I don't actually see any problem here. If it's a rumor and is disproven quickly, then even if the stock price bumps a little, it is completely innocent to the investors.
If you are real investor, you probably have longer time scale than hours (like years) to think about your stock. It could only affect speculators (the gamblers), which is maybe even a good thing.
Also, you could say that the share price won't return to the same level. But it's completely irrational to sell long-term investment based on few hours old rumor, so again, this only hurts people who deserve to be hurt. Someone else will buy the depressed stock instead after rumor is explained, and the price will return to its original value.
That doesn't mean he cannot have interesting or insightful comments. I don't understand why some people get so obsessed about him.
If I read a comment, I value it by itself, not by person who wrote it. And Slashdot moderation system is resistant to cloning, as far as I know.
This reminds me - so I wouldn't be offtopic - we very much need more statistical techniques for detection of duplicate online personas, and more robust systems to manage trust (like something that could trace the original source of information for us). This would certainly helped to alleviate problems mentioned in the article.
LZ77 is not run-length encoding. Run-length encoding only encodes repeated sequences of same letters, while LZ77 encodes repeated sequences as pointers to the previous instance of the same sequence.
I disagreed with the statement that formal computer mathematics is hard - I believe it's a matter of user interface, teaching it mathematicians and good tutorials. I believe most of this "hard" is just an illusion from people who don't know it (myself included). I already elaborated why I think so.
The important thing there is social, I think. The system needs to be open for all mathematicians (or general public), and there should be good tutorials for it.
Exactly, it was my belief that you cannot predict that or how you solve these problems, so this naturally poses a problem, how to formulate and select the requests for grant? That was actually question I had in mind - how is DARPA going to solve this problem? Or they will not solve it, but then this list is just another list of research areas eligible for grants.
I partly disagree. For example, Euler had no real understanding of real numbers and issues around them - for him, almost every function was continuous. Around 1900, you could also say that formalized mathematics (using logical quantifiers everywhere, starting from set theory) is very difficult when compared to more intuitive classical methods. Now we teach this way to students.
Formal mathematics on computer is the next step, just like logical formalization was, and all mathematicians will have to adapt to it. They will manage - they're smart. I think that every serious mathematical course should teach how to use formal proof systems, and what the basics of terminology and working of it are.
In the end, formalization of proof is not so much harder. For example, IIRC, in Mizar system average proof length is about 4 times longer than the equivalent proof readable by humans. This is an excellent ratio for a computer understanding something, and probably with further engineering could be even reduced.
The important step is to put the formal proving systems into mainstream, and I hope this wiki will help with this. Especially if it will be open for any mathematician, and there will be good tutorials on principles.
For example, there is Mizar system, which is a proof checker with about 46000 correct theorems in his database. So large parts of basic mathematics have already been formally verified.
What is new in this project is the fact that it's a wiki, so anyone can add new assertions. That's improvement, and I believe that this openness will encourage all mathematicians to converge to some site like this in the future.
This will ultimately benefit mathematics, because it will make research much more efficient. For example, it would be very nice to know that the theorem you need for your application has already been proven and that there is a nice theory around it. Formalization of all mathematics in computers is a first step in that direction.
No, hell no! I program in assembler (on zSeries). DJNZ and such are easy to find in the manual. Whoever reads the code is expected to know the instruction set.
I would recommend to comment on (almost) every line, but the comments have to be meaningful. For example, instead of saying "increment register AX" say "increment file array counter" or "point to next character", depending on what you are working with. It's extremely important for readability to constantly repeat what kind of data you have in registers. Or if you are testing a condition, write what condition means - is it error processing or normal program? Where do you jump? And so on.
Of course, you should also use comment blocks for larger algorithmic structure of the assembler program.
Open platforms is a hidden advantage; but so is user interface design, integration, and usability, and those are all benefits that Apple has in spades.
Maybe that explains why _they_ have 90% of marketshare. Seriously though - openness is advantage that works over longer time period. Also, note that it's an advantage to the customer, not the company. Give it a few years, and there will be more apps for Android than for iPhone (unless Apple changes their policy). And by the way - in the traditional Unix market has Linux now much more than 90% share.
Well, there are studies about your arguments, and they show that:
1. Direct democracy leads to better decisions; it has been statistically proven on budget spending both in U.S. and Switzerland. So it works better even in the US, which has (especially on local and state level) one of the best democratic systems in the world (maybe you are American, so it sounds strange to you, but from (my) foreigner's perspective it's very much true).
2. It also has been shown that the commitment and political education of population is the consequence of political system, not the other way around. To wait until these conditions are satisfied is just silly. Also, modern concepts of direct democracy are being used in practice for almost 100 years in both U.S. and Switzerland, and I highly doubt that people in 1908 had better education or more free time than we have now.
Openness of platform is not a selling point, it is a hidden advantage. Look at Wikipedia - almost no one, who uses it, contributes to it. Quite the contrary - the fact that anyone can contribute repels people from using it. So it's not the selling point. But the fact that Wikipedia contains all the information is the selling point, and reason why people use it. And it contains all the information precisely because everybody can contribute. The same goes for software platforms.
The representative part thoroughly quashes the notion that my vote counts for something. I live in the state of Indiana. My vote (for President) only matters if I vote the same way the majority of voters within my state vote.
This is quashed by voting method, IMHO. There are voting methods that count every vote, no matter what the result is, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting
It is my personal favorite, because no information from any voter gets discarded and plays a role in the result.
Of course, in the end, you have to choose someone, or decide something, so from that point of view some votes are always discarded. However, the range voting also discourages any tactical voting, and because opinions change, the voice of (larger) minority can easily be voice of majority next time.
Actually, democracy works pretty well. There are two types - representative and direct. The direct democracy works much better than representative, because you don't have to trust the representatives. In fact, representative democracy encourages people to blindly trust, and this brings these issues.
I like to compare this difference to difference with a contract system. Representative democracy is like spoken (unwritten) contract - you have to rely on trust. Direct (or semi-direct) democracy is analogous to written contract system - you use higher law - in case of contract the judicial system, in case of direct democracy the referendum, initiative and recall to enforce the contract. Obviously, the written contract is better than spoken contract. But people have trouble understanding that direct democracy is better than representative democracy for exactly the same reason.
I would also like to note that this result doesn't affect democracy in negative nor positive way, because the people who are wrong can be wrong both ways equally. I believe that facts triumph over superstition in the end, because there is no single superstition, but the whole spectrum. For example, those believing in evolution are united in their belief. Those believing in creationism are very fragmented - ranging from people who believe in ID without God to young earth creationists.
Well, it's actually quite possible to model climate but not weather. It's an issue of scales. I won't go into mathematical argument, because I don't understand it anymore, and you probably don't want to know that either.
But look at this thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_attractor - it is essentially an infinite line curved into a strange "two ears" shape. The line is defined by 3 ordinary differential equations, and it is completely defined by selected point and direction in space.
The interesting part is, if you start drawing the line from two very close points and directions, the lines that correspond to them will become completely separated after some time. For example, one will go in the left ear and one into the right ear.
However, what is even more interesting, no matter the starting point and direction, the resulting line will always give you the same ear shape.
So, to sum up - if you have a starting point, but not know quite exact position and direction, then, after some time, you are unable to predict in what ear the line will be. But you are able to predict the general shape of the thing. So here you have a system which is unpredictable on detailed scale but very predictable on larger scale.
With weather, it's a bit more complex, but very similar to this thing. We are able to model weather accurately on hours scale, and also we can model accurately the climate on tens of years scale (or lower - or lower scale, the climate tends to be very similar). But we are unable to extend this scale in weather to several years, and it is (probably) not possible to extend our understanding of climate to hundreds of years. The changes in climate are much slower, so we can model it on longer time scales.
I don't read articles about screenshots, and I don't care about Windows very much, in fact; I am just bombarded by it from sites such as Slashdot and OSNews. But, out of curiosity, I do wonder what else will be new in Windows, because these articles keep talking about GUI, that's all. So - thanks for this info.
1. Nothing is deleted without a good reason is already included in my proposal - if the topic wouldn't satisfy even the 7th level criteria, which would be very very broad, it would be deleted.
2. It would also be nice to have notability rating within the cultural area, for example, articles about Star Trek fiction would have another notability within this domain - Star Trek. Or American cities would have another notability rating within the domain of American culture. The rule would be that the global notability level is always lower or equal than the in-domain notability level.
It is still subjective, but the notability guidelines are more or less too. There should be guidelines similar to notability guidelines for the whole scale. Hopefully, there would be less contention in discussions in moving things between different notability levels, and this system would address the deletionists' concern about overflowing the system with worthless articles. Ideally, I would envision to mark the notability of target article in every link, but this is probably too distant future.
I belive there exists a technical solution - a notability scale. Every article would have number from 1-7 about how much it is notable. 1 would be a must have for any Encyclopedia (everyone in the world should know about the subject), and 7 would be personal vanity. I would say currently deleted articles would be between 5-6, so article satisfying the current notability guidelines would be at 4-5. This would also make orientation in long lists/categories easier, because you could roughly see the more important things.
You know, in all the time I've spent at Wikipedia, I've yet to see even one instance of this fabulous mythical beast, the "deletionist", whose identifying characteristic is that he wants things deleted for the sake of deletion.
There is one in this discussion just few paragraphs above.
editor who thought the article was a hoax
Wikipedia article on Jara Cimrman was once put to a deletion, because some admin thought it was a hoax. More research, less thinking, I would say.
who had some other concern about the article.
AFAIK, other article concerns than notability shouldn't be addressed by deletion.
I believe Wikipedia needs more democracy in it's decision-making, that's it. They should get rid of that "this is not voting, but consensus making" line and "Wikipedia is not a democracy" mantra. Voting means clear rules about what the consensus actually is, and also that the things are decided, for better or worse. Unclear rules only favor people who seek power. It also needs things like admin recall, finer division of admin privileges, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't actually see any problem here. If it's a rumor and is disproven quickly, then even if the stock price bumps a little, it is completely innocent to the investors.
If you are real investor, you probably have longer time scale than hours (like years) to think about your stock. It could only affect speculators (the gamblers), which is maybe even a good thing.
Also, you could say that the share price won't return to the same level. But it's completely irrational to sell long-term investment based on few hours old rumor, so again, this only hurts people who deserve to be hurt. Someone else will buy the depressed stock instead after rumor is explained, and the price will return to its original value.
That doesn't mean he cannot have interesting or insightful comments. I don't understand why some people get so obsessed about him.
If I read a comment, I value it by itself, not by person who wrote it. And Slashdot moderation system is resistant to cloning, as far as I know.
This reminds me - so I wouldn't be offtopic - we very much need more statistical techniques for detection of duplicate online personas, and more robust systems to manage trust (like something that could trace the original source of information for us). This would certainly helped to alleviate problems mentioned in the article.
LZ77 is not run-length encoding. Run-length encoding only encodes repeated sequences of same letters, while LZ77 encodes repeated sequences as pointers to the previous instance of the same sequence.
I disagreed with the statement that formal computer mathematics is hard - I believe it's a matter of user interface, teaching it mathematicians and good tutorials. I believe most of this "hard" is just an illusion from people who don't know it (myself included). I already elaborated why I think so.
The important thing there is social, I think. The system needs to be open for all mathematicians (or general public), and there should be good tutorials for it.
Exactly, it was my belief that you cannot predict that or how you solve these problems, so this naturally poses a problem, how to formulate and select the requests for grant? That was actually question I had in mind - how is DARPA going to solve this problem? Or they will not solve it, but then this list is just another list of research areas eligible for grants.
I partly disagree. For example, Euler had no real understanding of real numbers and issues around them - for him, almost every function was continuous. Around 1900, you could also say that formalized mathematics (using logical quantifiers everywhere, starting from set theory) is very difficult when compared to more intuitive classical methods. Now we teach this way to students.
Formal mathematics on computer is the next step, just like logical formalization was, and all mathematicians will have to adapt to it. They will manage - they're smart. I think that every serious mathematical course should teach how to use formal proof systems, and what the basics of terminology and working of it are.
In the end, formalization of proof is not so much harder. For example, IIRC, in Mizar system average proof length is about 4 times longer than the equivalent proof readable by humans. This is an excellent ratio for a computer understanding something, and probably with further engineering could be even reduced.
The important step is to put the formal proving systems into mainstream, and I hope this wiki will help with this. Especially if it will be open for any mathematician, and there will be good tutorials on principles.
Efforts like this one already exists.
For example, there is Mizar system, which is a proof checker with about 46000 correct theorems in his database. So large parts of basic mathematics have already been formally verified.
What is new in this project is the fact that it's a wiki, so anyone can add new assertions. That's improvement, and I believe that this openness will encourage all mathematicians to converge to some site like this in the future.
This will ultimately benefit mathematics, because it will make research much more efficient. For example, it would be very nice to know that the theorem you need for your application has already been proven and that there is a nice theory around it. Formalization of all mathematics in computers is a first step in that direction.
These are really hard problems and I wonder how does anyone formulate a research grant requests for them.
One ever. He will prove that it can be done. But after this is proven, it's quite uninteresting problem.
What about threads? They will show different signature each time.
You have two threads; one of them dies.
No, hell no! I program in assembler (on zSeries). DJNZ and such are easy to find in the manual. Whoever reads the code is expected to know the instruction set.
I would recommend to comment on (almost) every line, but the comments have to be meaningful. For example, instead of saying "increment register AX" say "increment file array counter" or "point to next character", depending on what you are working with. It's extremely important for readability to constantly repeat what kind of data you have in registers. Or if you are testing a condition, write what condition means - is it error processing or normal program? Where do you jump? And so on.
Of course, you should also use comment blocks for larger algorithmic structure of the assembler program.
Open platforms is a hidden advantage; but so is user interface design, integration, and usability, and those are all benefits that Apple has in spades.
Maybe that explains why _they_ have 90% of marketshare. Seriously though - openness is advantage that works over longer time period. Also, note that it's an advantage to the customer, not the company. Give it a few years, and there will be more apps for Android than for iPhone (unless Apple changes their policy). And by the way - in the traditional Unix market has Linux now much more than 90% share.
Well, there are studies about your arguments, and they show that:
1. Direct democracy leads to better decisions; it has been statistically proven on budget spending both in U.S. and Switzerland. So it works better even in the US, which has (especially on local and state level) one of the best democratic systems in the world (maybe you are American, so it sounds strange to you, but from (my) foreigner's perspective it's very much true).
2. It also has been shown that the commitment and political education of population is the consequence of political system, not the other way around. To wait until these conditions are satisfied is just silly. Also, modern concepts of direct democracy are being used in practice for almost 100 years in both U.S. and Switzerland, and I highly doubt that people in 1908 had better education or more free time than we have now.
If you want references for these studies, read the book at http://democracy-international.org/book-direct-democracy.html
Openness of platform is not a selling point, it is a hidden advantage. Look at Wikipedia - almost no one, who uses it, contributes to it. Quite the contrary - the fact that anyone can contribute repels people from using it. So it's not the selling point. But the fact that Wikipedia contains all the information is the selling point, and reason why people use it. And it contains all the information precisely because everybody can contribute. The same goes for software platforms.
Beta == Cool
As in: "I really like your t-shirt. It's so beta!"
The representative part thoroughly quashes the notion that my vote counts for something. I live in the state of Indiana. My vote (for President) only matters if I vote the same way the majority of voters within my state vote.
This is quashed by voting method, IMHO. There are voting methods that count every vote, no matter what the result is, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting
It is my personal favorite, because no information from any voter gets discarded and plays a role in the result.
Of course, in the end, you have to choose someone, or decide something, so from that point of view some votes are always discarded. However, the range voting also discourages any tactical voting, and because opinions change, the voice of (larger) minority can easily be voice of majority next time.
Actually, democracy works pretty well. There are two types - representative and direct. The direct democracy works much better than representative, because you don't have to trust the representatives. In fact, representative democracy encourages people to blindly trust, and this brings these issues.
I like to compare this difference to difference with a contract system. Representative democracy is like spoken (unwritten) contract - you have to rely on trust. Direct (or semi-direct) democracy is analogous to written contract system - you use higher law - in case of contract the judicial system, in case of direct democracy the referendum, initiative and recall to enforce the contract. Obviously, the written contract is better than spoken contract. But people have trouble understanding that direct democracy is better than representative democracy for exactly the same reason.
I would also like to note that this result doesn't affect democracy in negative nor positive way, because the people who are wrong can be wrong both ways equally. I believe that facts triumph over superstition in the end, because there is no single superstition, but the whole spectrum. For example, those believing in evolution are united in their belief. Those believing in creationism are very fragmented - ranging from people who believe in ID without God to young earth creationists.
Well, it's actually quite possible to model climate but not weather. It's an issue of scales. I won't go into mathematical argument, because I don't understand it anymore, and you probably don't want to know that either.
But look at this thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_attractor - it is essentially an infinite line curved into a strange "two ears" shape. The line is defined by 3 ordinary differential equations, and it is completely defined by selected point and direction in space.
The interesting part is, if you start drawing the line from two very close points and directions, the lines that correspond to them will become completely separated after some time. For example, one will go in the left ear and one into the right ear.
However, what is even more interesting, no matter the starting point and direction, the resulting line will always give you the same ear shape.
So, to sum up - if you have a starting point, but not know quite exact position and direction, then, after some time, you are unable to predict in what ear the line will be. But you are able to predict the general shape of the thing. So here you have a system which is unpredictable on detailed scale but very predictable on larger scale.
With weather, it's a bit more complex, but very similar to this thing. We are able to model weather accurately on hours scale, and also we can model accurately the climate on tens of years scale (or lower - or lower scale, the climate tends to be very similar). But we are unable to extend this scale in weather to several years, and it is (probably) not possible to extend our understanding of climate to hundreds of years. The changes in climate are much slower, so we can model it on longer time scales.
I don't read articles about screenshots, and I don't care about Windows very much, in fact; I am just bombarded by it from sites such as Slashdot and OSNews. But, out of curiosity, I do wonder what else will be new in Windows, because these articles keep talking about GUI, that's all. So - thanks for this info.
They are posting about ribbons and screenshots in Windows 7, but I wonder, will there be any other improvements aside from GUI?
Oh, and I forgot:
1. Nothing is deleted without a good reason is already included in my proposal - if the topic wouldn't satisfy even the 7th level criteria, which would be very very broad, it would be deleted.
2. It would also be nice to have notability rating within the cultural area, for example, articles about Star Trek fiction would have another notability within this domain - Star Trek. Or American cities would have another notability rating within the domain of American culture. The rule would be that the global notability level is always lower or equal than the in-domain notability level.
It is still subjective, but the notability guidelines are more or less too. There should be guidelines similar to notability guidelines for the whole scale. Hopefully, there would be less contention in discussions in moving things between different notability levels, and this system would address the deletionists' concern about overflowing the system with worthless articles. Ideally, I would envision to mark the notability of target article in every link, but this is probably too distant future.
I belive there exists a technical solution - a notability scale. Every article would have number from 1-7 about how much it is notable. 1 would be a must have for any Encyclopedia (everyone in the world should know about the subject), and 7 would be personal vanity. I would say currently deleted articles would be between 5-6, so article satisfying the current notability guidelines would be at 4-5. This would also make orientation in long lists/categories easier, because you could roughly see the more important things.
You know, in all the time I've spent at Wikipedia, I've yet to see even one instance of this fabulous mythical beast, the "deletionist", whose identifying characteristic is that he wants things deleted for the sake of deletion.
There is one in this discussion just few paragraphs above.
editor who thought the article was a hoax
Wikipedia article on Jara Cimrman was once put to a deletion, because some admin thought it was a hoax. More research, less thinking, I would say.
who had some other concern about the article.
AFAIK, other article concerns than notability shouldn't be addressed by deletion.
I believe Wikipedia needs more democracy in it's decision-making, that's it. They should get rid of that "this is not voting, but consensus making" line and "Wikipedia is not a democracy" mantra. Voting means clear rules about what the consensus actually is, and also that the things are decided, for better or worse. Unclear rules only favor people who seek power. It also needs things like admin recall, finer division of admin privileges, and so on.