Are there any good examples you know of that couldn't be explained by the placebo effect? If you go purely with statistics (which most of the research I've seen does) then you WILL see a positive result from acupuncture compared to "no treatment", but that doesn't mean it's actually doing anything.
They need to do a double blind study where one of the groups gets "real" acupuncture and the other group gets randomly stabbed with needles for a while. Then we'll see whats real... A study without a control group is mostly worthless.
Most real-world problems are parallel problems. Even the ones that aren't (say... compiling a file in C) you can usually run a lot of instances of in parallel.
True, but modern smart compilers do a remarkable job of putting the software back into a parallel configuration, Hence the term "optimizing compiler." Granted, they tend to do this on an instruction level basis, but the concepts are no different at the thread level and beyond.
Seems to me that a better solution would be to simply draw in outside air at -4 to +30 and add it to the room and exhaust the 31 to 37 dgree air to the outside directly. It seems to me that this would be more efficient and require less hardware to perform. All you would really need to do is open and close a hole in the ceiling and have an inlet to let the cool outside air in. This would be even more efficient with less airflow... The building I work in employs this very tactic for cooling in the summer (factory type setting). The total cooling capacity is remarkably high, and the total cost is $0 (completely passive cooling. In the winter we close the vents and turn on the heat).
These are the offices I'm most afraid of. If I find out that the office has on site showers, I run for the hills. I need my life outside of the office and would rather the office not try to be my second home.
I used to work at a place that had all the perks... Gym and game room in the building, showers, the whole 9 yards. It made a big difference when waiting for a 2 hour compile / simulation run to finish. I understand that these days, that isn't so much of a concern, but having something to do while waiting made it easier to handle the need for long hours when they occurred. On a side note, there is nothing so embarrassing as having your ass beaten severely at basketball by a bunch of middle aged Caucasian and Asian engineers...
The point that I am getting at was that the company understood that making things happen at work was about keeping the troops productive, and that was a lot more likely when everyone knew each other in more than just a cube-farm mentality. While I was there, we never missed a deadline, and we were almost always the first to market with our products. Qual generally went quickly and effectively. I can't imagine that much has changed, the company is still around, and still putting out top notch products.
Its not a lie if you don't tell Apple. Just restore the phone before you return it for warranty and don't say anything one way or the other about whether you have used unauthorized software on the phone.
What part of "covering your tracks" was unclear in the GP? Please remember that fraud is a felony. I just wish that more people who engaged in the practice were caught and punished, maybe then people in our society wouldn't feel that it is OK to lie.
The sad fact is we clearly saw, or should have seen, it coming. The system gave us every sign of being ready to fail. What was the 97 Asian financial crisis except a localized version of the same thing? It just didn't get big enough to build up the momentum to smash the whole system. Only one wing of the building fell off that time. If we had exercised any prudence whatsoever we would have taken the hint. But 'This American Life' certainly has it right in the sense that greed and hubris overrode common sense.
The problem is a damn sight bigger than just the sub-prime markets. The problem is that people in any of the first world nations have become accustomed to the idea that money earns money, without effort. This situation needs to stop immediately. The situation needs to be restructured so that only the government can borrow or loan money for the purchasing of anything other than real assets. For example, a bank could loan you money to buy a car or a house, but only the fed could loan you money to buy a mortgage. In that fashion, banks could not use investor money to buy mortgages, but could write mortgages. This would effectively eliminate the purchasing and selling of mortgages, and ensure that no bank would write a mortgage they believed to be bad, because they would be stuck with it for better or for worse.
Another problem that needs to be addressed is the stock market. Investors drive the overwhelming need for return on investment which causes many companies executives to behave very badly. Corporate executives need to be free from the need to be answerable to anyone except the companies employees and the general public. These are the only people that a companies management should be answerable to, but under the current system, management is only answerable to investors who are by definition shielded from the illegal and/or unethical activities that produce the returns that they demand. This shielding needs to stop immediately, and be replaced with a system whereby investors can never be shielded from the behaviors of the companies they invest in. In this fashion, Many investors would quit investing and return to the tried and true method of putting your money into CDs and Savings accounts, and those that remained would have a vested interest, so to speak, in making sure that their company wasn't going to do something that could put them at risk...
Second, I don't think the current financial problem world wide is the quants' fault. I think this credit crisis and market failure (although it might have a little to do with the quants) can be directly attributed to the world market investing heavily in the subprime mortgage bubble.
The problem does very much belong to the Quants. They are the ones that were tasked with assigning the proper values to the algorithms such that the algorithms work properly. Computers are notorious for doing exactly what they are told, and as the old saying goes "Garbage in Garbage out".
In finance, Return on investment is derived from a very large number of factors, but these factors can be lumped into two categories: Returns and Risks. Returns vs Risks are calculated such that they produce a balance sheet, and at the end of that balance is your return on investment. Now, the Quants job is to assess the Returns and the Risks and assign values to them such that they can be processed computationally. If the wrong values are put in, then the wrong values come out. The rest is simply statistics. In this case, the Quants didn't do their homework and drastically underestimated the Risks, such that the bottom line of the balance sheet looked absolutely stunning. If they had properly assessed the Risks, their algorithms would have shown that the balance sheet was in fact negative, and they would have known to stay the hell away from these loans. The failure was not of the process, but of specific persons in the process, namely the Quants.
Gallons/Mile: 6.077
Gallons/Passenger Mile:.01665
MPG per passenger: 60.06
You're going to want to put that into context *very* carefully. There are some assumptions in that statistic that are not valid, and are unlikely to ever be completely valid.
First: They are assuming that 364 passengers are riding on that flight. I don't know what the percent utilization is for the average commercial flight, but I would bet my left nut that it isn't 100%... Fuel consumption will not drop noticeably if the plane is only half full, so your fuel mileage per passenger is inaccurate right off the rip. In fact, I would bet that the average flight in the US is only 70%-80% utilized which would drop that fuel efficiency to about 45 MPG per passenger, as compared to a typical motor vehicle with two passengers which would get around 44 MPG per passenger.
1998 was not a bad year for the airlines. as I recall, low airfares meant a great deal of air travel, and without DHS and TSA around, many more people were flying. This suggests to me that my guess of 45MPG is probably about right these days.
Again, I don't know what percent of capacity the average train runs at, but I would bet based on my experiences that it is somewhere below 40%. This puts trains (or possibly cars) at the highest potential Passenger MPG.
I have to second this. Hire out the big jobs -- anything foundation-related/structural especially -- but otherwise learn to do it yourself. Yes, it will take longer but there is really a sense of accomplishment at the end.
I have to disagree, structural work is the best kind of fun. There is nothing more exciting and geeky than figuring out which supports you can afford to pull out, and then testing it on the real thing...
Foundation work is even more involved, and can be daunting to the first timer, but isn't really any harder than structural. Keep in mind that people have been building houses for thousands of years, and a disturbingly large percentage of them couldn't even count to 20, but their houses didn't fall down.
Despite being raised Roman Catholic for 18 years, this still baffles me. I know I'm not the first person to share this view (I think I read about it in Vonnegut's "Palm Sunday") but there is a reason I don't swear often. It's not so I can be 'clean' and 'pure'... it's so that when I do swear, people know I'm not fucking around. Seriously, if you're dropping f-bombs left and right then where do you go when you're genuinely upset? I prefer to not raise my voice so those words are reserved for extreme moments. I feel bad for the people who incorporate them into everyday life... how loud do you think an injured rapper would have to raise their voice before people gave them medical attention?
As someone who uses a fairly large and diverse profanity selection in my daily utterances, I can assure you that very few people have ever had trouble distinguishing between my merely unhappy moments, and my truly torqued moments. There are probably several non-verbal cues I use to impart this to others, but in any event, they just seem to know when I'm to be avoided, and when I'm relatively safe.
It is important to keep in mind that light mineral oil like that, while not as bad as other choices, will leech plasticizers out of insulators. The power supply wiring on my machine very quickly became stiff and brittle and it dissolved the soft rubber that was holding the fan assembly to the processor's heat sink. Not sure if it will have any long term effect on the plugs of the electrolytic caps on the board but I wouldn't be surprised.
Actually, Mineral oil didn't seem to do any real damage to my rig, even after two years in the tank. I'm guessing that even if the Mineral oil does leech into the caps, that its electrical properties are close enough to the designed insulator that it doesn't matter. My biggest problem was the tank I had it in was four pieces of glass connected by silicone seal at the edges... Took two years for one sides to fall off, and the others weren't far behind.
Now the problem is that restaurants and businesses which cheat on their taxes, not to mention individuals, get the same benefits that those that pay their share without having to pay all of the money due.
I defy you to show me how the food-service industry benefits from welfare, or from defense spending. No matter who invades, they all gotta eat when the fighting is over. Maybe the US government should try spending less by:
1:) Stop invading foreign countries for no apparent reason.
2:) Stop giving hundreds of dollars a month to people who are too lazy to work for a living. Welfare may have a new cap on it, but you should take a look at how much the disability spending has increased vs the welfare spending decrease over the last ten years. All of those former welfare recipients now seem to have mental disabilities...
3:) Stop subsidizing stupid energy plans that cant work (See ethanol. If its viable, it'll be financially viable. If the government has to subsidize it, its a bad idea...).
Those are just a few ways to save a bunch of money instead of increasing taxes...
The point of this rant is that there are a huge number of government spending programs from which no-one derives any value, much less those who are paying the bills and maybe we should make a bigger effort to catch welfare and disability abuse than chasing semi-legitimate businessmen.
Intel has made some bad mis-steps in the past, and one of them was failing to design their processors around the strengths and weakness' of their memory architecture. Rambus is a prime example. It was a superior solution for the wrong problem, and Intel failed to design their processors to take advantage of the memory's strengths, and it looks like they are doing it again. The limiting factor in CPU / GPU performance isn't how many instructions you can pound into any given second, its how much total memory can you get at, in that time frame. It does you no good to be able to process 16 billion pixels / second, when you can only get the data for 4 billion per second from your memories. Better to build a system that can get 6 Billion per second from the memory, and can process only 6 billion per second. That is the fundamental problem that Nvidia seems to understand, and Intel doesn't.
if the EU and US got rid of unfair tarifs and subsidies on agricultural products many many more people could afford this.
Those same import restrictions are one of the most important factors supporting the first world economies. Globalization tends to level the playing field, so that poor contries get wealthier and rich countries get poorer, but we in the first world have a vested interest in preventing this, hence the tarifs. If you remove them, yes you will create more wealth in the third world, as new jobs are created to provide cheap goods and services for the first world. The first world however sees a very negative downside result: unemployment and a decrease in standard of living. Why would any bureaucrat (elected or otherwise) sign them self up for that kind of trouble at home? For anyone who doesn't believe me, just look at what is happening with engineering and IT jobs in the US. global trade has given the Chinese and Indian economies a tremendous boost, but the cost has been American jobs. These second world nations are quickly becoming first world nations, but the US by contrast is now seeing the first generation in its history that has failed to see an increase in the standard of living from one generation to the next. Mark my words: the US is on the decline, because we sold our future to China and India for some cheap consumer goods. Half our population now has to mortgage their kids to afford those same goods that we used to make at home, and things are showing every sign of getting worse. The cost of these things hasn't gone up, our ability to buy has gone down. We have quite effectively wiped out the middle class in the US and with it goes our economy.
All the party leadership had to do was find a relative nobody with a relatively clean past (for a politician), and the election was theirs.
And Obama isn't that?
Sure, but Hilary isn't... She should have been told to stay the hell out of it. Maybe as VP, she and Obama could get elected, but *not* when they split the vote.
It's sheer idiocy and superstition that we treat aging as if it's a disease that needs to be treated.
Aging is a disease. It's a terrible disease that mother nature has gone to great lengths (procreation) to combat. Looking at it from that perspective is the most sensible approach to solving the whole problem. You can't simply take a holistic approach to aging, you need to follow good scientific / engineering process'. Break down the problem into smaller manageable pieces and solve the pieces one at a time.
And that won't do a bit of good in a two-party system, unfortunately, and in fact it may just get McCain elected. I don't like the way it is, but it is what it is.
I think McCain is going to win anyway. It's amazing to me that the democratic party could throw away the almost sure thing 2008 election by putting up two candidates who by themselves would have trouble winning the election, and then splitting the vote between them just to make damn sure they lost. All the party leadership had to do was find a relative nobody with a relatively clean past (for a politician), and the election was theirs. Instead they showed the usual amount of backbone, and let the party split right down the middle and melt down, by selecting two candidates, each of which is guaranteed to set of a large segment of the bigoted population in this country.
These are the reasons I don't vote. I don't believe in the system, and I wont show any form of support for it. When the time comes to make a real vote, I'll be there with my money and my guns to try and make a better system, but until then everything else is a waste.
If the founding fathers had envisioned George W Bush, we'd have a Direct Democracy instead of this half-assed representative crap, or better yet, some form of Anarchism.
Vista is not nearly as bad (and for that matter XP is not nearly as good) as the Slashdot echo chamber makes it out to be. We had the same type and level of whining when switching from 2000 to XP, or from 98SE to 2000. Anyone here want to go back to either of those two?
I skipped win2k altogether, and only got XP with a new computer purchase. I liked win98 just fine, and would still use it if it weren't more trouble than its worth. With winXP, I can't play many older games I still enjoy, but with win98, I can't play many newer games I still enjoy. Its a case of screwed either way, but all other things being equal I would stick with win98, and would still be using it except for the pre-installed nature of XP, and the hassle involved with "downgrading" a modern computer. For those who complained about how unsecure win98 is, I remind them that a good hardware firewall, and safe browsing habits will make even the most vulnerable OS as secure as XP, Vista, or even most *NIX variants.
Building a long term relationship is not really a difficult thing to do. The trick is to treat it the way you would approach any large scale project. First, acquire a subject, who is attainable. This is probably the hardest part. You need to know where to look. I would recommend that you determine the attributes of the type of person you want and use this as the basis for your search. If you want a semi-alcoholic bubble headed twit, for example, you would look in a bar. Otherwise, you might not want to look in a bar...
Once you have a subject acquired, you need a plan. Your plan should adhere to the I.M.P.R.E.S.S. principle, and to the K.I.S.S. principle. For those who are unaware of these two acronyms, the first stands for:
I) Immediate. Your plan should be something that you can begin immediately.
M) Measurable. Your plan should have measurable results (or lack thereof)
P) Personal. Your plan should be something that is controlled by you, and no one else. Don't leave your destiny in someone else's hands...
R) Repeatable. Your plan should be repeatable. Even the best plans can have flaws in execution, so you should be prepared to have to repeat the project a few times. This is ussually involved more at the subject selection phase.
E) Executable. Your plan should be something that you can execute yourself. It should not require the help or co-operation of anyone other than yourself and your subject.
S) Simple. A complex plan is usually doomed to failure. keep it as simple as realistically possible. A good understanding of basic psychology is very helpful in this regard.
S) Situational. Your plan should be somewhat fluid and allow you to react to changing circumstances and predictable events.
The second acronym stands for Keep It Simple Stupid, and this re-iterates the importance of simplicity in planning. Complexity is inversely proportional to the probability of success.
Three suggestions, although I doubt this post will ever see the light of day...
1) Costume Parties always go over well. With a group of above average intelligence, you can get some really wild and creative costumes.
2) A formal party. tuxedos, evening gowns and dancing (old school, none of this white guy two step shit that seems so popular these days) make for a damn good party, but you may have trouble finding people who know *how* to dance.
3) A shindig at a local amusement park can often be had for much less than you might expect if you can a large enough group together.
If the typical CD makes most of the money it will ever make in 5 years, then why does the RIAA insist on pushing copyright out to ridiculous time periods?
Thats actually a very good question, and the reason makes a very twisted kind of sense when your brain isn't getting enough oxygen from wearing a tye all day:
The music companies aren't worried about loosing money from the would be sales of old material, they are worried that those old materials will become a new source of competition. When the material becomes public domain, anyone can manufacture and resell the content. This would make some percentage of the sidewalk pirates you see actually be legal. This would complicate the hell out of their anti-piracy efforts. Just look how much trouble the RIAA has in fingering the right person in the P2P cases, where all they ahve to do is prove that the person was actually involved, now imagine if they had to prove that the material was actually still under copyright as well, and their success rate would plummet. You would also end up with a large percentage of the public whose opinion of piracy would change dramatically if there was a large amount of "popular" material that was in the public domain and free by definition. The content industries only hope for the future is to win the hearts and minds of the coming generation. Thats why they have spent so much effort on anti-piracy advertising on DVDs and in theatrical releases. They desperately need to convince an entire generation that content will never be free no matter what, or they have lost. It's a loosing battle, but the only way they can see going forward.
They can still follow what they've been doing by mirrorring the DVD market: sell the basic CD for peanuts, sell the enhanced CD+DVD with a t-shirt or a poster or more tracks for $20
No, They can't, and thats the problem for them.
When a Studio sells DVD's for $8, they can pretty much ignore several of the costs that the labels have to swallow:
First, They dont have to pay marketing. This cost was already absorbed into the theatircal release, and as such no longer has to be paid for the product to turn a profit.
Second, their manufacturing costs are much lower because they produce in *large* quantities. unsold albums do not stay in the pipe anymore. walmarts inventory control system ensures that they don't overbuy product, so they landfill very little of it. This means that the record labels produce much smaller batches, which incrases costs. The sad truth is that there is little demand for music older than 5 years. Those that want it have it, and those that don't have it don't want it. Movies on the other hand will sell. If not today, then tomorrow or the day after. People are still building DVD collections, so if a studio overproduces product, it will sell eventually, they just have to wait. Especially with the "wal-mart" pricing scheme, movies are going like hotcakes, both old and new...
Third, the movie studios pay much smaller royalties on DVD's to the actors than the labels do to the artists on CDs.
Fourth, other overhead associated with Studio costs are absorbed, primarily, by the theatrical release, and so that can be reduced by 90%. The result is that from inception to finish, the cost of a DVD is about $6.50 less than a CD, just based on the items listed above. This gives the retailer and the studio their shiny profit with a pricetag that is around $9 for the consumer. That can be droped significantly, if the retailer can curb their overhead the way walmart has, and can be cleaned up even further if the retailer and the studio are willing to take somewhat reduced profits per unit for the sake of moving volume.
That is why DVDs at walmart, and elsewhere, cost around $8 while CDs still cost around $13 at walmart and even more elsewhere.
Like astrology, Newtonian physics is a model that has been proven wrong.
Wow, I'm not quite sure how to begin explaining how bad that sounds on the face of it... However, One key point that needs to be addressed is that there is a major difference between Astrology (Witchcraft, magic, voodoo, etc...), and Newtonian Mechanics (Relativity, String Theory, QM, etc...). That is: one is a mathematical model designed exclusively to quantitatively predict results. When these results fail to materialize as expected, the entire theory is thrown immediately under suspicion until the flaw is either corrected, or the theory must be scrapped. Every scientist and engineer understands that the theories are only valuable as long as the results are 100% reliable for the given set of circumstances the theory relates to. No reputable scientist or engineer uses newtonian mechanics to determine the behavior of objects at relativistic speeds, because this violates the (now known) assumptions of Newtons Laws, and as such they don't apply. However within non-relativistic speeds, Newtons laws are 100% reliable to within acceptable (and measruable) accuracy.
On the other side of the coin you have the "psuedo-sciences". From these, there is no reliable mathematical models to predict behaviors. Predictions are qualitative and generally carry no guarantee of accuracy. When one of these predictions becomes accurate enough that it is proven false, then the assumtion is that someone withheld critical information, which any real theory should not allow. Any valuable theory should spell out exactly what information is necescary to the predictive nature of the theory, and if that information is not sufficient, then the theory is, by definition, deficient. The psuedo-sciences are also not repeatable, in the sense that there is no way to repeat your experiment to verify the validity of the theory. It is for these same reasons that Psychology has such a difficult time being accepted as a science, and why Psychology is plagued by so many myths and half truths.
Psychology stradles the line between science and psuedo-science. Good psychologists take great pains to ensure their science meets all of the requirements of the scientific method (not an easy task given the volatility of their subjects), but bad pschologists simply make assumtions and manipulate raw data into bad experiments to prove their own theories. Expert psychologists can tell the difference, but the rest of us would have a very difficult time without a formal grounding in the scientific method, and a very healthy dose of skepticism, which incidentally are the same basic requirements to spot the flaws in any psuedo-science.
Slashdot Mirror
Are there any good examples you know of that couldn't be explained by the placebo effect? If you go purely with statistics (which most of the research I've seen does) then you WILL see a positive result from acupuncture compared to "no treatment", but that doesn't mean it's actually doing anything.
They need to do a double blind study where one of the groups gets "real" acupuncture and the other group gets randomly stabbed with needles for a while. Then we'll see whats real... A study without a control group is mostly worthless.
-=Geoskd
Most real-world problems are parallel problems. Even the ones that aren't (say... compiling a file in C) you can usually run a lot of instances of in parallel.
True, but modern smart compilers do a remarkable job of putting the software back into a parallel configuration, Hence the term "optimizing compiler." Granted, they tend to do this on an instruction level basis, but the concepts are no different at the thread level and beyond.
-=Geoskd
Seems to me that a better solution would be to simply draw in outside air at -4 to +30 and add it to the room and exhaust the 31 to 37 dgree air to the outside directly. It seems to me that this would be more efficient and require less hardware to perform. All you would really need to do is open and close a hole in the ceiling and have an inlet to let the cool outside air in. This would be even more efficient with less airflow... The building I work in employs this very tactic for cooling in the summer (factory type setting). The total cooling capacity is remarkably high, and the total cost is $0 (completely passive cooling. In the winter we close the vents and turn on the heat).
-=Geoskd
These are the offices I'm most afraid of. If I find out that the office has on site showers, I run for the hills. I need my life outside of the office and would rather the office not try to be my second home.
I used to work at a place that had all the perks... Gym and game room in the building, showers, the whole 9 yards. It made a big difference when waiting for a 2 hour compile / simulation run to finish. I understand that these days, that isn't so much of a concern, but having something to do while waiting made it easier to handle the need for long hours when they occurred. On a side note, there is nothing so embarrassing as having your ass beaten severely at basketball by a bunch of middle aged Caucasian and Asian engineers...
The point that I am getting at was that the company understood that making things happen at work was about keeping the troops productive, and that was a lot more likely when everyone knew each other in more than just a cube-farm mentality. While I was there, we never missed a deadline, and we were almost always the first to market with our products. Qual generally went quickly and effectively. I can't imagine that much has changed, the company is still around, and still putting out top notch products.
-=Geoskd
Its not a lie if you don't tell Apple. Just restore the phone before you return it for warranty and don't say anything one way or the other about whether you have used unauthorized software on the phone.
What part of "covering your tracks" was unclear in the GP? Please remember that fraud is a felony. I just wish that more people who engaged in the practice were caught and punished, maybe then people in our society wouldn't feel that it is OK to lie.
-Geoskd
The sad fact is we clearly saw, or should have seen, it coming. The system gave us every sign of being ready to fail. What was the 97 Asian financial crisis except a localized version of the same thing? It just didn't get big enough to build up the momentum to smash the whole system. Only one wing of the building fell off that time. If we had exercised any prudence whatsoever we would have taken the hint. But 'This American Life' certainly has it right in the sense that greed and hubris overrode common sense.
The problem is a damn sight bigger than just the sub-prime markets. The problem is that people in any of the first world nations have become accustomed to the idea that money earns money, without effort. This situation needs to stop immediately. The situation needs to be restructured so that only the government can borrow or loan money for the purchasing of anything other than real assets. For example, a bank could loan you money to buy a car or a house, but only the fed could loan you money to buy a mortgage. In that fashion, banks could not use investor money to buy mortgages, but could write mortgages. This would effectively eliminate the purchasing and selling of mortgages, and ensure that no bank would write a mortgage they believed to be bad, because they would be stuck with it for better or for worse.
Another problem that needs to be addressed is the stock market. Investors drive the overwhelming need for return on investment which causes many companies executives to behave very badly. Corporate executives need to be free from the need to be answerable to anyone except the companies employees and the general public. These are the only people that a companies management should be answerable to, but under the current system, management is only answerable to investors who are by definition shielded from the illegal and/or unethical activities that produce the returns that they demand. This shielding needs to stop immediately, and be replaced with a system whereby investors can never be shielded from the behaviors of the companies they invest in. In this fashion, Many investors would quit investing and return to the tried and true method of putting your money into CDs and Savings accounts, and those that remained would have a vested interest, so to speak, in making sure that their company wasn't going to do something that could put them at risk...
-=Geoskd
Second, I don't think the current financial problem world wide is the quants' fault. I think this credit crisis and market failure (although it might have a little to do with the quants) can be directly attributed to the world market investing heavily in the subprime mortgage bubble.
The problem does very much belong to the Quants. They are the ones that were tasked with assigning the proper values to the algorithms such that the algorithms work properly. Computers are notorious for doing exactly what they are told, and as the old saying goes "Garbage in Garbage out".
In finance, Return on investment is derived from a very large number of factors, but these factors can be lumped into two categories: Returns and Risks. Returns vs Risks are calculated such that they produce a balance sheet, and at the end of that balance is your return on investment. Now, the Quants job is to assess the Returns and the Risks and assign values to them such that they can be processed computationally. If the wrong values are put in, then the wrong values come out. The rest is simply statistics. In this case, the Quants didn't do their homework and drastically underestimated the Risks, such that the bottom line of the balance sheet looked absolutely stunning. If they had properly assessed the Risks, their algorithms would have shown that the balance sheet was in fact negative, and they would have known to stay the hell away from these loans. The failure was not of the process, but of specific persons in the process, namely the Quants.
-=Geoskd
Specifically for a Boeing 777-300ER:
Gallons/Mile: 6.077 Gallons/Passenger Mile: .01665
MPG per passenger: 60.06
You're going to want to put that into context *very* carefully. There are some assumptions in that statistic that are not valid, and are unlikely to ever be completely valid. First: They are assuming that 364 passengers are riding on that flight. I don't know what the percent utilization is for the average commercial flight, but I would bet my left nut that it isn't 100%... Fuel consumption will not drop noticeably if the plane is only half full, so your fuel mileage per passenger is inaccurate right off the rip. In fact, I would bet that the average flight in the US is only 70%-80% utilized which would drop that fuel efficiency to about 45 MPG per passenger, as compared to a typical motor vehicle with two passengers which would get around 44 MPG per passenger.
Passenger airplanes averaged 4.8 L/100 km per passenger (49 passenger-miles per gallon) in 1998. (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation#Aircraft [wikipedia.org])
1998 was not a bad year for the airlines. as I recall, low airfares meant a great deal of air travel, and without DHS and TSA around, many more people were flying. This suggests to me that my guess of 45MPG is probably about right these days.
Amtrak reports 2005 energy use of 2,935 BTU per passenger-mile[33], or 39 passenger-miles per gallon (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation#Trains [wikipedia.org])
Again, I don't know what percent of capacity the average train runs at, but I would bet based on my experiences that it is somewhere below 40%. This puts trains (or possibly cars) at the highest potential Passenger MPG.
-=Geoskd
I have to second this. Hire out the big jobs -- anything foundation-related/structural especially -- but otherwise learn to do it yourself. Yes, it will take longer but there is really a sense of accomplishment at the end.
I have to disagree, structural work is the best kind of fun. There is nothing more exciting and geeky than figuring out which supports you can afford to pull out, and then testing it on the real thing...
Foundation work is even more involved, and can be daunting to the first timer, but isn't really any harder than structural. Keep in mind that people have been building houses for thousands of years, and a disturbingly large percentage of them couldn't even count to 20, but their houses didn't fall down.
-=Geoskd
Despite being raised Roman Catholic for 18 years, this still baffles me. I know I'm not the first person to share this view (I think I read about it in Vonnegut's "Palm Sunday") but there is a reason I don't swear often. It's not so I can be 'clean' and 'pure' ... it's so that when I do swear, people know I'm not fucking around. Seriously, if you're dropping f-bombs left and right then where do you go when you're genuinely upset? I prefer to not raise my voice so those words are reserved for extreme moments. I feel bad for the people who incorporate them into everyday life ... how loud do you think an injured rapper would have to raise their voice before people gave them medical attention?
As someone who uses a fairly large and diverse profanity selection in my daily utterances, I can assure you that very few people have ever had trouble distinguishing between my merely unhappy moments, and my truly torqued moments. There are probably several non-verbal cues I use to impart this to others, but in any event, they just seem to know when I'm to be avoided, and when I'm relatively safe.
-=Geoskd
It is important to keep in mind that light mineral oil like that, while not as bad as other choices, will leech plasticizers out of insulators. The power supply wiring on my machine very quickly became stiff and brittle and it dissolved the soft rubber that was holding the fan assembly to the processor's heat sink. Not sure if it will have any long term effect on the plugs of the electrolytic caps on the board but I wouldn't be surprised.
Actually, Mineral oil didn't seem to do any real damage to my rig, even after two years in the tank. I'm guessing that even if the Mineral oil does leech into the caps, that its electrical properties are close enough to the designed insulator that it doesn't matter. My biggest problem was the tank I had it in was four pieces of glass connected by silicone seal at the edges... Took two years for one sides to fall off, and the others weren't far behind.
-=Geoskd
I defy you to show me how the food-service industry benefits from welfare, or from defense spending. No matter who invades, they all gotta eat when the fighting is over. Maybe the US government should try spending less by:
1:) Stop invading foreign countries for no apparent reason.
2:) Stop giving hundreds of dollars a month to people who are too lazy to work for a living. Welfare may have a new cap on it, but you should take a look at how much the disability spending has increased vs the welfare spending decrease over the last ten years. All of those former welfare recipients now seem to have mental disabilities...
3:) Stop subsidizing stupid energy plans that cant work (See ethanol. If its viable, it'll be financially viable. If the government has to subsidize it, its a bad idea...).
Those are just a few ways to save a bunch of money instead of increasing taxes...
The point of this rant is that there are a huge number of government spending programs from which no-one derives any value, much less those who are paying the bills and maybe we should make a bigger effort to catch welfare and disability abuse than chasing semi-legitimate businessmen.
-=Geoskd
Intel has made some bad mis-steps in the past, and one of them was failing to design their processors around the strengths and weakness' of their memory architecture. Rambus is a prime example. It was a superior solution for the wrong problem, and Intel failed to design their processors to take advantage of the memory's strengths, and it looks like they are doing it again. The limiting factor in CPU / GPU performance isn't how many instructions you can pound into any given second, its how much total memory can you get at, in that time frame. It does you no good to be able to process 16 billion pixels / second, when you can only get the data for 4 billion per second from your memories. Better to build a system that can get 6 Billion per second from the memory, and can process only 6 billion per second. That is the fundamental problem that Nvidia seems to understand, and Intel doesn't.
-=Geoskd
if the EU and US got rid of unfair tarifs and subsidies on agricultural products many many more people could afford this.
Those same import restrictions are one of the most important factors supporting the first world economies. Globalization tends to level the playing field, so that poor contries get wealthier and rich countries get poorer, but we in the first world have a vested interest in preventing this, hence the tarifs. If you remove them, yes you will create more wealth in the third world, as new jobs are created to provide cheap goods and services for the first world. The first world however sees a very negative downside result: unemployment and a decrease in standard of living. Why would any bureaucrat (elected or otherwise) sign them self up for that kind of trouble at home? For anyone who doesn't believe me, just look at what is happening with engineering and IT jobs in the US. global trade has given the Chinese and Indian economies a tremendous boost, but the cost has been American jobs. These second world nations are quickly becoming first world nations, but the US by contrast is now seeing the first generation in its history that has failed to see an increase in the standard of living from one generation to the next. Mark my words: the US is on the decline, because we sold our future to China and India for some cheap consumer goods. Half our population now has to mortgage their kids to afford those same goods that we used to make at home, and things are showing every sign of getting worse. The cost of these things hasn't gone up, our ability to buy has gone down. We have quite effectively wiped out the middle class in the US and with it goes our economy.
-=Geoskd
All the party leadership had to do was find a relative nobody with a relatively clean past (for a politician), and the election was theirs.
And Obama isn't that?
Sure, but Hilary isn't... She should have been told to stay the hell out of it. Maybe as VP, she and Obama could get elected, but *not* when they split the vote.
-=Geoskd
It's sheer idiocy and superstition that we treat aging as if it's a disease that needs to be treated.
Aging is a disease. It's a terrible disease that mother nature has gone to great lengths (procreation) to combat. Looking at it from that perspective is the most sensible approach to solving the whole problem. You can't simply take a holistic approach to aging, you need to follow good scientific / engineering process'. Break down the problem into smaller manageable pieces and solve the pieces one at a time.
-=Geoskd
And that won't do a bit of good in a two-party system, unfortunately, and in fact it may just get McCain elected. I don't like the way it is, but it is what it is.
I think McCain is going to win anyway. It's amazing to me that the democratic party could throw away the almost sure thing 2008 election by putting up two candidates who by themselves would have trouble winning the election, and then splitting the vote between them just to make damn sure they lost. All the party leadership had to do was find a relative nobody with a relatively clean past (for a politician), and the election was theirs. Instead they showed the usual amount of backbone, and let the party split right down the middle and melt down, by selecting two candidates, each of which is guaranteed to set of a large segment of the bigoted population in this country.
These are the reasons I don't vote. I don't believe in the system, and I wont show any form of support for it. When the time comes to make a real vote, I'll be there with my money and my guns to try and make a better system, but until then everything else is a waste.
If the founding fathers had envisioned George W Bush, we'd have a Direct Democracy instead of this half-assed representative crap, or better yet, some form of Anarchism.
-=Geoskd
I skipped win2k altogether, and only got XP with a new computer purchase. I liked win98 just fine, and would still use it if it weren't more trouble than its worth. With winXP, I can't play many older games I still enjoy, but with win98, I can't play many newer games I still enjoy. Its a case of screwed either way, but all other things being equal I would stick with win98, and would still be using it except for the pre-installed nature of XP, and the hassle involved with "downgrading" a modern computer. For those who complained about how unsecure win98 is, I remind them that a good hardware firewall, and safe browsing habits will make even the most vulnerable OS as secure as XP, Vista, or even most *NIX variants.
-=Geoskd
Building a long term relationship is not really a difficult thing to do. The trick is to treat it the way you would approach any large scale project. First, acquire a subject, who is attainable. This is probably the hardest part. You need to know where to look. I would recommend that you determine the attributes of the type of person you want and use this as the basis for your search. If you want a semi-alcoholic bubble headed twit, for example, you would look in a bar. Otherwise, you might not want to look in a bar...
Once you have a subject acquired, you need a plan. Your plan should adhere to the I.M.P.R.E.S.S. principle, and to the K.I.S.S. principle. For those who are unaware of these two acronyms, the first stands for:
I) Immediate. Your plan should be something that you can begin immediately.
M) Measurable. Your plan should have measurable results (or lack thereof)
P) Personal. Your plan should be something that is controlled by you, and no one else. Don't leave your destiny in someone else's hands...
R) Repeatable. Your plan should be repeatable. Even the best plans can have flaws in execution, so you should be prepared to have to repeat the project a few times. This is ussually involved more at the subject selection phase.
E) Executable. Your plan should be something that you can execute yourself. It should not require the help or co-operation of anyone other than yourself and your subject.
S) Simple. A complex plan is usually doomed to failure. keep it as simple as realistically possible. A good understanding of basic psychology is very helpful in this regard.
S) Situational. Your plan should be somewhat fluid and allow you to react to changing circumstances and predictable events.
The second acronym stands for Keep It Simple Stupid, and this re-iterates the importance of simplicity in planning. Complexity is inversely proportional to the probability of success.
-=Geoskd
Three suggestions, although I doubt this post will ever see the light of day...
1) Costume Parties always go over well. With a group of above average intelligence, you can get some really wild and creative costumes.
2) A formal party. tuxedos, evening gowns and dancing (old school, none of this white guy two step shit that seems so popular these days) make for a damn good party, but you may have trouble finding people who know *how* to dance.
3) A shindig at a local amusement park can often be had for much less than you might expect if you can a large enough group together.
-=Geoskd
Thats actually a very good question, and the reason makes a very twisted kind of sense when your brain isn't getting enough oxygen from wearing a tye all day:
The music companies aren't worried about loosing money from the would be sales of old material, they are worried that those old materials will become a new source of competition. When the material becomes public domain, anyone can manufacture and resell the content. This would make some percentage of the sidewalk pirates you see actually be legal. This would complicate the hell out of their anti-piracy efforts. Just look how much trouble the RIAA has in fingering the right person in the P2P cases, where all they ahve to do is prove that the person was actually involved, now imagine if they had to prove that the material was actually still under copyright as well, and their success rate would plummet. You would also end up with a large percentage of the public whose opinion of piracy would change dramatically if there was a large amount of "popular" material that was in the public domain and free by definition. The content industries only hope for the future is to win the hearts and minds of the coming generation. Thats why they have spent so much effort on anti-piracy advertising on DVDs and in theatrical releases. They desperately need to convince an entire generation that content will never be free no matter what, or they have lost. It's a loosing battle, but the only way they can see going forward.
-=Geoskd
No, They can't, and thats the problem for them.
When a Studio sells DVD's for $8, they can pretty much ignore several of the costs that the labels have to swallow:
First, They dont have to pay marketing. This cost was already absorbed into the theatircal release, and as such no longer has to be paid for the product to turn a profit.
Second, their manufacturing costs are much lower because they produce in *large* quantities. unsold albums do not stay in the pipe anymore. walmarts inventory control system ensures that they don't overbuy product, so they landfill very little of it. This means that the record labels produce much smaller batches, which incrases costs. The sad truth is that there is little demand for music older than 5 years. Those that want it have it, and those that don't have it don't want it. Movies on the other hand will sell. If not today, then tomorrow or the day after. People are still building DVD collections, so if a studio overproduces product, it will sell eventually, they just have to wait. Especially with the "wal-mart" pricing scheme, movies are going like hotcakes, both old and new...
Third, the movie studios pay much smaller royalties on DVD's to the actors than the labels do to the artists on CDs.
Fourth, other overhead associated with Studio costs are absorbed, primarily, by the theatrical release, and so that can be reduced by 90%. The result is that from inception to finish, the cost of a DVD is about $6.50 less than a CD, just based on the items listed above. This gives the retailer and the studio their shiny profit with a pricetag that is around $9 for the consumer. That can be droped significantly, if the retailer can curb their overhead the way walmart has, and can be cleaned up even further if the retailer and the studio are willing to take somewhat reduced profits per unit for the sake of moving volume.
That is why DVDs at walmart, and elsewhere, cost around $8 while CDs still cost around $13 at walmart and even more elsewhere.
-=Geoskd
Oh, I don't know, it can be pretty damn amusing if you're good at it...
-=Geoskd
Wow, I'm not quite sure how to begin explaining how bad that sounds on the face of it... However, One key point that needs to be addressed is that there is a major difference between Astrology (Witchcraft, magic, voodoo, etc...), and Newtonian Mechanics (Relativity, String Theory, QM, etc...). That is: one is a mathematical model designed exclusively to quantitatively predict results. When these results fail to materialize as expected, the entire theory is thrown immediately under suspicion until the flaw is either corrected, or the theory must be scrapped. Every scientist and engineer understands that the theories are only valuable as long as the results are 100% reliable for the given set of circumstances the theory relates to. No reputable scientist or engineer uses newtonian mechanics to determine the behavior of objects at relativistic speeds, because this violates the (now known) assumptions of Newtons Laws, and as such they don't apply. However within non-relativistic speeds, Newtons laws are 100% reliable to within acceptable (and measruable) accuracy.
On the other side of the coin you have the "psuedo-sciences". From these, there is no reliable mathematical models to predict behaviors. Predictions are qualitative and generally carry no guarantee of accuracy. When one of these predictions becomes accurate enough that it is proven false, then the assumtion is that someone withheld critical information, which any real theory should not allow. Any valuable theory should spell out exactly what information is necescary to the predictive nature of the theory, and if that information is not sufficient, then the theory is, by definition, deficient. The psuedo-sciences are also not repeatable, in the sense that there is no way to repeat your experiment to verify the validity of the theory. It is for these same reasons that Psychology has such a difficult time being accepted as a science, and why Psychology is plagued by so many myths and half truths.
Psychology stradles the line between science and psuedo-science. Good psychologists take great pains to ensure their science meets all of the requirements of the scientific method (not an easy task given the volatility of their subjects), but bad pschologists simply make assumtions and manipulate raw data into bad experiments to prove their own theories. Expert psychologists can tell the difference, but the rest of us would have a very difficult time without a formal grounding in the scientific method, and a very healthy dose of skepticism, which incidentally are the same basic requirements to spot the flaws in any psuedo-science.
-=Geoskd
Actually, its more of a fancy way of saying "I'm guilty of something, just not what you were thinking of..."
-=Geoskd