Going for a full Google search, a search for "abstraction physics" yields about 100 more search results than "donkey physics". Further, it appears that you are the author of all the highest-rated links. Finally, you spend more time comparing your revolutionary approach to the switch from Roman numerals to Hindu.
When proclaiming a new, revolutionary branch of Computer Science? Physics? New Age Mysticism? it seems that you should at least mention that you are the only person studying it.
Might I add that this abdication has turned out to be wildly successful?
Not universally. In health care, our mostly private system is the most expensive in the world, yet we have about the same life expectancy as Cuba (with a higher infant mortality rate). In agriculture, we overproduce and overconsume things that are frankly not good for us. Our food is overprocessed, our diets too high in lard and sugar, and we eat far more than is healthy (in no small part thanks to the unceasing, mind-warping advertisements plastered on every visible surface in our country).
This is in no small part due to government agricultural subsidies, but the fact that these subsidies continue despite the fact that they actively undermine our health has to say something about the power our government grants business.
Meanwhile, the wages of the poorest 40% of Americans have hardly budged since the 1970s, while the richest 1% of Americans now own about half the wealth in this country. Is that the sort of economy anyone would plan, or anyone would ask for? Besides the aforementioned 1%, I mean.
In a way, we have the worst sort of mix of private and public: a government which allows business to write its rules. Capitalism is no more a panacea than communism. Global capitalism isn't all prosperity and health and flat-screen TVs; it also brings wage arbitrage, huge wealth inequalities, unsustainable overconsumption, sweatshop labor, and a host of other problems. In your rush to defend the good aspects of the free market, you shouldn't ignore its pitfalls and limitations.
You mean, let your children out into the wild, dangerous world when glorious technology allows them to experience the joys of healthy, aerobic tennis safe in your living room? What sort of a monster are you? Ain't nothing beyond your front door except crackheads and pedophiles.
Welcome to the era of personal responsibility. It's not the government's job to give you a safe neighborhood and a park to play in. If you want that stuff, you need to show some personal responsibility and move to a gated community with a private security force.
I agree that don' nobody in Hollywood give away the rights to nuttin', but if you put the raw footage and the script out there, there are plenty of people with the skills, equipment, and free time to do something with it. If the results were good enough, it might even get them some notice.
I wouldn't have gone to watch the finished product, but if somebody remastered it into a sepia-toned silent film...
I certainly wasn't suggesting that this would be a promising route for an individual investor. In my mind, it would have required the ability to make transactions nearly instantaneously, and also relies heavily on statistical tendencies (which a big company would be in a better position to handle than a small company).
I still have a hunch that it might be possible to do something in this field. Take product ship dates. While there may be occasions where announcing that you're going to let a deadline slip might be good for your stock (if the conventional wisdom says that you're rushing a crap product out the door), it's more likely to hurt your stock. Even with whisper numbers, it seems to me that (on average, over a broad range of stocks) either the whisper numbers are going to stay close to industry generated forecasts, or there is something seriously wrong with one of the two sets of numbers. So a revision upwards should be more likely to bump a stock than to tank it (though it might be a close thing).
Another thing to remember is that the goal is to act quickly on the information, before the market has time to fully digest the implications of the move. It seems like first impressions would matter a lot in such cases. You know, simple metrics like "increased earnings == good", "layoffs == outstanding", "merger == cha-ching", "merger with layoffs == do-money-dance". Hopefully you can get the trade done before the market does a doubletake and says, "You know, maybe Google buying YouTube isn't the smartest thing in the world." A basic system seems like it would have a better chance at predicting knee-jerk movements rather than the ones resulting from a few more moments consideration.
Last thing: If you're a company that is already buying projections, it doesn't seem too hard to take the results of the initial news-reading system and turn over the data about the new forecasted earnings to another system that already has knowledge of the projections. While the first system makes a small trade, the second one might decide to make a larger one if the new numbers beat the forecasts, or try to cancel the trade made by the first system.
This is why I don't play the market myself. I'd have to feel pretty self-confident to think that I could consistently outperform the market as a whole. Index funds, mutual funds, whatever minimizes the actual thinking I have to put into managing investments. My school brought in a guest lecturer who was a major honcho at an investment bank that does a lot of computerized training. I got some interesting stuff from him.
1) people try to sell his company on new algorithms almost daily. Many of them only appear to work because the author hasn't accounted for something (sometimes even things as small as network latency).
2) most of his research was focused on using current trading data to make short term projections. So throwing in external information sources might still be an exploitable niche.
3) Wall Street types are obsessed with money, and even being in the room with them for an hour makes me feel dirty.
Between #1 and #3, I'm positive I would never try to build such a system myself. Thanks for the information. It's a definite wake-up.
Don't be sorry. I think I see the problem. In a nifty sort of self-referentiality, word sense disambiguation is also an NLP problem.
In this case, NLP means Natural Language Processing. This is the process of taking information written in a human language (English, for example) and using a program to extract useful information out of it. It's a step that would absolutely be required for the rest of my system to work, since all these announcements the computer would be required to make decisions on are written in human language.
In this case, the program would need to read press releases and extract the following useful information: The stock to buy/sell to take advantage of the information (which goes a bit beyond simple Named Entity Recognition, because other companies might be named in the bulletin, but should still be relatively easy) and whether the stock is more likely to go up or down based on the news. The latter task is obviously more tricky, but it would definitely be an NLP problem.
It's worse than that. The moment you try to explain virtualization to a non-techie, they're going to think, "Sounds like one of those sneaky, underhanded things a hacker would do," and automatically assume that anyone who wanted to run Vista on a virtual machine must be up to something dirty and underhanded.
If I had to guess, I would say that NLP techniques are probably mature enough to take stories off a newswire and determine whether the story is good news or bad news for company X (with perhaps 80% accuracy). So, if your goal was to take advantage of jumps and dips caused by news before your competitors, you might have the computer make a few trades.
[Note: the following example is based on my understanding of the stock market, which is most likely wrong]. For example, say you had 1000 shares of Google, currently selling at $432.10/share. Your computer gets a story off the news feed saying Google has announced it will exceed its previously projected earnings, and the computer correctly interprets it as Good News. The computer might automatically place two trades, one which tries to buy twenty shares at $432.10, and tries to sell twenty shares at $433.10. It might do this even as it passes on the news to human analysts, who have to determine whether the news requires more drastic action. They might decide that their system has already adequately covered the new position, or that it will probably drive the price up by $25/share instead of $1. If the computer's rather conservative trade is adequate, then presuming they were among the first traders to act on the news, both trades will probably be successful and they've made a quick $20 without actually changing their overall portfolio.
So I think that while it would be a bad idea to have the computer make long-term strategic decisions about the portfolio, it might be able to make small reactions quickly to take advantage of short-term reactions to news.
I don't think religion would get a fair shake if genocide was the only aspect of religion that was covered. Religion has been a force for good and for evil, and it's wrong to pander to any particular outlook on which more accurately portrays its value.
I also think that every student who graduates high school should have had a fair amount of comparative religion at some point in their education. I'm not talking about holding any particular religion up for ridicule or congratulations. Just give a broad understanding of the beliefs of several major religions in a nonjudgmental way. While I think it would convince more than a few people to be atheists, that's not my intent. I think its real value would be in mitigating the fear and threat that other religious outlooks pose to many people.
I absolutely agree that this guy has no business pushing his beliefs on his students, or undermining the work of other teachers who are trying to promote a rational, scientific approach to the world. But religion is very much a part of the human race, and trying to understand the world without reference to the world is futile.
Text summarizers are weird beasts. The NLP class I TA for had a lecture on them yesterday.
Quick breakdown: Most summarizers are of the "sentence selecting" sort. That is, they go through a document or set of documents, trying to find those sentences which appear to convey the most unique information. My impression was that while they can be very elaborate in their approach, they're hamstrung by the fact that thus far, getting a computer to understand the meaning of a text is impossible. Lacking such understanding, even the most elaborate techniques have proven little better than truly stupid approaches. For example, in the domain of news articles, programs generally find it impossible to create summaries that humans judge superior to the output of a program that simply returns the first sentence of the article.
Other programs try to shorten individual sentences by using techniques like pruning away adjectives (risky in cases like "fake gun") or entire branches of the sentence's parse tree. They can also try things like taking a list of objects and replacing them with their parent semantic class (replacing "apples, dates, and pomegranites" with "fruit").
In summary, the fact that a text summarizer proclaims an article to be "content free" is hardly evidence of its triviality. But I did read the article, and strongly regret the time squandered on it. So in this case, the text summarizer may be onto something.
The reason we don't talk much about water vapor is because humanity really doesn't have much control over the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. However, we are definitely the primary source for the steady increase in CO2 over the last few decades.
Another thing to remember is that we're talking about climate *change*. The fact that water vapor provides most of the Earth's warm comfy blanket is less important than the fact that we're adding another layer, because the addition is what is driving the change (and possibly starting up various feedback loops). If your wife asks you to stop hogging the covers, do you point out how she would be freezing to death without the insulation provided by the house? No, you accept that the smaller thermal value of the blanket is a real issue.
Water vapor is tricky. We don't have as much direct control over it as we do CO2, and that's why we tend to focus on the latter.
There are a lot of positive and negative feedbacks associated with it. For one thing, planting trees (a very "poplar" form of carbon sequestration) tends to increase water vapor, as the leaves transpire to keep themselves cool. Also, as oceans heat up (which might be kicked off by an increase in CO2), water vapor increases. This both traps more heat (positive feedback) and increases cloud cover (negative feedback).
I wish I knew where it would stabilize. But I hope it doesn't end up being hot, muggy, and overcast. That would suck.
For market decisions, more is more, given a metastasized domain of perfect information efficiency and ideal, rational actors.
So, more is more, given two things that practically never happen?
My opinion: More choices are good when the person making the choice has a full grasp of the implications of the choice, and the value of making the best choice is sufficient to override the cost of choosing (your economic approach seems to assume that the cost of researching the choice is negligible). More choices are also good when the decider knows exactly what she wants, and having more choices only makes it more likely that the ideal choice will be present. Beyond that, if you start adding too many choices, users start trying to use simple elimination heuristics that might not lead to the best choice.
Yes, but that's too obvious to need stating. The converse thought (that more choices can lead to a worse overall experience) is the one that actually surprises.
Imagine going to the grocery store and finding three different brands of refried beans. Three is a small enough number that you could actually try out all available brands to see which one you like best.
Now imagine going to the grocery store and finding thirty different brands, broken up along numerous axes (mild/spicy, regular/lowfat/lowsalt, standard/vegetarian, etc.) What are the effects?
First negative effect: You have twenty-seven more products to compare. That can't help but take more time.
Second negative effect: While it's much more likely that your ideal refried bean is somewhere on the shelf, it's far less likely that you'll find the one that is best for you, which undermines much of the value of having all the choices in the first place.
Third negative effect: People generally take one of two approaches to a choice. Either they are 'maximizers' or 'satisficers.' If you're of a maximizing persuasion, then as you're eating the refried beans you'll be wondering if you could have made a better choice back when you bought them. This also undermines the value of having all those choices, since you were supposed to choose something that made you happier.
For satisficers, it's a slightly different story. Once they've found something that fits their ideal of good price/good yumminess, they never look back. All those other brands on the shelf don't make a difference. But they probably would have found a satisfactory choice among the original three selections, so all the extra choices don't help them much either.
I guess what I'm saying is... refried beans suck. Or maybe I'm saying that our "every imaginable product in a dozen different variations" approach to consumption isn't making people happier. In my ideal world, you'd go to the grocery store, and it would be lined from floor to ceiling with cans. Each can would have a plain black and white label which said 'Stuff' and each can would be on sale at $0.33/can.
My point was, the government doesn't have to place specific restrictions on individuals and corporations, so asking for such a list . All it has to do is make the costs of our actions apparent in the pricetags of the things we buy and do.
Under a cap and trade system, the U.S. would be given a certain amount of CO2 that it can produce (under Kyoto, that would have been the amount it produced in 1990). It puts these blocks of "pollution rights" out on the market, and people pay what the right to pollute is worth. If you have some sequestration technique (planting trees, for example) then you can generate new blocks to sell on the market. If you replace a coal-fired plant with a wind farm or a nuclear plant, you don't have to buy the credits anymore.
The great thing about cap and trade systems is that they quickly demonstrate to the market where pollution is doing the most economic good, and where it can be most easily mitigated. Back in the mid-nineties, such a system was developed for sulfur dioxide emissions. Industry numbers were claiming that it would cost $1200/ton of emissions to clean up their act. But when the trading system got underway, the bidding never got close to $100/ton. Most places found much cheaper ways to stop polluting.
So no, it's not simply "a huge tax on fossil fuels," although it will have similar effects. If we placed a tax on fossil fuels, we would have to decide how much that tax would be, which would imply that we could get the taxation level very wrong. This system is more natural, because it lets the market decide for itself how to best fulfill the target.
Finally, I think that if this were in place, the government might be able to drop its CAFTA standards entirely.
You haven't explained how "humanity is on the decline" even as the population is still increasing quickly. You also haven't explained why it would be a bad thing if the population leveled off.
You made all sorts of outlandish, unsupportable claims to provoke a reaction. That makes you a troll.
Turn in your nick. Phaedrus was cool. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was cool. You, on the other hand, can't think your way out of a wet paper bag.
The Earth is not depopulating. The population is actually still rising, and rapidly.
Let's say we end up with an eventual population of ten billion. Given that we're causing a huge ecological disaster by simply trying to raise one billion people to a decent standard of living (and that only for a handful of decades), how do you expect to find the resources to bring the other nine billion up to that standard? Especially given that we've already burned through the most easily accessible stuff, and are otherwise using any number of critical resources (metal, timber, oil, topsoil, etc.) at an unsustainable rate.
Finally, by what metric do you judge ten billion people (or six billion, or even one billion) to be "too few?"
What is this so-called "freedom" everyone is afraid of losing? Has somebody proposed that the government be abolished in favor of rule by King Algore the Good? If so, that person was probably more than a little drunk, and should not be listened to.
Ideally, we'd end up with a cap-and-trade system with a slowly dropping cap. Under such a system, people would pay the costs of CO2 pollution, but the government wouldn't have much authority to decide how the cap was met. For example, a car company could meet their requirements by producing more efficient cars, or by planting trees, or by buying up wind farm credits. The market would go for whatever techniques remediated the CO2 problem most efficiently. If you find that driving a hummer brings happiness to your life, enough that you're willing to pay some extra for the damage its exhaust produces, then you just pay at the pump and know you're covered. There is no need for the government to ban any particular mode of transportation.
In short, such a system would infringe on your personal liberties only as much as was necessary to solve the problem. If you want to argue that it is unjust for the government to rid the market of damaging externalities, then you're in poor company. I don't think even Milton Friedman argued that.
Okay, let's not start with the whole, "But look how many people went to Iraq and didn't get killed" argument. That way lies true madness.
Yes, there are a lot of people out here (myself included) who don't believe that the Iraq war is serving our country's interests, and no, I don't see that as a problem. I respect most everyone who is fighting over there. They're making great sacrifices and I believe that most of them honestly believe they are trying to make the world a better place. But I also believe that our leaders were delusional in their reasoning and grossly incompetent and greedy in their execution. Finally, I do not believe that the Iraq war has made the U.S. or even Iraq better off.
Now you seem to be back to the "windfarms are an energy sink" argument. Find a reasonable source to back your assertion, or just admit that you came to your conclusion first (nuclear now), and are now using whatever arguments will sink competitors. Arguing from your own incredulity is unconvincing.
I didn't ask whether they had the right to control access (though as a public university, there may be some legal questions there). What I'm asking is, do these sweeps make a bit of difference, and do they make sense? You say "especially after hours." Presumably, you're not saying that after 11PM some additional law kicks in giving them more legal right to restrict access. So you must be claiming that restricting access to students and faculty (which is not the same thing as restricting access to non-predators).
These random sweeps are probably about as security enhancing as all the new, random hoops you have to jump through to get on a flight these days. Security these days is a debacle, and supporting feel-good initiatives just wastes everyone's time and money.
My suggestion? Take the tazers away from the cops, who appear all to eager to use them. Give them to the librarians, who are probably much more likely to use them only when it's really necessary.
Someone on a message board for drunken fratboys claims to have been there. Well, that clinches it. The kid deserved every taze he got.
Further quotes from the alleged witness:
By the way, UCLA is filled with hippie/hipster Che Guevara t-shirt wearing down with capitalism spewing faggots, so because of this there is a protest organized in the middle of our busiest walk-through on campus at 12 pm tomorrow. Way to show the man what you think by preventing college students who are minding their own business and walking to class from being able to do so.
This is complete bullshit, he just said he was leaving to add fire to the scene. The guy wasn't going anywhere until he got tazered. It was a bait tactic on the part of tazer-boy. When the cops initially asked him to leave he was limp like a drunk's dick.
I'll take my buddy's digital camera and get pictures of our protest tomorrow so you can see these college-aged convenient liberals in all their pussy-footing complaining glory. I don't know if he pissed himself because my perspective of the situation was from behind.
The guy who said that quote in the Metafiler site is the same guy in the white shirt who was demanding the badge number of all the officers during this entire incident. I put his opinion on the same level as a floating turd in public restroom.
Alright guys, me and a few of my friends have decided that we want to crash this protest tomorrow that they are having from 12 pm onwards. Since the TMMB is world famous for having people that can think of the most intelligent and depraved methods of crashing this sort of shit, I need help on ideas of what to do. Oh, and the protest has now turned into a march that will probably have around 500 students or so walking through the BUSIEST part of campus. Fucking idiots.
Honestly I think the only medical condition the guy has is being a complete idiot. But we all know the treatment for that...a few tasings here and there.
Now that this model of circumspection and evenhandedness has weighed in, I think we can all stop talking about that pesky "police brutality" crap and rely on this young man's insight instead.
And what, precisely, are these random sweeps supposed to prove?
Are student IDs difficult to forge?
Are students somehow incapable of also being sexual predators?
Now we discover other problems with the policy:
- It gets students pissed off
- It sets up confrontations between the police and people who have legitimate business at the library.
- "Random" gives police too much leeway to go after people who look swarthy-I mean suspicious.
I don't see how this policy can make anyone safer. A library is a big place, and it shouldn't be hard for the malicious to avoid the police sweeps by--you know--not hanging around in the open by a computer.
You're not changing the subject, are you? I mean, I shoot down one unsubstantiated allegation, and you just move on to another.
Get me a source for this '5%' claim, and we'll talk. In the meantime, let me just point out that windmills can be designed with very different wind profiles in mind. Some are designed for putting in areas with high windspeeds, others are designed to take advantage of low and intermittent winds. So while you could easily make wind power look impractical by assuming that only the absolute best sites are going to generate well, such assumptions are not reasonable.
I admit that the point Joel is making isn't too different. Yes: look at the costs and the benefits. But agile isn't quite about instantaneous responsiveness. That's a red herring and I'm suprised that Joel threw it's stinky carcass into the discussion. Agile is also about balancing that responsiveness with the overall view of value for the team and the organization. The tool for doing that is the prioritized list of work, not the email message from Sales Guy to Sarah.
I think Joel just had the hammer brought down on him. I usually like Joel, but I think he lost this round.
Slashdot Mirror
A new field, indeed.
Going for a full Google search, a search for "abstraction physics" yields about 100 more search results than "donkey physics". Further, it appears that you are the author of all the highest-rated links. Finally, you spend more time comparing your revolutionary approach to the switch from Roman numerals to Hindu.
When proclaiming a new, revolutionary branch of Computer Science? Physics? New Age Mysticism? it seems that you should at least mention that you are the only person studying it.
This is in no small part due to government agricultural subsidies, but the fact that these subsidies continue despite the fact that they actively undermine our health has to say something about the power our government grants business.
Meanwhile, the wages of the poorest 40% of Americans have hardly budged since the 1970s, while the richest 1% of Americans now own about half the wealth in this country. Is that the sort of economy anyone would plan, or anyone would ask for? Besides the aforementioned 1%, I mean.
In a way, we have the worst sort of mix of private and public: a government which allows business to write its rules. Capitalism is no more a panacea than communism. Global capitalism isn't all prosperity and health and flat-screen TVs; it also brings wage arbitrage, huge wealth inequalities, unsustainable overconsumption, sweatshop labor, and a host of other problems. In your rush to defend the good aspects of the free market, you shouldn't ignore its pitfalls and limitations.
You mean, let your children out into the wild, dangerous world when glorious technology allows them to experience the joys of healthy, aerobic tennis safe in your living room? What sort of a monster are you? Ain't nothing beyond your front door except crackheads and pedophiles.
Welcome to the era of personal responsibility. It's not the government's job to give you a safe neighborhood and a park to play in. If you want that stuff, you need to show some personal responsibility and move to a gated community with a private security force.
I agree that don' nobody in Hollywood give away the rights to nuttin', but if you put the raw footage and the script out there, there are plenty of people with the skills, equipment, and free time to do something with it. If the results were good enough, it might even get them some notice.
I wouldn't have gone to watch the finished product, but if somebody remastered it into a sepia-toned silent film...
I certainly wasn't suggesting that this would be a promising route for an individual investor. In my mind, it would have required the ability to make transactions nearly instantaneously, and also relies heavily on statistical tendencies (which a big company would be in a better position to handle than a small company).
I still have a hunch that it might be possible to do something in this field. Take product ship dates. While there may be occasions where announcing that you're going to let a deadline slip might be good for your stock (if the conventional wisdom says that you're rushing a crap product out the door), it's more likely to hurt your stock. Even with whisper numbers, it seems to me that (on average, over a broad range of stocks) either the whisper numbers are going to stay close to industry generated forecasts, or there is something seriously wrong with one of the two sets of numbers. So a revision upwards should be more likely to bump a stock than to tank it (though it might be a close thing).
Another thing to remember is that the goal is to act quickly on the information, before the market has time to fully digest the implications of the move. It seems like first impressions would matter a lot in such cases. You know, simple metrics like "increased earnings == good", "layoffs == outstanding", "merger == cha-ching", "merger with layoffs == do-money-dance". Hopefully you can get the trade done before the market does a doubletake and says, "You know, maybe Google buying YouTube isn't the smartest thing in the world." A basic system seems like it would have a better chance at predicting knee-jerk movements rather than the ones resulting from a few more moments consideration.
Last thing: If you're a company that is already buying projections, it doesn't seem too hard to take the results of the initial news-reading system and turn over the data about the new forecasted earnings to another system that already has knowledge of the projections. While the first system makes a small trade, the second one might decide to make a larger one if the new numbers beat the forecasts, or try to cancel the trade made by the first system.
This is why I don't play the market myself. I'd have to feel pretty self-confident to think that I could consistently outperform the market as a whole. Index funds, mutual funds, whatever minimizes the actual thinking I have to put into managing investments. My school brought in a guest lecturer who was a major honcho at an investment bank that does a lot of computerized training. I got some interesting stuff from him.
1) people try to sell his company on new algorithms almost daily. Many of them only appear to work because the author hasn't accounted for something (sometimes even things as small as network latency).
2) most of his research was focused on using current trading data to make short term projections. So throwing in external information sources might still be an exploitable niche.
3) Wall Street types are obsessed with money, and even being in the room with them for an hour makes me feel dirty.
Between #1 and #3, I'm positive I would never try to build such a system myself. Thanks for the information. It's a definite wake-up.
Don't be sorry. I think I see the problem. In a nifty sort of self-referentiality, word sense disambiguation is also an NLP problem.
In this case, NLP means Natural Language Processing. This is the process of taking information written in a human language (English, for example) and using a program to extract useful information out of it. It's a step that would absolutely be required for the rest of my system to work, since all these announcements the computer would be required to make decisions on are written in human language.
In this case, the program would need to read press releases and extract the following useful information: The stock to buy/sell to take advantage of the information (which goes a bit beyond simple Named Entity Recognition, because other companies might be named in the bulletin, but should still be relatively easy) and whether the stock is more likely to go up or down based on the news. The latter task is obviously more tricky, but it would definitely be an NLP problem.
It's worse than that. The moment you try to explain virtualization to a non-techie, they're going to think, "Sounds like one of those sneaky, underhanded things a hacker would do," and automatically assume that anyone who wanted to run Vista on a virtual machine must be up to something dirty and underhanded.
If I had to guess, I would say that NLP techniques are probably mature enough to take stories off a newswire and determine whether the story is good news or bad news for company X (with perhaps 80% accuracy). So, if your goal was to take advantage of jumps and dips caused by news before your competitors, you might have the computer make a few trades.
[Note: the following example is based on my understanding of the stock market, which is most likely wrong]. For example, say you had 1000 shares of Google, currently selling at $432.10/share. Your computer gets a story off the news feed saying Google has announced it will exceed its previously projected earnings, and the computer correctly interprets it as Good News. The computer might automatically place two trades, one which tries to buy twenty shares at $432.10, and tries to sell twenty shares at $433.10. It might do this even as it passes on the news to human analysts, who have to determine whether the news requires more drastic action. They might decide that their system has already adequately covered the new position, or that it will probably drive the price up by $25/share instead of $1. If the computer's rather conservative trade is adequate, then presuming they were among the first traders to act on the news, both trades will probably be successful and they've made a quick $20 without actually changing their overall portfolio.
So I think that while it would be a bad idea to have the computer make long-term strategic decisions about the portfolio, it might be able to make small reactions quickly to take advantage of short-term reactions to news.
I don't think religion would get a fair shake if genocide was the only aspect of religion that was covered. Religion has been a force for good and for evil, and it's wrong to pander to any particular outlook on which more accurately portrays its value.
I also think that every student who graduates high school should have had a fair amount of comparative religion at some point in their education. I'm not talking about holding any particular religion up for ridicule or congratulations. Just give a broad understanding of the beliefs of several major religions in a nonjudgmental way. While I think it would convince more than a few people to be atheists, that's not my intent. I think its real value would be in mitigating the fear and threat that other religious outlooks pose to many people.
I absolutely agree that this guy has no business pushing his beliefs on his students, or undermining the work of other teachers who are trying to promote a rational, scientific approach to the world. But religion is very much a part of the human race, and trying to understand the world without reference to the world is futile.
Text summarizers are weird beasts. The NLP class I TA for had a lecture on them yesterday.
Quick breakdown: Most summarizers are of the "sentence selecting" sort. That is, they go through a document or set of documents, trying to find those sentences which appear to convey the most unique information. My impression was that while they can be very elaborate in their approach, they're hamstrung by the fact that thus far, getting a computer to understand the meaning of a text is impossible. Lacking such understanding, even the most elaborate techniques have proven little better than truly stupid approaches. For example, in the domain of news articles, programs generally find it impossible to create summaries that humans judge superior to the output of a program that simply returns the first sentence of the article.
Other programs try to shorten individual sentences by using techniques like pruning away adjectives (risky in cases like "fake gun") or entire branches of the sentence's parse tree. They can also try things like taking a list of objects and replacing them with their parent semantic class (replacing "apples, dates, and pomegranites" with "fruit").
In summary, the fact that a text summarizer proclaims an article to be "content free" is hardly evidence of its triviality. But I did read the article, and strongly regret the time squandered on it. So in this case, the text summarizer may be onto something.
The reason we don't talk much about water vapor is because humanity really doesn't have much control over the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. However, we are definitely the primary source for the steady increase in CO2 over the last few decades.
Another thing to remember is that we're talking about climate *change*. The fact that water vapor provides most of the Earth's warm comfy blanket is less important than the fact that we're adding another layer, because the addition is what is driving the change (and possibly starting up various feedback loops). If your wife asks you to stop hogging the covers, do you point out how she would be freezing to death without the insulation provided by the house? No, you accept that the smaller thermal value of the blanket is a real issue.
Water vapor is tricky. We don't have as much direct control over it as we do CO2, and that's why we tend to focus on the latter.
There are a lot of positive and negative feedbacks associated with it. For one thing, planting trees (a very "poplar" form of carbon sequestration) tends to increase water vapor, as the leaves transpire to keep themselves cool. Also, as oceans heat up (which might be kicked off by an increase in CO2), water vapor increases. This both traps more heat (positive feedback) and increases cloud cover (negative feedback).
I wish I knew where it would stabilize. But I hope it doesn't end up being hot, muggy, and overcast. That would suck.
My opinion: More choices are good when the person making the choice has a full grasp of the implications of the choice, and the value of making the best choice is sufficient to override the cost of choosing (your economic approach seems to assume that the cost of researching the choice is negligible). More choices are also good when the decider knows exactly what she wants, and having more choices only makes it more likely that the ideal choice will be present. Beyond that, if you start adding too many choices, users start trying to use simple elimination heuristics that might not lead to the best choice.
Yes, but that's too obvious to need stating. The converse thought (that more choices can lead to a worse overall experience) is the one that actually surprises.
Imagine going to the grocery store and finding three different brands of refried beans. Three is a small enough number that you could actually try out all available brands to see which one you like best.
Now imagine going to the grocery store and finding thirty different brands, broken up along numerous axes (mild/spicy, regular/lowfat/lowsalt, standard/vegetarian, etc.) What are the effects?
First negative effect: You have twenty-seven more products to compare. That can't help but take more time.
Second negative effect: While it's much more likely that your ideal refried bean is somewhere on the shelf, it's far less likely that you'll find the one that is best for you, which undermines much of the value of having all the choices in the first place.
Third negative effect: People generally take one of two approaches to a choice. Either they are 'maximizers' or 'satisficers.' If you're of a maximizing persuasion, then as you're eating the refried beans you'll be wondering if you could have made a better choice back when you bought them. This also undermines the value of having all those choices, since you were supposed to choose something that made you happier.
For satisficers, it's a slightly different story. Once they've found something that fits their ideal of good price/good yumminess, they never look back. All those other brands on the shelf don't make a difference. But they probably would have found a satisfactory choice among the original three selections, so all the extra choices don't help them much either.
I guess what I'm saying is... refried beans suck. Or maybe I'm saying that our "every imaginable product in a dozen different variations" approach to consumption isn't making people happier. In my ideal world, you'd go to the grocery store, and it would be lined from floor to ceiling with cans. Each can would have a plain black and white label which said 'Stuff' and each can would be on sale at $0.33/can.
Someday. Someday.
My point was, the government doesn't have to place specific restrictions on individuals and corporations, so asking for such a list . All it has to do is make the costs of our actions apparent in the pricetags of the things we buy and do.
Under a cap and trade system, the U.S. would be given a certain amount of CO2 that it can produce (under Kyoto, that would have been the amount it produced in 1990). It puts these blocks of "pollution rights" out on the market, and people pay what the right to pollute is worth. If you have some sequestration technique (planting trees, for example) then you can generate new blocks to sell on the market. If you replace a coal-fired plant with a wind farm or a nuclear plant, you don't have to buy the credits anymore.
The great thing about cap and trade systems is that they quickly demonstrate to the market where pollution is doing the most economic good, and where it can be most easily mitigated. Back in the mid-nineties, such a system was developed for sulfur dioxide emissions. Industry numbers were claiming that it would cost $1200/ton of emissions to clean up their act. But when the trading system got underway, the bidding never got close to $100/ton. Most places found much cheaper ways to stop polluting.
So no, it's not simply "a huge tax on fossil fuels," although it will have similar effects. If we placed a tax on fossil fuels, we would have to decide how much that tax would be, which would imply that we could get the taxation level very wrong. This system is more natural, because it lets the market decide for itself how to best fulfill the target.
Finally, I think that if this were in place, the government might be able to drop its CAFTA standards entirely.
Does humanity == white people in your world?
You haven't explained how "humanity is on the decline" even as the population is still increasing quickly. You also haven't explained why it would be a bad thing if the population leveled off.
You made all sorts of outlandish, unsupportable claims to provoke a reaction. That makes you a troll.
Turn in your nick. Phaedrus was cool. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was cool. You, on the other hand, can't think your way out of a wet paper bag.
You, sir, are a troll.
The Earth is not depopulating. The population is actually still rising, and rapidly.
Let's say we end up with an eventual population of ten billion. Given that we're causing a huge ecological disaster by simply trying to raise one billion people to a decent standard of living (and that only for a handful of decades), how do you expect to find the resources to bring the other nine billion up to that standard? Especially given that we've already burned through the most easily accessible stuff, and are otherwise using any number of critical resources (metal, timber, oil, topsoil, etc.) at an unsustainable rate.
Finally, by what metric do you judge ten billion people (or six billion, or even one billion) to be "too few?"
What is this so-called "freedom" everyone is afraid of losing? Has somebody proposed that the government be abolished in favor of rule by King Algore the Good? If so, that person was probably more than a little drunk, and should not be listened to.
Ideally, we'd end up with a cap-and-trade system with a slowly dropping cap. Under such a system, people would pay the costs of CO2 pollution, but the government wouldn't have much authority to decide how the cap was met. For example, a car company could meet their requirements by producing more efficient cars, or by planting trees, or by buying up wind farm credits. The market would go for whatever techniques remediated the CO2 problem most efficiently. If you find that driving a hummer brings happiness to your life, enough that you're willing to pay some extra for the damage its exhaust produces, then you just pay at the pump and know you're covered. There is no need for the government to ban any particular mode of transportation.
In short, such a system would infringe on your personal liberties only as much as was necessary to solve the problem. If you want to argue that it is unjust for the government to rid the market of damaging externalities, then you're in poor company. I don't think even Milton Friedman argued that.
Okay, let's not start with the whole, "But look how many people went to Iraq and didn't get killed" argument. That way lies true madness.
Yes, there are a lot of people out here (myself included) who don't believe that the Iraq war is serving our country's interests, and no, I don't see that as a problem. I respect most everyone who is fighting over there. They're making great sacrifices and I believe that most of them honestly believe they are trying to make the world a better place. But I also believe that our leaders were delusional in their reasoning and grossly incompetent and greedy in their execution. Finally, I do not believe that the Iraq war has made the U.S. or even Iraq better off.
Fusion would be cool. I'll grant that.
Now you seem to be back to the "windfarms are an energy sink" argument. Find a reasonable source to back your assertion, or just admit that you came to your conclusion first (nuclear now), and are now using whatever arguments will sink competitors. Arguing from your own incredulity is unconvincing.
I didn't ask whether they had the right to control access (though as a public university, there may be some legal questions there). What I'm asking is, do these sweeps make a bit of difference, and do they make sense? You say "especially after hours." Presumably, you're not saying that after 11PM some additional law kicks in giving them more legal right to restrict access. So you must be claiming that restricting access to students and faculty (which is not the same thing as restricting access to non-predators).
These random sweeps are probably about as security enhancing as all the new, random hoops you have to jump through to get on a flight these days. Security these days is a debacle, and supporting feel-good initiatives just wastes everyone's time and money.
My suggestion? Take the tazers away from the cops, who appear all to eager to use them. Give them to the librarians, who are probably much more likely to use them only when it's really necessary.
Further quotes from the alleged witness:
Now that this model of circumspection and evenhandedness has weighed in, I think we can all stop talking about that pesky "police brutality" crap and rely on this young man's insight instead.
And what, precisely, are these random sweeps supposed to prove?
Are student IDs difficult to forge?
Are students somehow incapable of also being sexual predators?
Now we discover other problems with the policy:
- It gets students pissed off
- It sets up confrontations between the police and people who have legitimate business at the library.
- "Random" gives police too much leeway to go after people who look swarthy-I mean suspicious.
I don't see how this policy can make anyone safer. A library is a big place, and it shouldn't be hard for the malicious to avoid the police sweeps by--you know--not hanging around in the open by a computer.
You're not changing the subject, are you? I mean, I shoot down one unsubstantiated allegation, and you just move on to another.
Get me a source for this '5%' claim, and we'll talk. In the meantime, let me just point out that windmills can be designed with very different wind profiles in mind. Some are designed for putting in areas with high windspeeds, others are designed to take advantage of low and intermittent winds. So while you could easily make wind power look impractical by assuming that only the absolute best sites are going to generate well, such assumptions are not reasonable.