A 95% confidence interval is the usual convention, but there's nothing sacred about that number. In my view, it's usually more important to consider expected loss, where you multiply the probability of something going wrong by how much damage would occur for each possible outcome. Let's take a walk and see why you might want a much tighter CI for something like this:
At some point, an automated car will be involved in an accident that causes a fatality. It might be the other car's fault, it might be equipment failure, it might be the AI's fault, but it will happen. People are not very good at understanding risk or teasing out causality, so there will be an outcry calling for heads at Google to roll for this. People will see a new process that takes away control from them, freak out, think that they would do better with their own hands on the steering wheel, and there will be a major push to ban driverless cars. States like California might not give in, since their economy is closely tied into tech companies, but red states? Fuggedaboutit. Emotions trump statistics, and the longer we have to adjust to the idea of driverless cars, the less likely it is that there will be a strong resistance. At this point, we're considering a 5% chance that we were wrong and that driverless cars aren't demonstrably better than humans behind the wheel. A 5% probability of driverless cars being just as unsafe as manually driven cars, multiplied by the lives lost because of delays in implementation after the general public freaks out, is a pretty big expected loss. Truth be told, this probably understates the expected loss, because we're shooting to prove that driverless cars are safer, but it will take a lot of time before we know how much safer. We've been driving for a century, our country is permeated with the car culture, and we have a reasonable grasp of the risks involved (from a statistical, not emotional, level). It will take a while to accumulate the same kind of data on driverless cars.
This also considers a driverless car surrounded by cars with human drivers in the state of California. It's important to keep the scope of the testing in context. It's probably true that we can extend this to the roads in various conditions with varying compositions of driver+driverless cars, but it's easy to see how many people will have reservations about that. Heck, look at this thread.
I can't wait for driverless cars to roll out en masse, not least because of how many lives they will save, but it really is the cultural and legal side that will hold things up across the country. If we have to wait a little longer for the rollout to happen because we're looking for a higher standard of proof, that might be an optimal course of action once you consider that we're dealing with the general public.
WPS (the SAS-compatible software produced by WPL) is a pretty darned good SAS clone for a fraction of the cost. I'm positive that they thought suing was a good business decision, even if they knew they didn't have a leg to stand on. The impact of WPL's existence is going to hurt their bottom line much more than what they had to pay their legal team. I don't have anything in the fight (other than being a user of both), I'm just happy to see something that'll either make SAS drop the price, or that we've found a good replacement.
Can someone explain the particular benefits of having a 64-bit browser? I particularly appreciate the fact that Firefox currently can't hog all of my RAM when something (oftentimes Flash) spirals out of control. Do web developers use memory beyond the 4 gig limit, and is this a godsend for them?
"Innumeracy" and others are very good general introductions to how math is used in the real world. The kids who are going to do an extra-credit reading list will likely be right at the target level you're going for. A lot of them are also structured so you can take in a couple small chapters at a time and move on.
I'd recognize that Breakfast Club anywhere! Granted, the local cops don't exactly have the reputation of being the best and the brightest as it is, and that just reinforces it.
Ah, mea culpa. While it is true that he didn't mention it in his writeup, I did have to click through the page you linked to read his account of the day's activities.
Nowhere in his original account (http://www.duanek.name/Amtrak/index.htm) does he state that he was taking the pictures for the contest. It seems to be that the journalist chose to heavily emphasize the contest angle, perhaps to go for a more compelling story. Unfortunately, the journalist's choice to spin it as a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, he missed the bigger picture. Photographers are increasingly faced with arbitrary restrictions and demands that are not based upon the law, but based on fear. Forums at places like dpreview.com and flickr are often abuzz with stories of cops making unreasonable demands.
I wish I hadn't forfeited my mod points trying to cram in a Penny Arcade link earlier, so rather than mod you up I'll respond.
The less-than-perfect launch seems to be a minor point of criticism. I think some of the fundamental game choices are the object of their ire. Choosing to artificially limit access to content seems to be the main objection. It makes it more similar to real life, but it also makes it much more frustrating to people. It's already selectively enhancing part of real life, why can't it eliminate scarcity? If there's a technological reason that prohibits that, then hopefully we'll find out about it sooner or later and adjust expectations for the (server-side and client-side) hardware accordingly.
It seems to work splendidly for more narrow objectives, such as having a meeting place for a clan. I hadn't heard that brought up before, and that's a really good point. However, as a general multifaceted virtual world it seems to fall short of its aims.
As a final note, I don't have any current-gen consoles, and I really only use my Xbox for a living room media player, so I can't really say I have fanboy-like opinions for or against the PS3. These are just some comments from someone bored at home.
RSS feeds for the photographer geek: Strobist http://www.strobist.com/ Off-camera lighting, and possibly the geekiest popular photography blog around. Give this site a serious look.
Joe McNally http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/ National Geographic shooter, photojournalist extraordinaire. Less about the mechanics than Strobist.
Library of Congress http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ The Library of Congress has been putting their archives on Flickr. Some are slightly dull, but it's an interesting exposure to first half of the 20th century.
These all link to the main site, where you should hopefully be able to find the RSS feed.
"If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of Hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater."
My solution to finding time has been to cut out/. and sites like it. I'm pretty sure I haven't been here in over a year, and I'll stop checking it after this story fades away. It's amazing how much time one recovers in doing that.
We actually have two trebuchets, a mini-treb and our full-featured one. The links to picture galleries are here with the mini-treb in the mentor/mentee gallery, and the main trebuchet is in the Ft. Wayne galleries, the Elkhart gallery, and obviously the trebuchet gallery.
Dang it, make that "Although it hasn't been tested yet, we are pretty sure that we will be able to tow our trebuchet with the couch, albeit very slowly."
We are also blessed with the advantage of numbers. Because the club is very diverse with regards to people's individual talents, people often mix up what they're involved with so that they don't get burnt out.
Yeah, it is the tractor transmission. Although it hasn't been tested yet, we pretty sure that we will be able to tow our trebuchet with the couch, albeit very slowly.
Note: This is not a small trebuchet by any means, the counterweight is 750 lbs. and I would guess that the frame moves it close to a half-ton.
If you're looking for a great aggregate of news sites put into context, I highly recommend The Note. While the ABC News site itself has a leftward bias, The Note stands out for being pretty impartial, and extremely thorough. Now that college is back in session, I don't have time to visit it as often, because it's a long read, especially if you follow all of the links.
For a good analysis of things, I prefer the Christian Science Monitor. The bias vacillates, simply because of the variety of guest columnists.
Dork, yes, but in different ways. Until fencing came along, I hadn't really been involved in a competitive sport since 8th grade; high school created a gap in my competitive physical activity.
I also manage to go to keggers (though I don't drink), and can reasonably fake being one of the popular kids.
I'm just urging people to not get locked into what they did in high school.
I'm not exactly a sage old man (I'm merely a sophomore), but there are some things I've learned: 1) Dorms are your friend, and your home to friends: Regardless of what you're like, you're bound to find someone with whom you can hang out. Don't be afraid to knock on some doors. 2) Colleges have lots of neat convocations and clubs...join them and check things out. You'll probably try and join different stuff from the things you were involved in back in high school. I've switched from somone involved in band and speech to someone in fencing and our physics chapter. 3) Study. If you're on/., you're probably more interested in a college's academic program more than its party school ranking. It's a lot harder than what you're used to (and this comes from someone who blew off high school and was fine). Don't skip classes either, there's a lot of money invested in that 8 AM lecture (or 7:30 if you go to Purdue). 4) Have fun. Your life takes on a whole new meaning, it truly becomes yours in a way that wasn't possible back in high school. Make the most of it.
This is the perfect time to plug StepMania, an open source version you can get here. I'm not a developer, just someone that enjoys short techno songs and a frantic workout.
It's about actually punishing the crime. This might filter out a few people who would've committed a crime, but that's only a secondary function of the law. Given the greater damage incurred by attacks (worms and viruses being a key component of that), it seems fit to more severely punish those who take a part in this increased damage.
Slashdot Mirror
A 95% confidence interval is the usual convention, but there's nothing sacred about that number. In my view, it's usually more important to consider expected loss, where you multiply the probability of something going wrong by how much damage would occur for each possible outcome. Let's take a walk and see why you might want a much tighter CI for something like this:
At some point, an automated car will be involved in an accident that causes a fatality. It might be the other car's fault, it might be equipment failure, it might be the AI's fault, but it will happen. People are not very good at understanding risk or teasing out causality, so there will be an outcry calling for heads at Google to roll for this. People will see a new process that takes away control from them, freak out, think that they would do better with their own hands on the steering wheel, and there will be a major push to ban driverless cars. States like California might not give in, since their economy is closely tied into tech companies, but red states? Fuggedaboutit. Emotions trump statistics, and the longer we have to adjust to the idea of driverless cars, the less likely it is that there will be a strong resistance. At this point, we're considering a 5% chance that we were wrong and that driverless cars aren't demonstrably better than humans behind the wheel. A 5% probability of driverless cars being just as unsafe as manually driven cars, multiplied by the lives lost because of delays in implementation after the general public freaks out, is a pretty big expected loss. Truth be told, this probably understates the expected loss, because we're shooting to prove that driverless cars are safer, but it will take a lot of time before we know how much safer. We've been driving for a century, our country is permeated with the car culture, and we have a reasonable grasp of the risks involved (from a statistical, not emotional, level). It will take a while to accumulate the same kind of data on driverless cars.
This also considers a driverless car surrounded by cars with human drivers in the state of California. It's important to keep the scope of the testing in context. It's probably true that we can extend this to the roads in various conditions with varying compositions of driver+driverless cars, but it's easy to see how many people will have reservations about that. Heck, look at this thread.
I can't wait for driverless cars to roll out en masse, not least because of how many lives they will save, but it really is the cultural and legal side that will hold things up across the country. If we have to wait a little longer for the rollout to happen because we're looking for a higher standard of proof, that might be an optimal course of action once you consider that we're dealing with the general public.
Yes, IAAStatistician.
WPS (the SAS-compatible software produced by WPL) is a pretty darned good SAS clone for a fraction of the cost. I'm positive that they thought suing was a good business decision, even if they knew they didn't have a leg to stand on. The impact of WPL's existence is going to hurt their bottom line much more than what they had to pay their legal team. I don't have anything in the fight (other than being a user of both), I'm just happy to see something that'll either make SAS drop the price, or that we've found a good replacement.
Check out Armadillo, it's goal is to make dealing with matrices in C++ nearly as simple as Matlab:
http://arma.sourceforge.net/
There's even a handy-dandy conversion chart: http://arma.sourceforge.net/docs.html#syntax
You could also "hire" an "editor" to "clean up" your superfluous use of "quotation marks".
Can someone explain the particular benefits of having a 64-bit browser? I particularly appreciate the fact that Firefox currently can't hog all of my RAM when something (oftentimes Flash) spirals out of control. Do web developers use memory beyond the 4 gig limit, and is this a godsend for them?
...was the best part of my day. Of course, that's just because they said "Thatmushroom is as big as a Cadillac!"
That's right, I was just called morbidly obese by Blizzard. And it was awesome.
"Innumeracy" and others are very good general introductions to how math is used in the real world. The kids who are going to do an extra-credit reading list will likely be right at the target level you're going for. A lot of them are also structured so you can take in a couple small chapters at a time and move on.
I'd recognize that Breakfast Club anywhere! Granted, the local cops don't exactly have the reputation of being the best and the brightest as it is, and that just reinforces it.
Ah, mea culpa. While it is true that he didn't mention it in his writeup, I did have to click through the page you linked to read his account of the day's activities.
Nowhere in his original account (http://www.duanek.name/Amtrak/index.htm) does he state that he was taking the pictures for the contest. It seems to be that the journalist chose to heavily emphasize the contest angle, perhaps to go for a more compelling story. Unfortunately, the journalist's choice to spin it as a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, he missed the bigger picture. Photographers are increasingly faced with arbitrary restrictions and demands that are not based upon the law, but based on fear. Forums at places like dpreview.com and flickr are often abuzz with stories of cops making unreasonable demands.
The only way to counteract this is with knowledge. If you happen to like taking pictures of subjects in public spaces, http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm is an enlightening read. This link (http://www.kantor.com/blog/Legal-Rights-of-Photographers.pdf) says essentially the same thing, but lays it out with a real-world example.
Also, to the editors, perhaps having a link to the current version of the contest (http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/am2Copy/Hot_Deals_Page&c=am2Copy&cid=1093554057903&ssid=224) would be good. I was skeptical that they actually had continued running the contest until I found that.
I wish I hadn't forfeited my mod points trying to cram in a Penny Arcade link earlier, so rather than mod you up I'll respond.
The less-than-perfect launch seems to be a minor point of criticism. I think some of the fundamental game choices are the object of their ire. Choosing to artificially limit access to content seems to be the main objection. It makes it more similar to real life, but it also makes it much more frustrating to people. It's already selectively enhancing part of real life, why can't it eliminate scarcity? If there's a technological reason that prohibits that, then hopefully we'll find out about it sooner or later and adjust expectations for the (server-side and client-side) hardware accordingly.
It seems to work splendidly for more narrow objectives, such as having a meeting place for a clan. I hadn't heard that brought up before, and that's a really good point. However, as a general multifaceted virtual world it seems to fall short of its aims.
As a final note, I don't have any current-gen consoles, and I really only use my Xbox for a living room media player, so I can't really say I have fanboy-like opinions for or against the PS3. These are just some comments from someone bored at home.
http://penny-arcade.com/ has an extremely critical take on it.
RSS feeds for the photographer geek:
Strobist http://www.strobist.com/
Off-camera lighting, and possibly the geekiest popular photography blog around. Give this site a serious look.
Joe McNally http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/
National Geographic shooter, photojournalist extraordinaire. Less about the mechanics than Strobist.
Flash Flavor http://www.flashflavor.com/
Insights from a very popular wedding shooter.
The Big Picture http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
A blog attempting to fill the shoes of LIFE.
Library of Congress http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
The Library of Congress has been putting their archives on Flickr. Some are slightly dull, but it's an interesting exposure to first half of the 20th century.
These all link to the main site, where you should hopefully be able to find the RSS feed.
"If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of Hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater."
'nuff said.
My solution to finding time has been to cut out /. and sites like it. I'm pretty sure I haven't been here in over a year, and I'll stop checking it after this story fades away. It's amazing how much time one recovers in doing that.
We actually have two trebuchets, a mini-treb and our full-featured one. The links to picture galleries are here with the mini-treb in the mentor/mentee gallery, and the main trebuchet is in the Ft. Wayne galleries, the Elkhart gallery, and obviously the trebuchet gallery.
Dang it, make that "Although it hasn't been tested yet, we are pretty sure that we will be able to tow our trebuchet with the couch, albeit very slowly."
Sometimes I words out.
We are also blessed with the advantage of numbers. Because the club is very diverse with regards to people's individual talents, people often mix up what they're involved with so that they don't get burnt out.
Yeah, it is the tractor transmission. Although it hasn't been tested yet, we pretty sure that we will be able to tow our trebuchet with the couch, albeit very slowly.
Note: This is not a small trebuchet by any means, the counterweight is 750 lbs. and I would guess that the frame moves it close to a half-ton.
If you're looking for a great aggregate of news sites put into context, I highly recommend The Note. While the ABC News site itself has a leftward bias, The Note stands out for being pretty impartial, and extremely thorough. Now that college is back in session, I don't have time to visit it as often, because it's a long read, especially if you follow all of the links.
For a good analysis of things, I prefer the Christian Science Monitor. The bias vacillates, simply because of the variety of guest columnists.
Dork, yes, but in different ways. Until fencing came along, I hadn't really been involved in a competitive sport since 8th grade; high school created a gap in my competitive physical activity.
I also manage to go to keggers (though I don't drink), and can reasonably fake being one of the popular kids.
I'm just urging people to not get locked into what they did in high school.
I'm not exactly a sage old man (I'm merely a sophomore), but there are some things I've learned: /., you're probably more interested in a college's academic program more than its party school ranking. It's a lot harder than what you're used to (and this comes from someone who blew off high school and was fine). Don't skip classes either, there's a lot of money invested in that 8 AM lecture (or 7:30 if you go to Purdue).
1) Dorms are your friend, and your home to friends: Regardless of what you're like, you're bound to find someone with whom you can hang out. Don't be afraid to knock on some doors.
2) Colleges have lots of neat convocations and clubs...join them and check things out. You'll probably try and join different stuff from the things you were involved in back in high school. I've switched from somone involved in band and speech to someone in fencing and our physics chapter.
3) Study. If you're on
4) Have fun. Your life takes on a whole new meaning, it truly becomes yours in a way that wasn't possible back in high school. Make the most of it.
This is the perfect time to plug StepMania, an open source version you can get here. I'm not a developer, just someone that enjoys short techno songs and a frantic workout.
Would you consider being retained for the Ask Slashdot section? Heaven knows that you'd be absolutely invaluable.
It's about actually punishing the crime. This might filter out a few people who would've committed a crime, but that's only a secondary function of the law. Given the greater damage incurred by attacks (worms and viruses being a key component of that), it seems fit to more severely punish those who take a part in this increased damage.