The statements in your own post makes no sense. If the sports program is profitable, by definition they are not cutting other programs to support it.
And honestly what good does a single anecdote like Florida have to do with educational focus? I'm happy to give a counter example, my alma mater had two Nobel prize winners this year and yet somehow has managed to win the award for best college athletic program for the last 18 years in a row. Not to mention the #1 ranked Computer Science program in the US (which I'm going to be arrogant and call #1 the world). How's that for narrow focus?
Just because a specific implementation sucks, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. In fact, a good counterexample that works proves it's possible...
Except it wasn't a product, it was just a random post to the Mavericks page. Facebook basically wanted to charge him $3000 to bypass their "spam filter" so it went to the top of everyone's news feed.
They claim they "It's Not A Shakedown - We're Trying To Fight Spam" but SPAM is unsolicited junk email. When you specifically choose to follow a page you are signing up for whatever posts they make to the page. And what's even worse is Facebook provides a way for someone to choose what types of posts they see in this case, *unless* Facebook gets paid in which case they are explicitly encouraging the spam...
But hey, it's their service and it's free and ad supported. They have a right to do things like this to make money, and if you don't like it the appropriate response is to stop using the service, as Cuban has done. That and bitch about their hypocrisy and apparent redefinition of "spam", which is more satisfying but usually less productive (unless you are a billionaire who influences purchasing decisions for dozens of companies... in which case bitching is both satisfying AND productive!)
Well, ideally, the University of Washington would stop pouring tuition into stadiums and scholarships for athletic idiots, and focus on such mundane things as academics.
Except those athletic programs actually MAKE money for many universities. Not to mention athletics are not just football, there are dozens of college sports, some of which are paid for by the bigger ones. And many of those sports are as old or older than the concept of the university itself (and an integral part since the start). The ancient Greeks, Romans, British, Germans, etc who created many of the modern concepts of organized higher education have always considered athletics a part of development of young people. Maybe if we'd go back to those basics a bit more we'd have fewer obese people sitting around staring at their computer screen or TV all day. I mean seriously, since when did sweating become a bad thing!?
Personally I take satisfaction knowing that my alma mater is usually ranked in the top 5 for academics while having won the award for best college athletics program for the last 18 years in a row. I have a lot of friends who were athletes and are now engineers, doctors, executives, lawyers, even a few PhDs.
Yes, University of Washington, as well as other teams in their conference like Cal, Stanford, UCLA, USC, etc, have no focus on education and somehow an athletic program has totally ruined their teaching and research programs.
Oh, or maybe those latter 4 are in the top 25 in national Academic rankings (and UW in the top 50) while still managing to have fun (and profitable, yes - how is that a bad thing again?) athletic programs.
Ironically I updated my FC17 install today on a VM and it wouldn't boot. Which was ok, but it caused Gnome 3 to enable fallback mode when I booted the old kernel. Which also would have been ok, if the system settings didn't segfault when run so I couldn't switch it back.
(and yes, I tried screwing with dconf manually to enable it - holy hell another Gnome disaster of an idea! - but ended up restoring the VM image... upgrades are overrated...)
And Fedora is their biggest supporter. For christsakes I just found with Fedora 17 they don't even include the Unix man pages in the default installation. Sigh.
"But what I do have is a very particular set of silverware; silverware I have acquired over a very long meal. Silverware that makes me drool over people like you. If you tell me who you are now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will eat you."
What's absurd when doctors are ordering expensive tests like MRIs and CT scans on speculation or trivial injury just to make people feel better. Not to mention all of the neurotic parents saving their childrens' umbilical cords at the cost of thousands of dollars in the microscopically minute chance it may come in handy in some as of yet unknown way in the future.
But saving a few more medical records is wasteful...
That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.
Actually, there wasn't all *that* much math... and in fact (given most of his raw data was just the polls) - the polls that mattered did *not* have them neck and neck. His key insight was just to use polling information by state, find the bias in some polls (like Rasmussen, which had Romney by 2%, hah!) and then weigh and average those polls to get predicted electoral votes. I bet it's simple enough computations Univac could chug through it in a reasonable time:)
It's basically a given now that future presidential race predictions will be based on those same ideas... in fact, the Princeton predictions use a similar model and came up with pretty much the same results:
ELECTORAL PREDICTION (mode): Barack Obama 303 EV, Mitt Romney 235 EV. The mode is the single most frequent value on the EV histogram. It corresponds to the map below, and has a 22% chance of being exactly correct. The next-most-likely outcome is Obama 332, Romney 206 EV.
[and unlike Silver, their blog goes into all of the gory details of their model, which is pretty cool...]
Actually, all of my records have been available online for at least the last 7-8 years. I can even log in and look at them myself. That storage is in fact pretty cheap...
Hell, my Dad is a veterinarian (where technology in the office tends to lag human medicine by a fair bit) and he has had all of his records computerized for almost 10 years. He's even had all x-rays, ultrasounds, etc stored digitally for the last few years.
I can imagine most practices, hospitals, etc will not bother to digitize their old paper records, but the majority are definitely now storing things digitally. I really doubt "most healthcare organizations" are deleting digital records as soon as the legal requirements are up...
Ok, here's an example: OHSA requires any work health related records to be kept for 30 years. There are plenty of exposures to toxic chemicals, etc, that only show up as cancer many years later, but knowledge of that exposure would dramatically help a diagnosis.
Even many booster vaccinations are recommended every 10 years.
They are not required to be *destroyed* after 5 years, they are required to be *kept* for 5 years. It's a minimum guarantee to patients, not a maximum.
It would be pretty awful medicine to require doctors not to be able to know your heath history longer than that!
In the US it would have been both beyond any legal requirement to keep records (which is usually 5-7 years) and allowed to charge a fee based on the actual cost of making the copy. So doubly screwed by that amazing private health care system.
Not sure why you are being sarcastic to him, since he's right, it's pretty easy to look up.
It somewhat varies due to different state laws, and the *recommendations* are generally 10 years, but 5-7 is a pretty common *requirement*. Of course that's the minimum, if your doctor/group/HMO doesn't suck I would think they would probably keep more, especially now that things are mostly digital.
Though as far as I can tell none require them to provide the data in any raw format (besides basic imaging/x-rays). An interpreted summary/result (which they already gave the guy in the article) is sufficient (by law at least).
You mean the people in high income enclaves like Silicon Valley, where both Facebook and the majority of tech startups that get sold are founded? (yes, I know this guy is In St. Louis, which is interesting but not the norm).
And who the hell wants to sell a high tech company at age 19 and move to a small midwest town? The dude's just beginning his life, if he's not a complete loser I'm sure he's going to want to "get out", as you say, not spend the next 60 years as a shut in with "no commute". Not to mention that median includes a LOT of property that no one would describe as "living comfortably" (in fact I have family who live in the same county that he grew up, and I'm sure he'd agree!)
But that's why it's all irrelevant, anyway. People as smart and ambitious as he is don't do that. They continue to work because they have *fun* doing it...
And that $76K doesn't include any health care, pensions/retirement, and because he had no SS or medicare contribution, no social security or medicare coverage at retirement age. Not to mention it's a constant value over 60 years! Inflation over the last 60 years was over 700%, so that 76k would be the equivalent of about $10k when he's 80. Not going to bother with the exact math now but that's going to be closer to $40-45k in today's money averaged with inflation, and that ALSO doesn't take into account that most of those "average" people making ~$45k will get pensions, 401k tax breaks, payroll tax towards social security, etc to help (generally "total compensation" benefits for an employee is 1.5-2x their salary/wages.
So once he's 70-80 and has health issues he's on his own, with $10-15k a year to spend. I sure don't call that retiring comfortably. That's actually way beyond "fairly prudent", in fact.
Finally, *I* am the one who pointed out the 76k number if NO taxes were taken out of $5M and that living expenses cost NOTHING (or someone wanted to use that to calculate them). I did that for the very fact that I knew people would point out the non-sequiter of housing prices, which I now see I shouldn't have bothered mentioning (even though I said you can ignore it in my post!)
Jeez, the mathematicians and economists sure aren't on slashdot today. Guess they are watching the election results...
Google maps may possibly have better data overall, but I've never personally had any difficulty with Apple Maps
That's ok, anecdotal evidence is fine to form your *own* opinion, just don't think it will change anyone else's.
My anecdote is that about half of the restaurants and businesses on Apple Maps within a couple miles of my house are off by at least a half block, sometimes more. Sure, people can still find them, but given Google has most of them pinpointed down to about 10 feet, it really is bad data on Apple's part.
And to make it even worse - I anally spent about 30 minutes correcting dozens of them a few weeks ago. And none have changed yet. So much for their excuse about "crowdsourcing" improving the data. Finally, the really ironic part - I live about 5 miles from Apple's HQ. There are probably dozens of Apple employees living in my neighborhood an using those businesses... couldn't they even get those right?
People ask me why I have a negative stance towards Apple and its products. It is because of people like the parent poster: people that have no clue how technological development has progressed and have probably derided many an early adopter in the past ("Hmph, I just want my phone to make calls!"), yet now boast with technologically ancient features that are supposedly something exceptional.
Remember, now, according to Apple no one would EVER want a 7" tablet...
Hey, have you seen that new iPad Mini? It's amazing, revolutionary, even. I just don't understand why no one else thought of it sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
The statements in your own post makes no sense. If the sports program is profitable, by definition they are not cutting other programs to support it.
And honestly what good does a single anecdote like Florida have to do with educational focus? I'm happy to give a counter example, my alma mater had two Nobel prize winners this year and yet somehow has managed to win the award for best college athletic program for the last 18 years in a row. Not to mention the #1 ranked Computer Science program in the US (which I'm going to be arrogant and call #1 the world). How's that for narrow focus?
Just because a specific implementation sucks, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. In fact, a good counterexample that works proves it's possible...
Unless it's a class action, in which case he'll get a $5 coupon towards purchase of another broken app and the lawyers will get the rest.
Except it wasn't a product, it was just a random post to the Mavericks page. Facebook basically wanted to charge him $3000 to bypass their "spam filter" so it went to the top of everyone's news feed.
They claim they "It's Not A Shakedown - We're Trying To Fight Spam" but SPAM is unsolicited junk email. When you specifically choose to follow a page you are signing up for whatever posts they make to the page. And what's even worse is Facebook provides a way for someone to choose what types of posts they see in this case, *unless* Facebook gets paid in which case they are explicitly encouraging the spam...
But hey, it's their service and it's free and ad supported. They have a right to do things like this to make money, and if you don't like it the appropriate response is to stop using the service, as Cuban has done. That and bitch about their hypocrisy and apparent redefinition of "spam", which is more satisfying but usually less productive (unless you are a billionaire who influences purchasing decisions for dozens of companies... in which case bitching is both satisfying AND productive!)
...working on an RIAA chain gang CD duplicator.
Well, ideally, the University of Washington would stop pouring tuition into stadiums and scholarships for athletic idiots, and focus on such mundane things as academics.
Except those athletic programs actually MAKE money for many universities. Not to mention athletics are not just football, there are dozens of college sports, some of which are paid for by the bigger ones. And many of those sports are as old or older than the concept of the university itself (and an integral part since the start). The ancient Greeks, Romans, British, Germans, etc who created many of the modern concepts of organized higher education have always considered athletics a part of development of young people. Maybe if we'd go back to those basics a bit more we'd have fewer obese people sitting around staring at their computer screen or TV all day. I mean seriously, since when did sweating become a bad thing!?
Personally I take satisfaction knowing that my alma mater is usually ranked in the top 5 for academics while having won the award for best college athletics program for the last 18 years in a row. I have a lot of friends who were athletes and are now engineers, doctors, executives, lawyers, even a few PhDs.
Yes, University of Washington, as well as other teams in their conference like Cal, Stanford, UCLA, USC, etc, have no focus on education and somehow an athletic program has totally ruined their teaching and research programs.
Oh, or maybe those latter 4 are in the top 25 in national Academic rankings (and UW in the top 50) while still managing to have fun (and profitable, yes - how is that a bad thing again?) athletic programs.
It's easy in four downs if you try.
Ethics tests are pretty pointless in practice. There is a big difference between knowing ethics and being ethical.
I'm pretty sure 99.9% of convicted criminals knew they were committing a crime at the time...
...that the #1 world commodity may lead to the extinction of the #2.
Ironically I updated my FC17 install today on a VM and it wouldn't boot. Which was ok, but it caused Gnome 3 to enable fallback mode when I booted the old kernel. Which also would have been ok, if the system settings didn't segfault when run so I couldn't switch it back.
(and yes, I tried screwing with dconf manually to enable it - holy hell another Gnome disaster of an idea! - but ended up restoring the VM image... upgrades are overrated...)
And Fedora is their biggest supporter. For christsakes I just found with Fedora 17 they don't even include the Unix man pages in the default installation. Sigh.
"But what I do have is a very particular set of silverware; silverware I have acquired over a very long meal. Silverware that makes me drool over people like you. If you tell me who you are now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will eat you."
Based on his picture eating is a big hobby for him, and he takes it very seriously.
What's absurd when doctors are ordering expensive tests like MRIs and CT scans on speculation or trivial injury just to make people feel better. Not to mention all of the neurotic parents saving their childrens' umbilical cords at the cost of thousands of dollars in the microscopically minute chance it may come in handy in some as of yet unknown way in the future.
But saving a few more medical records is wasteful...
That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.
Actually, there wasn't all *that* much math... and in fact (given most of his raw data was just the polls) - the polls that mattered did *not* have them neck and neck. His key insight was just to use polling information by state, find the bias in some polls (like Rasmussen, which had Romney by 2%, hah!) and then weigh and average those polls to get predicted electoral votes. I bet it's simple enough computations Univac could chug through it in a reasonable time :)
It's basically a given now that future presidential race predictions will be based on those same ideas... in fact, the Princeton predictions use a similar model and came up with pretty much the same results:
ELECTORAL PREDICTION (mode): Barack Obama 303 EV, Mitt Romney 235 EV. The mode is the single most frequent value on the EV histogram. It corresponds to the map below, and has a 22% chance of being exactly correct. The next-most-likely outcome is Obama 332, Romney 206 EV.
[and unlike Silver, their blog goes into all of the gory details of their model, which is pretty cool...]
Actually, all of my records have been available online for at least the last 7-8 years. I can even log in and look at them myself. That storage is in fact pretty cheap...
Hell, my Dad is a veterinarian (where technology in the office tends to lag human medicine by a fair bit) and he has had all of his records computerized for almost 10 years. He's even had all x-rays, ultrasounds, etc stored digitally for the last few years.
I can imagine most practices, hospitals, etc will not bother to digitize their old paper records, but the majority are definitely now storing things digitally. I really doubt "most healthcare organizations" are deleting digital records as soon as the legal requirements are up...
Ok, here's an example: OHSA requires any work health related records to be kept for 30 years. There are plenty of exposures to toxic chemicals, etc, that only show up as cancer many years later, but knowledge of that exposure would dramatically help a diagnosis.
Even many booster vaccinations are recommended every 10 years.
They are not required to be *destroyed* after 5 years, they are required to be *kept* for 5 years. It's a minimum guarantee to patients, not a maximum.
It would be pretty awful medicine to require doctors not to be able to know your heath history longer than that!
In the US it would have been both beyond any legal requirement to keep records (which is usually 5-7 years) and allowed to charge a fee based on the actual cost of making the copy. So doubly screwed by that amazing private health care system.
Not sure why you are being sarcastic to him, since he's right, it's pretty easy to look up.
It somewhat varies due to different state laws, and the *recommendations* are generally 10 years, but 5-7 is a pretty common *requirement*. Of course that's the minimum, if your doctor/group/HMO doesn't suck I would think they would probably keep more, especially now that things are mostly digital.
Though as far as I can tell none require them to provide the data in any raw format (besides basic imaging/x-rays). An interpreted summary/result (which they already gave the guy in the article) is sufficient (by law at least).
He not only has the clear lead in Ohio, but also Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia. It's not even going to be close.
You mean the people in high income enclaves like Silicon Valley, where both Facebook and the majority of tech startups that get sold are founded? (yes, I know this guy is In St. Louis, which is interesting but not the norm).
And who the hell wants to sell a high tech company at age 19 and move to a small midwest town? The dude's just beginning his life, if he's not a complete loser I'm sure he's going to want to "get out", as you say, not spend the next 60 years as a shut in with "no commute". Not to mention that median includes a LOT of property that no one would describe as "living comfortably" (in fact I have family who live in the same county that he grew up, and I'm sure he'd agree!)
But that's why it's all irrelevant, anyway. People as smart and ambitious as he is don't do that. They continue to work because they have *fun* doing it...
And that $76K doesn't include any health care, pensions/retirement, and because he had no SS or medicare contribution, no social security or medicare coverage at retirement age. Not to mention it's a constant value over 60 years! Inflation over the last 60 years was over 700%, so that 76k would be the equivalent of about $10k when he's 80. Not going to bother with the exact math now but that's going to be closer to $40-45k in today's money averaged with inflation, and that ALSO doesn't take into account that most of those "average" people making ~$45k will get pensions, 401k tax breaks, payroll tax towards social security, etc to help (generally "total compensation" benefits for an employee is 1.5-2x their salary/wages.
So once he's 70-80 and has health issues he's on his own, with $10-15k a year to spend. I sure don't call that retiring comfortably. That's actually way beyond "fairly prudent", in fact.
Finally, *I* am the one who pointed out the 76k number if NO taxes were taken out of $5M and that living expenses cost NOTHING (or someone wanted to use that to calculate them). I did that for the very fact that I knew people would point out the non-sequiter of housing prices, which I now see I shouldn't have bothered mentioning (even though I said you can ignore it in my post!)
Jeez, the mathematicians and economists sure aren't on slashdot today. Guess they are watching the election results...
Google maps may possibly have better data overall, but I've never personally had any difficulty with Apple Maps
That's ok, anecdotal evidence is fine to form your *own* opinion, just don't think it will change anyone else's.
My anecdote is that about half of the restaurants and businesses on Apple Maps within a couple miles of my house are off by at least a half block, sometimes more. Sure, people can still find them, but given Google has most of them pinpointed down to about 10 feet, it really is bad data on Apple's part.
And to make it even worse - I anally spent about 30 minutes correcting dozens of them a few weeks ago. And none have changed yet. So much for their excuse about "crowdsourcing" improving the data. Finally, the really ironic part - I live about 5 miles from Apple's HQ. There are probably dozens of Apple employees living in my neighborhood an using those businesses... couldn't they even get those right?
People ask me why I have a negative stance towards Apple and its products. It is because of people like the parent poster: people that have no clue how technological development has progressed and have probably derided many an early adopter in the past ("Hmph, I just want my phone to make calls!"), yet now boast with technologically ancient features that are supposedly something exceptional.
Remember, now, according to Apple no one would EVER want a 7" tablet...
Hey, have you seen that new iPad Mini? It's amazing, revolutionary, even. I just don't understand why no one else thought of it sooner.