My PhD supervisor (or dissertation advisor, as Americans would call it) often uses the example of psychohistory when explaining the role of statistics and prediction in social science. I personally like the analogy of those physics slit-experiments (can't remember the correct name of it, but the one where you pass individual photos through a slit and they form an interference pattern on the other side, thus suggesting the wave-particle duality of photons). You can't predict what an individual photon can do, but when you have enough of them, you get a distinct pattern.
One thing my supervisor and myself disagree on is the role of agency (or free will). He says that, as social scientists, we aren't interested in free will. When you're analysing the behaviour of a group of people, the overall trends are more important than why any one individual made a certain decision. I don't like to write off agency quite so quickly, but I'm willing to concede that individuals can easily get lost in a crowd.
A few people in this thread have pointed out that considering the trends of billions of individuals, and having those individuals ignorant to your prediction, are important components of psychohistory. Although I suspect that the point about ignorance isn't that central, I'd be prepared to believe that, if you had good information about the beliefs and attitudes of billions of people, some good algorithms, and a bloody big computer, that you'd probably do a reasonable job of predicting a couple of years into the future. I think it's probably less difficult than that other staple of science fiction: faster than light travel.
Back in the dawn of time when the C64 was a cutting-edge computer (and I was but a slip of a lad) I knew a guy who was a real warez puppy. Back in those days, it meant that you had a room full of floppy disks - no CDs or hard drives.
I got a few games from this guy, but not that many, mainly because a box of 5.25" floppy disks was prohibitively expensive for me at the time.
I remember asking this guy once what his favourite game was. He had thousands (his list was on fan-fold printer paper, about a 6mm high stack - this was well before email), so I figured it'd be something like Test Drive, or something else graphical and flashy.
Well, his two favourites were actually M.U.L.E. and Castle Wolfenstein (way before id/Raven remade it as RtCW). Personally, I never played them (they weren't flashy enough for my superficial self back then), but I remember thinking that they must be pretty special.
It seems that the biggest issue with the sex reassignment is the confusing use of pronouns in the story. In one paragraph on the second page they refer to Bunten as both "he" and "she", which is very confusing. It's especially confusing that they use "he" when discussing Bunten's earler life, and "she" when discussing her (see, now even I've done it) later life.
I haven't used xdvi myself, but if you use dvipdf, you can view your documents with preview.app which comes with OS X. Yes, it's one more step (but if you use BibTeX, and references, and the other cool LaTeX stuff, you have to do a few steps before you even get a dvi, so it's not that much more work).
Also there is a packaged called TeXshop which runs dvipdf and previews the PDF document, but personally I've never got the pdf previewer on it to work (and I prefer to use emacs to write my documents)
I'm one of those people who believes that Linux on the desktop can work (for some of us at least, I'm not going to make my mum use it), and have been using Debian as my desktop for a few years now pretty much exclusively.
I've got an oldish Windows XP box for playing games (Morrowind stole my life!), but it doesn't get booted all that often. It sits on a KVM with the linux box.
However, when I was recently in the market for a laptop, I went straight for an ibook. It's a cool looking, compact, and moderately powerful PC. However, it wouldn't have been an option without OS X.
I'm writing a PhD thesis (in Criminology), and I spend my days in emacs and LaTeX. Emacs 21 rocks on OS X (well, except for the whole one mouse button not working with flyspell), and BibDesk is the best free (as in speech) BibTeX reference manager I have ever seen. LaTeX works beautifully, and with fink I have pretty much the same Unix goodness I love about Debian (and it works almost as well as real Debian apt!).
Of course, I'd like better virtual workspace management (space.app doesn't really do it for me), but on the whole, it's easy to use (for someone who has never used a mac in his life), it looks great, and it is rock solid. Sure, it's not cheep, and it's not free (as in speech), but it's still cool.
I'm not a coder myself, and am probably not very up to date on the whole p2p scene (other than knowning that Limewire doesn't seem to work real well on my box at work), but one of the real problems on the p2p networks seems to be trust. With the recent news about entertainment industry bodies seeking legislation to DoS the networks, and the common user experience of crap files on the network (incomplete, or incorrectly labled files), I wonder whether someone could make a system based on the same sort of web of trust model than PGP/GnuPG uses.
The Keyserver infrastructure is already there, and the apps (like GnuPG) are readily available cross-platform. So why can't p2p clients allow content to be signed, so that you can establish a web of trust as to whose content can and cannot be trusted. Downloading a signature of a file to check it's validity would certainly help reduce the chance of downloading dodgy content. This should be especially useful as you tend to get groups of people who are all interested in the same sorts of files (anime, divx, certain bands, etc), so you could imagine a good web forming fairly rapidly.
Making a valid OpenPGP key is a computationally intensive task, suggesting that few people would make thousands of them on the possibility they would be blacklisted. They also don't require any form of real identification, making them effectively anonymous. Also gaining a good trust metric would be an incentive to keep the same key, especially if downloading was restricted based on your trustability.
I can't think of any good reason that this couldn't be worked into an existing p2p network. Whether it would work in practice I have no idea. Anyone who knows more about this than me care to comment? Anyone done it already?
Lots of people probably wont read the linked interview, so I think it's worth quoting this beautiful little paragraph as to why the world might need Yet Another Scripting Language.
Why should you switch to Ruby? If you are happy with Perl or Python, you don't have to. But if you do feel there must be a better language, Ruby may be your language of choice. Learning a new language is harmless. It gives you new ideas and insights. You don't have to switch, just learn and try it. You may find yourself comfortable enough with Ruby to decide to switch to it.
For those who don't need the rock-stable, but somewhat out-of-date reliability of Potato, but want to give Debian a bash, try the testing (AKA woody) release. It's generally pretty stable (although there was a doosie with X not long ago that many people had problems with), and contains a lot of the latest and greatest software. Plus it comes with the quality and apt goodness that Debian is famous for.
I probably wouldn't run testing on a production server (although I certainly do run Potato on them), but if you're knowledgeable enough to cope with the odd dependency conflist or other problem, it makes a great desktop. Only problem is that security fixes might take a few weeks to make it into testing.
Of course, if you really want to live on the edge, Sid (unstable) is even more fun. Certainly not for beginners, however (Sid, that is, Debian generally isn't as difficult to install as its reputation suggests).
I'd personally love to see an option where I can view only positively moderated comments, rather than browsing at +2 and seeing all the posts from users with the karma posting bonus. Often, especially for stories with hundreds of replies, an AC who gets a +1 to be modded at 1 will be more worthwhile reading than a random comment posted by a karma whore with an automatic bonus.
Yes, I realise that the +1 bonus is supposed to reward those who contribute, but meta-moderation doesn't crop them efficiently enough. So once you have that karma cap, all those people who browse at +2 will keep seeing your useless comments until someone wastes a mod point modding you down (wastes because the discussion often benefits more from modding someone up than down).
I'm a social scientist (criminologist), and while I'm not widely published, I've got a couple of papers out there. It's always seemed disturbing to me that you are required to sign away copyright to your own work to be published in any of the major jornals. You need to get permission from the publisher to even reproduce a section of your own work.
Academic journals have a curious role in modern world. They are incredibly expensive to subscribe to, receive all their content at no expense to themselves, and even the peer reviewing is usually on a volunteer basis. However the "publish or perish" attitude of many in academia ensures that they are able to continue making a killing.
One wonders how much longer these publishing companies are going to be able to get away with it, especially now when so many people are publishing themselves online first, and submitting them to journals later.
Netraverse don't seem to have released any kernel patches since 2.4.5, so if you're running a cutting edge kernel (like I suspect quite a few people here are), then your choices are somewhat diminished.
...is that when you are GMT-10 (or whatever we are in Melbourne now that daylight savings have finally finished), all of the slashdot April fools jokes are posted on April 2nd. When none of them are even remotely funny, you just end up confused. I think we need an agreed timezone for April fools jokes (AFAIK, people have always maintained that if you do your joke after April 1st, you are the fool - where does that leave slashdot?).
I think it's just worth pointing out that many people here are laboring under the misconception of what `college' means in this context. This is a residential college, not a university. It's where University of Melbourne students live, and while it might have a tutorial program, it is not a teaching institution. So issues such as access to marks, and essential 24/7 connectivity are not issues here.
That said, I'm very keen to show this article to the business manager of the college I'm a resident tutor at (another small Melbourne Uni college), as it's something I'd really like to see happen here.
It's interesting to read some people posting that in some US counties you can buy data files of voter details all ready to go into a mail merge package. Earlier this year the Australain people had a Goods and Services Tax (GST) imposed upon them. The Prime Minister intended to send a personalised letter to each adult Australian (in Australia it's compulsory to vote, so every person over 18 should be on the electoral role) using a mass mail merge. The federal privacy comissioner (yes, there is such a person, but most of the time he seems pretty useless) eventually stepped in and stopped the plan, saying that the laws concerning the electoral role prevented it from being used in an electronic fashion. In other words, it would have been alright if someone typed them in all by hand, but importing them into Word (am I the only one who thinks using Word to generate over 10 million documets is a terrifying proposition!?) wasn't allowed.
Of course, this only came to light after someone (can't remember who, the opposition maybe) kicked up a stink and took it to the comissioner.
Slashdot Mirror
My PhD supervisor (or dissertation advisor, as Americans would call it) often uses the example of psychohistory when explaining the role of statistics and prediction in social science. I personally like the analogy of those physics slit-experiments (can't remember the correct name of it, but the one where you pass individual photos through a slit and they form an interference pattern on the other side, thus suggesting the wave-particle duality of photons). You can't predict what an individual photon can do, but when you have enough of them, you get a distinct pattern.
One thing my supervisor and myself disagree on is the role of agency (or free will). He says that, as social scientists, we aren't interested in free will. When you're analysing the behaviour of a group of people, the overall trends are more important than why any one individual made a certain decision. I don't like to write off agency quite so quickly, but I'm willing to concede that individuals can easily get lost in a crowd.
A few people in this thread have pointed out that considering the trends of billions of individuals, and having those individuals ignorant to your prediction, are important components of psychohistory. Although I suspect that the point about ignorance isn't that central, I'd be prepared to believe that, if you had good information about the beliefs and attitudes of billions of people, some good algorithms, and a bloody big computer, that you'd probably do a reasonable job of predicting a couple of years into the future. I think it's probably less difficult than that other staple of science fiction: faster than light travel.
Back in the dawn of time when the C64 was a cutting-edge computer (and I was but a slip of a lad) I knew a guy who was a real warez puppy. Back in those days, it meant that you had a room full of floppy disks - no CDs or hard drives.
I got a few games from this guy, but not that many, mainly because a box of 5.25" floppy disks was prohibitively expensive for me at the time.
I remember asking this guy once what his favourite game was. He had thousands (his list was on fan-fold printer paper, about a 6mm high stack - this was well before email), so I figured it'd be something like Test Drive, or something else graphical and flashy.
Well, his two favourites were actually M.U.L.E. and Castle Wolfenstein (way before id/Raven remade it as RtCW). Personally, I never played them (they weren't flashy enough for my superficial self back then), but I remember thinking that they must be pretty special.
It seems that the biggest issue with the sex reassignment is the confusing use of pronouns in the story. In one paragraph on the second page they refer to Bunten as both "he" and "she", which is very confusing. It's especially confusing that they use "he" when discussing Bunten's earler life, and "she" when discussing her (see, now even I've done it) later life.
I haven't used xdvi myself, but if you use dvipdf, you can view your documents with preview.app which comes with OS X. Yes, it's one more step (but if you use BibTeX, and references, and the other cool LaTeX stuff, you have to do a few steps before you even get a dvi, so it's not that much more work).
Also there is a packaged called TeXshop which runs dvipdf and previews the PDF document, but personally I've never got the pdf previewer on it to work (and I prefer to use emacs to write my documents)
I'm one of those people who believes that Linux on the desktop can work (for some of us at least, I'm not going to make my mum use it), and have been using Debian as my desktop for a few years now pretty much exclusively.
I've got an oldish Windows XP box for playing games (Morrowind stole my life!), but it doesn't get booted all that often. It sits on a KVM with the linux box.
However, when I was recently in the market for a laptop, I went straight for an ibook. It's a cool looking, compact, and moderately powerful PC. However, it wouldn't have been an option without OS X.
I'm writing a PhD thesis (in Criminology), and I spend my days in emacs and LaTeX. Emacs 21 rocks on OS X (well, except for the whole one mouse button not working with flyspell), and BibDesk is the best free (as in speech) BibTeX reference manager I have ever seen. LaTeX works beautifully, and with fink I have pretty much the same Unix goodness I love about Debian (and it works almost as well as real Debian apt!).
Of course, I'd like better virtual workspace management (space.app doesn't really do it for me), but on the whole, it's easy to use (for someone who has never used a mac in his life), it looks great, and it is rock solid. Sure, it's not cheep, and it's not free (as in speech), but it's still cool.
I'm not a coder myself, and am probably not very up to date on the whole p2p scene (other than knowning that Limewire doesn't seem to work real well on my box at work), but one of the real problems on the p2p networks seems to be trust. With the recent news about entertainment industry bodies seeking legislation to DoS the networks, and the common user experience of crap files on the network (incomplete, or incorrectly labled files), I wonder whether someone could make a system based on the same sort of web of trust model than PGP/GnuPG uses.
The Keyserver infrastructure is already there, and the apps (like GnuPG) are readily available cross-platform. So why can't p2p clients allow content to be signed, so that you can establish a web of trust as to whose content can and cannot be trusted. Downloading a signature of a file to check it's validity would certainly help reduce the chance of downloading dodgy content. This should be especially useful as you tend to get groups of people who are all interested in the same sorts of files (anime, divx, certain bands, etc), so you could imagine a good web forming fairly rapidly.
Making a valid OpenPGP key is a computationally intensive task, suggesting that few people would make thousands of them on the possibility they would be blacklisted. They also don't require any form of real identification, making them effectively anonymous. Also gaining a good trust metric would be an incentive to keep the same key, especially if downloading was restricted based on your trustability.
I can't think of any good reason that this couldn't be worked into an existing p2p network. Whether it would work in practice I have no idea. Anyone who knows more about this than me care to comment? Anyone done it already?
For those who don't need the rock-stable, but somewhat out-of-date reliability of Potato, but want to give Debian a bash, try the testing (AKA woody) release. It's generally pretty stable (although there was a doosie with X not long ago that many people had problems with), and contains a lot of the latest and greatest software. Plus it comes with the quality and apt goodness that Debian is famous for.
I probably wouldn't run testing on a production server (although I certainly do run Potato on them), but if you're knowledgeable enough to cope with the odd dependency conflist or other problem, it makes a great desktop. Only problem is that security fixes might take a few weeks to make it into testing.
Of course, if you really want to live on the edge, Sid (unstable) is even more fun. Certainly not for beginners, however (Sid, that is, Debian generally isn't as difficult to install as its reputation suggests).
I'd personally love to see an option where I can view only positively moderated comments, rather than browsing at +2 and seeing all the posts from users with the karma posting bonus. Often, especially for stories with hundreds of replies, an AC who gets a +1 to be modded at 1 will be more worthwhile reading than a random comment posted by a karma whore with an automatic bonus.
Yes, I realise that the +1 bonus is supposed to reward those who contribute, but meta-moderation doesn't crop them efficiently enough. So once you have that karma cap, all those people who browse at +2 will keep seeing your useless comments until someone wastes a mod point modding you down (wastes because the discussion often benefits more from modding someone up than down).
I'm a social scientist (criminologist), and while I'm not widely published, I've got a couple of papers out there. It's always seemed disturbing to me that you are required to sign away copyright to your own work to be published in any of the major jornals. You need to get permission from the publisher to even reproduce a section of your own work.
Academic journals have a curious role in modern world. They are incredibly expensive to subscribe to, receive all their content at no expense to themselves, and even the peer reviewing is usually on a volunteer basis. However the "publish or perish" attitude of many in academia ensures that they are able to continue making a killing.
One wonders how much longer these publishing companies are going to be able to get away with it, especially now when so many people are publishing themselves online first, and submitting them to journals later.
Netraverse don't seem to have released any kernel patches since 2.4.5, so if you're running a cutting edge kernel (like I suspect quite a few people here are), then your choices are somewhat diminished.
For those who are interested, the full text of the bill can be found here. (Junkbuster users: it requires cookies to be enabled in your browser.)
...is that when you are GMT-10 (or whatever we are in Melbourne now that daylight savings have finally finished), all of the slashdot April fools jokes are posted on April 2nd. When none of them are even remotely funny, you just end up confused. I think we need an agreed timezone for April fools jokes (AFAIK, people have always maintained that if you do your joke after April 1st, you are the fool - where does that leave slashdot?).
Which is it? Semiconductor or superconductor (can't be bothered getting an NYT login to check)?
I think it's just worth pointing out that many people here are laboring under the misconception of what `college' means in this context. This is a residential college, not a university. It's where University of Melbourne students live, and while it might have a tutorial program, it is not a teaching institution. So issues such as access to marks, and essential 24/7 connectivity are not issues here.
That said, I'm very keen to show this article to the business manager of the college I'm a resident tutor at (another small Melbourne Uni college), as it's something I'd really like to see happen here.
It's interesting to read some people posting that in some US counties you can buy data files of voter details all ready to go into a mail merge package. Earlier this year the Australain people had a Goods and Services Tax (GST) imposed upon them. The Prime Minister intended to send a personalised letter to each adult Australian (in Australia it's compulsory to vote, so every person over 18 should be on the electoral role) using a mass mail merge. The federal privacy comissioner (yes, there is such a person, but most of the time he seems pretty useless) eventually stepped in and stopped the plan, saying that the laws concerning the electoral role prevented it from being used in an electronic fashion. In other words, it would have been alright if someone typed them in all by hand, but importing them into Word (am I the only one who thinks using Word to generate over 10 million documets is a terrifying proposition!?) wasn't allowed.
Of course, this only came to light after someone (can't remember who, the opposition maybe) kicked up a stink and took it to the comissioner.
The background images you can see in the shots look like they came from on of the propaganda collections...