just crossed over into the world of the professional journalist.
Technology will cause things to change and serve as a destabilizing influence for many established institutions, but I think we will always have and pay people who relate the news to us, bring us the wider world and tell stories. This will become especially more important as increasing percentages of societies become more specialized and fragment their time into narrowly defined regions of interest/study.
I am going to be very skeptical of this and would not be tossing any money into a private company to study this just yet. The olfactory system is well capable of distinguishing many small molecules, even those that are very similar using a variety of well known and well understood processes just as in the immune system. Look, a Nobel prize was awarded back in the 30's for the discovery that IGGs can recognize even racemic molecules such as L and D forms of glycine even and the olfactory literature is just as rich. The biggest problem however, with the UCL approach is that it completely ignores years of cortical, subcortical and psychophysics data. Furthermore, there is no effort or model in their work that might explain how the signals would be transduced into cortical/subcortical signals or how they account for potential noise in the system. Their claim that signals can be translated through tunneling in a biological system which likely swamps those potential signals with noise is what really troubles me.
I am not saying that they should not do it, or that they are absolutely wrong, as it is possibly interesting. Rather all I am saying is my eyebrows are raised at their claims.
Hi. Like the man said, 'from my cold dead hands.' Guns aren't just for the military, cops, and gang-bangers -- we have 'em to make sure that our government doesn't herd us into cattle-cars, and send us off to the thermal depolymerizor en masse. We've already got Extrordinary Rendition, what's after that?
It's a little melodramatic, and trite, don't you think? But I suppose that coming from an actor, it was intended to be a sound bite. That said, a stable government is rarely going to suddenly and massively reverse course on an issue like this, but you make a good point with rendition and I suspect you intended to invoke the revocation of Habeus Corpus. The change happens over years where rights are slowly eroded from both the whako far left and from the extreme neo-cons that have held our government for the last few years. The left wants to take away gun rights because "guns are bad, m'kay?" and the right will cave to big business and slowly erode personal freedoms to further their goals and to keep those who are without down to enable cheap labor. I personally just see guns as a tool that far too many people attach some sort of mystical power to, handguns in particular. After all, most people who own handguns simply do not have enough training and someone with even a knife can do much more damage than a gun can deliver. What's next? Doing something totally absurd like banning knives as they are doing in the UK?
Look, what people need to realize is that in any society where you have vast numbers of people, there is *always* going to be some sort of violence. However, violence can be mitigated through a stable government with flat economic pyramids where the gap between those that have everything and those that have nothing is reduced. Access to healthcare, housing and a job combined with supporting our Constitutional rights through separation of powers and a strong military is what our government needs to be focusing on. All of this other garbage to induce fear, make more needless laws and marginalize those rights that the founding fathers of this country worked so hard to establish is not remotely patriotic. In fact, one might make an argument for sedition given some of the rights that have been passed by lawmakers, whether they realize it or not....
His new number, which he calls "nullity"
:-)
Well, thats just nullty.
Seriously though, as I understand it, this is simply another mathematical structure that allows a different scalar much like a real projective line, right? If that is the case, then there is nothing really new here and there can be no application or definition with real numbers or integers. Alternatively by interpreting this as a commutative ring, one might be able to extend this to where division by zero does not always get you in trouble, but the precise interpretation of "division" is fundamentally altered. This too is not a new concept.
However, all of that said, I am a bioscientist and my math skills are not as strong as a formally trained mathematician, so I will defer to those here who are stronger mathematicians than I if this interpretation is incorrect.