From what I gather from the/. user page, friends are people who you think you like, and fans are people who think they like you. For example, I currently post on/. using a two-fan system.
"the number of ignorant references to Moore's Law doubles every 12 months."
An exponential increase in the number of articles written about any subject is happening pretty much everywhere. Researchers will occasionally claim that this means their particular subject area is becoming more important (because they don't consider that it happens elsewhere). If we assume that a constant proportion of articles referencing Moore's Law are ignorant, and articles referencing Moore's Law also increase at an exponential rate, it follows that there will also be an exponential increase in ignorant references to Moore's Law.
All the kernel needs to do is run text console mode so why does it contain graphics drivers?
Frame buffer, a "text" console that can display graphics, kernel mode setting, X-independent video drivers, flicker-free startup, suspend, power management (among other things, I presume).
I recall having a littlediscussion about this a week or so ago on/., at the time of the bee research by 8-year olds, in which I linked to this PLoS paper. It's from 2005, not exactly new.
I don't think it's a problem with the research in itself, but the demand to get things published or funded by demonstrating statistical significance. Most researchers aren't statisticians, but know that demonstrating a p-value of less than 0.05 (at least in biomedical research) is good enough to convince most publishers and funders. Test 20 different things, and chances are than one of those things will pass this significance threshold. That chance effect will end up getting published and the rest will be left behind as useless work. I find the bit about "gold-standard" research three pages into TFA to be particularly telling:
In 2005, Ioannidis published an article... that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.... the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
Note it mentions "of the claims that had been subject to replication". If you look at the abstract of that paper, only 20 (44%) of the most cited studies were replicated, and 11 (24%) remained largely unchallenged.
Claims from highly cited observational studies persist and continue to be supported in the medical literature despite strong contradictory evidence from randomized trials.
I don't think this is as much of a problem in the fields of mathematics and physics, because they are more likely to understand the statistics involved in demonstrating that something is a real effect. I have heard that physicists only accept p-value cutoffs that are approaching the planck constant in magnitude, which would be somewhat harder to fudge.
we have the dedicated trolly bus fleet, that can switch to running on batteries when there is no power, then back to overhead lines when power is restored
They did this when they were (up/down)grading manners street, with dedicated "pole-removers" waiting to detach buses from the wires before going past the inner city malls, then another group of workers on the other side of the malls.
I wonder if it'd be possible to automate that (i.e. computerised pole-retractors and re-attachers), which would allow the possibility for buses to transfer between charging/powered and unpowered regions of their bus route. That could make the trolley buses useful on more routes, assuming they can be made to have enough stored energy for travel on a partially-powered route. Something like the Southern Shopper would work well for that, Unpowered between Brooklyn, Island Bay, Newtown, but powered within those regions.
If you could, perhaps, tell this to my advisor/coauthor, that would be great
I'm not sure that would help, because your coauthor may just be thinking in terms of what the particular journal demands. Even if that were not the case, some people just like to micro-revise, and can't be swayed from that.
I had about 14 "official" revisions on a paper that got published (12 or so before it was submitted), but there were plenty of other quick time wasters: "Oh, could you please change this picture from X to Y. Hang on, that doesn't fit with the table, so change the table as well. Actually, I think X fits our story better." I've given up hope in getting anything more published under that supervisor.
In my opinion faulty conclusions derived from bogus statistics is one of the worst problems in science. Next to that is no statistical analysis at all.
It is a huge problem, and practically everyone does that in the field of biology, even in published papers. Anyone who accepts a 5% threshold as significant should understand that such a threshold means that 5% of their "significant" results are statistical flukes.
I agree with rejecting research that is not appropriate for the journal subject (e.g. rejecting this study for AJHG, because it's not human and not genetics), but I'm less convinced about the statistics angle. There's no point in forcing people to include and evaluate statistics that they don't understand. The problem can't be fixed by refusing to publish research because significance levels haven't been determined (or are too high).
Scientists don't need to be statisticians to be able to do good research. They also don't need to be good writers, or good reviewers. These things help, but shouldn't be necessary in order to get results out to the world.
I, for one, am glad that this paper was published. It gives the scientific community as a whole the opportunity to critique this, rather than just the reviewing panel. It looks like the review process worked well in this case — the investigation that was carried out seems reasonable, and I very much doubt that the published version is the first version that the journal editors saw, even though they have kept in some of the cutesy language.
Everyone has a few hidden DNA defects that would severely impact their health if ever triggered. If insurance companies took this at face value, no one would be insured, and they'd be out of business — a silly position for the companies to take. I would expect that it'd just be factored into their risk analysis, which already includes things with a high heritability (like family history of particular diseases).
I don't think it's a good idea to give an insurance company your entire genome sequence, but I think fears about that particular situation are somewhat unfounded.
For now, genomic data is almost entirely a novelty -- mostly good for entertainment value.
I suspect that it'll get cost-effective for drug companies a bit before it becomes popular for the general public. 'Sequence once, test for ever' is quite an attractive proposition.
Gosh, you're making quite a lot of assumptions here, and you've changed where the (-2) goes, which is not necessary. Here's a slightly more detailed expansion: 2 + a = 3 [assume addition exists for 'a', follows standard rules of integer addition] -2 + (2 + a) = -2 + (3) [assume can add -2 to LHS of both sides of '=' without changing equation, define -2 as the additive inverse of 2] (-2 + 2) + a = -2 + (3) [assume order of addition does not change outcome] 0 + a = -2 + (3) [additive inverse + number is additive identity, 0] (0 + a) = -2 + 3 [assume shifting brackets doesn't affect outcome of addition] a = -2 + 3 [addtive identity + number can be represented by number alone] a = -2 + (2 + 1) [assume 3 is the successor of 2, where the sucessor is generated by + 1] a = (-2 + 2) + 1 [assume order of addition does not change outcome] a = 0 + 1 [additive inverse + number is additive identity, 0] a = (0 + 1) [assume shifting brackets doesn't affect outcome of addition] a = 1 [addtive identity + number can be represented by number alone]
This article frustrates me. He talks a lot about some particular thing, claims that it relates to maths, but doesn't really say what particular part of maths it relates to, nor does he get into specifics, nor does he spend much (if any) time on how to improve matters.
Okay, I'll try to explain my confusion with a parable. When I was fifteen, I did a school certificate maths exam. It had a whole bunch of questions, none of which we had ever answered earlier in the year, but somehow the examiner thought I could answer them, and unfortunately I was unable to answer all questions "correctly" according to the examiner.
What does that have to do with mathematics education over the past 25 years? Unfortunately a great deal. We were required to have exams for mathematics, because every subject had exams. The end result was that some people didn't do well in exams, even failing enough to be unable to continue on in their maths education in the next year. The truth is that exams cannot alone be used to evaluate a person's effectiveness as a mathematician. The only way to get around this is to teach mathematics properly, and make sure each person understands maths at all levels.
will be fully operational after the last strings freeze in March 2011
Translation efforts are under way. It is expected that a Chinese version of the project will be available soon after President Hu visits the facility in late 2011.
Just something to take into account, many programs don't allow for same-sex marriages (or partnerships) -- a child *has* to have a male parent who is partnered with a female parent. This is a problem for my wife, who has one parent in a male/female partnership and the other parent in a same-sex partnership, and makes finding appropriate family tree programs difficult. The most common "hack" is to make one or both partners of the same sex marriage unknown gender, but often you need to enforce the male/female parts of marriages.
"Accuracy" is a difficult measure to quantify. I see from reading the article that the accuracy has been estimated at 95% due to a a 95% true positive rate and a 95% true negative rate. Given that the current spam rate is 40%, these rates aren't particularly bad, but Amazon would still have quite a few problems with angry customers. Assuming 1500 HITs per day, and 60% of those non-spam submissions, 45 would be falsely flagged as spam.
Am I alone in preferring single-player modes of most games?
No.
From reading the other comments on this story, you are most definitely not alone. People who have similar ideas to this are all around you. They are everywhere. They know where you live. They check your landlady's garbage. They hide under your bed at night....
So to use a sporting analogy, it would be like saying that more experienced soccer teams would be given a larger goal to defend when playing against novice opponents.
FTFY. Larger goals are harder to defend, easier for the attacking team.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I gather from the /. user page, friends are people who you think you like, and fans are people who think they like you. For example, I currently post on /. using a two-fan system.
Who needs windows in a datacentre without walls?
"the number of ignorant references to Moore's Law doubles every 12 months."
An exponential increase in the number of articles written about any subject is happening pretty much everywhere. Researchers will occasionally claim that this means their particular subject area is becoming more important (because they don't consider that it happens elsewhere). If we assume that a constant proportion of articles referencing Moore's Law are ignorant, and articles referencing Moore's Law also increase at an exponential rate, it follows that there will also be an exponential increase in ignorant references to Moore's Law.
All the kernel needs to do is run text console mode so why does it contain graphics drivers?
Frame buffer, a "text" console that can display graphics, kernel mode setting, X-independent video drivers, flicker-free startup, suspend, power management (among other things, I presume).
I recall having a little discussion about this a week or so ago on /., at the time of the bee research by 8-year olds, in which I linked to this PLoS paper. It's from 2005, not exactly new.
I don't think it's a problem with the research in itself, but the demand to get things published or funded by demonstrating statistical significance. Most researchers aren't statisticians, but know that demonstrating a p-value of less than 0.05 (at least in biomedical research) is good enough to convince most publishers and funders. Test 20 different things, and chances are than one of those things will pass this significance threshold. That chance effect will end up getting published and the rest will be left behind as useless work. I find the bit about "gold-standard" research three pages into TFA to be particularly telling:
In 2005, Ioannidis published an article... that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.... the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
Note it mentions "of the claims that had been subject to replication". If you look at the abstract of that paper, only 20 (44%) of the most cited studies were replicated, and 11 (24%) remained largely unchallenged.
But wait, there's more:
Claims from highly cited observational studies persist and continue to be supported in the medical literature despite strong contradictory evidence from randomized trials.
I don't think this is as much of a problem in the fields of mathematics and physics, because they are more likely to understand the statistics involved in demonstrating that something is a real effect. I have heard that physicists only accept p-value cutoffs that are approaching the planck constant in magnitude, which would be somewhat harder to fudge.
The article leads to something that could bring down the network again, if Skype hasn't learnt from their failure:
we have the dedicated trolly bus fleet, that can switch to running on batteries when there is no power, then back to overhead lines when power is restored
They did this when they were (up/down)grading manners street, with dedicated "pole-removers" waiting to detach buses from the wires before going past the inner city malls, then another group of workers on the other side of the malls.
I wonder if it'd be possible to automate that (i.e. computerised pole-retractors and re-attachers), which would allow the possibility for buses to transfer between charging/powered and unpowered regions of their bus route. That could make the trolley buses useful on more routes, assuming they can be made to have enough stored energy for travel on a partially-powered route. Something like the Southern Shopper would work well for that, Unpowered between Brooklyn, Island Bay, Newtown, but powered within those regions.
Stuxnet had nothing to do with windows. It attacked motor controller chips made by Seimans.
To get into the Siemens controller chips, it had to travel through Windows computers.
If you could, perhaps, tell this to my advisor/coauthor, that would be great
I'm not sure that would help, because your coauthor may just be thinking in terms of what the particular journal demands. Even if that were not the case, some people just like to micro-revise, and can't be swayed from that.
I had about 14 "official" revisions on a paper that got published (12 or so before it was submitted), but there were plenty of other quick time wasters: "Oh, could you please change this picture from X to Y. Hang on, that doesn't fit with the table, so change the table as well. Actually, I think X fits our story better." I've given up hope in getting anything more published under that supervisor.
It is a huge problem, and practically everyone does that in the field of biology, even in published papers.
Aha, finally found what I was looking for when I constructed this sentence:
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
In my opinion faulty conclusions derived from bogus statistics is one of the worst problems in science. Next to that is no statistical analysis at all.
It is a huge problem, and practically everyone does that in the field of biology, even in published papers. Anyone who accepts a 5% threshold as significant should understand that such a threshold means that 5% of their "significant" results are statistical flukes.
I agree with rejecting research that is not appropriate for the journal subject (e.g. rejecting this study for AJHG, because it's not human and not genetics), but I'm less convinced about the statistics angle. There's no point in forcing people to include and evaluate statistics that they don't understand. The problem can't be fixed by refusing to publish research because significance levels haven't been determined (or are too high).
the Competes Act gives every department and agency the authority to conduct prize competitions
Prize competitons, puzzles, solutions. It sounds a bit like innocentive, which is a more global thing that has been running for the past 9 years.
Scientists don't need to be statisticians to be able to do good research. They also don't need to be good writers, or good reviewers. These things help, but shouldn't be necessary in order to get results out to the world.
I, for one, am glad that this paper was published. It gives the scientific community as a whole the opportunity to critique this, rather than just the reviewing panel. It looks like the review process worked well in this case — the investigation that was carried out seems reasonable, and I very much doubt that the published version is the first version that the journal editors saw, even though they have kept in some of the cutesy language.
Everyone has a few hidden DNA defects that would severely impact their health if ever triggered. If insurance companies took this at face value, no one would be insured, and they'd be out of business — a silly position for the companies to take. I would expect that it'd just be factored into their risk analysis, which already includes things with a high heritability (like family history of particular diseases).
I don't think it's a good idea to give an insurance company your entire genome sequence, but I think fears about that particular situation are somewhat unfounded.
For now, genomic data is almost entirely a novelty -- mostly good for entertainment value.
I suspect that it'll get cost-effective for drug companies a bit before it becomes popular for the general public. 'Sequence once, test for ever' is quite an attractive proposition.
2 + a = 3
a = 3 - 2
a = 1
Gosh, you're making quite a lot of assumptions here, and you've changed where the (-2) goes, which is not necessary. Here's a slightly more detailed expansion:
2 + a = 3 [assume addition exists for 'a', follows standard rules of integer addition]
-2 + (2 + a) = -2 + (3) [assume can add -2 to LHS of both sides of '=' without changing equation, define -2 as the additive inverse of 2]
(-2 + 2) + a = -2 + (3) [assume order of addition does not change outcome]
0 + a = -2 + (3) [additive inverse + number is additive identity, 0]
(0 + a) = -2 + 3 [assume shifting brackets doesn't affect outcome of addition]
a = -2 + 3 [addtive identity + number can be represented by number alone]
a = -2 + (2 + 1) [assume 3 is the successor of 2, where the sucessor is generated by + 1]
a = (-2 + 2) + 1 [assume order of addition does not change outcome]
a = 0 + 1 [additive inverse + number is additive identity, 0]
a = (0 + 1) [assume shifting brackets doesn't affect outcome of addition]
a = 1 [addtive identity + number can be represented by number alone]
Anyone want to expand further on this?
This article frustrates me. He talks a lot about some particular thing, claims that it relates to maths, but doesn't really say what particular part of maths it relates to, nor does he get into specifics, nor does he spend much (if any) time on how to improve matters.
Okay, I'll try to explain my confusion with a parable. When I was fifteen, I did a school certificate maths exam. It had a whole bunch of questions, none of which we had ever answered earlier in the year, but somehow the examiner thought I could answer them, and unfortunately I was unable to answer all questions "correctly" according to the examiner.
What does that have to do with mathematics education over the past 25 years? Unfortunately a great deal. We were required to have exams for mathematics, because every subject had exams. The end result was that some people didn't do well in exams, even failing enough to be unable to continue on in their maths education in the next year. The truth is that exams cannot alone be used to evaluate a person's effectiveness as a mathematician. The only way to get around this is to teach mathematics properly, and make sure each person understands maths at all levels.
will be fully operational after the last strings freeze in March 2011
Translation efforts are under way. It is expected that a Chinese version of the project will be available soon after President Hu visits the facility in late 2011.
Just something to take into account, many programs don't allow for same-sex marriages (or partnerships) -- a child *has* to have a male parent who is partnered with a female parent. This is a problem for my wife, who has one parent in a male/female partnership and the other parent in a same-sex partnership, and makes finding appropriate family tree programs difficult. The most common "hack" is to make one or both partners of the same sex marriage unknown gender, but often you need to enforce the male/female parts of marriages.
"Accuracy" is a difficult measure to quantify. I see from reading the article that the accuracy has been estimated at 95% due to a a 95% true positive rate and a 95% true negative rate. Given that the current spam rate is 40%, these rates aren't particularly bad, but Amazon would still have quite a few problems with angry customers. Assuming 1500 HITs per day, and 60% of those non-spam submissions, 45 would be falsely flagged as spam.
I prefer the Signal Search Group of Veterans (SIGSEGV). They're a bit harder to ignore, and are really good at messing with your memory.
Spamgourmet is useful as well. You can set a maximum number of emails that you want to receive sent to a particular email address.
Am I alone in preferring single-player modes of most games?
No.
From reading the other comments on this story, you are most definitely not alone. People who have similar ideas to this are all around you. They are everywhere. They know where you live. They check your landlady's garbage. They hide under your bed at night....
So to use a sporting analogy, it would be like saying that more experienced soccer teams would be given a larger goal to defend when playing against novice opponents.
FTFY. Larger goals are harder to defend, easier for the attacking team.
It also opens the provocative possibility of same-sex couples having their own genetic children, the researchers note.
As long as they're happy with only female children, or are males themselves.