The scope of this is very limited. It applies primarily to functions that encapsulate a secret (not a general piece of code). From reading the paper, it appears that the goal is to attempt to frustrate folks that that want to disassemble software routines to look for small secrets buried in the code.
Example: Let's say you have a function that decrypts a message from a server with a key and you want to say embed that code in javascript. You don't, however, want someone figure out the key by just looking at the javascript, you want it to be a black box.
This technique allegedly can obfuscate the code so that it is just as hard to figure out how the secret is used as it is to infer the secret from sending in values and building a lookup table. Of course you could just cut-out the obfuscated code and use it as an oracle (because you can still run it), but it continues to effectively hide the secret as best as possible.
As I understand it, the basic techique is to create a function (from a class of functions with certain properties) that cuts the input domain into a large number sets and for each set finds a cheap multi-linear function that maps the correct output values for that small set of the input values but is don't care for the rest of the input values. The "trick" is that the class functions that cut the input domain are not fixed, but depend on the input so it is a hard problem to figure out which maps are used without just searching them all. Thus every obfucation instance of a function that encapsulates the same secret could look different and still compute the same result, or conversely, encapsulate different secrets, yet look very similar, but produce the correct result.
The downside of course is that small multi-linear functions aren't the best implementation for actual encryption functions. For example, something very simple like 128-bit AES, might be considered a function with 2^128 entry 128bit table. Unless I'm mistaken, it will be very hard to chop up a 2^128 bit table using their method (even the authors concede the fact that thier construction isn't efficient enough for practical problems).
However, they make a "bold" assertion, that they can apply their technique to stuff like crippleware by obfuscating the function that enables/disables various program features. I'll go out on a limb and say most folks that hack stuff like that don't bother to figure out ways to turn on/off features, but just go for attempting to bypass calls to such a function or disable the function altogether.
The other "bold" assertion they make is that it might be used by software vendors to deploy a patch without tipping off the black-hats about the nature of the vunerablity before all systems can be patched. This is wishful thinking as functions are generally not vunerable (since they by definiton have no-side effects), but procedures (the function-like modules that render side-effects) are the modules that tend to have the bugs. This technique of theirs really only applies to functions, not procedures so it's hard to see how this would help in many circumstances.
I'd also add, that if you believe in the study about influenza in the mother being a risk factor for ASD, then you might be predisposed to take the current bit of medical advice and have the **pregnant mother** get a flu shot when they are pregnant to attempt to avoid severe flu symptoms and increase your child's risk of ASD.
Then again if you are anti-vacc and don't believe this study, then perhaps you don't get the flu shot to avoid exposing your unborn child to the vaccine...
Maybe you're just damned if you do, and damned if you don't...
There is a link between the fever that kids get as a result of the immunization that can cause autistic spectrum disorder due to an underlying mitochondrial disorder, but this only happens in less than.01% of the time.
There have been some studies linking prolonged fevers in the **pregnant mother** with increased risk of ASD...
There have also been some studies that indicate a prevalence of a certain type of mitochondrial disorder in those diagnosed with ASD...
However, I don't know of any studies that link any potential fever that a **child** gets due to vaccination to a mitochondrial disorder, or a predisposition to ASD. It appears that the underlying mitochondrial disorder itself may be the risk factor independent of any vaccination or fever.
This sounds to me a case of someone sympathetic to anit-vac camp putting 1+2 together and getting 10,000.
...willing to do the job at the peanut pay offered.
Actually, captains for international airlines that fly trans-pacific routes get paid okay (north of USD$200K). There's also a dearth of experience pilots so growing airlines are poaching them from shrinking US carriers at record rates. Sometimes experienced US pilots can double their salaries by moving to Dubai or Asian based airlines.
Unfortunatly, this is leading to a tiered situation. The route to get these jobs involves much lower paying options (around USD$80K/year for a first officer on a trans-pacific route, and even lower pay for domestic routes less than USD$40K). Because of the poor career options starting at the bottom and rampant job hopping and outsourcing of top jobs to foreign pilots, this leads many airlines to have abbreviated training programs because the resources to train a large amount of pilots is hard to obtain and a significant number of folks they do train tend to hop to another company after a year or so (some airlines now make prospective pilots post training bonds ~USD$50K that must be repaid by serving for 4 years to attempt to combat this problem).
Does this situation with poor career options, rampant job hopping and outsourcing of top jobs and complaints that the newbies that just got into it for the money can barely function without bells and whisltes sound familiar to any/.-ers?
The only reason the US is in a slightly better situation is that we have a reasonably robust civil/general aviation options for early training where some pilots can come into airline training programs with some significant aviation experience on things like prop-planes or even airforce training (and of course reasonably proficient english skills).
AFAIK, the basic ASCAP license fee formula is revenue based, not 'play' based***
Although in the past, the revenue rate has been as high as 3%, recently the radio licensing revenue rate has been rolled back to is approximatly 1.7% (because radio stations are going broke). The current situation for internet streaming services is that they can be assessed on a scale starting from 1.85%. To make matters worse, radio stations get to exempt up to 25% of their revenue from license fees when streaming over the internet. Why should Pandora pay a higher percentage of their revenue just because they are only streaming over the internet?
***there is a license option to weight license fees by programming timeslots (under the theory that income derived from say talk-shows and songs played in the dead of night shouldn't count as much).
Science is not as stupid as you seem to think. Fundamental knowledge of physics and chemistry allows prediction rather than dependence on mass experiment to see results.
Although there are "successful" predictions, there are also misses. Like all human endeavors, sometimes we cannot escape our own stupidity. Often we know less than we think we do.
Science has predicted ice ages, Malthusian famine, aether wind, Le Verrier's planet Vulcan, Lowell's Martian canals and other non-occurrences.
We can also find single scienctists on both sides for the fence like thalidomide and debendox. Even double nobel prize winner Linus Pauling had his Vitamin C moments...
Of course there's actual outright fraud too like N-rays and various vaccine studies (e.g., Andrew Wakefield). The jury is out on cold fusion...
Although I believe science nets out for the positive, and kernels of knowledge can provide hints of things to come, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of any endeavor in which humans are involved. Like the common investment platitude, past performance does not necessarily foreshadow future success so you should do your own research.
From what I can gather, although the code was well scrubbed so that the single processor, threaded and message passing (MPI) versions produce the same binary result indicating no vectorization errors, machine rounding differences caused problems.
Since all the platforms were IEEE754 compliant and the code was mostly written in Fortran 90, I'm assuming that one of the main contributor to this rounding is the evaluation order of terms and perhaps the way that double fourier series and spherical harmonics where written.
Both SPH and DFS operations use sine/cosine evaluation which vary a great deal from platform to platform (since generally they only round within 1ulp, not within 1/2ulp of an infinitely precise result).
I remember many moons ago, when I was working on fixed-point FFT accelerators, we were lazy and generated sine/cosine tables using the host platform (x86) and neglected to worry about the fact that using different compliers and different optimization levels on the same platform we got twiddle-factor tables that were different (off-by-one).
With one bug report, we eventually tracked it down to different intrinsics (x87 FSIN w/ math or FSINCOS) were used and sometime libraries were used. Ack... Later library releases we complied in a whole bunch of pregenerated tables to avoid this problem.
Of course putting in a table or designing your own FSIN function for a spherical harmonic or fourier series numerical library solver might be a bit out of scope (not to mention tank the performance), so I'm sure that's why they didn't bother to make the code platform independent w/ respect to transcendental functions, although with Fortran 90, it seems like they could of fixed the evaluation order issues (with appropriate parenthesis to force a certain evaluation order, something you can't do in C).
Short story swirls** have nothing to do with strings, nor dimensions, just vanilla big-bang stuff...
Let's start with what this is.
Basically, cosmic microwave background radiation (aka CMB) is theorized to be weakly linearly polarized due to scattering processes like Thomson Scattering with free-electrons. Since this polarization has 2 net degrees of freedom, you can measure it a few different ways, but one interesting way to do so is to use divergence component (aka E-mode), and curl (aka B-mode) which comes from an analogy with electromagenetics*** So far they've measured some linear polarization with an E-mode component (since it has divergence only, you can think of as being scattered from the position of the last object/electron it interacted with shortly after the big-bang), but until now they've not confident that they measured any net B-mode component in CMB radiation.
E-mode polarization measurements in conjunction with theories about the CMB temperature has helped to advance some theory about some cosmological constants. B-mode measurements are interesting in that if detected are likely from stochastic scattering of a radiation field which is theorized to come from some sort of gravitational waves generated when the early universe was undergoing inflation, but unfortunatly since this is a scattering effect, it could also originate as E-mode and later converted to B-mode by gravitational interaction with matter since the big-bang (a kind of gravitational lensing effect). So B-mode is really small and noisy (which is why they had a hard time isolating it), but it might help us understand if the inflation model is consistent with the universe we see.
**Somehow "curl" gets converted "swirls" in laymanspeak... ***static electric fields (aka 'E' fields) exhibit net divergence from electrical "charges", but static magnetic (aka 'B'**** fields) don't have this because there aren't magnetic monopoles, so they only exhibit net curl (kind of a rotation), but this scattering polarization "mode" really doesn't have too much to do with this (since even polarized electromagnetic radiation has both E-field and B-field components), except for the general mathematical concepts of div and curl. ****Apparently, Maxwell used the letter 'B' (and 'H') to represent magnetic fields when he wrote his Maxell's equations and it stuck. Today, 'M' is commonly used for magnetization (maxwell apparently used 'I' for magnetization and 'C' for current, but now we use 'I' for current so go figure some terminology doesn't stick).
People in the society (e.g., India) understand, but of course some people (e.g., messr Singh) was a bit less informed... From the original article...
Army lance naik Sheminderpal Singh — a regular observer at Point 4715 — told the astronomers that he had noticed a delay of four minutes in the appearance of one of the objects each consecutive day. Singh also told them that the object seemed to be the brightest light in the sky and always appeared to move with respect to the stars.
The IIAP team told the Indian Army to use an instrument called a theodolite to record the horizontal angle and vertical elevation of the two objects. Army personnel performed these observations between February 17 and 22 and submitted the data to the IIAP.
The astronomers have concluded that the object observed from Point 4715 is Jupiter as the observations coincide with the planet’s diurnal motion and the apparent motion of the object due to the rotation of the Earth.
The description of the second unidentified object that appeared early in the morning suggests that it is Venus, which is currently moving behind the Sun and will in the coming months appear as an evening object.
The IIAP team said stars and planets over the horizon in Ladakh appear very bright because of increased atmospheric transparency at the high altitude and both Jupiter and Venus at the time were the brightest planets in the sky.
The astronomers also clarified that objects that rise in the east may appear to be moving across the LAC and approaching the Indian side.
Of course venus and jupiter get mistaken for UFOs by many folks from time to time, but inflating the mistakes of an individual, to the group to which they are a member makes for a better tagline...
The real question is why the fuck there's no purely mechanical backup to the foot brake.
Automatics do have a purely mechanical emergency brake pedal. Many safety concious folks use this emergency brake (aka a parking brake) when parking on steep hills to augment the so-called "Park" position on the automatic transmission (which usually just a pawl in the transmission which can't really stop you when you are moving). It isn't a great thing to do when you aren't stoppped, but hey, it's an emergency backup.
Of course if you didn't know of the existance of this pedal, perhaps you should go locate it in your car before the next time you drive.
Most folks go see movies and watch TV as part of a shared an experience (either physically with other people, or virtually so they can talk about it at parties). Although many folks talk about only seeing "good" stuff on recommendations (either from friends, or trusted reviewers), the demographics that blockbusters target will often just as likely go see a "bad" movie, just because other folks want to go, or have indicated that they saw and was "okay". Have you noticed that in a group of friends, there are a few that exercise veto-power such that the least common denominator activity was chosen? This has little to do with plot-formulas or cult status of films which generally don't affect the box-office bottom line very much.
Simple things: like you put it out there and people will come, just don't work the way they used to. Although perhaps many of the/. audience perhaps research/hyperplan their lives, many ordinary folks used to just say, lets go to the movies this Saturday, and watch *whatever* was on the big screen. Or, they heard some movie was being advertized as part of a cross promotion and want to see it simply to be able to say they saw it. Or even, they'd go down to the rental store and get the just released Video. Nowdays, the demographic targetted by blockbusters have social networks that are more fragmented and the choice of entertainment options more varied (even movie theaters are ridiculously multiplexed). This reduces the ability of hollywood to leverage any effciencies of the shared experience to the box-office bottom lines.
Although you might argue that if they made better films that garner support via word-of-mouth instead of in-your-face blockbuster releases, that would improve things. It might make better movies, but it wouldn't make for the efficiencies the studios required. Right now the movie industry makes a bulk of the money up front (first few weeks of release), where they can concentrate the people into sold-out theaters on a limited number of reels supported by a short push of high cost advertising and marketing. They make the rest of the money spread out over a longer period of time over slower distribution (dvd, foreign release, etc) w/ limited advertising and marketing (basically mostly by inertia and signing big stars, etc).
The original investors and key players generally get the money up-front, and the residuals pay the bills for rest of the supporting cast (not just actors, but the other mouths as well). W/o the initial return, there's nobody to fund a big-budget movie and the economics of movies suddenly changes. It may be the case that the big-budget movie in a movie house is a dying breed. This means the rest of the industry that rides its coattails (e.g., the movie theaters, the indy pictures, the equipment manufactuers, etc), will need a new model to survive the change. The long tail model is kind of wishful thinking from a business efficiency point of view, so maybe Mr. Spielberg is right, a big change is coming to the studio biz near you...
In power plants, water is kind of being used as a cheap waste heat reservior. We are just too cheap to use other heat exchange techiques since water is cheap and available, other exchangers/reservior techniques are less economically viable.
Most folks realize that opening your fridge to cool your house probably isn't a long term solution. That's when they install AC where at least the heat reseviour is outside the house. But of course if you were to scale your AC unit past a certain point, it's kind of like your fridge situation all over again...
The end solution of course is to: stop warming up the local environment and use less energy.
The competition was not that AI was in competition with humans to develop spacecraft trajectories, it was that humans were in competition with other humans to quickly develop frameworks create the best mission design in a complicated search space that had multiple local optima and unusual constraint functions (preventing the use of "canned" solvers).
One of the critera used to select the problem was...
Problem is easy enough to tackle in a 3-4 week timeframe for experienced mission designers or mathematicians, including exploration of new algorithms.
Of course many of the teams in the competition probably used AI-like frameworks to find the actual trajectories so it's unsurprising an AI technique won. Although perhaps some teams tried other non-AI-like searching techniques (like pseudo-objective functions), I'm pretty sure none of the teams chose to use human pondering to come up with mission designs.
I wonder who would be hurt or what would be damaged by a falling drone...
Having driven past Deer-trail on I-70 on my way to Kansas, I hardly noticed the town. I seriously doubt anything would likely be damaged by a falling drone. Also, most hunters that shoot buckshot at flying objects know not to hurt other folks (except perhaps if you are named Harry Whittington).
In case you are ever curious, CDOT has a live webcam of Deer-trail if you want to check it out for yourself...
So, damaging US Federal Government Property by deliberately firing your gun at it is free speech now?
But inciting people to damage US Federal Government Property by occupy wallstreet and other simlar protesters is somehow different?
I think it's all free speech. It may conflict with some law, but that's generally an issue for the enforcement folks to decide. For example, San Francisco allegedly voted themselves to be sort of a federal immigration sanctuary zone in conflict with federal immigration laws. I don't see the Feds arresting up the mayor and city council members for this (yet)...
Most cars have folding seats which can be opened into the trunk from the inside. second a lot of cars have internal trunk release levers. you can open the trunk from the front seat.
I don't know about "most" cars, but two of the cars I own allow you to lock the internal trunk release and the one car that has the fold-down rear seat has a lock as well (not that I ever actually lock them nor the glove compartment). The other car I have is an SUV which of course is open to the trunk from the rear seat making any locks silly... My dad's car has the trunk release button inside the glove compartment door (which is of course lockable).
I think maybe the old '85 subaru I once owned, had a non-locking trunk release, but since it's long gone, I can't check. It also didn't have the inside-the-boot glow-in-the-dark release mechanism which is now mandatory on new cars to avoid being able to lock people in the trunck (and I know this for a fact, but that is a long story)...
Of course the cheesy cylinder locks like the kind you find on a glove compartment (or trunk release or fold-down seat) are pretty easily to pick with a skeleton key or a hairpin if a minimum wage valet car-parker working for tips were so inclined which is why I just try to avoid putting any valuables in the car if I valet it.
Then why haven't my IQ scores gone up since I was 18? I have scored right in the range of 135-140 since that time. I did score slightly lower when I was 13 (but it actually wasn't that much lower - can't remember exactly now*).
If IQ is based heavily on acquired knowledge, then increases in IQ test scores should correlate to age...no?
The reason your IQ scores don't change much is that is measured relative to the standard deviation of the testing that was used to "curve" the test. Nearly all IQ indices are scaled so that 130 is 2 std-dev away from median. If you think about standard deviation from a population statistic point of view, if you get approximately the same answers right (you've accumulated the knowledge that is estimated to be approx 2-std above average), you'll score nearly the same all the time (especially if the test doesn't have many variants and has a limited number of questions).
This is a general problem with indices reported by normalized measurement. The going-in assumption is that 68.2% of the population is within 1 std-dev, and 95.5% of the population is within 2 std deviations. Say if there are 10 questions on the IQ test, and 70% of the test takers get 6-8 of them right and 95% get 5-9 right, you'd probably report the index as follows 7->100, 8 ->115, 9->130, 10->145+ (because +15 ~ 1 stddev in IQ scoring). You'd think that if you scored in the top 2.5% of the raw score of people that took the test would get you a higher IQ, but instead you must be in the top 2.5% of the raw score of the people that were chosen to scale the test (generally a much smaller pool of people constructed to capture the statistics of the general population). Generally there isn't that large a spread for tests of short duration (basically this is a quantization measurement problem).
Then why do some IQ-like tests actually give "extra credit" for age? For instance the Wonderlic Assessment, give you an additional point for every decade out of school (on a 50 point scale!).
For wonderlic (a timed test), this is to theoretically to normalize for the observation that you think slower as you get older (aka "Gs" or processing speed intelligence goes down). They could have just as easily said your intelligence goes down as you get older, or given older folks a longer time to complete the test.
Also I am not sure long term memory (which I am not good at) is "intelligence". It certainly helps to recall that acquired knowledge... but that actually seems to be something you *wouldn't* want to base intelligence on, according to your position.
I don't have a specific position on what is (or is not) intelligence. Although most folks use "intelligence" rather loosely, when you are talking about IQ-testing, there is apparently some theory about cognitive intelligence that they base their tests on. You can google Cattell-Horn-Carrol (aka CHC theory) for background. CHC asserts that short and long term memory are among some of the broad cognitive abilities that forms human intelligence.
The funny part about IQ testing is that they claim it is based on this broad theory, yet the actual tests only cover a small sliver of it which is why I said they aren't even really testing much of anything (even according to their theory). As to if CHC theory holds water, not being a cognitive psychologist have no idea, but IQ tests don't seem to be measuring it either. As a result, I'm not very impressed by IQ tests in specific, or the ability to measure any presumably multi-dimensional characteristic like intelligence on a monotonic scale, in general.
the score on the IQ test is correlated highly with the intelligence of the person who took the test.
No, but thanks for playing...
Nearly all IQ tests simply attempt to make a normalized measurment of only two aspects** of intelligence: acquired knowledge (aka crystalized intelligence), and quantitative reasoning. They also often bulk up the tests with basic reading and writing skills assesment. Probably the only case that can be made is that if you do well on an IQ test, you have more than expected amount of acquired knowledge, can read and write the language you took it in and are probably not a slouch at quantitative reasoning (unless you happed to be able to pad up your score with the knowledge and language questions but still suck at quantitiative reasoning).
Since there isn't really an absolute ground-truth intelligence measure to correlate the test to, a simple standard might be to measure its autocorrelation (when a person has multiple assesments with the same type of test taken at different times). Looking at many studies, it seems like the correlation coefficient for many popular IQ tests hovers around r=0.8 which is just barely enough to say that it is a self consistent measurement of anything let alone correlated with any absolute measure of intelligence. It's safe to say your score on the IQ test is somewhat correlated to the measurement of the normal distribution of the scores they used to scale the test.
Although it might be "most accepted", above the age of say 7 years old, typical IQ tests are a limited dimensional measure at best and likely not very correlated either (since it barely correlates with itself). Also as with most scalar measurements of a multi-dimensional attribute, it is probably not very useful.
For example, this AI program only did the "verbal" part of the test (presumably, it's composite IQ including the zero it would probably score on the auditory or visua and spatial part of the test would indicate a not very intelligent program).
** some IQ tests targetted only children under 7 are much more comprehensive in that they test visual, spatial and auditory processing, decision speed, and short term memory aspects of intelligence, however most still fail to address other measures of intelligence like long-term memory or reaction time.
Won't the desert being the exact opposite environment that fungus would exist in?
When it's in the dry desert soil, these fungi (Coccidioides immitis) are dormant. When it rains, it grows into mold and then yields spores. Then when it's dry again after a rainy spell, the spores detach and blow in the wind. The spores want an environment just like your lungs so if they happen to end up there, it's party time for them.
How did this fungus get to located in the desert in the first place? Who knows, but it's there in the soil, probably longer that humans were around.
Of course there are also other fungi like Cryptococcus gattii (a kind of yeast-like fungi) which fit the more traditional view as they thrive in the humid pacific northwest (Vancouver, Washington, Oregon) and wreak their havok on people there...
Wow, I never knew disenfranchisement was actually a thing in modern countries.
Although most countries in the EU allow prisoners to vote, some countries like Begium, Finland and Iceland have differing rules on felony disenfranchisement that end post release (depending on the seriousness of the crime). In the UK, this is currently a hot topic as recently, the European Court of Human Rights issued a final ruling that the UK needs to change its law that stipulated felony disenfranchisement whilst incarcerated. However, to my knowledge the law has not changed on this yet.
Similarly, each state in the US has slightly varying rules. For example, in Vermont and Maine felons can vote whilst incarcerated, where in Massachusetts disenfranchisement ends when a prisoner is released, in California felony disenfranchisement ends after parole, and in Virginia and Kentucky the only recourse is to petition the governor. However, most states are similar to the UK (can't vote whilst incarcerated).
Of course it goes the other way too. For example, in Japan, felons can vote whilst incarcerated, but homeless people can't vote (because they are currently not allowed to register with temporary accomodations as an address). Also until just recently, if you were under a guardianship in Japan (kinda like britney spears) you couldn't vote either. Of course in Japan, there are quite a few obsticles to naturalization for a person born a non-citizen to obtain citizenship and thus voting rights in the first place so they are probably an outlier...
So, I am confused how this is better than longitude and latitude? I can use L&L offline, and it can have almost an infinite precision. Also, with my memory I am no more likely to remember the 3 words here than a long string of numbers.
You can't charge licensing fees for L&L, but you can for OneWord shortcuts to a 3-word location name...
Do you mean why is it better for you ? Well, you'll have to answer that one for yourself...
Slashdot Mirror
Just skimmed the paper...
The scope of this is very limited. It applies primarily to functions that encapsulate a secret (not a general piece of code). From reading the paper, it appears that the goal is to attempt to frustrate folks that that want to disassemble software routines to look for small secrets buried in the code.
Example: Let's say you have a function that decrypts a message from a server with a key and you want to say embed that code in javascript. You don't, however, want someone figure out the key by just looking at the javascript, you want it to be a black box.
This technique allegedly can obfuscate the code so that it is just as hard to figure out how the secret is used as it is to infer the secret from sending in values and building a lookup table. Of course you could just cut-out the obfuscated code and use it as an oracle (because you can still run it), but it continues to effectively hide the secret as best as possible.
As I understand it, the basic techique is to create a function (from a class of functions with certain properties) that cuts the input domain into a large number sets and for each set finds a cheap multi-linear function that maps the correct output values for that small set of the input values but is don't care for the rest of the input values. The "trick" is that the class functions that cut the input domain are not fixed, but depend on the input so it is a hard problem to figure out which maps are used without just searching them all. Thus every obfucation instance of a function that encapsulates the same secret could look different and still compute the same result, or conversely, encapsulate different secrets, yet look very similar, but produce the correct result.
The downside of course is that small multi-linear functions aren't the best implementation for actual encryption functions. For example, something very simple like 128-bit AES, might be considered a function with 2^128 entry 128bit table. Unless I'm mistaken, it will be very hard to chop up a 2^128 bit table using their method (even the authors concede the fact that thier construction isn't efficient enough for practical problems).
However, they make a "bold" assertion, that they can apply their technique to stuff like crippleware by obfuscating the function that enables/disables various program features. I'll go out on a limb and say most folks that hack stuff like that don't bother to figure out ways to turn on/off features, but just go for attempting to bypass calls to such a function or disable the function altogether.
The other "bold" assertion they make is that it might be used by software vendors to deploy a patch without tipping off the black-hats about the nature of the vunerablity before all systems can be patched. This is wishful thinking as functions are generally not vunerable (since they by definiton have no-side effects), but procedures (the function-like modules that render side-effects) are the modules that tend to have the bugs. This technique of theirs really only applies to functions, not procedures so it's hard to see how this would help in many circumstances.
FWIW, of course Microsoft (like Apple) has on-line sales...
Of course it's really easy to forget you can buy things online these days, right?
Not that online sales helped at all in this case, but it just illustrates that often math rears its ugly head in straw-man arguments...
I'd also add, that if you believe in the study about influenza in the mother being a risk factor for ASD, then you might be predisposed to take the current bit of medical advice and have the **pregnant mother** get a flu shot when they are pregnant to attempt to avoid severe flu symptoms and increase your child's risk of ASD.
Then again if you are anti-vacc and don't believe this study, then perhaps you don't get the flu shot to avoid exposing your unborn child to the vaccine...
Maybe you're just damned if you do, and damned if you don't...
There is a link between the fever that kids get as a result of the immunization that can cause autistic spectrum disorder due to an underlying mitochondrial disorder, but this only happens in less than .01% of the time.
There have been some studies linking prolonged fevers in the **pregnant mother** with increased risk of ASD...
There have also been some studies that indicate a prevalence of a certain type of mitochondrial disorder in those diagnosed with ASD...
However, I don't know of any studies that link any potential fever that a **child** gets due to vaccination to a mitochondrial disorder, or a predisposition to ASD. It appears that the underlying mitochondrial disorder itself may be the risk factor independent of any vaccination or fever.
This sounds to me a case of someone sympathetic to anit-vac camp putting 1+2 together and getting 10,000.
...willing to do the job at the peanut pay offered.
Actually, captains for international airlines that fly trans-pacific routes get paid okay (north of USD$200K). There's also a dearth of experience pilots so growing airlines are poaching them from shrinking US carriers at record rates. Sometimes experienced US pilots can double their salaries by moving to Dubai or Asian based airlines.
Unfortunatly, this is leading to a tiered situation. The route to get these jobs involves much lower paying options (around USD$80K/year for a first officer on a trans-pacific route, and even lower pay for domestic routes less than USD$40K). Because of the poor career options starting at the bottom and rampant job hopping and outsourcing of top jobs to foreign pilots, this leads many airlines to have abbreviated training programs because the resources to train a large amount of pilots is hard to obtain and a significant number of folks they do train tend to hop to another company after a year or so (some airlines now make prospective pilots post training bonds ~USD$50K that must be repaid by serving for 4 years to attempt to combat this problem).
Does this situation with poor career options, rampant job hopping and outsourcing of top jobs and complaints that the newbies that just got into it for the money can barely function without bells and whisltes sound familiar to any /.-ers?
The only reason the US is in a slightly better situation is that we have a reasonably robust civil/general aviation options for early training where some pilots can come into airline training programs with some significant aviation experience on things like prop-planes or even airforce training (and of course reasonably proficient english skills).
AFAIK, the basic ASCAP license fee formula is revenue based, not 'play' based***
Although in the past, the revenue rate has been as high as 3%, recently the radio licensing revenue rate has been rolled back to is approximatly 1.7% (because radio stations are going broke). The current situation for internet streaming services is that they can be assessed on a scale starting from 1.85%. To make matters worse, radio stations get to exempt up to 25% of their revenue from license fees when streaming over the internet. Why should Pandora pay a higher percentage of their revenue just because they are only streaming over the internet?
***there is a license option to weight license fees by programming timeslots (under the theory that income derived from say talk-shows and songs played in the dead of night shouldn't count as much).
Science is not as stupid as you seem to think. Fundamental knowledge of physics and chemistry allows prediction rather than dependence on mass experiment to see results.
Although there are "successful" predictions, there are also misses. Like all human endeavors, sometimes we cannot escape our own stupidity. Often we know less than we think we do.
Science has predicted ice ages, Malthusian famine, aether wind, Le Verrier's planet Vulcan, Lowell's Martian canals and other non-occurrences.
We can also find single scienctists on both sides for the fence like thalidomide and debendox. Even double nobel prize winner Linus Pauling had his Vitamin C moments...
Of course there's actual outright fraud too like N-rays and various vaccine studies (e.g., Andrew Wakefield). The jury is out on cold fusion...
Although I believe science nets out for the positive, and kernels of knowledge can provide hints of things to come, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of any endeavor in which humans are involved. Like the common investment platitude, past performance does not necessarily foreshadow future success so you should do your own research.
A better article...
From what I can gather, although the code was well scrubbed so that the single processor, threaded and message passing (MPI) versions produce the same binary result indicating no vectorization errors, machine rounding differences caused problems.
Since all the platforms were IEEE754 compliant and the code was mostly written in Fortran 90, I'm assuming that one of the main contributor to this rounding is the evaluation order of terms and perhaps the way that double fourier series and spherical harmonics where written.
Both SPH and DFS operations use sine/cosine evaluation which vary a great deal from platform to platform (since generally they only round within 1ulp, not within 1/2ulp of an infinitely precise result).
I remember many moons ago, when I was working on fixed-point FFT accelerators, we were lazy and generated sine/cosine tables using the host platform (x86) and neglected to worry about the fact that using different compliers and different optimization levels on the same platform we got twiddle-factor tables that were different (off-by-one).
With one bug report, we eventually tracked it down to different intrinsics (x87 FSIN w/ math or FSINCOS) were used and sometime libraries were used. Ack... Later library releases we complied in a whole bunch of pregenerated tables to avoid this problem.
Of course putting in a table or designing your own FSIN function for a spherical harmonic or fourier series numerical library solver might be a bit out of scope (not to mention tank the performance), so I'm sure that's why they didn't bother to make the code platform independent w/ respect to transcendental functions, although with Fortran 90, it seems like they could of fixed the evaluation order issues (with appropriate parenthesis to force a certain evaluation order, something you can't do in C).
Short story swirls** have nothing to do with strings, nor dimensions, just vanilla big-bang stuff...
Let's start with what this is.
Basically, cosmic microwave background radiation (aka CMB) is theorized to be weakly linearly polarized due to scattering processes like Thomson Scattering with free-electrons. Since this polarization has 2 net degrees of freedom, you can measure it a few different ways, but one interesting way to do so is to use divergence component (aka E-mode), and curl (aka B-mode) which comes from an analogy with electromagenetics*** So far they've measured some linear polarization with an E-mode component (since it has divergence only, you can think of as being scattered from the position of the last object/electron it interacted with shortly after the big-bang), but until now they've not confident that they measured any net B-mode component in CMB radiation.
E-mode polarization measurements in conjunction with theories about the CMB temperature has helped to advance some theory about some cosmological constants. B-mode measurements are interesting in that if detected are likely from stochastic scattering of a radiation field which is theorized to come from some sort of gravitational waves generated when the early universe was undergoing inflation, but unfortunatly since this is a scattering effect, it could also originate as E-mode and later converted to B-mode by gravitational interaction with matter since the big-bang (a kind of gravitational lensing effect). So B-mode is really small and noisy (which is why they had a hard time isolating it), but it might help us understand if the inflation model is consistent with the universe we see.
**Somehow "curl" gets converted "swirls" in laymanspeak...
***static electric fields (aka 'E' fields) exhibit net divergence from electrical "charges", but static magnetic (aka 'B'**** fields) don't have this because there aren't magnetic monopoles, so they only exhibit net curl (kind of a rotation), but this scattering polarization "mode" really doesn't have too much to do with this (since even polarized electromagnetic radiation has both E-field and B-field components), except for the general mathematical concepts of div and curl.
****Apparently, Maxwell used the letter 'B' (and 'H') to represent magnetic fields when he wrote his Maxell's equations and it stuck. Today, 'M' is commonly used for magnetization (maxwell apparently used 'I' for magnetization and 'C' for current, but now we use 'I' for current so go figure some terminology doesn't stick).
People in the society (e.g., India) understand, but of course some people (e.g., messr Singh) was a bit less informed... From the original article...
Army lance naik Sheminderpal Singh — a regular observer at Point 4715 — told the astronomers that he had noticed a delay of four minutes in the appearance of one of the objects each consecutive day. Singh also told them that the object seemed to be the brightest light in the sky and always appeared to move with respect to the stars.
The IIAP team told the Indian Army to use an instrument called a theodolite to record the horizontal angle and vertical elevation of the two objects. Army personnel performed these observations between February 17 and 22 and submitted the data to the IIAP.
The astronomers have concluded that the object observed from Point 4715 is Jupiter as the observations coincide with the planet’s diurnal motion and the apparent motion of the object due to the rotation of the Earth.
The description of the second unidentified object that appeared early in the morning suggests that it is Venus, which is currently moving behind the Sun and will in the coming months appear as an evening object.
The IIAP team said stars and planets over the horizon in Ladakh appear very bright because of increased atmospheric transparency at the high altitude and both Jupiter and Venus at the time were the brightest planets in the sky.
The astronomers also clarified that objects that rise in the east may appear to be moving across the LAC and approaching the Indian side.
Of course venus and jupiter get mistaken for UFOs by many folks from time to time, but inflating the mistakes of an individual, to the group to which they are a member makes for a better tagline...
An automatic can be slammed into neutral too.
The real question is why the fuck there's no purely mechanical backup to the foot brake.
Automatics do have a purely mechanical emergency brake pedal. Many safety concious folks use this emergency brake (aka a parking brake) when parking on steep hills to augment the so-called "Park" position on the automatic transmission (which usually just a pawl in the transmission which can't really stop you when you are moving). It isn't a great thing to do when you aren't stoppped, but hey, it's an emergency backup.
Of course if you didn't know of the existance of this pedal, perhaps you should go locate it in your car before the next time you drive.
Most folks go see movies and watch TV as part of a shared an experience (either physically with other people, or virtually so they can talk about it at parties). Although many folks talk about only seeing "good" stuff on recommendations (either from friends, or trusted reviewers), the demographics that blockbusters target will often just as likely go see a "bad" movie, just because other folks want to go, or have indicated that they saw and was "okay". Have you noticed that in a group of friends, there are a few that exercise veto-power such that the least common denominator activity was chosen? This has little to do with plot-formulas or cult status of films which generally don't affect the box-office bottom line very much.
Simple things: like you put it out there and people will come, just don't work the way they used to. Although perhaps many of the /. audience perhaps research/hyperplan their lives, many ordinary folks used to just say, lets go to the movies this Saturday, and watch *whatever* was on the big screen. Or, they heard some movie was being advertized as part of a cross promotion and want to see it simply to be able to say they saw it. Or even, they'd go down to the rental store and get the just released Video. Nowdays, the demographic targetted by blockbusters have social networks that are more fragmented and the choice of entertainment options more varied (even movie theaters are ridiculously multiplexed). This reduces the ability of hollywood to leverage any effciencies of the shared experience to the box-office bottom lines.
Although you might argue that if they made better films that garner support via word-of-mouth instead of in-your-face blockbuster releases, that would improve things. It might make better movies, but it wouldn't make for the efficiencies the studios required. Right now the movie industry makes a bulk of the money up front (first few weeks of release), where they can concentrate the people into sold-out theaters on a limited number of reels supported by a short push of high cost advertising and marketing. They make the rest of the money spread out over a longer period of time over slower distribution (dvd, foreign release, etc) w/ limited advertising and marketing (basically mostly by inertia and signing big stars, etc).
The original investors and key players generally get the money up-front, and the residuals pay the bills for rest of the supporting cast (not just actors, but the other mouths as well). W/o the initial return, there's nobody to fund a big-budget movie and the economics of movies suddenly changes. It may be the case that the big-budget movie in a movie house is a dying breed. This means the rest of the industry that rides its coattails (e.g., the movie theaters, the indy pictures, the equipment manufactuers, etc), will need a new model to survive the change. The long tail model is kind of wishful thinking from a business efficiency point of view, so maybe Mr. Spielberg is right, a big change is coming to the studio biz near you...
Maybe they'll start making... (gasp)... actual plots to accompany those stars/explosions/special effects?
But it worked before... What changed now?
In power plants, water is kind of being used as a cheap waste heat reservior. We are just too cheap to use other heat exchange techiques since water is cheap and available, other exchangers/reservior techniques are less economically viable.
Most folks realize that opening your fridge to cool your house probably isn't a long term solution.
That's when they install AC where at least the heat reseviour is outside the house.
But of course if you were to scale your AC unit past a certain point, it's kind of like your fridge situation all over again...
The end solution of course is to: stop warming up the local environment and use less energy.
The competition was not that AI was in competition with humans to develop spacecraft trajectories, it was that humans were in competition with other humans to quickly develop frameworks create the best mission design in a complicated search space that had multiple local optima and unusual constraint functions (preventing the use of "canned" solvers).
One of the critera used to select the problem was...
Problem is easy enough to tackle in a 3-4 week timeframe for experienced mission designers or mathematicians, including exploration of new algorithms.
Of course many of the teams in the competition probably used AI-like frameworks to find the actual trajectories so it's unsurprising an AI technique won. Although perhaps some teams tried other non-AI-like searching techniques (like pseudo-objective functions), I'm pretty sure none of the teams chose to use human pondering to come up with mission designs.
I wonder who would be hurt or what would be damaged by a falling drone...
Having driven past Deer-trail on I-70 on my way to Kansas, I hardly noticed the town. I seriously doubt anything would likely be damaged by a falling drone. Also, most hunters that shoot buckshot at flying objects know not to hurt other folks (except perhaps if you are named Harry Whittington).
In case you are ever curious, CDOT has a live webcam of Deer-trail if you want to check it out for yourself...
So, damaging US Federal Government Property by deliberately firing your gun at it is free speech now?
But inciting people to damage US Federal Government Property by occupy wallstreet and other simlar protesters is somehow different?
I think it's all free speech. It may conflict with some law, but that's generally an issue for the enforcement folks to decide. For example, San Francisco allegedly voted themselves to be sort of a federal immigration sanctuary zone in conflict with federal immigration laws. I don't see the Feds arresting up the mayor and city council members for this (yet)...
two points about valet keys.
Most cars have folding seats which can be opened into the trunk from the inside. second a lot of cars have internal trunk release levers. you can open the trunk from the front seat.
I don't know about "most" cars, but two of the cars I own allow you to lock the internal trunk release and the one car that has the fold-down rear seat has a lock as well (not that I ever actually lock them nor the glove compartment). The other car I have is an SUV which of course is open to the trunk from the rear seat making any locks silly... My dad's car has the trunk release button inside the glove compartment door (which is of course lockable).
I think maybe the old '85 subaru I once owned, had a non-locking trunk release, but since it's long gone, I can't check. It also didn't have the inside-the-boot glow-in-the-dark release mechanism which is now mandatory on new cars to avoid being able to lock people in the trunck (and I know this for a fact, but that is a long story)...
Of course the cheesy cylinder locks like the kind you find on a glove compartment (or trunk release or fold-down seat) are pretty easily to pick with a skeleton key or a hairpin if a minimum wage valet car-parker working for tips were so inclined which is why I just try to avoid putting any valuables in the car if I valet it.
There isn't even the pretense of a public safety issue with a car parked at the airport.
Perhaps not in the US, but cars at airports have been at issue internationally.
* Madird
* Glasgow
Then why haven't my IQ scores gone up since I was 18? I have scored right in the range of 135-140 since that time. I did score slightly lower when I was 13 (but it actually wasn't that much lower - can't remember exactly now*).
If IQ is based heavily on acquired knowledge, then increases in IQ test scores should correlate to age...no?
The reason your IQ scores don't change much is that is measured relative to the standard deviation of the testing that was used to "curve" the test. Nearly all IQ indices are scaled so that 130 is 2 std-dev away from median. If you think about standard deviation from a population statistic point of view, if you get approximately the same answers right (you've accumulated the knowledge that is estimated to be approx 2-std above average), you'll score nearly the same all the time (especially if the test doesn't have many variants and has a limited number of questions).
This is a general problem with indices reported by normalized measurement. The going-in assumption is that 68.2% of the population is within 1 std-dev, and 95.5% of the population is within 2 std deviations. Say if there are 10 questions on the IQ test, and 70% of the test takers get 6-8 of them right and 95% get 5-9 right, you'd probably report the index as follows 7->100, 8 ->115, 9->130, 10->145+ (because +15 ~ 1 stddev in IQ scoring). You'd think that if you scored in the top 2.5% of the raw score of people that took the test would get you a higher IQ, but instead you must be in the top 2.5% of the raw score of the people that were chosen to scale the test (generally a much smaller pool of people constructed to capture the statistics of the general population). Generally there isn't that large a spread for tests of short duration (basically this is a quantization measurement problem).
Then why do some IQ-like tests actually give "extra credit" for age? For instance the Wonderlic Assessment, give you an additional point for every decade out of school (on a 50 point scale!).
For wonderlic (a timed test), this is to theoretically to normalize for the observation that you think slower as you get older (aka "Gs" or processing speed intelligence goes down). They could have just as easily said your intelligence goes down as you get older, or given older folks a longer time to complete the test.
Also I am not sure long term memory (which I am not good at) is "intelligence". It certainly helps to recall that acquired knowledge... but that actually seems to be something you *wouldn't* want to base intelligence on, according to your position.
I don't have a specific position on what is (or is not) intelligence. Although most folks use "intelligence" rather loosely, when you are talking about IQ-testing, there is apparently some theory about cognitive intelligence that they base their tests on. You can google Cattell-Horn-Carrol (aka CHC theory) for background. CHC asserts that short and long term memory are among some of the broad cognitive abilities that forms human intelligence.
The funny part about IQ testing is that they claim it is based on this broad theory, yet the actual tests only cover a small sliver of it which is why I said they aren't even really testing much of anything (even according to their theory). As to if CHC theory holds water, not being a cognitive psychologist have no idea, but IQ tests don't seem to be measuring it either. As a result, I'm not very impressed by IQ tests in specific, or the ability to measure any presumably multi-dimensional characteristic like intelligence on a monotonic scale, in general.
the score on the IQ test is correlated highly with the intelligence of the person who took the test.
No, but thanks for playing...
Nearly all IQ tests simply attempt to make a normalized measurment of only two aspects** of intelligence: acquired knowledge (aka crystalized intelligence), and quantitative reasoning. They also often bulk up the tests with basic reading and writing skills assesment. Probably the only case that can be made is that if you do well on an IQ test, you have more than expected amount of acquired knowledge, can read and write the language you took it in and are probably not a slouch at quantitative reasoning (unless you happed to be able to pad up your score with the knowledge and language questions but still suck at quantitiative reasoning).
Since there isn't really an absolute ground-truth intelligence measure to correlate the test to, a simple standard might be to measure its autocorrelation (when a person has multiple assesments with the same type of test taken at different times). Looking at many studies, it seems like the correlation coefficient for many popular IQ tests hovers around r=0.8 which is just barely enough to say that it is a self consistent measurement of anything let alone correlated with any absolute measure of intelligence. It's safe to say your score on the IQ test is somewhat correlated to the measurement of the normal distribution of the scores they used to scale the test.
Although it might be "most accepted", above the age of say 7 years old, typical IQ tests are a limited dimensional measure at best and likely not very correlated either (since it barely correlates with itself). Also as with most scalar measurements of a multi-dimensional attribute, it is probably not very useful.
For example, this AI program only did the "verbal" part of the test (presumably, it's composite IQ including the zero it would probably score on the auditory or visua and spatial part of the test would indicate a not very intelligent program).
** some IQ tests targetted only children under 7 are much more comprehensive in that they test visual, spatial and auditory processing, decision speed, and short term memory aspects of intelligence, however most still fail to address other measures of intelligence like long-term memory or reaction time.
The only real problem with battery cars is the battery. Where do used batteries go?
Used batteries are recycled by KBI/Toxco...
Won't the desert being the exact opposite environment that fungus would exist in?
When it's in the dry desert soil, these fungi (Coccidioides immitis) are dormant. When it rains, it grows into mold and then yields spores. Then when it's dry again after a rainy spell, the spores detach and blow in the wind. The spores want an environment just like your lungs so if they happen to end up there, it's party time for them.
How did this fungus get to located in the desert in the first place? Who knows, but it's there in the soil, probably longer that humans were around.
Of course there are also other fungi like Cryptococcus gattii (a kind of yeast-like fungi) which fit the more traditional view as they thrive in the humid pacific northwest (Vancouver, Washington, Oregon) and wreak their havok on people there...
Basically fungi are everywhere...
Wow, I never knew disenfranchisement was actually a thing in modern countries.
Although most countries in the EU allow prisoners to vote, some countries like Begium, Finland and Iceland have differing rules on felony disenfranchisement that end post release (depending on the seriousness of the crime). In the UK, this is currently a hot topic as recently, the European Court of Human Rights issued a final ruling that the UK needs to change its law that stipulated felony disenfranchisement whilst incarcerated. However, to my knowledge the law has not changed on this yet.
Similarly, each state in the US has slightly varying rules. For example, in Vermont and Maine felons can vote whilst incarcerated, where in Massachusetts disenfranchisement ends when a prisoner is released, in California felony disenfranchisement ends after parole, and in Virginia and Kentucky the only recourse is to petition the governor. However, most states are similar to the UK (can't vote whilst incarcerated).
Of course it goes the other way too. For example, in Japan, felons can vote whilst incarcerated, but homeless people can't vote (because they are currently not allowed to register with temporary accomodations as an address). Also until just recently, if you were under a guardianship in Japan (kinda like britney spears) you couldn't vote either. Of course in Japan, there are quite a few obsticles to naturalization for a person born a non-citizen to obtain citizenship and thus voting rights in the first place so they are probably an outlier...
So, I am confused how this is better than longitude and latitude? I can use L&L offline, and it can have almost an infinite precision. Also, with my memory I am no more likely to remember the 3 words here than a long string of numbers.
You can't charge licensing fees for L&L, but you can for OneWord shortcuts to a 3-word location name...
Do you mean why is it better for you ? Well, you'll have to answer that one for yourself...