The nuimbers of prisoners has not declined significantly since 2009. This doesn't mean the bubble hasn't burst, the nature of the bubble resists bursting. People can leave the housing market, but prisoners can't leave the prison market.
Still, anyone who invested big-time in prisons back in 2008 or so on the basis of 30 years of exponential prison population growth was just stupid. We were approaching 1% of the Amercian population incarcerated, how much higher did they expect that to go?
I have no sympathy with a town that bet its financial future on prisons while its schools rate minimally acceptable.
and America has always valued the cantankerous Individual above the glorious Collective, that other cultures prefer...
When I was in college I took several courses from the famous scholar of Japanese literature, Howard Hibbet. In one of the classes there was student who liked to talk about Japanese culture's "Samurai values". The professor listened politely to this student, until one day he said somethign that has stuck with me for thirty years: "You should be careful about uncritically accepting the way a culture likes to present itself."
I have found this to be very true, even of corporate cultures.
Many years ago there was a brief vogue among a few companies for psych testing potential employees. So I paid to have myself tested so I'd know what my potential employers "knew". Among other things, the tests informed me that I have an IQ that is 4.3 standard deviations above the mean.
This got me thinking. Which is more likely, that I'm smarter than 99.999% of the population, or that the test score was bogus? It should be obvious that it's far more likely that my test results were bogus!
Just because we can assign a single number to a person's intelligence the way we can to that person's height or weight doesn't mean that that number is as objective as height or weight is. What IQ tests purport to measure *cannot be observed directly*, and therefore cannot be measured directly. So we must not lose sight of the fact that IQ tests are *devised* by psychologists to correlate with something. How do they do this? By comparing a test's scores against something easy to measure -- rank in school for example. An IQ test that correlates poorly to performance in school would be considered "faulty", but one that correlates strongly to performancve in school would be considered "accurate".
In other words, IQ tests are only as meaningful as the outcomes they're deisgned to correlate with. An IQ test correlated to school success doesn't necessarily correlate precisely with "street smarts", many components of which are evolutionarily important (e.g. reading facial expressions).
Another thing to consider about how the test are calibrated is that the result is bound to be reliable ONLY near the mean, simply because confirmatory data out on the tails of the distribution is necessarily rare. So while I'd lend considerable credence to the 20 point spread between a 90 IQ and aa 110 IQ, I wouldn't lend the same credence to a difference between 140 and 160. I'd lend no credence whatsoever to the difference between a 140 and 160 IQ.
Basically, I consider distinctions betwen IQs over 125 unreliable, and distinctions between IQs over 135 as absolutely meaningless. There's no epistemological justfication for ranking people's intellectual abilities by IQ at that level. It's entirely possible that John Sunnunu would score 2.6 standard deviations higher than Stephen Hawking, but that's an artifact of the test, not reality.
If I were hiring you I'd be concerned that you would use your patents against me if we have a dispute later on. Of course I can work out a special agreement with you where you agree to automatically license to me any patents you hold. Or... I could hire that other guy I like about the same as you but who doesn't come with any special legal issues to resolve.
As for be *impressed* by the fact that you hold your own patents, I wouldn't be, given some of the silly patents that I've seen. Holding a patent is not, per se, impressive. Inventing something truly novel *that actually gets built into products* is impressive. It's accomplishment, not the recognition of the patent office.
My father-in-law designed the gyros used to guide the Apollo spacecraft. That's impressive, but so far as I know he never applied for any patents on his work. One of my friends from MIT designed a flat transfer case that can be retrofitted onto a transverse mounted front wheel drive car designs to make them 4WD. It's in use on cars by several manufacturers. It's patented, but that's not what makes it impressive. What makes it impressive is that it is a practical solution that nobody every thought of before and other engineers are eager to use.
In fact, I might well terminate a hiring interview if you began describing patents *you personally* held relating to my work. Why? Becuase if I don't hire you I don't want you coming after me for triple damages for knowingly infringing on your patent. Even if that patent won't hold up to litigation, I don't need that problem. It's the same reason that I tell coworkers barging into my office with "Have you seen this patent" on their lips to STFU. If it's really novel then I'm unlikely to infringe on it. If it's a bad patent then I'm better off not knowing about it.
You got it exactly right. Cities *concentrate* polution. Spreading the same populatioh over a wider area *disperses* the pollution.
Civil engineers used to say "dilution is the solution to pollution", but no longer -- except ironically. That's because there can be offsetting mechanmisms that concentrate a pollutant -- e.g. collecting in streams.
Cities actually make processing pollution and waste more financially efficient, although the price tag in absolute (rather than per capita) terms can be eye-popping. Here in Boston we went through a major shock about 25 years ago. We had had the lowest water and sewer rates in the country, living off massive infrastructure investments made generations prior; but we were dumping minimally treated sewage and sludge into the harbor. A lawsuit forced us to disband the agency which was running the sewage and water system, but also recreation like parks and skating rinks, and form a new quasi-independent authority . After 6.8 billion dollars spent on new treatment plants, we had more expensive than average water. 6.8 billion spread over 2.5 million ratepayers is a LOT of money $2750 / person over a decade or so. But it's cheaper than if those 2.5 million people were spread out evenly along the coast for a few hundred miles.
The level of power output he's claiming *should* be able to make the device self-sustaining. 1.5 Megawatt-hours over 32 days (768 hours) works out to 1953 watts. On a 120V circuit that'd be the equivalent of drawing 16 amps; 9 amps on a 220v circuilt.
If the *bulk* of the power is coming from fusion, then despite the inefficiencies it should be possible to get this machine to run itself without external power inputs after an initial "bootstrapping".
OR... scale the machine up to generate more power than a wall outlet can provide, but still "starts" off a wall outlet.
OR.... plug a fast electric tea kettle into the same circuit and see if the breaker trips. The fact that the machine "generates" power in the middle (ish) of the range supplied by a standard electric circuit is suspicious.
It really is unfortunate. Where there is room for a decent, effective animal rights group to help solve problems of animal abuse and cruel treatment, PETA has decided to completely occupy the space with its lunatic and extreme ideals, berating or silencing anyone that dares oppose their just and righteous mission.
To answer your question, if you mean *absolutely* prevent, the answer is nothing. But that's not the right question. The question is whether this will be transmitted at such a rate that it can result in sustained "endemic" transmission. "Endemic" is defined as a situation where each person infected in a location on average infects at least one other person. There may be a handful of transmissions from this index case, but it will fizzle out.
People worried about Ebola becoming endemic based on what's happening in West Africa have no idea how primitive conditions are in West Africa, where hospital workers often lack basic supplies like gloves, and are even reduced to re-using hypodermic needles. And people there who get to one of those horrible hospitals are the lucky ones. The health care and sanitation standards in the effected regions has been described as "medieval".
"Pulling out all the stops" sounds like a good idea, except if you think about it, it gives you absolutely no guidance about what you should do. Some of those "stops" would actually make things worse, and others would be a ridiculous overreaction. For example, should we quarrantine the state of Texas? After all there's been a case of transmission there. That's an overreaction.
Beware the Dunning Kruger effect. Not knowing anything about public health or tropical disease makes it really easy to design a containment program that sounds to you like it ought to work. But there aren't infinite dollars, even to fight Ebola. Every half-baked thing you do comes at the expense of something that would have been more effective. I've worked with the CDC, specifically the Fort Collins DVBID, which does vector borne stuff. The agency is full of PhDs and MDs who've spent their career studying tropical disease outbreaks and what to do about them.
People who think they know better remind me of this quote from Terry Pratchett:
Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands To Reason, and was now a post-graduate student of the University of What Some Bloke In The Pub Told Me.
For those who said "No need to panic"... are we there yet?
Nope. And we never will be. Panicked people make stupid decisions that make the situation worse.
One thing these outbreaks in Europe and the US show - we don't know enough about Ebola.
There is no "outbreak" in the US or Europe. And not knowing enough about Ebola is not the same as saying we know nothing about Ebola, and what we know says there is not going to be an outbreak here -- just a few isolated cases of transmission. Thus far there have been one confirmed case of endemic transmission in the US and one in Europe, both nurses. The other "cases" were people with other viral diseases. One transmission does not an "outbreak" make, except to people who are panicky. It's normal in a situation like this for "suspected cases" to pop up all over the place. What do you expect, with the media spreading panic.
The CDC is now saying that the transmission in TX was caused by a "breach of protocol", which is not surprising given that the barrior protocols are exacting and onerous.
The barrier protocols are quite onerous. It doesn't need to be idiocy, fatigue is enough to induce human error. Experts have pointed to this as a factor in the spread of Ebola in West Africa; aside from the fact that most people have access to medieval levels of health care, or facilities that lack things like latex gloves, supplying hospitals with equipment is not enough. The workload of health care workers has to be kept light enough that they can take the extreme precautions needed without making errors.
It is also possible that the barrior protocols have a bug somewhere in them.
SIGINT is the NSA's bailiwick and nothing in the mission statement of the NSA precludes using physical intrusion to obtain it.
What's more NSA is part of the DoD, and the DoD has been conducting physical intrusion to obtain SIGINT for years. In the Cold War American subs tapped undersea cables believed by the Soviets to be impervious. That was a joint NSA, Navy, CIA program, which makes sense.
It also makes sense that physical intrusion to obtain SIGINT would be a joint NSA/CIA operation, which means that someone with access to the NSA family jewels can also compromise CIA "assets" overseas.
Well, yes. Then if you see one call the public health authorities.
Common sense? Sure, but you'd be surprised at the degree to which what you'd think was common sense flies out the window when people encounter the unexpected.
In my experience what people do when confornted with the unexpected is take their cue from what other people around them are doing, and if that's nothing, they'll try to ignore whatever it is. I've even seen that happen with FIRE ALARMS. Instead of getting up and leaving, they look to see what other people are doing. And since those other people are doing the same thing, nobody is leaving. They're looking at each other, wondering whether that really IS a fire alarm. I once had to stick my head in the room on my way out and tell the people there that yes, it really is a fire alarm and they have to leave right away.
If people have been recently primed then perhaps they're more likely to do something reasonable. Of course that sometimes means lots more false positives, but that's a tradeoff.
Engineering is by inclination more conservative than science. That's because the failure of an engineering project is more catastrophic than the failure of a hypothesis, which after all is a result. But ultimately, after the engineer has done all he could to resolve competing priorities of cost, schedule, safety etc., it's whoever is bankrolling a project that decides to pull the trigger. The Apollo program was incredibly dangerous; more money and time might have mitigated that, but they were on a hard deadline to get to the moon by the end of the decade and were already spending an almost unthinkable fraction of the nation's GDP (0.8%) to do it. So they went ahead anyway. They lost three men on the ground and of the 33 they sent into space came within a whisker of killing five of them: all three on Apollo 13, and the LEM crew on Apollo 11 who almost ran out of fuel looking for a safe landing spot. And while you might point out that the Apollo 11 LEM crew still had 25 seconds of fuel left when they touched down, compare that to the margin of safety we set for aircraft, which can still glide if they lose engines.
While I agree broadly with the conclusion of the MIT critique, what I'm suggesting is that the engineering enterprise might have a degree of freedom they may not have considered, which is a willingness to take high levels of human casualties. The degree to which we value human life is a recent innovation. In the 1830s, trading ships began traveling between New England and California. That meant crossing Cape Horn in the winter, one way or another, and the casualty rates were appalling by modern standards. Sailors were routinely swept off the deck or fell from ice caked rigging to near instant death in freezing waters. But this was viewed as an acceptable price to pay in order to supply the New England shoe factories with cheaper leather.
While I don't think the proposed schedule is at all feasible, just from the time it will take to decide to *do* this thing, we might not necessarily have to wait until all the safety concerns are addressed to contemporary standards for things like ships and aircraft. Of course I wouldn't dream of boarding a ship to Mars unless I was 99% certain of surviving to death by old age, but some people might be happy to do it with 50%, or even less. Of course populating the mission with the wing suit contingent might have other unexpected effects...
Well, dismissing the suit because iof this kind of technicality is certainly feasible, but the reasoning behind it is circular.
If someone's legal status of "person" isn't recognized by the courts, then it is likely NOBODY can have the standing to bring suit on their behalf. There is, in a purely technical sense, there is nobody TO bring a suit on behalf of.
It turns out there are *other* grounds for establishing standing. It's not necessary to show that you are directly affected by some action to bring a First Amendment suit against a government entity for example. Such a suit brought on 14th Amendment "due process" grounds would put the court in a bind: it could not dismiss the suit because of standing without, in effect, making a ruling, or at least a determination.
We may well be forced to clarify the basis of indvidual "personhood" in the law by advancing technology; possibly AI, possibly even biotechnology. What if research into intelligence enhancement produced a chimp that could score above 100 on an IQ test that had been devised to handle humans with speech loss? Would it be reasonable to deny that chimp legal personhood while allowing someone who'd had a stroke to retain his? Why?
The state takes a protective stance toward children that it does not toward adults, because children while human are neither competent to exercise adult freedoms nor fully capable of defending themselves against adult humans. The state recognizes the human rights of children less in protecting their exercise of free rights or participation in the public sphere than by protecting them from arm and ensuring they are nurtured to some minimal standard.
Presumably the status sought for chips is similar. To turn your questions around, is it OK to capture children from their native environment as bush meat or for purposes of experimentation?
When you're apply reductio ad absurdum to a proposal, you ought to ensure the nature of that proposal is unchanged, otherwise you're just scoring emotional points.
Cherry browns are quieter than Cherry Blues. However this is far from silent. Browns are quite noisy in comparison to dome switch keyboards which are standard today. I bought a mechanical keyboard with Kailh brown switches because I thought I might use it in the library, but it's far too loud. From what I've seen the Cherry Browns are just as loud, but they have a slightly nicer sound.
The Cherry patents have run out and Kailh is making a less expensive knock-off that's appearing on some sub-$100 keyboards. I'm typing on a cheap Kailh brown keyboard now -- the nixeus moda. It's not bad. It takes me back to some of the early Macintosh keyboards -- chunky and simple. Because of the mechanical switches the keyboard is two inches thick. A wrist wrest is probably a good idea (remember those?).
After many years of typing on Thinkpad keyboards I've actually come to prefer the quietness and lesser key travel of a scissors switch to the old mechanical keyboards. I've gone back to mechanical however because those scissors switches just don't last long enough. Between six months and a year the switches start to fall apart.
To tell you the truth I find the noisiness of mechanical switches irritating. I have a very old Hewlett Packard AT clone keyboard in the attic, complete with giant DIN connector. I might give that a whirl; as I recall it felt almost as good as a model M but was much quieter. I think that might be close to my ideal keyboard, except that takes up a ton of space. I prefer a tenkeyless design.
Oh, for Pete's sake this is not the 1918 Flu; it's not going spread like wildfire in first world sanitary conditions. We're not a third world country, yet. Ebola only spreads from symptomatic patients, and possibly through corpses through West African funeral practices. In the US most people go to the hospital when they're sick and are prepared for burial by a professional undertaker.
It's highly unlikely that the deputy contracted the infection just by walking into a house full of asymptomatic people.
Anyhow, get used to it. Emergent infectious agents emerge because of two things: local ecological disruption, and international commerce. We're going to be seeing a lot more emergent pathogens in this century.
My bet, however, is on the re-emergence of an old, familiar killer. Yellow fever has on multiple occasions depopulated US cities prior to the 20th C. Dengue is making a comeback in the US, and it's transmitted by the same mosquito species: Aedes aegypti.
Don't ever consent to anything if you are the target of a criminal investigation or anything (like a traffic stop) that might turn into a criminal investigation. What you think they're going to do with your consent and what they intend to do may be two different things. You may be surprised at what the courts *allow* them to do with information you've given them permission to access it.
Be scrupulously cooperative with anything the cop is allowed to demand that you do. Don't argue, lecture or harangue, do everything you can to make an encounter with the police, smooth, courteous and above all, brief. But politely and firmly draw the line if they ask you for information about yourself other than your identity (which in some jurisdictions you are required to provide). Do not resist, because that can get you tased. Cooperate, but make it clear you don't consent, then sort things out later with your lawyer.
Be on your guard especially with a polite cop. Many of them are polite because they were brought up that way, but the smart ones know that courtesy is a powerful way to gain cooperation. They get you into a rhythm by politely asking for a series of reasonable things, then slipping in a request for something they can't compel, like you opening your trunk, granting them access to your cell phone, or letting them search your house.
It would be great if all cops abided by Peelian principles, but the "War on Drugs" has undermined the relationship between the police and the public. Fully ONE PERCENT of all Americans are behind bars, most of them on drug charges. If you, any of your family, or any of your friends have so much as smoked a joint, you can't afford to give the police any personal information at all.
You don't get it: inciting impotent rage is a *feature*. When you feel rage, everything becomes clear. That's *so* much more satisfying than gnawing, existential doubt.
Because this method returns a ranking that seems more intuitively "right"?
It's worth asking why that should be. Think about a rating scale of one to four stars. What does *averaging* those ratings mean? Yes, I know the *formula* for computing an average, but being able to *compute* an average isn't the same thing being able to *interpret* that average. Why? Because a two star rated item isn't really "twice as good" as one star, a four star rating isn't really "four times as good" as a one star or "twice as good" as a two star. In other words we're not measuring something like height, or number of widgets sold. We're *characterizing* something as shit, meh, OK, or awesome.
The method proposed is more mathematically defensible. It converts each 1 to 4 score into a coin flip (Bernoulli process for you probability geeks): positive or negative. This actually captures what the rating system does better than treating the ratings as meaningful numbers.
This doesn't automatically mean you'll get more intuitively pleasing results than using weighted averages; YMMV. But I think this system is bound to give more *consistently* intuitive results across applications and datasets. Weighting the average is an easy, but extremely arbitrary operation. As a compromise you might come up with a formula to tweak the score *toward the mean* depending on how few reviews there were; by adjusting the parameters you use you could probably get that formula to yield an intuitively satisfying ranking. The advantage of using a confidence interval as suggested is that approach is highly likely to yield a reasonable result out of the box, across a wide variety of datasets.
And after all, even if it looks like a "hot mess" to people who haven't taken advanced statistics, how hard is it to copy and paste a bit of code?
It's not an algorithm, except in the trivial sense. It's a formula for calculating an adjusted rating value that discounts extreme ratings for items with small numbers of reviewers.
This actually matches what you do intuitively when you see an item with a single rating of 5.0 at the top of a list, just above another item with an average rating of 4.9 from a thousand users. You mentally deduct a bit from the "top rated" item because you know it's probably too high. Likewise a 1.0 rating from a single user is probably too low, so you mentally add a bit to that.
The question is, how much to deduct or add from the score?
The approach suggested is to ask a slightly different question. Instead of "what is the average rating of the product", you ask "what percentage of positive ratings can I be 95% certain the product would score above have if *everyone* rated it?" It turns out there's a number of mathematical formulas that are supposed to tell you precisely that.
There's still a lot of arbitrariness in this approach. Why 95%? I'm reasonably sure that results would be just as intuitively reasonable if we chose 80% instead. But if 95% seems to generate intuitively reasonable results there's no particular reason to monkey with that parameter.
BUT, I think, the level of arbitrariness involved probably means we could choose a simpler approximation than the Wilson interval if we could dream one up. The more familiar Wald interval taught in basic statistics courses is somewhat simpler, but not so much that it's worth worrying about, at least not if you're doing the calculation on a database server which typically has a few CPU cycles to spare.
If I were to attempt something like this on a massive scale in an environment where CPU cycles were precious, I'd probably devise some kind of simple algebraic scaling formula that tweaked scores toward the mean, depending on the number of ratings. The results wouldn't be quite as good as the Wald or Wilson intervals, but maybe not so much less good that anyone would notice.
I suspect the restriction is impossible to enforce, because it's almost certainly the case that the facial recognition isn't performed on the device itself. So it's a bit like saying you can't use the things for pornography; you'd have to know somehow that the user intends to pleasure himself later by looking at pictures of ladies' shoes.
It's a bit too late on that score anway. Having boots on the ground is an anachronism, even if they've got high tech wearables. In 2000 Scotland Yard was able to foil the Millennium Dome diamond heist by tracking all the gang's preparations using a network of public and private security cameras. There was almost no in-person surveillance. The first time the gang was physically near the police was when they were surrounded by an armed response team inside the exhibit hall.
Here in the US, the NYPD has acquired similar, possibly even more advanced capabilities. They can for example find all the six foot-ish blond men wearing blue sweaters in a one block radius of Penn Station then run their images through facial recognition software, then follow their suspect almost anywhere in Manhattan with no chance of being detected.
In comparison to camera networks, having a cop wearing Google glasses isn't that big a deal. A lot of our legal privacy protections are based on the assumption it's too labor intensive to follow people around for frivolous purposes. An army of cops with cameras is expensive to maintain; a network of surveillance cameras is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out this graph.
The nuimbers of prisoners has not declined significantly since 2009. This doesn't mean the bubble hasn't burst, the nature of the bubble resists bursting. People can leave the housing market, but prisoners can't leave the prison market.
Still, anyone who invested big-time in prisons back in 2008 or so on the basis of 30 years of exponential prison population growth was just stupid. We were approaching 1% of the Amercian population incarcerated, how much higher did they expect that to go?
I have no sympathy with a town that bet its financial future on prisons while its schools rate minimally acceptable.
and America has always valued the cantankerous Individual above the glorious Collective, that other cultures prefer...
When I was in college I took several courses from the famous scholar of Japanese literature, Howard Hibbet. In one of the classes there was student who liked to talk about Japanese culture's "Samurai values". The professor listened politely to this student, until one day he said somethign that has stuck with me for thirty years: "You should be careful about uncritically accepting the way a culture likes to present itself."
I have found this to be very true, even of corporate cultures.
Example: Hawking: 150ish IQ, John Sununu 190.
Many years ago there was a brief vogue among a few companies for psych testing potential employees. So I paid to have myself tested so I'd know what my potential employers "knew". Among other things, the tests informed me that I have an IQ that is 4.3 standard deviations above the mean.
This got me thinking. Which is more likely, that I'm smarter than 99.999% of the population, or that the test score was bogus? It should be obvious that it's far more likely that my test results were bogus!
Just because we can assign a single number to a person's intelligence the way we can to that person's height or weight doesn't mean that that number is as objective as height or weight is. What IQ tests purport to measure *cannot be observed directly*, and therefore cannot be measured directly. So we must not lose sight of the fact that IQ tests are *devised* by psychologists to correlate with something. How do they do this? By comparing a test's scores against something easy to measure -- rank in school for example. An IQ test that correlates poorly to performance in school would be considered "faulty", but one that correlates strongly to performancve in school would be considered "accurate".
In other words, IQ tests are only as meaningful as the outcomes they're deisgned to correlate with. An IQ test correlated to school success doesn't necessarily correlate precisely with "street smarts", many components of which are evolutionarily important (e.g. reading facial expressions).
Another thing to consider about how the test are calibrated is that the result is bound to be reliable ONLY near the mean, simply because confirmatory data out on the tails of the distribution is necessarily rare. So while I'd lend considerable credence to the 20 point spread between a 90 IQ and aa 110 IQ, I wouldn't lend the same credence to a difference between 140 and 160. I'd lend no credence whatsoever to the difference between a 140 and 160 IQ.
Basically, I consider distinctions betwen IQs over 125 unreliable, and distinctions between IQs over 135 as absolutely meaningless. There's no epistemological justfication for ranking people's intellectual abilities by IQ at that level. It's entirely possible that John Sunnunu would score 2.6 standard deviations higher than Stephen Hawking, but that's an artifact of the test, not reality.
Your observation would be insightful if holding a software patent demosntrated ability in the field.
Worse than useless in fact.
If I were hiring you I'd be concerned that you would use your patents against me if we have a dispute later on. Of course I can work out a special agreement with you where you agree to automatically license to me any patents you hold. Or... I could hire that other guy I like about the same as you but who doesn't come with any special legal issues to resolve.
As for be *impressed* by the fact that you hold your own patents, I wouldn't be, given some of the silly patents that I've seen. Holding a patent is not, per se, impressive. Inventing something truly novel *that actually gets built into products* is impressive. It's accomplishment, not the recognition of the patent office.
My father-in-law designed the gyros used to guide the Apollo spacecraft. That's impressive, but so far as I know he never applied for any patents on his work. One of my friends from MIT designed a flat transfer case that can be retrofitted onto a transverse mounted front wheel drive car designs to make them 4WD. It's in use on cars by several manufacturers. It's patented, but that's not what makes it impressive. What makes it impressive is that it is a practical solution that nobody every thought of before and other engineers are eager to use.
In fact, I might well terminate a hiring interview if you began describing patents *you personally* held relating to my work. Why? Becuase if I don't hire you I don't want you coming after me for triple damages for knowingly infringing on your patent. Even if that patent won't hold up to litigation, I don't need that problem. It's the same reason that I tell coworkers barging into my office with "Have you seen this patent" on their lips to STFU. If it's really novel then I'm unlikely to infringe on it. If it's a bad patent then I'm better off not knowing about it.
You got it exactly right. Cities *concentrate* polution. Spreading the same populatioh over a wider area *disperses* the pollution.
Civil engineers used to say "dilution is the solution to pollution", but no longer -- except ironically. That's because there can be offsetting mechanmisms that concentrate a pollutant -- e.g. collecting in streams.
Cities actually make processing pollution and waste more financially efficient, although the price tag in absolute (rather than per capita) terms can be eye-popping. Here in Boston we went through a major shock about 25 years ago. We had had the lowest water and sewer rates in the country, living off massive infrastructure investments made generations prior; but we were dumping minimally treated sewage and sludge into the harbor. A lawsuit forced us to disband the agency which was running the sewage and water system, but also recreation like parks and skating rinks, and form a new quasi-independent authority . After 6.8 billion dollars spent on new treatment plants, we had more expensive than average water. 6.8 billion spread over 2.5 million ratepayers is a LOT of money $2750 / person over a decade or so. But it's cheaper than if those 2.5 million people were spread out evenly along the coast for a few hundred miles.
The level of power output he's claiming *should* be able to make the device self-sustaining. 1.5 Megawatt-hours over 32 days (768 hours) works out to 1953 watts. On a 120V circuit that'd be the equivalent of drawing 16 amps; 9 amps on a 220v circuilt.
If the *bulk* of the power is coming from fusion, then despite the inefficiencies it should be possible to get this machine to run itself without external power inputs after an initial "bootstrapping".
OR ... scale the machine up to generate more power than a wall outlet can provide, but still "starts" off a wall outlet.
OR .... plug a fast electric tea kettle into the same circuit and see if the breaker trips. The fact that the machine "generates" power in the middle (ish) of the range supplied by a standard electric circuit is suspicious.
It really is unfortunate. Where there is room for a decent, effective animal rights group to help solve problems of animal abuse and cruel treatment, PETA has decided to completely occupy the space with its lunatic and extreme ideals, berating or silencing anyone that dares oppose their just and righteous mission.
Did the ASPCA go out of business?
To answer your question, if you mean *absolutely* prevent, the answer is nothing. But that's not the right question. The question is whether this will be transmitted at such a rate that it can result in sustained "endemic" transmission. "Endemic" is defined as a situation where each person infected in a location on average infects at least one other person. There may be a handful of transmissions from this index case, but it will fizzle out.
People worried about Ebola becoming endemic based on what's happening in West Africa have no idea how primitive conditions are in West Africa, where hospital workers often lack basic supplies like gloves, and are even reduced to re-using hypodermic needles. And people there who get to one of those horrible hospitals are the lucky ones. The health care and sanitation standards in the effected regions has been described as "medieval".
"Pulling out all the stops" sounds like a good idea, except if you think about it, it gives you absolutely no guidance about what you should do. Some of those "stops" would actually make things worse, and others would be a ridiculous overreaction. For example, should we quarrantine the state of Texas? After all there's been a case of transmission there. That's an overreaction.
Beware the Dunning Kruger effect. Not knowing anything about public health or tropical disease makes it really easy to design a containment program that sounds to you like it ought to work. But there aren't infinite dollars, even to fight Ebola. Every half-baked thing you do comes at the expense of something that would have been more effective. I've worked with the CDC, specifically the Fort Collins DVBID, which does vector borne stuff. The agency is full of PhDs and MDs who've spent their career studying tropical disease outbreaks and what to do about them.
People who think they know better remind me of this quote from Terry Pratchett:
Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands To Reason, and was now a post-graduate student of the University of What Some Bloke In The Pub Told Me.
Because, to paraphrase the late computer science pioneer Alan Perlis, Alice in Wonderland is the best book ever written about anything.
For those who said "No need to panic" ... are we there yet?
Nope. And we never will be. Panicked people make stupid decisions that make the situation worse.
One thing these outbreaks in Europe and the US show - we don't know enough about Ebola.
There is no "outbreak" in the US or Europe. And not knowing enough about Ebola is not the same as saying we know nothing about Ebola, and what we know says there is not going to be an outbreak here -- just a few isolated cases of transmission. Thus far there have been one confirmed case of endemic transmission in the US and one in Europe, both nurses. The other "cases" were people with other viral diseases. One transmission does not an "outbreak" make, except to people who are panicky. It's normal in a situation like this for "suspected cases" to pop up all over the place. What do you expect, with the media spreading panic.
The CDC is now saying that the transmission in TX was caused by a "breach of protocol", which is not surprising given that the barrior protocols are exacting and onerous.
The barrier protocols are quite onerous. It doesn't need to be idiocy, fatigue is enough to induce human error. Experts have pointed to this as a factor in the spread of Ebola in West Africa; aside from the fact that most people have access to medieval levels of health care, or facilities that lack things like latex gloves, supplying hospitals with equipment is not enough. The workload of health care workers has to be kept light enough that they can take the extreme precautions needed without making errors.
It is also possible that the barrior protocols have a bug somewhere in them.
SIGINT is the NSA's bailiwick and nothing in the mission statement of the NSA precludes using physical intrusion to obtain it.
What's more NSA is part of the DoD, and the DoD has been conducting physical intrusion to obtain SIGINT for years. In the Cold War American subs tapped undersea cables believed by the Soviets to be impervious. That was a joint NSA, Navy, CIA program, which makes sense.
It also makes sense that physical intrusion to obtain SIGINT would be a joint NSA/CIA operation, which means that someone with access to the NSA family jewels can also compromise CIA "assets" overseas.
Well, yes. Then if you see one call the public health authorities.
Common sense? Sure, but you'd be surprised at the degree to which what you'd think was common sense flies out the window when people encounter the unexpected.
In my experience what people do when confornted with the unexpected is take their cue from what other people around them are doing, and if that's nothing, they'll try to ignore whatever it is. I've even seen that happen with FIRE ALARMS. Instead of getting up and leaving, they look to see what other people are doing. And since those other people are doing the same thing, nobody is leaving. They're looking at each other, wondering whether that really IS a fire alarm. I once had to stick my head in the room on my way out and tell the people there that yes, it really is a fire alarm and they have to leave right away.
If people have been recently primed then perhaps they're more likely to do something reasonable. Of course that sometimes means lots more false positives, but that's a tradeoff.
Except this is engineering, not science.
Engineering is by inclination more conservative than science. That's because the failure of an engineering project is more catastrophic than the failure of a hypothesis, which after all is a result. But ultimately, after the engineer has done all he could to resolve competing priorities of cost, schedule, safety etc., it's whoever is bankrolling a project that decides to pull the trigger. The Apollo program was incredibly dangerous; more money and time might have mitigated that, but they were on a hard deadline to get to the moon by the end of the decade and were already spending an almost unthinkable fraction of the nation's GDP (0.8%) to do it. So they went ahead anyway. They lost three men on the ground and of the 33 they sent into space came within a whisker of killing five of them: all three on Apollo 13, and the LEM crew on Apollo 11 who almost ran out of fuel looking for a safe landing spot. And while you might point out that the Apollo 11 LEM crew still had 25 seconds of fuel left when they touched down, compare that to the margin of safety we set for aircraft, which can still glide if they lose engines.
While I agree broadly with the conclusion of the MIT critique, what I'm suggesting is that the engineering enterprise might have a degree of freedom they may not have considered, which is a willingness to take high levels of human casualties. The degree to which we value human life is a recent innovation. In the 1830s, trading ships began traveling between New England and California. That meant crossing Cape Horn in the winter, one way or another, and the casualty rates were appalling by modern standards. Sailors were routinely swept off the deck or fell from ice caked rigging to near instant death in freezing waters. But this was viewed as an acceptable price to pay in order to supply the New England shoe factories with cheaper leather.
While I don't think the proposed schedule is at all feasible, just from the time it will take to decide to *do* this thing, we might not necessarily have to wait until all the safety concerns are addressed to contemporary standards for things like ships and aircraft. Of course I wouldn't dream of boarding a ship to Mars unless I was 99% certain of surviving to death by old age, but some people might be happy to do it with 50%, or even less. Of course populating the mission with the wing suit contingent might have other unexpected effects...
Well, dismissing the suit because iof this kind of technicality is certainly feasible, but the reasoning behind it is circular.
If someone's legal status of "person" isn't recognized by the courts, then it is likely NOBODY can have the standing to bring suit on their behalf. There is, in a purely technical sense, there is nobody TO bring a suit on behalf of.
It turns out there are *other* grounds for establishing standing. It's not necessary to show that you are directly affected by some action to bring a First Amendment suit against a government entity for example. Such a suit brought on 14th Amendment "due process" grounds would put the court in a bind: it could not dismiss the suit because of standing without, in effect, making a ruling, or at least a determination.
We may well be forced to clarify the basis of indvidual "personhood" in the law by advancing technology; possibly AI, possibly even biotechnology. What if research into intelligence enhancement produced a chimp that could score above 100 on an IQ test that had been devised to handle humans with speech loss? Would it be reasonable to deny that chimp legal personhood while allowing someone who'd had a stroke to retain his? Why?
Well do children get to vote? Hold office?
The state takes a protective stance toward children that it does not toward adults, because children while human are neither competent to exercise adult freedoms nor fully capable of defending themselves against adult humans. The state recognizes the human rights of children less in protecting their exercise of free rights or participation in the public sphere than by protecting them from arm and ensuring they are nurtured to some minimal standard.
Presumably the status sought for chips is similar. To turn your questions around, is it OK to capture children from their native environment as bush meat or for purposes of experimentation?
When you're apply reductio ad absurdum to a proposal, you ought to ensure the nature of that proposal is unchanged, otherwise you're just scoring emotional points.
Cherry browns are quieter than Cherry Blues. However this is far from silent. Browns are quite noisy in comparison to dome switch keyboards which are standard today. I bought a mechanical keyboard with Kailh brown switches because I thought I might use it in the library, but it's far too loud. From what I've seen the Cherry Browns are just as loud, but they have a slightly nicer sound.
The Cherry patents have run out and Kailh is making a less expensive knock-off that's appearing on some sub-$100 keyboards. I'm typing on a cheap Kailh brown keyboard now -- the nixeus moda. It's not bad. It takes me back to some of the early Macintosh keyboards -- chunky and simple. Because of the mechanical switches the keyboard is two inches thick. A wrist wrest is probably a good idea (remember those?).
After many years of typing on Thinkpad keyboards I've actually come to prefer the quietness and lesser key travel of a scissors switch to the old mechanical keyboards. I've gone back to mechanical however because those scissors switches just don't last long enough. Between six months and a year the switches start to fall apart.
To tell you the truth I find the noisiness of mechanical switches irritating. I have a very old Hewlett Packard AT clone keyboard in the attic, complete with giant DIN connector. I might give that a whirl; as I recall it felt almost as good as a model M but was much quieter. I think that might be close to my ideal keyboard, except that takes up a ton of space. I prefer a tenkeyless design.
Oh, for Pete's sake this is not the 1918 Flu; it's not going spread like wildfire in first world sanitary conditions. We're not a third world country, yet. Ebola only spreads from symptomatic patients, and possibly through corpses through West African funeral practices. In the US most people go to the hospital when they're sick and are prepared for burial by a professional undertaker.
It's highly unlikely that the deputy contracted the infection just by walking into a house full of asymptomatic people.
Anyhow, get used to it. Emergent infectious agents emerge because of two things: local ecological disruption, and international commerce. We're going to be seeing a lot more emergent pathogens in this century.
My bet, however, is on the re-emergence of an old, familiar killer. Yellow fever has on multiple occasions depopulated US cities prior to the 20th C. Dengue is making a comeback in the US, and it's transmitted by the same mosquito species: Aedes aegypti.
I thought the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy was that it doesn't work?
No, the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that it doesn't work for long.
Don't ever consent to anything if you are the target of a criminal investigation or anything (like a traffic stop) that might turn into a criminal investigation. What you think they're going to do with your consent and what they intend to do may be two different things. You may be surprised at what the courts *allow* them to do with information you've given them permission to access it.
Be scrupulously cooperative with anything the cop is allowed to demand that you do. Don't argue, lecture or harangue, do everything you can to make an encounter with the police, smooth, courteous and above all, brief. But politely and firmly draw the line if they ask you for information about yourself other than your identity (which in some jurisdictions you are required to provide). Do not resist, because that can get you tased. Cooperate, but make it clear you don't consent, then sort things out later with your lawyer.
Be on your guard especially with a polite cop. Many of them are polite because they were brought up that way, but the smart ones know that courtesy is a powerful way to gain cooperation. They get you into a rhythm by politely asking for a series of reasonable things, then slipping in a request for something they can't compel, like you opening your trunk, granting them access to your cell phone, or letting them search your house.
It would be great if all cops abided by Peelian principles, but the "War on Drugs" has undermined the relationship between the police and the public. Fully ONE PERCENT of all Americans are behind bars, most of them on drug charges. If you, any of your family, or any of your friends have so much as smoked a joint, you can't afford to give the police any personal information at all.
You don't get it: inciting impotent rage is a *feature*. When you feel rage, everything becomes clear. That's *so* much more satisfying than gnawing, existential doubt.
Because this method returns a ranking that seems more intuitively "right"?
It's worth asking why that should be. Think about a rating scale of one to four stars. What does *averaging* those ratings mean? Yes, I know the *formula* for computing an average, but being able to *compute* an average isn't the same thing being able to *interpret* that average. Why? Because a two star rated item isn't really "twice as good" as one star, a four star rating isn't really "four times as good" as a one star or "twice as good" as a two star. In other words we're not measuring something like height, or number of widgets sold. We're *characterizing* something as shit, meh, OK, or awesome.
The method proposed is more mathematically defensible. It converts each 1 to 4 score into a coin flip (Bernoulli process for you probability geeks): positive or negative. This actually captures what the rating system does better than treating the ratings as meaningful numbers.
This doesn't automatically mean you'll get more intuitively pleasing results than using weighted averages; YMMV. But I think this system is bound to give more *consistently* intuitive results across applications and datasets. Weighting the average is an easy, but extremely arbitrary operation. As a compromise you might come up with a formula to tweak the score *toward the mean* depending on how few reviews there were; by adjusting the parameters you use you could probably get that formula to yield an intuitively satisfying ranking. The advantage of using a confidence interval as suggested is that approach is highly likely to yield a reasonable result out of the box, across a wide variety of datasets.
And after all, even if it looks like a "hot mess" to people who haven't taken advanced statistics, how hard is it to copy and paste a bit of code?
It's not an algorithm, except in the trivial sense. It's a formula for calculating an adjusted rating value that discounts extreme ratings for items with small numbers of reviewers.
This actually matches what you do intuitively when you see an item with a single rating of 5.0 at the top of a list, just above another item with an average rating of 4.9 from a thousand users. You mentally deduct a bit from the "top rated" item because you know it's probably too high. Likewise a 1.0 rating from a single user is probably too low, so you mentally add a bit to that.
The question is, how much to deduct or add from the score?
The approach suggested is to ask a slightly different question. Instead of "what is the average rating of the product", you ask "what percentage of positive ratings can I be 95% certain the product would score above have if *everyone* rated it?" It turns out there's a number of mathematical formulas that are supposed to tell you precisely that.
There's still a lot of arbitrariness in this approach. Why 95%? I'm reasonably sure that results would be just as intuitively reasonable if we chose 80% instead. But if 95% seems to generate intuitively reasonable results there's no particular reason to monkey with that parameter.
BUT, I think, the level of arbitrariness involved probably means we could choose a simpler approximation than the Wilson interval if we could dream one up. The more familiar Wald interval taught in basic statistics courses is somewhat simpler, but not so much that it's worth worrying about, at least not if you're doing the calculation on a database server which typically has a few CPU cycles to spare.
If I were to attempt something like this on a massive scale in an environment where CPU cycles were precious, I'd probably devise some kind of simple algebraic scaling formula that tweaked scores toward the mean, depending on the number of ratings. The results wouldn't be quite as good as the Wald or Wilson intervals, but maybe not so much less good that anyone would notice.
I suspect the restriction is impossible to enforce, because it's almost certainly the case that the facial recognition isn't performed on the device itself. So it's a bit like saying you can't use the things for pornography; you'd have to know somehow that the user intends to pleasure himself later by looking at pictures of ladies' shoes.
It's a bit too late on that score anway. Having boots on the ground is an anachronism, even if they've got high tech wearables. In 2000 Scotland Yard was able to foil the Millennium Dome diamond heist by tracking all the gang's preparations using a network of public and private security cameras. There was almost no in-person surveillance. The first time the gang was physically near the police was when they were surrounded by an armed response team inside the exhibit hall.
Here in the US, the NYPD has acquired similar, possibly even more advanced capabilities. They can for example find all the six foot-ish blond men wearing blue sweaters in a one block radius of Penn Station then run their images through facial recognition software, then follow their suspect almost anywhere in Manhattan with no chance of being detected.
In comparison to camera networks, having a cop wearing Google glasses isn't that big a deal. A lot of our legal privacy protections are based on the assumption it's too labor intensive to follow people around for frivolous purposes. An army of cops with cameras is expensive to maintain; a network of surveillance cameras is not.