The computer systems weren't responsible for the overall drop, but rather the rate of the drop during the few minutes of switching over to the backup computers. This queued up trades, and at the current volume of the switchover, caused a large drop when they caught up. At least that's how I understand it.
So not only is your god mutable, but at one point in time (approximately two thousand years ago) it punished people for myriad minutiae (I'm thinking of Leviticus here)? Is this really your worldview? I'm curious why you think your omnipotent god changed its mind all of a sudden?
The downside is that my eyes start to bleed when I turn on the flourescent lights that came with my apartment because of the light it's giving off. My ears also panic with the buzzing noise. And I'm supposed to have someone over for dinner with that light above my kitchen table? It feels like an interrogation room with it on. Ugly, ugly, ugly. How can anyone stand it?
The rest of us will read it, close the book, and start will thinking: What's the real meaning? How does that fit with my understanding of the world? How do I reconcile the notion of a universe created in 6 days, while living in a planet that was formed 4.5 billions years ago?
Agreed completely. The problem is, then we get 2 billion different interpretations of what the "real meaning" is, one for each person who takes this route. That is *not* actually a problem, sorry. It would be, in my opinion, a beautiful thing to have 2 billion different interpretations, and everyone sharing them with each other in a respectful manner, much of this is happening in this thread right now!
The problem is when some of these "real meanings" are close enough that people form ideological groups around them with the intent of furthering their narrow views. This can lead to hate, anger, violence, and death.
I love personal interpretations, it's all we have. But sometimes what follows is a closed-mindedness that your interpretation is the only right one, and that all others must change.
I'm not like that, I don't feel you're like that, but I think a lot of people *are* like that, and that's what I dislike.
"Blacks are twice as likely as whites (62% vs. 31%) to say that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, and this is significantly higher than among Hispanics (38%) and other non-whites (32%) as well."
Can you see why he's mad when in 2007, we on one hand have the scientific enterprise, which seems to me to one of the, if not the most, important thing that has advanced the human race. On the other hand, we have the most powerful world leaders, most with incredible weapons at their disposal, and *almost all* of them have the "GOD IS ON OUR SIDE" mentality.
To me, that's scary, and it's wrong. I haven't read Dawkin's work, is he against internal, personal ideas about God and how we came to be? Or is he sick of seeing countless lives lost because "Our God is more right than your God"?
My point is, the Christian story seems ultimately grounded in the fact that at some point, humans were "pefect beings", uncapable of sin. Then, at some precise moment, man *chose* to become a sinful creature. If you believe evolution, how can you reconcile those two things? Did evolution lead to sinless humans? Was the first sin really a woman eating an apple?
I'd also ask them as to how we're to divine which parts of the Bible are literal, and which aren't? Who is God talking to today that can tell us which parts we should live by? Is it just whichever fit in with people's worldview today regarding science, women's rights, etc? It sure seems that way.
Well I'd ask them my question then: If you don't literally believe that God created man in a perfect state, and that man subsequently chose to fall into sin as described in Genesis, then what was Jesus sent for?
If evolution is true, you'd agree that God did not create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, right?
Well, that Adam and Eve story is the entire basis of Christianity, because that's where sin originated. If there is no original sin, then what was Jesus sent to save us from? If Jesus was just a man who was trying to preach love, he wouldn't be the savior of the world, whatever that means.
So that's why Christians have to not believe evolution. If they accept evolution, then the entire point of Christianity is called into question.
I agree completely with your points, I don't think scientists have an a priori "attack religion" mentality. If the observable data led people to believe that Christianity was true, of course scientists would believe it. A scientist is just someone who uses observation and experiments to get at the truth, not dogma.
Interesting idea. The main difference between newspapers/magazines and encyclopedias is of course the timing of information. I can write an encyclopedia article about a subject I know by investing time and research. However, the research for writing magazine articles is much different, relying on interviews, travelling, even subpoenas, etc.
Wikepedia already has certain magazine aspects to it, it is updated with current events quite quickly. But those articles are (usually) simply relaying information obtained from a traditional news source.
I would like to see the attemp though, what's the harm?
A zealous Reuters reporter apparently conflated the FSF with the open source community in general, took some quotes out of context, and ended up with a sensational headline that fooled a number of people.
This just reinforces why I read Slashdot instead of other news, there's no chance of something like this happening here.
If you're a programmer, and even if you're not, use R to plot from spreadsheet programs, databases, and flat files! I highly recommend the book "R Graphics" by Paul Murrell if you're interested in not being constrained to what Excel and others limit you to! Murrell's grid package for R can have you building publication quality plots from scratch, it's very powerful.
I read this article yesterday, I don't think the submitter understood the point of it. I could be wrong. The point of the article isn't so much that income inequality is going to cause more crime in the US.
"Is this violence a direct result of income inequality? Almost certainly not. Brazil has a history of slavery and colonization that was far more brutal than the U.S. It would require a team of sociologists, historians, economists, and criminologists to explain the roots of violence in Brazil. Based on my knowledge of academics, I don't think they would come to a conclusion anyway."
I think the main point of the article is something "The Economist" talked about in last weeks issue. It's that even though the economies he discusses are doing tremendously well on average, the income gap still makes people unhappy and not content. The point is, it's not peoples absolute wealth that determines happiness, but their relative wealth.
From the article "In other words, we care less about how much money we have than we do about how much money we have relative to everyone else. In a fascinating survey, Cornell economist Robert Frank found that a majority of Americans would prefer to earn $100,000 while everyone else earns $85,000, rather than earning $110,000 while everyone else earns $200,000."
That's the upshot of this article, which I find quite interesting!
If everyone had their basic needs met, I don't think income inequality would matter as much.
Possibly, but as the article points out, happiness and contentment is not so much our absolute wealth, but our relative wealth. Many have their basic needs met, but still feel obligated to put in long hours to increase their relative wealth. The Economist's holiday issue had a nice article on this research.
Here's a quick review. I think you're thinking of correlation between two variables, not p-values.
When doing a statistical test, you have a null hypothesis, and an alternative hypothesis. As a simple example, a null hypothesis could be: the average body weight for males at my workplace equals the average body weight for females at my workplace. The alternative could then be a few things: the average weights are different, males have a higher average weight than females, or males have a lower average weight than females. Data would be collected, and a statistical test performed. The result of the test would be some test statistic, which has a certain distribution under the null hypothesis (for example, the t-distribution).
Since we then have a statistic with a known distribution under the null, we can say "If the null hypothesis were true, what is the probability of seeing the data in our sample, or more extreme than our sample." This probability is the p-value. If this probability is low (say less than.05), we say, "if the null were true, data like ours or more extreme is not very probable, therefore we conclude the null is not true, and accept the alternative hypothesis." So lower p-values are more evidence against the null hypothesis. It is similar to a reductio ad absurdum in logic, you assume something is true and show that it leads to a strange conclusion. In this case, it leads to seeing data that have very low probability of occurring by chance.
I think what you're thinking of is probably correlation coefficients (sometimes represented by the Greek letter "rho", perhaps the source of the confusion). The simple correlation coefficient measures the strength of a linear relationship between two variables. Rho is bounded by -1 for a perfectly negative correlation, and +1 for a perfectly positive correlation. On the other hand, a p-value is a probability, and therefore is between 0 and 1. For p-values,.05 is most often used for the "cut-off" to determine "too rare to be chance" as described above, although there is nothing magical about.05.
And that's an *article* based on a *publication* in a peer-reviewed journal. I would hope most of us here would want that original source, as articles, even in science mags, get things wrong.
The publication is
Haselton MG, et al. Hormones and Behavior 51 (2007). 40-45.
If your university has access to this journal, you can read the article online.
Slashdot Mirror
The computer systems weren't responsible for the overall drop, but rather the rate of the drop during the few minutes of switching over to the backup computers. This queued up trades, and at the current volume of the switchover, caused a large drop when they caught up. At least that's how I understand it.
So not only is your god mutable, but at one point in time (approximately two thousand years ago) it punished people for myriad minutiae (I'm thinking of Leviticus here)? Is this really your worldview? I'm curious why you think your omnipotent god changed its mind all of a sudden?
So that's what these kids are so happy about.
The downside is that my eyes start to bleed when I turn on the flourescent lights that came with my apartment because of the light it's giving off. My ears also panic with the buzzing noise. And I'm supposed to have someone over for dinner with that light above my kitchen table? It feels like an interrogation room with it on. Ugly, ugly, ugly. How can anyone stand it?
The rest of us will read it, close the book, and start will thinking: What's the real meaning? How does that fit with my understanding of the world? How do I reconcile the notion of a universe created in 6 days, while living in a planet that was formed 4.5 billions years ago?
Agreed completely. The problem is, then we get 2 billion different interpretations of what the "real meaning" is, one for each person who takes this route. That is *not* actually a problem, sorry. It would be, in my opinion, a beautiful thing to have 2 billion different interpretations, and everyone sharing them with each other in a respectful manner, much of this is happening in this thread right now!
The problem is when some of these "real meanings" are close enough that people form ideological groups around them with the intent of furthering their narrow views. This can lead to hate, anger, violence, and death.
I love personal interpretations, it's all we have. But sometimes what follows is a closed-mindedness that your interpretation is the only right one, and that all others must change.
I'm not like that, I don't feel you're like that, but I think a lot of people *are* like that, and that's what I dislike.
"Blacks are twice as likely as whites (62% vs. 31%) to say that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, and this is significantly higher than among Hispanics (38%) and other non-whites (32%) as well."
http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=29
That's a lot of fundamentalists in my opinion.
Perhaps your right, but think about this.
Can you see why he's mad when in 2007, we on one hand have the scientific enterprise, which seems to me to one of the, if not the most, important thing that has advanced the human race. On the other hand, we have the most powerful world leaders, most with incredible weapons at their disposal, and *almost all* of them have the "GOD IS ON OUR SIDE" mentality.
To me, that's scary, and it's wrong. I haven't read Dawkin's work, is he against internal, personal ideas about God and how we came to be? Or is he sick of seeing countless lives lost because "Our God is more right than your God"?
My point is, the Christian story seems ultimately grounded in the fact that at some point, humans were "pefect beings", uncapable of sin. Then, at some precise moment, man *chose* to become a sinful creature. If you believe evolution, how can you reconcile those two things? Did evolution lead to sinless humans? Was the first sin really a woman eating an apple?
I'd also ask them as to how we're to divine which parts of the Bible are literal, and which aren't? Who is God talking to today that can tell us which parts we should live by? Is it just whichever fit in with people's worldview today regarding science, women's rights, etc? It sure seems that way.
Well I'd ask them my question then: If you don't literally believe that God created man in a perfect state, and that man subsequently chose to fall into sin as described in Genesis, then what was Jesus sent for?
The reason is this.
If evolution is true, you'd agree that God did not create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, right?
Well, that Adam and Eve story is the entire basis of Christianity, because that's where sin originated. If there is no original sin, then what was Jesus sent to save us from? If Jesus was just a man who was trying to preach love, he wouldn't be the savior of the world, whatever that means.
So that's why Christians have to not believe evolution. If they accept evolution, then the entire point of Christianity is called into question.
I agree completely with your points, I don't think scientists have an a priori "attack religion" mentality. If the observable data led people to believe that Christianity was true, of course scientists would believe it. A scientist is just someone who uses observation and experiments to get at the truth, not dogma.
Interesting idea. The main difference between newspapers/magazines and encyclopedias is of course the timing of information. I can write an encyclopedia article about a subject I know by investing time and research. However, the research for writing magazine articles is much different, relying on interviews, travelling, even subpoenas, etc.
Wikepedia already has certain magazine aspects to it, it is updated with current events quite quickly. But those articles are (usually) simply relaying information obtained from a traditional news source.
I would like to see the attemp though, what's the harm?
With a movie sale ratio of almost 2:1
Unfortunately, he forgot to mention that those were also the actual numbers of discs sold.
Can you explain to me why a PC game that comes on one of these same pressed CDs costs $50?
A zealous Reuters reporter apparently conflated the FSF with the open source community in general, took some quotes out of context, and ended up with a sensational headline that fooled a number of people.
This just reinforces why I read Slashdot instead of other news, there's no chance of something like this happening here.
It seems, at least theoretically, that there may be 'ocean planets' out there in the galaxy. If there are, we are closer than ever to detecting them.
Nice to start the summary off with not just one, but *two* tautologies!
I've seen this in the B terminal of Dulles Airport, everytime I fly out.
Are you sure it's not you?
If you're a programmer, and even if you're not, use R to plot from spreadsheet programs, databases, and flat files! I highly recommend the book "R Graphics" by Paul Murrell if you're interested in not being constrained to what Excel and others limit you to! Murrell's grid package for R can have you building publication quality plots from scratch, it's very powerful.
Yes I agree with you.
I read this article yesterday, I don't think the submitter understood the point of it. I could be wrong. The point of the article isn't so much that income inequality is going to cause more crime in the US.
"Is this violence a direct result of income inequality? Almost certainly not. Brazil has a history of slavery and colonization that was far more brutal than the U.S. It would require a team of sociologists, historians, economists, and criminologists to explain the roots of violence in Brazil. Based on my knowledge of academics, I don't think they would come to a conclusion anyway."
I think the main point of the article is something "The Economist" talked about in last weeks issue. It's that even though the economies he discusses are doing tremendously well on average, the income gap still makes people unhappy and not content. The point is, it's not peoples absolute wealth that determines happiness, but their relative wealth.
From the article "In other words, we care less about how much money we have than we do about how much money we have relative to everyone else. In a fascinating survey, Cornell economist Robert Frank found that a majority of Americans would prefer to earn $100,000 while everyone else earns $85,000, rather than earning $110,000 while everyone else earns $200,000."
That's the upshot of this article, which I find quite interesting!
If everyone had their basic needs met, I don't think income inequality would matter as much.
Possibly, but as the article points out, happiness and contentment is not so much our absolute wealth, but our relative wealth. Many have their basic needs met, but still feel obligated to put in long hours to increase their relative wealth. The Economist's holiday issue had a nice article on this research.
Here's a quick review. I think you're thinking of correlation between two variables, not p-values.
.05), we say, "if the null were true, data like ours or more extreme is not very probable, therefore we conclude the null is not true, and accept the alternative hypothesis." So lower p-values are more evidence against the null hypothesis. It is similar to a reductio ad absurdum in logic, you assume something is true and show that it leads to a strange conclusion. In this case, it leads to seeing data that have very low probability of occurring by chance.
.05 is most often used for the "cut-off" to determine "too rare to be chance" as described above, although there is nothing magical about .05.
When doing a statistical test, you have a null hypothesis, and an alternative hypothesis. As a simple example, a null hypothesis could be: the average body weight for males at my workplace equals the average body weight for females at my workplace. The alternative could then be a few things: the average weights are different, males have a higher average weight than females, or males have a lower average weight than females. Data would be collected, and a statistical test performed. The result of the test would be some test statistic, which has a certain distribution under the null hypothesis (for example, the t-distribution).
Since we then have a statistic with a known distribution under the null, we can say "If the null hypothesis were true, what is the probability of seeing the data in our sample, or more extreme than our sample." This probability is the p-value. If this probability is low (say less than
I think what you're thinking of is probably correlation coefficients (sometimes represented by the Greek letter "rho", perhaps the source of the confusion). The simple correlation coefficient measures the strength of a linear relationship between two variables. Rho is bounded by -1 for a perfectly negative correlation, and +1 for a perfectly positive correlation. On the other hand, a p-value is a probability, and therefore is between 0 and 1. For p-values,
I guess that is the publication, good job finding that. I wonder if that works for everyone or just those at unis with access to SD?
And that's an *article* based on a *publication* in a peer-reviewed journal. I would hope most of us here would want that original source, as articles, even in science mags, get things wrong.
The publication is
Haselton MG, et al. Hormones and Behavior 51 (2007). 40-45.
If your university has access to this journal, you can read the article online.
They did do a real test, look at the actual publication in "Hormones and Behavior".