"So for the clusters of flips where all nine justices agreed to have meaning, you first have to control for the system biases that produced the cases over which the flips were made."
You're trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, you say no better than chance, and yet, you say we have a preselected pool. Who did the selecting? Those same justices you say are no more related than chance. And having greater than 82 instances just makes it that much less likely we'd see the agreement we in fact do see in the results if it was only chance.
"there is no study that has any predictive theory that is better than chance."
Saying that a simulation can't reproduce the outcomes with better fidelity than chance is NOT saying that there is no underlying pattern.
Going back to my protein folding example, the first tries at simulating it were downright pitiful. That hardly means there is no pattern to it. It took twenty years of work to get it to make useful predictions to guide experiment (and it's still just a guide of limited fidelity). Yet, they fold with regularity or else your own body wouldn't work very well.
That's why I put in that "tends". There are things where you can save a lot. We have people keeping protein solutions cold in a small anerobic hood using an off the shelf peltier cooler like you buy at Walmart. It works well.
For the PC, you have fairly integrated building blocks you can buy at quite low cost since they are mass produced. But, for a lot of things, you have to do things up from the component and board level. Let alone the mechanical side, thats tough to do cheaply.
They have the right to control their own lives. But much of the time the signal comes from outside them! You have them so oppressed and in the slave mindset that they nearly always obey your order to die. They release those caspases to rip their own genetic material apart just for your sick pleasure.
In fact, when they don't you often call them derogatory names, like cancer.
Why, this destroys cells. The very basis of all life! It must be stopped!
You're such a villian that you even do it to your own cells!
How many cells did you callously murder last night when you took a drink of alcohol? Or even accidently bite the inside of your cheek.
And what about the flesh in between your fingers in the womb that you thoughtlessly put to cell death so you could selfishly have fingers. Or the skin cells you made thirst to death as formerly living shields against the outside world?
Your whole existance is dedicated to torturing and murdering cellular life!
This could be the start of whole industries of advocacy groups.
And that's a key point. For someone doing it on the side and having their expenses already paid for, the marginal cost can be pretty small.
But, that limits how much of the time you can spend on it. It also makes it tough to get away for technical conferences (gotta earn that salary somewhere that won't pay for them usually).
You can do a lot with it. Innovative ideas, Makerspaces and open source are wonderful. But, just like anything, they have limitations.
This augments the usual scientific funding sources rather than replaces them.
Sometimes that can work. (I'm on some of the open source hardware mailing lists.)
Often though, even at the inflated prices, building your own when it's only a single item is rarely a way to save a lot unless you give up a lot in features.
I've worked for a custom electronics shop as well. We usually were quite inexpensive compared to other companies, but there was a limit to how cheap we could be and still pay ourselves and the bills.
Making onesy twosey quantities of things gets expensive unless you've got an angle like adapting an existing consumer item that's made in large quantities. That way you piggyback on the economy of scale.
There's a lot to be said for small and easily ignored.
It's when you start making them and selling them that you really run into problems. Yes, a manufacturer could start lawsuits, but it's pretty hard when a set of plans just shows up on a file server somewhere and then people make their own. Witness the RIAA and MPAA, etc. over the past decade.
That said, it's rarely a way to really save that much money. Rolling your own to the same level of quality tends to cost a lot.
Complete agreement. In a lot of situations, it can do a lot of good. It's just not the total solution.
Especially when combined with existing labs or researchers it is a Good Thing(tm).
Most science is small science and often it costs more than it sometimes really needs too. That said, we have to feed the researcher and pay their rent as well.
A temp controlled stirring hot plate at over 400 and often over a grand?
And we're not even talking about the more complicated experimental apparatus here. How is this more than a tiny tiny impact? This might fund a grad student. Maybe. Small grants rely on the existing infrastructure that groups have. You already have the equipment and the grad student and you allocate half their time to something.
Far too early to be crowing about how it's the next big thing with these funding levels.
(Aside: I work for a chemistry department doing lab equipment and instrument repair. At work, I spend my day finding ways to get equipment for such people for tiny fractions of the above prices. But, that's relying on the gear having been paid for years or decades back and me digging it out of storage, then finding ways to fix it for low cost. Starting up a lab without an existing infrastructure is expensive with a couple exclamation points. Yeah, I find the cost of current scientific gear to be outrageously high, but that's a different discussion.)
Yes, I'm quite aware of the philosophical differences of judges and that they assume different bases for law.
But look at what actually happens. They often reach the same conclusions regardless.
It's not the only field that happens in. Example: Look at physics. Bohr and Everett disagreed fundamentally on what the nature of quantum reality was. And yet, they would calculate the exact same results.
As the next post points out (mythicalreptile), last term better than half the decisions were unanimous.
Are you really saying that in 82 (cases) trials of flipping 8 coins in each case you'd expect you'd expect all to come up either heads or tails more than 50% of the time? That's what being uncorrelated and no better than chance and yet leading to this result means.
Of course there are going to be correlations. You have human beings with similar backgrounds on the bench. Humans you may not like, but regardless they're going to behave like humans and come to the same conclusions more often than random. If that weren't the tendency, how would we even begin to see the level of agreement and organization we see in any society?
Forgive me, but I'm a touch incredulous at that statement.
Not my recollection (60s through now) at all, especially the Warren court and the early 70s.
The Warren court was pretty unabashedly activist. Go read up on it. They saw themselves as addressing needed social injustices via court decision. You may agree with what they decided (and many times it was needed badly as the civil rights cases and some of the liability) but that's the very definition of judicial activism.
How do you think they didn't overturn precedent on Brown vs Board of Education and the other cases that were the very core of the victories of the civil rights movement? In Brown, they specifically went against previous decisions (Plessey vs Ferguson) that said segregation was acceptable. In Brown, they said seperate but equal was not.
How was Roe vs Wade not a change from the longstanding tendency to leave medical regulation to the states? Etc, etc, the list is a long one. Look at liability law as well. there was major overruling of standing precedent.
Just because a decision was a good or needed one doesn't bear on whether it was activist or precedent preserving.
What you're saying just doesn't agree with history.
I used to work with a group that simulated the folding of proteins.
You'd take an assortment of protein sequences and train a neural net on how they folded. Then you try to use that to predict the folding of another different protein that wasn't in the set you trained it on.
But, in this case, they don't try to predict the behavior of an independent case, they use it to predict the behavior of one of the 8 items (justices) they trained the simulation on. That's fine as an exercise in simulation, but using it to reach conclusions on intent and bias is a real reach. I suspect the journalists hyped that part of it a lot more than the researchers themselves.
That's underwhelming enough as is. But what do you use as a measure of how "independent" a judge is?
Assuming no relationship between decisions is ludicrous. On many items that aren't terribly controversial, Ginsburg and Scalia, for example, would rule similarly just because they are trained judges with a background in US law.
Similarly, you wouldn't be surprised if Krugman and Friedman agreed on the proper answer to a question from an Econ 101 textbook, regardless that they would differ massively on more complex issues.
Add to that, the Supreme Court doesn't get the expected and routine "no-brainer" type decisions. It's where the ones with thorny legal interpretation and constitutional issues end up.
I'd be really surprised if you didn't have a correlation between how one particular justice votes and how the rest of the justices vote.
There's a bit of a time horizon issue in that. You've got to decide what period of time you look at. That's going to have an impact on what you see.
My guess is that if you looked at the years of the Warren court, you'd get a different answer.
The court is not utterly independent of the politics of the country around it. In the 50s, there was a move toward activist decisions that could be considered liberal at their time. In the 80s, there was something of a reversal of that with more activist decisions coming from the right.
The group that is defending the status quo of the time is less likely to be "activist" than a group more inclined to change it.
My dad was a high school biology teacher. He also kept bees. For several years, he kept a glass sided demonstration hive in his classroom. It was wood and glass, rather than the plastic this is.
He had a tube through the window that the bees could enter and leave through. The classroom wasn't on the ground floor, and that way there wasn't a problem with nearby pedestrians and the bees.
Was a nice relief from the usual in a high school class. Instead of just stuffed or formaldehyded specimens, you had living creatures on display.
Slashdot Mirror
"So for the clusters of flips where all nine justices agreed to have meaning, you first have to control for the system biases that produced the cases over which the flips were made."
You're trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, you say no better than chance, and yet, you say we have a preselected pool. Who did the selecting? Those same justices you say are no more related than chance. And having greater than 82 instances just makes it that much less likely we'd see the agreement we in fact do see in the results if it was only chance.
"there is no study that has any predictive theory that is better than chance."
Saying that a simulation can't reproduce the outcomes with better fidelity than chance is NOT saying that there is no underlying pattern.
Going back to my protein folding example, the first tries at simulating it were downright pitiful. That hardly means there is no pattern to it. It took twenty years of work to get it to make useful predictions to guide experiment (and it's still just a guide of limited fidelity). Yet, they fold with regularity or else your own body wouldn't work very well.
"That's too general of a statement."
That's why I put in that "tends". There are things where you can save a lot. We have people keeping protein solutions cold in a small anerobic hood using an off the shelf peltier cooler like you buy at Walmart. It works well.
For the PC, you have fairly integrated building blocks you can buy at quite low cost since they are mass produced. But, for a lot of things, you have to do things up from the component and board level. Let alone the mechanical side, thats tough to do cheaply.
Where it works economically, do it.
They have the right to control their own lives. But much of the time the signal comes from outside them! You have them so oppressed and in the slave mindset that they nearly always obey your order to die. They release those caspases to rip their own genetic material apart just for your sick pleasure.
In fact, when they don't you often call them derogatory names, like cancer.
Why, this destroys cells. The very basis of all life! It must be stopped!
You're such a villian that you even do it to your own cells!
How many cells did you callously murder last night when you took a drink of alcohol? Or even accidently bite the inside of your cheek.
And what about the flesh in between your fingers in the womb that you thoughtlessly put to cell death so you could selfishly have fingers. Or the skin cells you made thirst to death as formerly living shields against the outside world?
Your whole existance is dedicated to torturing and murdering cellular life!
This could be the start of whole industries of advocacy groups.
"But it's interesting to learn that an algorithm is sufficient, with no analyzation of the facts and law necessary."
That's not what the simulation did.
It can't independently predict the decisions. It predicts what one justice will do based on what the others do.
Implicit in what the other justices do is analyzing the fact and law of the case.
And that's a key point. For someone doing it on the side and having their expenses already paid for, the marginal cost can be pretty small.
But, that limits how much of the time you can spend on it. It also makes it tough to get away for technical conferences (gotta earn that salary somewhere that won't pay for them usually).
You can do a lot with it. Innovative ideas, Makerspaces and open source are wonderful. But, just like anything, they have limitations.
This augments the usual scientific funding sources rather than replaces them.
Sometimes that can work. (I'm on some of the open source hardware mailing lists.)
Often though, even at the inflated prices, building your own when it's only a single item is rarely a way to save a lot unless you give up a lot in features.
I've worked for a custom electronics shop as well. We usually were quite inexpensive compared to other companies, but there was a limit to how cheap we could be and still pay ourselves and the bills.
Making onesy twosey quantities of things gets expensive unless you've got an angle like adapting an existing consumer item that's made in large quantities. That way you piggyback on the economy of scale.
There's a lot to be said for small and easily ignored.
It's when you start making them and selling them that you really run into problems. Yes, a manufacturer could start lawsuits, but it's pretty hard when a set of plans just shows up on a file server somewhere and then people make their own. Witness the RIAA and MPAA, etc. over the past decade.
That said, it's rarely a way to really save that much money. Rolling your own to the same level of quality tends to cost a lot.
Complete agreement. In a lot of situations, it can do a lot of good. It's just not the total solution.
Especially when combined with existing labs or researchers it is a Good Thing(tm).
Most science is small science and often it costs more than it sometimes really needs too. That said, we have to feed the researcher and pay their rent as well.
With a new roughing vacuum pump over 2k?
A temp controlled stirring hot plate at over 400 and often over a grand?
And we're not even talking about the more complicated experimental apparatus here. How is this more than a tiny tiny impact? This might fund a grad student. Maybe. Small grants rely on the existing infrastructure that groups have. You already have the equipment and the grad student and you allocate half their time to something.
Far too early to be crowing about how it's the next big thing with these funding levels.
(Aside: I work for a chemistry department doing lab equipment and instrument repair. At work, I spend my day finding ways to get equipment for such people for tiny fractions of the above prices. But, that's relying on the gear having been paid for years or decades back and me digging it out of storage, then finding ways to fix it for low cost. Starting up a lab without an existing infrastructure is expensive with a couple exclamation points. Yeah, I find the cost of current scientific gear to be outrageously high, but that's a different discussion.)
"This can't be reversed!!"
Easy. You just have to know the admin password to the database.
Yes, I'm quite aware of the philosophical differences of judges and that they assume different bases for law.
But look at what actually happens. They often reach the same conclusions regardless.
It's not the only field that happens in. Example: Look at physics. Bohr and Everett disagreed fundamentally on what the nature of quantum reality was. And yet, they would calculate the exact same results.
As the next post points out (mythicalreptile), last term better than half the decisions were unanimous.
Are you really saying that in 82 (cases) trials of flipping 8 coins in each case you'd expect you'd expect all to come up either heads or tails more than 50% of the time? That's what being uncorrelated and no better than chance and yet leading to this result means.
Of course there are going to be correlations. You have human beings with similar backgrounds on the bench. Humans you may not like, but regardless they're going to behave like humans and come to the same conclusions more often than random. If that weren't the tendency, how would we even begin to see the level of agreement and organization we see in any society?
Forgive me, but use your head.
Forgive me, but I'm a touch incredulous at that statement.
Not my recollection (60s through now) at all, especially the Warren court and the early 70s.
The Warren court was pretty unabashedly activist. Go read up on it. They saw themselves as addressing needed social injustices via court decision. You may agree with what they decided (and many times it was needed badly as the civil rights cases and some of the liability) but that's the very definition of judicial activism.
How do you think they didn't overturn precedent on Brown vs Board of Education and the other cases that were the very core of the victories of the civil rights movement? In Brown, they specifically went against previous decisions (Plessey vs Ferguson) that said segregation was acceptable. In Brown, they said seperate but equal was not.
How was Roe vs Wade not a change from the longstanding tendency to leave medical regulation to the states? Etc, etc, the list is a long one. Look at liability law as well. there was major overruling of standing precedent.
Just because a decision was a good or needed one doesn't bear on whether it was activist or precedent preserving.
What you're saying just doesn't agree with history.
I used to work with a group that simulated the folding of proteins.
You'd take an assortment of protein sequences and train a neural net on how they folded. Then you try to use that to predict the folding of another different protein that wasn't in the set you trained it on.
But, in this case, they don't try to predict the behavior of an independent case, they use it to predict the behavior of one of the 8 items (justices) they trained the simulation on. That's fine as an exercise in simulation, but using it to reach conclusions on intent and bias is a real reach. I suspect the journalists hyped that part of it a lot more than the researchers themselves.
That's underwhelming enough as is. But what do you use as a measure of how "independent" a judge is?
Assuming no relationship between decisions is ludicrous. On many items that aren't terribly controversial, Ginsburg and Scalia, for example, would rule similarly just because they are trained judges with a background in US law.
Similarly, you wouldn't be surprised if Krugman and Friedman agreed on the proper answer to a question from an Econ 101 textbook, regardless that they would differ massively on more complex issues.
Add to that, the Supreme Court doesn't get the expected and routine "no-brainer" type decisions. It's where the ones with thorny legal interpretation and constitutional issues end up.
I'd be really surprised if you didn't have a correlation between how one particular justice votes and how the rest of the justices vote.
There's a bit of a time horizon issue in that. You've got to decide what period of time you look at. That's going to have an impact on what you see.
My guess is that if you looked at the years of the Warren court, you'd get a different answer.
The court is not utterly independent of the politics of the country around it. In the 50s, there was a move toward activist decisions that could be considered liberal at their time. In the 80s, there was something of a reversal of that with more activist decisions coming from the right.
The group that is defending the status quo of the time is less likely to be "activist" than a group more inclined to change it.
It didn't make your intarwebs faster or your graphics resolution on WoW better, so you can safely go back to sleep and just ignore it.
You mean they make a cool high tech nanocar but you still have to get out and push?
Bummer!
My dad was a high school biology teacher. He also kept bees. For several years, he kept a glass sided demonstration hive in his classroom. It was wood and glass, rather than the plastic this is.
He had a tube through the window that the bees could enter and leave through. The classroom wasn't on the ground floor, and that way there wasn't a problem with nearby pedestrians and the bees.
Was a nice relief from the usual in a high school class. Instead of just stuffed or formaldehyded specimens, you had living creatures on display.
There are already bees in urban areas.
But, if someone gets stung within a few blocks of a hive someone is keeping, they'll point the finger at them.
Even if it was a bumblebee or wasp that stung them.
That way maybe I can get longshot odds in Vegas and retire early.
"No, more likely it'll be President Tux."
And we'll have a penguin army. So the bear cavalry will be totally screwed.
Aral Sea pollutes you!
These wild environmental accusations are just malicious rumors spawned by outside interests.
The Chinese government is handling the problem as outlined here: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/10/26/1924201/china-detains-internet-users-for-spreading-rumors
" Imagine browsing through millions of pictures of LOLcats"
I can has top seecretz?
Vengeful Librarians? Unassuming brick building?
Let's hope Max Von Sydow doesn't show up at their door.