There's a lot of interesting things you can do in research when you get people involved. The simplest is just hiring someone to find the information you need. I believe that a *lot* of companies could significantly increase the productivity of their developers, engineers, etc, if they maintained a pool of trained searchers that could be called upon for difficult queries (paid at maybe a fourth the rate of salaried employees). I know that I've had searches for work that took most of a day just to find that one formula I needed from 30 years worth of journal papers.
A somewhat more interesting thing, in my opinion, is all the "wisdom of crowds" stuff we see so much hype about. It's interesting because it works very well in certain cases - basically the case where the popular thing is the right thing. The main problem with this is that any search engine that shows you 10 results and then counts which ones you click, well, it's not getting your input on result #11, or 23, etc. So before anyone votes, items that happen to be near the top almost certainly stay at the top. Many good items that the algorithm ranked medium might never get voted on!
One way around this is to randomly select some less good results, so that viewers get a chance to vote for the underdogs and bring them to the top of the pile. But this pollutes results for each user, essentially making them pay a "moderation tax" by requiring them to see things that the algorithm has no reason to believe are better results.
All-in-all, social information finding features seem to be much better suited for finding things you didn't even *know* you wanted - StumbleUpon being a great example of a tool for doing that. I would imagine that this could be very useful even in the corporate sector, as many business strategies and engineering techniques have variants or cousins that are similar in function, but may be more obscure. Having the ability to see that "people who searched for X ended up wanting to know about Y too" might save me a lot of time...
Does this mean we might see drivers for most devices that aren't part of the kernel itself? A stock Windows XP install is surprisingly robust, but add even one crappy driver to the mix (Yeah, ATI, I'm looking at you!) and soon the computer's gone on a one-way vacation to Reboot City.
I think there are a lot of people who are not really taught Bayesian statistics, and so they are limited to think of probability solely in terms of frequentist terminology.
To be fair, many things about Bayesian statistics are odd, and possibly even unsound (yay prior distributions we just made up!) The confidence interval thing can get a bit ridiculous, but I prefer Dempster Shafer theory for the precise reason that I emphatically DO NOT want to treat all evidence with equal weight.
Interestingly enough, I did some research in school with that last bit, using Bayesian combination for ensemble classifiers, and varying the coefficient which determined how strong the exponential bayesian weighting was (how much more strongly slightly better classifiers were preferred to their peers in terms of voting weight). Turns out it affects the ensemble quite a bit, but not in an obviously predictable (read - useful) manner.
Given the ability to measure the angle of a photon down to, oh, something on the order of 10e-34 radians or so, one should have no problem transmitting multiple yottabytes on a single photon.
Looks like someone didn't take their Quantum class before posting! Shame on you!
Before a photon's polarization is measured, it exists as a wavefunction expressable as a linear combination of eigenstates for a given polarization operator. After being measured, its state is only one eigenstate of the particular polarization operator used (what laymen might call "parallel" or "perpendicular"). There is no way to measure the "exact" polarization of a photon - indeed quantum theory says it does not have one, save for the exact moment of being measured (when it is "collapsed" or whatever you wish to call it) when it takes on a single eigenstate, defined by the measuring apparatus.
There are other operators with potentially infinite numbers of eigenstates, and provided you could find one with a large number of eigenstates at attainable energies, you might be able to do as you suggest. But as for polarization, sorry it's fundamentally limited.
Before posting about legal stuff, please get your facts straight. The people being stopped are being stopped because the police believe they have reasonable suspicion, which is very different from probable cause.
Whether or not they have reasonable suspicion is not for you or I to say, that power is given to the judiciary. Can you find any jurisprudence that suggests that setting off the nuclear radiation detector does not indicate reasonable suspicion? Has this been successfully challenged in court?
Just my luck huh, here I go looking all smart then some uber Bayesian has to come along and spoil my party.
I'm hardly a Bayesian in spirit, but it's useful enough when treated properly. I'm actually much more likely to say "Bayesian statistics is absolute bollocks - which just so happens to work very reliably in many cases". This is due to the well known paradoxes with priors, and issues associated with the certainty of beliefs (which you referenced). I prefer Dempster Shafer evidence combination when I can use that, for that reason, but still it's a lot of inductive reasoning with a provably sketchy base case.
Anyway, with little expectation of anything good coming from this (for my ego I mean), here's why I don't usually think in Bayesian terms. Correct me if I'm wrong which I probably am.
While I have heard Bayesians talk about probability not meaning the same thing as as "normal", I've never seen any Bayes p which means anything other than a relative likelihood that I'm familiar with. If there is a bag with 3 red balls and 2 white balls in it, the probability of randomly drawing a red ball out is 3/5 even to a Bayesian, right?
Interestingly enough, I think that Bayesian probability more accurately reflects what nonmathemeticians often mean when they give statistics about predictions - indeed due to its connection with betting, you can see why it would be intuitively favored by the common folk. Of course I doubt they do explicit probability chaining, however I think bayesian inference is intuitively used for many statistical deductions made by the untrained... it just "feels" right for many real life situations - situations that do not involve ensembles.
As per your question, well, you left a lot there to be assumed. Assuming there's no other factors involved (the selection is purely random) then yes, a Bayesian would say "I have a 60% belief that the ball I pull out will be Red." So it is compatible in that sense (one of the many reasons it's useful at all, and why one can even call the Bayesian notion of belief a "probability".
I believe, and here is where I could be all wrong, that as Bayesians we should interpret the 50% number from the OP as an a-priori estimate which is to be refined if we ever get better information. But doesn't that have the same problem that I talked about, which is that the thing under consideration is not a stochastic variable?
I'd say that's actually inaccurate. If he was being a strict Bayesian (which I doubt), there would be an a-priori estimate about the difficulty of the challenge being faced. The actual belief (his stated 50%) would actually be a chaining of that a-priori estimate with all other information this individual happens to have about their efforts. Given that Ron Ho is one of the scientists leading the effort, I would tend to believe that he actually has quite a bit of information, indeed possibly enough to dwarf the influence of the prior. This is one of the features of Bayesian Probability that prevents it from being useless, the fact that in many real life situations, even a crappy prior will lead to estimates that agree well with experimental results.
And even if it is valid to do that, simply elevating the 50% to the status of an a-priori estimate doesn't suddenly make it a more accurate or even legitimate number. I mean, does it?
If someone makes an assertion, I generally try to estimate how likely they are to be accurate given what I know about what they've said. (Interestingly enough, I wrote a slashdot comment about this being a logical basis for the validity of ad hominem attacks - you may find this interesting). If this were a random slashdotter (such as myself) saying the 50% number, I'd say "bollocks" (which I inexplicably say despite being a quaint colonial), but this is an expert in th
That has to be the stupidest thing I've read all day. How, again, is getting chemotherapy for my cancer the equivilent (sic) of shouting: "Hey, look at me! I'm a dangerous terrorist!"
It's not. It's the equivalent to shouting "Hey, look at me, I've got something radioactive in my car!". That is actually very unusual (what percentage of cars do you think contain items so powerfully radioactive that they set off these remote detectors?)
I'm sure it's very annoying to be stopped for being radioactive, but it's not the end of the world. It's not like they are arresting you for "suspicion of being a radioactive terrorist."
Well, really he can search pull you over and search you without probable cause these days. Way to go U.S. citizens. Way to sacrifice liberty for safety, get neither, and deserve it!
Wow, not even the ACLU is complaining about the use of dirty bomb detectors at ports and on interstates. It's not like this is something that will allow police to randomly harass anyone they choose (just for being the wrong race/sex/religion).
You need to test not just for the presence of nuclear radiation, but to set an appropriate threshold.
I suppose that the calculation of such a threshold with a formula involving the square of the distance to the object being tested is too complicated for the majority of people responsible for our security. And that, friends, is not reassuring.
Absolutely! It's merely a simple matter of calculating the expected radiative flux (dependent on the quantity and identity of the radioactive isotopes, and any secondary stimulated emission, say, from subcritical fission), the expected dissipation (all you need to know is the thickness and type of shielding between the radiator and detector),nd there's your inverse distance squared law, which is easy enough if you assume a far field approximation (you have, of course calculated the higher order moments for various configurations of dirty bombs known to exist, compared them to the length scale and shape of the detectors, and shown that near field effects are negligible, right?). See how easy it is? Those guys must be morons to not do all of that! Why should they let a few unknown variables that could affect the threshold by several orders of magnitude stop them?
DISCLAIMER: Why yes, I do have a degree in physics... I don't detect dirty bombs for a living though.
In probability theory, "p" has a specific meaning which is roughly stated as "the ratio of the total number of positive outcomes to the total number of possible outcomes in a population". So for the number of 50% to be right, it must be known that if this research was repeated a million times, 500,000 times there would be success and 500,000 times there would be failure. But this makes no sense because the thing being measured is not a stochastic property. It is simply an unknown thing.
This is true, if by "probability theory" you mean "Frequentism". Frequentism is nice, for those cases where you are dealing with nice, neat ensembles. For a lot of real world situations which require probabilistic reasoning, there are no ensembles, only unique events which require prediction. For that, we often use Bayesian Probability.
Take the assertion "I'd say there's a 10% chance that there was once life on Mars." Well, from a Frequentist point of view, that's complete bullshit. Either we will find evidence of life, or we won't - either the probability is 100% or 0%. There's only one Mars out there.
In order to deal with this limitation, Bayesian Probability Theory was born. In it probabilities reflect degrees of belief, rather than frequencies of occurance. Despite meaning something quite different, Bayesian probabilities still obey the laws of probability (they sum/integrate to one, etc), thus making them mathematically compatible (and thus leading to confusion by those that don't study probability theory carefully.) Of course there are issues with paradoxes and the fact that prior distributions must be assumed rather than empirically gathered, but that does not prevent it from being very useful for spam filtering, machine vision and adaptive software.
As someone who professionally uses statistics to model the future performance of a very large number of high-budget projects at a major U.S. defense contractor, I can assure you that his statement was much more in line with the Bayesian interpretation of probability than the Frequentist view you implicitly assume.
Sorry for the rant, I just get very annoyed when people assume that Frequentism is all there is to statistics - Frequentism is just the beginning.
But it gets even more complicated. One cannot state a probability like this without stating how confident one is in the estimate of the number.
Of course! But where did the confidence interval come from, and how much confidence do we have in it? It's important to provide a meta-confidence score, so that we know how much to trust it! That too, however, should be suspect - indeed even moreso because it is a more complex quantity to measure! So a meta-2 confidence score is in order, for any serious statistician... But why stop there?!
With that as background here is what I humbly suggest 50% really means: it means "I have no idea how to quantify the error of this estimate. It doesn't matter what the estimate is because the error band could possibly stretch between 0% and 100%. So I'll split the difference and call it 50%".
So, if someone does not give an error bound on an estimate, we should assume that the error is maximal?
So whenever anyone says there is a 50% chance, or a 50/50 probability of something happening, they might as well talk in made-up Klingon words, the information content of their statement will be equivalent.
Or, it's entirely possible that that 50% number is somewhat accurate, because they know something about the subject that you do not.
Emitting nuclear radiation is the equivilent of shouting "hey, here, look in my vehicle. I've got something NUCLEAR!" No wonder there's no privacy.
I'm sure if the vehicle was glowing no one would feel bad about them being pulled over. This just happens to glow in a very different way.
I have yet to successfully install iTunes without the stupid mandatory Quicktime installation taking over most of my media file associations, no matter how hard I try to disable them. It even tries to display JPEGs in Quicktime instead of inline in IE. [snip] everyone I know who has tried this has had the same experience.
I call bullshit on that one. I've had iTunes and Quicktime installed on my XP box for a year. I paid attention during the setup process, and I didn't get anything in the way of unwanted file associations. Quicktime movies play in Quicktime, everything else plays where it should. JPEGs haven't been touched.
Either this is new behavior, or you and your friends don't read what you click.
Back when I was working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, I was stuck in a basement laboratory. One interesting thing was that there were old robots *everywhere*, including a big old surgical robot right beside my desk. It was really interesting, as it had two 6-Degrees of Freedom "scapel" controls, and a microscope-like magnifying viewer.
I asked some folks about it, and they said that one of the main benefits was that they used Fourier transforms and other filtering to significantly reduce the "jitter" of the doctor's hands, without aversely affecting intentional motions. I thought that was really interesting, and might save a lot of complications. A former boss of mine has a surgeon for a father, and he said it was quite common fifty years ago for them to have an alcoholic beverage before a surgery to steady their nerves, and seems to think this was effective. I suppose the robotic version wouldn't have all the downsides.
I also think an interesting possibility for this technology is plastic surgery - one of the biggest current problems with plastic surgery isn't expense (a lot of things people want aren't that expensive), it's the risk of complication, which can be quite significant. My brother did not get his face repaired after breaking a cheekbone due to this risk.
This would especially be good for individuals who have recently lost a lot of weight - there's a lot of self consciousness about excess skin, and being able to safely remove it with much reduced risk of complications would go a long way towards helping these people feel better about themselves (which is one way to help keep the weight off).
So yes, I for one welcome my robot surgeon. Some day it might save my life!
Yeah, it's really quite unfortunate. They really need to work on security, and make it easier to upgrade automatically (for sites with no full-time admins, like I imagine most of these were).
I'm a big FLOSS advocate, but seriously I see so many people on places like slashdot saying "run FLOSS because it's more secure than proprietary software." I don't see huge headlines about vBulletin getting hundreds of thousands of breakins, even though "powered by vbulletin" gets three millions hits.
I'd argue that the "many eyes" argument holds water if and only if those eyes are actually paying attention, the developers are responding, and the admins do their jobs properly. Otherwise the source code serves as a blueprint to allow hackers to figure out *exactly* what to do.
Granted PHPBB was hacked because it's poorly written and these sites were likely not kept up to date, but... these kinds of success large scale attacks really don't do much to show how much more secure open source software is - even very popular FOSS like this!
Yeah yeah, I know I'll be marked as troll/flamebait or whatever... but I don't see any upmodded discussion of this, it's a serious issue, if only for the perception it fosters in the industry.
While I can understand them (or any employer for that matter) requesting you dont come in drunk/high on the job (thus their time), but short of people on call 24 hrs, I cant see any difference between smoking up for a weekend and getting drunk (thus YOUR time), as neither effects your job!
The U.S. Department of Defense takes the use of any mind-altering drug while in possession of sensitive information quite seriously. The DoD has decided that Marijuana use is much more dangerous than alcohol use, from a "data security" perspective, and thus take steps to prevent those with sensitive information from participating - and they also deal out severe punishment to those who do. This may seem like an overreaction to you, but from their perspective it's a small price to pay for additional safeguarding of our Nation's important information.
Well, I'm fairly new to the tabletop scene (just over a year of it), but those I play with are mostly from other parts of the country and their aggregate experience was reflected in my comment.
I think the sheer commercial success of D&D/d20 (as opposed to other, more sophisticated roleplaying systems) lends some credence to the idea that there is a lack of diversity in roleplaying groups in general. Sure there's plenty of other options out there, but few seem to be playing them.
I think a lot of folks are just getting tired of the same stale dungeon-crawling that D&D has been pushing for the last 25 years, moving on to bigger and better things (like GURPS, as mentioned in the tags).
I'm very active in the Role-Playing Felllowship of Greater Boston and lately we've been trying many new things. Probably my favorite is a small indy system called Universalis, a GM-less collaborative roleplaying/storytelling system which uses a set of simple socioeconomic feedback mechanisms to regulate the narrative and resolve conflicts without any centralized authority. This has the effect of making the game much more about creativity and interesting stories (indeed the game itself "pays" you to create conflicts in the story) than about playing what is essentially a video game on pen and paper. In a manner similar to brainstorming, Universalis combines the intellectual and creative abilities of the players in such a way that other players act as randomizing agents on your ideas, taking characters and story elements in directions that you yourself would have never thought of. I think it's absolutely brilliant, and indeed a feasible system for brainstorming and generating new and unique stories.
If you live in the Greater Boston area, you should check us out. It's one of the few places you'll find roleplayers willing to try just about anything.
It seems to me that web browsers are poor tools for what we currently ask of them - online mail viewing, interactive AJAX applications, rich client stuff, etc. We need something better, something standard, and something ubiquitous.
There's a pain level to switching - which is why we haven't yet. But if the pain of not switching finally gets too high, maybe we will switch, and all be better off for it.
If for some reason the number of processors you had scaled polynomially with the number of data inputs, then yes a parallel algorithm might run faster than n log n.
As someone who has worked on magnetohydrodynamic simulations on a massively parallel cluster (#50 supercomputer in the world, at the time), I can say that the Cell architecture is not well supported by current programming language paradigms. And, if you look at the current crop of PS3 games, it's clear that they are not living up to the potential of the hardware - with all of it's power it should blow away the 360, and yet it does not.
That's not why I hate the PS3. It's just that, well, I like to have fun playing games. I can do that on my 360 (I have no love for MS, but the 360 is absolutely fun w/ the current crop of games, as long as the RRoDs don't come your way), and I can do that on my Wii, and I can do that on my PS2.
There's just nothing compelling about a PS3, and I think part of it is because Sony didn't take adequate steps to make things work well for game developers. The Cell architecture is ambitious, and trying to adequately take advantage of that in an outdated programming language like C is pretty ridiculous - it's clear that we need languages that have built-in constructs that directly support parallelism (similar to High Performance Fortran, Parallel Haskell, etc).
Anyways, I take whatever Anonymous Cowards say with a grain of salt, but seriously - if you're offended that my observations that video game programmers are not trained to think in ways that lend themselves to this kind of parallelism, I'm sorry. However, having played many video games, I can attest to the fact that they are often unstable, buggy and or otherwise poorly constructed - game publishershave no economic motivation to put the time, money, and human resources into making bulletproof code. And I'm sorry, but if you're good enough to push something like the Cell to its limits, you're probably doing something a little more serious with your time than programming video games, the market tends to work that way. It's just that damn hard of a problem.
Unfortunately, due to scaling problems, any sufficiently large and diverse corporation will have components that exhibit behavior that are detrimental to other components, or even the whole. While this can be reduced and discouraged, I do not believe it can be completely solved - something will always manage to slip its way through the cracks.
Sony has a huge image problem (especially among the geek elite) due to this effect, and due to the fact that its goals do not seem to align with the geeks of Slashdot's dream of free content for all. Maybe better laws, regulation, and consumer awareness will provide the sticks and carrots necessary to help guide this behavior to constructive not destructive purposes. If that happens, I'd suggest investing heavily in porcine aviation stocks, however.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of interesting things you can do in research when you get people involved. The simplest is just hiring someone to find the information you need. I believe that a *lot* of companies could significantly increase the productivity of their developers, engineers, etc, if they maintained a pool of trained searchers that could be called upon for difficult queries (paid at maybe a fourth the rate of salaried employees). I know that I've had searches for work that took most of a day just to find that one formula I needed from 30 years worth of journal papers.
A somewhat more interesting thing, in my opinion, is all the "wisdom of crowds" stuff we see so much hype about. It's interesting because it works very well in certain cases - basically the case where the popular thing is the right thing. The main problem with this is that any search engine that shows you 10 results and then counts which ones you click, well, it's not getting your input on result #11, or 23, etc. So before anyone votes, items that happen to be near the top almost certainly stay at the top. Many good items that the algorithm ranked medium might never get voted on!
One way around this is to randomly select some less good results, so that viewers get a chance to vote for the underdogs and bring them to the top of the pile. But this pollutes results for each user, essentially making them pay a "moderation tax" by requiring them to see things that the algorithm has no reason to believe are better results.
All-in-all, social information finding features seem to be much better suited for finding things you didn't even *know* you wanted - StumbleUpon being a great example of a tool for doing that. I would imagine that this could be very useful even in the corporate sector, as many business strategies and engineering techniques have variants or cousins that are similar in function, but may be more obscure. Having the ability to see that "people who searched for X ended up wanting to know about Y too" might save me a lot of time...
Does this mean we might see drivers for most devices that aren't part of the kernel itself? A stock Windows XP install is surprisingly robust, but add even one crappy driver to the mix (Yeah, ATI, I'm looking at you!) and soon the computer's gone on a one-way vacation to Reboot City.
I think there are a lot of people who are not really taught Bayesian statistics, and so they are limited to think of probability solely in terms of frequentist terminology.
To be fair, many things about Bayesian statistics are odd, and possibly even unsound (yay prior distributions we just made up!) The confidence interval thing can get a bit ridiculous, but I prefer Dempster Shafer theory for the precise reason that I emphatically DO NOT want to treat all evidence with equal weight.
Interestingly enough, I did some research in school with that last bit, using Bayesian combination for ensemble classifiers, and varying the coefficient which determined how strong the exponential bayesian weighting was (how much more strongly slightly better classifiers were preferred to their peers in terms of voting weight). Turns out it affects the ensemble quite a bit, but not in an obviously predictable (read - useful) manner.
Before a photon's polarization is measured, it exists as a wavefunction expressable as a linear combination of eigenstates for a given polarization operator. After being measured, its state is only one eigenstate of the particular polarization operator used (what laymen might call "parallel" or "perpendicular"). There is no way to measure the "exact" polarization of a photon - indeed quantum theory says it does not have one, save for the exact moment of being measured (when it is "collapsed" or whatever you wish to call it) when it takes on a single eigenstate, defined by the measuring apparatus.
There are other operators with potentially infinite numbers of eigenstates, and provided you could find one with a large number of eigenstates at attainable energies, you might be able to do as you suggest. But as for polarization, sorry it's fundamentally limited.
Before posting about legal stuff, please get your facts straight. The people being stopped are being stopped because the police believe they have reasonable suspicion, which is very different from probable cause.
Whether or not they have reasonable suspicion is not for you or I to say, that power is given to the judiciary. Can you find any jurisprudence that suggests that setting off the nuclear radiation detector does not indicate reasonable suspicion? Has this been successfully challenged in court?
I'm hardly a Bayesian in spirit, but it's useful enough when treated properly. I'm actually much more likely to say "Bayesian statistics is absolute bollocks - which just so happens to work very reliably in many cases". This is due to the well known paradoxes with priors, and issues associated with the certainty of beliefs (which you referenced). I prefer Dempster Shafer evidence combination when I can use that, for that reason, but still it's a lot of inductive reasoning with a provably sketchy base case.
Interestingly enough, I think that Bayesian probability more accurately reflects what nonmathemeticians often mean when they give statistics about predictions - indeed due to its connection with betting, you can see why it would be intuitively favored by the common folk. Of course I doubt they do explicit probability chaining, however I think bayesian inference is intuitively used for many statistical deductions made by the untrained... it just "feels" right for many real life situations - situations that do not involve ensembles.
As per your question, well, you left a lot there to be assumed. Assuming there's no other factors involved (the selection is purely random) then yes, a Bayesian would say "I have a 60% belief that the ball I pull out will be Red." So it is compatible in that sense (one of the many reasons it's useful at all, and why one can even call the Bayesian notion of belief a "probability".
I'd say that's actually inaccurate. If he was being a strict Bayesian (which I doubt), there would be an a-priori estimate about the difficulty of the challenge being faced. The actual belief (his stated 50%) would actually be a chaining of that a-priori estimate with all other information this individual happens to have about their efforts. Given that Ron Ho is one of the scientists leading the effort, I would tend to believe that he actually has quite a bit of information, indeed possibly enough to dwarf the influence of the prior. This is one of the features of Bayesian Probability that prevents it from being useless, the fact that in many real life situations, even a crappy prior will lead to estimates that agree well with experimental results.
If someone makes an assertion, I generally try to estimate how likely they are to be accurate given what I know about what they've said. (Interestingly enough, I wrote a slashdot comment about this being a logical basis for the validity of ad hominem attacks - you may find this interesting). If this were a random slashdotter (such as myself) saying the 50% number, I'd say "bollocks" (which I inexplicably say despite being a quaint colonial), but this is an expert in th
I'm sure it's very annoying to be stopped for being radioactive, but it's not the end of the world. It's not like they are arresting you for "suspicion of being a radioactive terrorist." Wow, not even the ACLU is complaining about the use of dirty bomb detectors at ports and on interstates. It's not like this is something that will allow police to randomly harass anyone they choose (just for being the wrong race/sex/religion).
DISCLAIMER: Why yes, I do have a degree in physics... I don't detect dirty bombs for a living though.
Take the assertion "I'd say there's a 10% chance that there was once life on Mars." Well, from a Frequentist point of view, that's complete bullshit. Either we will find evidence of life, or we won't - either the probability is 100% or 0%. There's only one Mars out there.
In order to deal with this limitation, Bayesian Probability Theory was born. In it probabilities reflect degrees of belief, rather than frequencies of occurance. Despite meaning something quite different, Bayesian probabilities still obey the laws of probability (they sum/integrate to one, etc), thus making them mathematically compatible (and thus leading to confusion by those that don't study probability theory carefully.) Of course there are issues with paradoxes and the fact that prior distributions must be assumed rather than empirically gathered, but that does not prevent it from being very useful for spam filtering, machine vision and adaptive software.
As someone who professionally uses statistics to model the future performance of a very large number of high-budget projects at a major U.S. defense contractor, I can assure you that his statement was much more in line with the Bayesian interpretation of probability than the Frequentist view you implicitly assume.
Sorry for the rant, I just get very annoyed when people assume that Frequentism is all there is to statistics - Frequentism is just the beginning. Of course! But where did the confidence interval come from, and how much confidence do we have in it? It's important to provide a meta-confidence score, so that we know how much to trust it! That too, however, should be suspect - indeed even moreso because it is a more complex quantity to measure! So a meta-2 confidence score is in order, for any serious statistician... But why stop there?! So, if someone does not give an error bound on an estimate, we should assume that the error is maximal? Or, it's entirely possible that that 50% number is somewhat accurate, because they know something about the subject that you do not.
Emitting nuclear radiation is the equivilent of shouting "hey, here, look in my vehicle. I've got something NUCLEAR!" No wonder there's no privacy. I'm sure if the vehicle was glowing no one would feel bad about them being pulled over. This just happens to glow in a very different way.
Either this is new behavior, or you and your friends don't read what you click.
Back when I was working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, I was stuck in a basement laboratory. One interesting thing was that there were old robots *everywhere*, including a big old surgical robot right beside my desk. It was really interesting, as it had two 6-Degrees of Freedom "scapel" controls, and a microscope-like magnifying viewer.
I asked some folks about it, and they said that one of the main benefits was that they used Fourier transforms and other filtering to significantly reduce the "jitter" of the doctor's hands, without aversely affecting intentional motions. I thought that was really interesting, and might save a lot of complications. A former boss of mine has a surgeon for a father, and he said it was quite common fifty years ago for them to have an alcoholic beverage before a surgery to steady their nerves, and seems to think this was effective. I suppose the robotic version wouldn't have all the downsides.
I also think an interesting possibility for this technology is plastic surgery - one of the biggest current problems with plastic surgery isn't expense (a lot of things people want aren't that expensive), it's the risk of complication, which can be quite significant. My brother did not get his face repaired after breaking a cheekbone due to this risk.
This would especially be good for individuals who have recently lost a lot of weight - there's a lot of self consciousness about excess skin, and being able to safely remove it with much reduced risk of complications would go a long way towards helping these people feel better about themselves (which is one way to help keep the weight off).
So yes, I for one welcome my robot surgeon. Some day it might save my life!
Yeah, it's really quite unfortunate. They really need to work on security, and make it easier to upgrade automatically (for sites with no full-time admins, like I imagine most of these were).
I'm a big FLOSS advocate, but seriously I see so many people on places like slashdot saying "run FLOSS because it's more secure than proprietary software." I don't see huge headlines about vBulletin getting hundreds of thousands of breakins, even though "powered by vbulletin" gets three millions hits.
I'd argue that the "many eyes" argument holds water if and only if those eyes are actually paying attention, the developers are responding, and the admins do their jobs properly. Otherwise the source code serves as a blueprint to allow hackers to figure out *exactly* what to do.
Granted PHPBB was hacked because it's poorly written and these sites were likely not kept up to date, but... these kinds of success large scale attacks really don't do much to show how much more secure open source software is - even very popular FOSS like this!
Yeah yeah, I know I'll be marked as troll/flamebait or whatever... but I don't see any upmodded discussion of this, it's a serious issue, if only for the perception it fosters in the industry.
Take that MOND!
Soon all your adherents will have to move to studying a crazy theory that can't disproven, like String Theory!
While I can understand them (or any employer for that matter) requesting you dont come in drunk/high on the job (thus their time), but short of people on call 24 hrs, I cant see any difference between smoking up for a weekend and getting drunk (thus YOUR time), as neither effects your job!
The U.S. Department of Defense takes the use of any mind-altering drug while in possession of sensitive information quite seriously. The DoD has decided that Marijuana use is much more dangerous than alcohol use, from a "data security" perspective, and thus take steps to prevent those with sensitive information from participating - and they also deal out severe punishment to those who do. This may seem like an overreaction to you, but from their perspective it's a small price to pay for additional safeguarding of our Nation's important information.
If time is simply another dimension, then "before the big bang" is just another type of "outside of the universe." Who knows what's out there?
I'm sorry if this is offtopic, but I have found that reading slashdot via the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag is actually quite amusing! I say, we keep it (but only use where applicable). Who's with me?
Well, I'm fairly new to the tabletop scene (just over a year of it), but those I play with are mostly from other parts of the country and their aggregate experience was reflected in my comment.
I think the sheer commercial success of D&D/d20 (as opposed to other, more sophisticated roleplaying systems) lends some credence to the idea that there is a lack of diversity in roleplaying groups in general. Sure there's plenty of other options out there, but few seem to be playing them.
I think a lot of folks are just getting tired of the same stale dungeon-crawling that D&D has been pushing for the last 25 years, moving on to bigger and better things (like GURPS, as mentioned in the tags).
I'm very active in the Role-Playing Felllowship of Greater Boston and lately we've been trying many new things. Probably my favorite is a small indy system called Universalis, a GM-less collaborative roleplaying/storytelling system which uses a set of simple socioeconomic feedback mechanisms to regulate the narrative and resolve conflicts without any centralized authority. This has the effect of making the game much more about creativity and interesting stories (indeed the game itself "pays" you to create conflicts in the story) than about playing what is essentially a video game on pen and paper. In a manner similar to brainstorming, Universalis combines the intellectual and creative abilities of the players in such a way that other players act as randomizing agents on your ideas, taking characters and story elements in directions that you yourself would have never thought of. I think it's absolutely brilliant, and indeed a feasible system for brainstorming and generating new and unique stories.
If you live in the Greater Boston area, you should check us out. It's one of the few places you'll find roleplayers willing to try just about anything.
It seems to me that web browsers are poor tools for what we currently ask of them - online mail viewing, interactive AJAX applications, rich client stuff, etc. We need something better, something standard, and something ubiquitous.
There's a pain level to switching - which is why we haven't yet. But if the pain of not switching finally gets too high, maybe we will switch, and all be better off for it.
If for some reason the number of processors you had scaled polynomially with the number of data inputs, then yes a parallel algorithm might run faster than n log n.
As someone who has worked on magnetohydrodynamic simulations on a massively parallel cluster (#50 supercomputer in the world, at the time), I can say that the Cell architecture is not well supported by current programming language paradigms. And, if you look at the current crop of PS3 games, it's clear that they are not living up to the potential of the hardware - with all of it's power it should blow away the 360, and yet it does not.
That's not why I hate the PS3. It's just that, well, I like to have fun playing games. I can do that on my 360 (I have no love for MS, but the 360 is absolutely fun w/ the current crop of games, as long as the RRoDs don't come your way), and I can do that on my Wii, and I can do that on my PS2.
There's just nothing compelling about a PS3, and I think part of it is because Sony didn't take adequate steps to make things work well for game developers. The Cell architecture is ambitious, and trying to adequately take advantage of that in an outdated programming language like C is pretty ridiculous - it's clear that we need languages that have built-in constructs that directly support parallelism (similar to High Performance Fortran, Parallel Haskell, etc).
Anyways, I take whatever Anonymous Cowards say with a grain of salt, but seriously - if you're offended that my observations that video game programmers are not trained to think in ways that lend themselves to this kind of parallelism, I'm sorry. However, having played many video games, I can attest to the fact that they are often unstable, buggy and or otherwise poorly constructed - game publishershave no economic motivation to put the time, money, and human resources into making bulletproof code. And I'm sorry, but if you're good enough to push something like the Cell to its limits, you're probably doing something a little more serious with your time than programming video games, the market tends to work that way. It's just that damn hard of a problem.
Unfortunately, due to scaling problems, any sufficiently large and diverse corporation will have components that exhibit behavior that are detrimental to other components, or even the whole. While this can be reduced and discouraged, I do not believe it can be completely solved - something will always manage to slip its way through the cracks.
Sony has a huge image problem (especially among the geek elite) due to this effect, and due to the fact that its goals do not seem to align with the geeks of Slashdot's dream of free content for all. Maybe better laws, regulation, and consumer awareness will provide the sticks and carrots necessary to help guide this behavior to constructive not destructive purposes. If that happens, I'd suggest investing heavily in porcine aviation stocks, however.
Well, we cannot even start applying knowledge to influence human behavior positively until we have it.