Two teachers at Miramonte Elementary School here in Los Angeles were arrested on molestation/lewd acts charges. They closed the school for a couple days and when it re-opened they replaced every single teacher (temporarily).
Fair point. I misspoke. My original point remains though.
The algorithm arbitrarily up-ranks or down-ranks sites based on the nature of their content. It is biased against content like link/content farms because the humans that write and maintain it are biased against that content. It does not up/down-rank sites based on being pro-Democratic or pro-Republican because while the writers might hold such biases, through Google's internal processes and editorial decisions, those biases are "scrubbed" from the algorithm.
We may (and probably do) all agree for the most part that this bias is to the benefit of our search results. However, this bias is constantly evolving, and we should be mindful of it.
I'm not an expert, hence the suggestion being qualified as humble, but I think the current tax revenus of the US government would cover the 2006 budget.
Assuming that this is right (could be wrong), were people dying in the streets for lack of government services back then? Is there any crucial reason why the government couldn't survive on a budget equivalent to what it had just a few years ago?
You're pretty close - 2004 is closer to the right answer. Federal revenue was 2,303.5 billion in 2011. That is in the ballpark of spending in 2004 which was 2292.84 billion.
What you're missing is change in GDP over that time. The numbers are: $11,788.9b in 2004; $14,958.6b in 2011. So, GDP grew 26.9% so of course you would expect that there would be an increase in government services - it generally takes more resources to run a larger country. Additionally there were a couple of exigent circumstances which played a major part in the increased spending in the intervening years.
Link farms are ranked down by search engines using some arbitrary impartial metrics. . ..What does "created and maintained by humans" have to do with that?
What's the metric? Someone decides an arbitrary metric to apply to sites that are crawled, let say ratio of incoming to outgoing links (and let's keep it simple at just that - in reality they probably measure the amount of interconnectedness of sub-networks of sites). If a person (like Matt Cutts) at Google decides that sites with an incoming:outgoing ratio of 1:100 should be ranked lower than one with a ratio of 1:50, that is a bias that humans have written into the algorithm. Why should 1:100 be the number? Why not 1:1000? or 1:50?
There are a myriad of such judgement calls (and they are much more complicated than this simple example) that the writers of the algorithm must make. Should they weight the in:out ratio more or less than keywords written into the metadata? Should all keywords be weighted equally to each other? Should a page with 100 keywords be treated the same as one with 10? With 1000?
The algorithm is not impartial because it was written by humans who are not impartial. The strive for impartiality, but they are not perfect.
It's hard for an American President to win re-election if the economy is bad. The US economy is unlikely to be "good" by November, especially if your memories of "good" include the internet bubble of the late 90's and the housing bubble of the late 2000's.
I think people will have a decidedly shorter memory, and think about where they were in 2008. Most of us were either unemployed or shitting our pants at the news of credit freezes, bank implosions, underwater mortgages and the like. If the current (3 month) trends in employment continue, Obama will be in good shape going into the election.
Think about how you were in late 2008, and your outlook for the future. How does it compare to today?
But all Google is doing is presenting an unbiased ranking
Google is only unbiased in the (theoretical) sense that a newspaper or other media outlet is unbiased.
The search algorithm is written by humans who have biases, just as the stories in the NYT are written by people with biases. Both institutions surely have procedures in place to review coders/journalists work to make sure as much bias is removed, but those review processes involve people who have biases too. NYT editors make decisions not to run story X because it doesn't make the threshold of newsworthiness, and Google's editors make decisions to remove or push down results that lead to spammers/link farms/content farms.
To be clear, I think Google does a good job in their endeavor for impartiality - probably better than most media outlets - but they are not unbiased. At the very least they are biased against spam and what they consider unethical SEO.
Face it, Google didn't have anything to do with the "Santorum is a frothy mixture..." campaign. After all, Google isn't the only search engine in which the creative and apt comparison can be found.
I don't disagree with you.
However, search engine results are not impartial. When Google (or Bing, etc.) return spreadingsantorum.com, they do so because of the algorithm, which is created and maintained by humans. Google, by it's own admission, censors search results such as link/content farms because they believe they don't return value to the user (and if the value of the search results goes down, they lose users and ad revenue).
Google and other search engines need to walk a very fine line in this regard, lest they be accused of advancing or squashing a certain viewpoint. This particular case is interesting because of the profile of Santorum (even before his Presidential bid), and I personally think Google made the right decision based on a host of factors, most of which you pointed out. But there will be a decision they make (which me may or may not notice or be aware of), where the call is much closer, and it will a very difficult position for them (and all search engines) to be in.
That's 100bn/year. Deficit is close to 100bn *a month*...
Are you saying a 1/12 reduction in the deficit is immaterial?
I'm not sure that tax is going to do better than encourage the government to spend more. I humbly propose that a tad more attention be put on lowering spending rather than increasing taxes.
Well, that first sentence is debatable, given the current political climate. But I agree with you on the second. A real solution will involve both strategies, and the mix should probably be around 50/50 (+/- 10).
Yes, because they won't make $35m on every low budget film. They are more likely to make a smaller percentage, but larger dollar value, on a big budget film that has similar quality directors, actors, and writers, but much better production values (including marketing).
Marketing budget is proportional to the films gross, at least for the first couple weeks (then word of mouth takes over). Take away Inception's marketing budget and it wouldn't have gross nearly as much I'd wager.
But anyway, I'd like to know your source for the claim that more money was spent marketing the film than on special effects, post production, set design, and all the other things that make Inception feel so different (from a production standpoint) from Memento.
The problem with that analysis is that the variance in return on a Memento type film is probably a lot higher than the variance for an Inception. If you had $160m to invest, would you rather do one (or two) big budget film(s), or 32 Mementos? With an auteur director like Nolan (or Scorsese, Tarantino, etc.) I'd probably do the former.
Movies could be produced for far less than what is typically spent on them, and at a reasonable quality level. What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects or the bogus accounting, but the story that it tells, and that story could be told on a lower budget, with good acting, good directing, and good camerawork replacing much of the technology that is thrown at movies today. Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.
I don't necessarily disagree, but compare Memento and Inception. Both tell a very interesting "what is real/my mind" story. The level of directing is comparable, as is the acting (to me anyway). One made great use of special effects, and had the "sheen" of a well financed production. The other was made for about $5 million. Memento grossed about $40 million ($35m). The numbers for Inception were $825m gross and and $160m budget ($665m profit).
Both were critically acclaimed and appear on numerous lists of best X films. Yet it's clear that having a major studio backing you and throwing money on the project (in part so you can make it look slick) helps immensely.
Interestingly, GGP is wrong when he said "They don't have military-like armaments." From his wikipedia link (emphasis mine):
The ineffectiveness of the pistol rounds and shotgun pellets in penetrating the robbers' body armor led to a trend in the United States toward arming selected police patrol officers with semi-automatic 5.56 mm AR-15 type rifles.[13] Seven months after the incident, the Department of Defense gave 600 surplus M16s to the LAPD, which were issued to each patrol sergeant;[27] other cities, such as Miami, also moved to supply patrol officers, not just SWAT teams, with heavier firepower.[28] LAPD patrol vehicles now carry AR-15s as standard issue, with bullet-resistant Kevlar plating in their doors as well.[29] Also as a result of this incident LAPD authorized its officers to carry.45 ACP caliber semiautomatic pistols as duty sidearms, specifically the Smith and Wesson Models 4506 and 4566. Prior to 1997 only LAPD SWAT officers were authorized to carry.45 ACP caliber pistols, specifically the Model 1911A1.45 ACP semiautomatic pistol.[citation needed]
While these are not cruise missiles or attack helicopters, they are military-grade small arms. I wonder how often they are actually needed. Of course, we've also seen an increase in the deployment of "non-lethal" weapons such as pepper spray, tazers, beanbags, etc., so while I would say that our police forces have become more militarized, it's not a simple picture.
Single data point. We shouldn't set the standard for appropriate police armament based on a single incident 15 years ago. The patrol officers were outgunned, and called in the SWAT team. It doesn't make sense to arm all patrol officers with armor-piercing rounds, or assault rifles, because of this incident.
As for immunity from prosecution, they are likely the most prosecuted in the country
Slashdot Mirror
Two teachers at Miramonte Elementary School here in Los Angeles were arrested on molestation/lewd acts charges. They closed the school for a couple days and when it re-opened they replaced every single teacher (temporarily).
In the United States, we call our logical fallacies Texans. What do you call them in Canada?
Americans.
That comic is from 28 weeks ago!
Randall is either a precog or the leader of Anonymous.
Fair point. I misspoke. My original point remains though.
The algorithm arbitrarily up-ranks or down-ranks sites based on the nature of their content. It is biased against content like link/content farms because the humans that write and maintain it are biased against that content. It does not up/down-rank sites based on being pro-Democratic or pro-Republican because while the writers might hold such biases, through Google's internal processes and editorial decisions, those biases are "scrubbed" from the algorithm.
We may (and probably do) all agree for the most part that this bias is to the benefit of our search results. However, this bias is constantly evolving, and we should be mindful of it.
I'm not an expert, hence the suggestion being qualified as humble, but I think the current tax revenus of the US government would cover the 2006 budget.
Assuming that this is right (could be wrong), were people dying in the streets for lack of government services back then? Is there any crucial reason why the government couldn't survive on a budget equivalent to what it had just a few years ago?
You're pretty close - 2004 is closer to the right answer.
Federal revenue was 2,303.5 billion in 2011.
That is in the ballpark of spending in 2004 which was 2292.84 billion.
What you're missing is change in GDP over that time. The numbers are: $11,788.9b in 2004; $14,958.6b in 2011. So, GDP grew 26.9% so of course you would expect that there would be an increase in government services - it generally takes more resources to run a larger country. Additionally there were a couple of exigent circumstances which played a major part in the increased spending in the intervening years.
Link farms are ranked down by search engines using some arbitrary impartial metrics. . . .What does "created and maintained by humans" have to do with that?
What's the metric? Someone decides an arbitrary metric to apply to sites that are crawled, let say ratio of incoming to outgoing links (and let's keep it simple at just that - in reality they probably measure the amount of interconnectedness of sub-networks of sites). If a person (like Matt Cutts) at Google decides that sites with an incoming:outgoing ratio of 1:100 should be ranked lower than one with a ratio of 1:50, that is a bias that humans have written into the algorithm. Why should 1:100 be the number? Why not 1:1000? or 1:50?
There are a myriad of such judgement calls (and they are much more complicated than this simple example) that the writers of the algorithm must make. Should they weight the in:out ratio more or less than keywords written into the metadata? Should all keywords be weighted equally to each other? Should a page with 100 keywords be treated the same as one with 10? With 1000?
The algorithm is not impartial because it was written by humans who are not impartial. The strive for impartiality, but they are not perfect.
It's hard for an American President to win re-election if the economy is bad. The US economy is unlikely to be "good" by November, especially if your memories of "good" include the internet bubble of the late 90's and the housing bubble of the late 2000's.
I think people will have a decidedly shorter memory, and think about where they were in 2008. Most of us were either unemployed or shitting our pants at the news of credit freezes, bank implosions, underwater mortgages and the like. If the current (3 month) trends in employment continue, Obama will be in good shape going into the election.
Think about how you were in late 2008, and your outlook for the future. How does it compare to today?
I propose a new unit of measure:
stevens: n. a series of tubes
Usage: "You're gonna need at least 3 stevens to get all that santorum out of your bush."
But all Google is doing is presenting an unbiased ranking
Google is only unbiased in the (theoretical) sense that a newspaper or other media outlet is unbiased.
The search algorithm is written by humans who have biases, just as the stories in the NYT are written by people with biases. Both institutions surely have procedures in place to review coders/journalists work to make sure as much bias is removed, but those review processes involve people who have biases too. NYT editors make decisions not to run story X because it doesn't make the threshold of newsworthiness, and Google's editors make decisions to remove or push down results that lead to spammers/link farms/content farms.
To be clear, I think Google does a good job in their endeavor for impartiality - probably better than most media outlets - but they are not unbiased. At the very least they are biased against spam and what they consider unethical SEO.
Face it, Google didn't have anything to do with the "Santorum is a frothy mixture..." campaign. After all, Google isn't the only search engine in which the creative and apt comparison can be found.
I don't disagree with you.
However, search engine results are not impartial. When Google (or Bing, etc.) return spreadingsantorum.com, they do so because of the algorithm, which is created and maintained by humans. Google, by it's own admission, censors search results such as link/content farms because they believe they don't return value to the user (and if the value of the search results goes down, they lose users and ad revenue).
Google and other search engines need to walk a very fine line in this regard, lest they be accused of advancing or squashing a certain viewpoint. This particular case is interesting because of the profile of Santorum (even before his Presidential bid), and I personally think Google made the right decision based on a host of factors, most of which you pointed out. But there will be a decision they make (which me may or may not notice or be aware of), where the call is much closer, and it will a very difficult position for them (and all search engines) to be in.
If the noise in the LSB tends to be Brownian and you replace it with white noise, that's going to be detectable
Replacing brown noise with white noise? Sounds pretty racist to me.
Rip down their posters.
Where are the demonstrations against the Chinese government?
There were never any demonstrations, and the demonstrators are in jail.
Facts? Or hear-say anecdotal evidence?
That's 100bn/year. Deficit is close to 100bn *a month*...
Are you saying a 1/12 reduction in the deficit is immaterial?
I'm not sure that tax is going to do better than encourage the government to spend more. I humbly propose that a tad more attention be put on lowering spending rather than increasing taxes.
Well, that first sentence is debatable, given the current political climate. But I agree with you on the second. A real solution will involve both strategies, and the mix should probably be around 50/50 (+/- 10).
I've seen them. The rage is not misplaced. :)
Yes, because they won't make $35m on every low budget film. They are more likely to make a smaller percentage, but larger dollar value, on a big budget film that has similar quality directors, actors, and writers, but much better production values (including marketing).
Marketing budget is proportional to the films gross, at least for the first couple weeks (then word of mouth takes over). Take away Inception's marketing budget and it wouldn't have gross nearly as much I'd wager.
But anyway, I'd like to know your source for the claim that more money was spent marketing the film than on special effects, post production, set design, and all the other things that make Inception feel so different (from a production standpoint) from Memento.
I thought about this.
The problem with that analysis is that the variance in return on a Memento type film is probably a lot higher than the variance for an Inception. If you had $160m to invest, would you rather do one (or two) big budget film(s), or 32 Mementos? With an auteur director like Nolan (or Scorsese, Tarantino, etc.) I'd probably do the former.
Fair point. I wonder though, being only 2 at the time it was released, was that the draw of the film? Perhaps.
And yet, the Special Edition versions were so reviled. Is that simply because of the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia?
Movies could be produced for far less than what is typically spent on them, and at a reasonable quality level. What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects or the bogus accounting, but the story that it tells, and that story could be told on a lower budget, with good acting, good directing, and good camerawork replacing much of the technology that is thrown at movies today. Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.
I don't necessarily disagree, but compare Memento and Inception. Both tell a very interesting "what is real/my mind" story. The level of directing is comparable, as is the acting (to me anyway). One made great use of special effects, and had the "sheen" of a well financed production. The other was made for about $5 million. Memento grossed about $40 million ($35m). The numbers for Inception were $825m gross and and $160m budget ($665m profit).
Both were critically acclaimed and appear on numerous lists of best X films. Yet it's clear that having a major studio backing you and throwing money on the project (in part so you can make it look slick) helps immensely.
I'd love to see you tell the story of Harry Potter without "fancy effects" and I doubt you can say that story isn't character based.
Star Wars Episode IV was told without "fancy effects", and I've heard it effectively argued that the story was pretty shallow on the character side.
And yet, this happens all the time.
Which, I think you'll agree, is wrong.
Interestingly, GGP is wrong when he said "They don't have military-like armaments." From his wikipedia link (emphasis mine):
The ineffectiveness of the pistol rounds and shotgun pellets in penetrating the robbers' body armor led to a trend in the United States toward arming selected police patrol officers with semi-automatic 5.56 mm AR-15 type rifles.[13] Seven months after the incident, the Department of Defense gave 600 surplus M16s to the LAPD, which were issued to each patrol sergeant;[27] other cities, such as Miami, also moved to supply patrol officers, not just SWAT teams, with heavier firepower.[28] LAPD patrol vehicles now carry AR-15s as standard issue, with bullet-resistant Kevlar plating in their doors as well.[29] Also as a result of this incident LAPD authorized its officers to carry .45 ACP caliber semiautomatic pistols as duty sidearms, specifically the Smith and Wesson Models 4506 and 4566. Prior to 1997 only LAPD SWAT officers were authorized to carry .45 ACP caliber pistols, specifically the Model 1911A1 .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol.[citation needed]
While these are not cruise missiles or attack helicopters, they are military-grade small arms. I wonder how often they are actually needed. Of course, we've also seen an increase in the deployment of "non-lethal" weapons such as pepper spray, tazers, beanbags, etc., so while I would say that our police forces have become more militarized, it's not a simple picture.
The right expression is "pedantic."
for example
Single data point. We shouldn't set the standard for appropriate police armament based on a single incident 15 years ago. The patrol officers were outgunned, and called in the SWAT team. It doesn't make sense to arm all patrol officers with armor-piercing rounds, or assault rifles, because of this incident.
As for immunity from prosecution, they are likely the most prosecuted in the country
Tell that to black males, 18-35.