I'd guess this is a case of weasel reporting or words. The Obama administration decided on a moratorium on drilling wells under more than 500ft of seawater. I note the Washington Times doesn't mention this limit in their article but conflates the limited ban with drilling any wells at all. Any member of the NAE would say they were against a total ban, but I'd doubt so many would are against a temporary ban on deeper drilling.
The problem with that is the relief well has exactly the same failure modes as the original well.. and if either is done shoddily, it increases the risk. So, increasing the safety factor for the main well is paramount. But that doesn't mean we can't 'mostly' drill relief wells to be ready if there's a spill.
Business School != Economics, and economics itself has a really big black eye right now.. and Harvard is a place for 'serious' people who toe the politically acceptable line. There is no worse place to turn to for authority after all the predictions and theories have been problematic to say the least. I checked the references in the paper you linked: The political side has the most references (1959 is the oldest) none of which are from economists.
On the economics side, the oldest reference is 1976, which is well after not only Friedman's important works but also after Black-Scholes was published in 1973. These contributions to our understanding of markets are ignored. Of course, this all misses the key difference: interest rates were not near zero within the time period of the data.
A paper that never cites Keynes and ignores mainstream scholarship (even if that scholarship is wrong), cannot credibly make claims upon Keynes' theories.
It's a difference in language (and/or translation) between civil and common law countries. To be 'indicted' in most civil law countries means that you are being formally investigated. Charges are provided at a later stage (traditionally called assizes). In common law countries on the other hand, it is not necessary to declare that an investigation is being undertaken. But any formal charges require an indictment, which means a grand jury has to find there is probable cause, reasonable suspicion or prima facie evidence to indict.
If you're interested in a very well written history of early nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, I'd highly recommend Richard Rhodes book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It does a phenomenal job of covering the theory, experiments and engineering involved in big chunk of nuclear research. It is very well written and has compelling mini-biographies of several of the scientists. No Einstein lasers though.
In my initial post I used the term null hypothesis since it is familiar language, more so at least than the Bayesian terminology. This has led to some level of confusion, and you into the fallacy of rejecting null-hypothesis as an inferential test (eg. Rozeboom, 1960).
One must remember that rejecting the null hypothesis does not prove the alternative, nor does accepting the null hypothesis prove the contra-positive.
Your example of extra-solar planets is an excellent one to show why your 'semantic trick' doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There are several cases of possible extra-solar planets 100 years go. There might be planets that orbit another star, there might be planets that don't orbit any star but have periodic orbits (eg. galactic etc), and there might be planets that have no periodic orbits at all. Using the technology available 100 years ago, there was very little evidence available: no matter what your prior curve, the posterior was bound to be nearly flat, and no hypothesis could be confirmed or rejected. Today, we have considerably more evidence available, enough to confirm one of the above hypotheses: that there are extra-solar planets in orbit around other stars (and allows us to reject the equivalent of the null hypothesis: there are no extra-solar planets). The other cases do not have enough evidence to accept or reject.
If we apply this to the atheism argument, at first glance a similar situation ensues: There is little evidence either for the existence of one or more deities, and there is little evidence against the existence of any deity. Therefore regardless of the prior, the posterior is going to be nearly flat which would support the supposition “we don’t know if there is a deity or not”.
But we live in a world where there are a finite number of deities whose existence has been proposed. And in many of these cases, the proposal of the deity has been accompanied by claims of that deity’s powers, claims which are measurable. In this case, as we collect data that contradicts the supposed power of a given deity, it shifts the posterior curve against that proposed deity’s existence. And once this has been done enough (especially given that many of the proposed powers of various deities are not independent, but overlap) it raises the posterior probability that there are no deities sufficient to make an initial assessment. That assessment of course, must be revised if new data are collected that increase the posterior probability for the existence of one or more deities.
While some atheists may assert positively that there is no deity, many make a different claim: There is little evidence of a deity, and since asserting the existence of a deity is a rather bold claim, there should be evidence to back it up. In this context, there is nothing to disprove. Atheists need only evaluate whether the evidence for any particular deity is convincing or not. In that context, specific claims about a deity's intervention in the world which are measurable and don't pan out favor the null hypothesis -- that deity doesn't exist.
Indeed, because 100 years from now, the wetlands being destroyed today will most likely be under water due to global warming.... and who is it that funds much of the anti-global warming movement?
There area plenty of other ideas to deal with noisy chips.. I'd point out DARPA's SyNAPSE program as an example. Due to quantum constraints, the future of deterministic computation must eventually deal with the noise in a robust manner. The above efforts are focusing on memristor technology.
I don't know whether stochastic architectures do better than noisy memristor ones, but either way we'll have to learn how to program in an environment that the least predictable element is not the one at the console.
No, it means that in one of the few examples of a laissez-faire market in the modern world, Veblen was right. No matter what the economic system, the main engine of expanding commerce, inventors, get fucked.
(For those interested in original text, I would note that all his major works were published in the late period of the public domain, including The Theory of the Leisure class (pdf).
In terms of final market share, you're totally correct, and that's why the iPhone won't really try to compete directly with Android. I've been following Apple for quite a long time*, and while they've been successful, they've been much less concerned about total market share than their margin of diminishing returns. Apple is totally satisfied taking over a good chunk of the high margin market, rather than trying to compete in the low margin market. For Google, it makes sense to cater to the low margin market, get all the cellphone hardware companies competing and drive up ad revenue. For Apple, that approach is more problematic, and most likely doesn't make sense. They'd prefer taking as much of the market as they can without significantly lowering their margins, and leave it at that.
Apples major approach (again, under Steve) appears to be: make everything 'Just Work' well enough for users to notice the difference. This is both the reason behind OSX, and more aggressively with the iPhone. It's not that everything has to work, it just has to work NOTICEABLY better than the competitors (eg. JND, Weber's law).
For me, I still use a Mac laptop (and repeat frequently the motto: Mac's for work, PC's for play) as my primary computer. I use Ubuntu 8.04 on my workstation (works a hell of a lot better on Mathematica large RAM tasks than either OSX or Windows), and Windows XP x64 on my home desktop, which is mostly for gaming.
*My first computer was a Macintosh SE/30, my family owned an 128k mac (I think the first computer I ever put my grubby fingers on was a TRS-80)
There are so many great poets that one can prefer from WWI. It is a good thing to remember all the talent, from poetry (eg. Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Seeger) to physics (eg. Moseley). But it is especially important to remember that it was all snuffed out in pursuit of national honor.
The pain is instantiated in the physical behavior of a group of neurons, not an 'imaginary' symptom -- the change in neural response is just as real as having a broken arm. Just because we don't understand how to accurately diagnose, alleviate or correct most problems that occur in neural circuitry doesn't mean they aren't just as physically real as those ailments that we do understand.
Indeed, NYC created a taxi monopoly in 1937, partially as a response to poorly maintained vehicles and their attendant dangers. The problem is, that the law which did so hasn't been revised since, we've only had several hundred new medallions issued (as far as I know given for hybrid cabs) since 1937, and are stuck with the same ~13k cabs. Since this has made the medallions extremely valuable ($500k+), there is obviously a significant lobbying interest to prevent the sale of new medallions. While I'm not a huge fan of gypsy cabs (which, for example, often don't have functioning seat belts) the idea that the current population is served by the same number of cabs as was available in 1937 is absurd.
And I would totally disagree. What you say has some truth for one particular type of college class: a lecture style class in a technical subject. In any other setting however, both the learning environment and student responses are often vital to the success of a class. This is particularly true in a seminar setting. By goofing off during discussions, when student responses to material or group work are regularly expected, you are hurting not just yourself, but the other students in the class.
Signing up for a college class is not simply "I pay you, you go regurgitate at the front of the room, and if I don't want to learn, it's my damned money." When you sign up for the class, you are obliged to comport yourself in a manner appropriate to the class and to engender an environment conducive to learning. It is unfair both for your fellow students and your professor if you do not do so, and the professor has both right and responsibility to ask you to leave the class or mark you down if they deem your behavior to be disruptive.
Both are needed for people to live functional lives.
I'd point out that it's quite different to say "both are needed for people to live functional lives" and "both are needed for a person to live a functional life." I am unaware of any society that has functioned without religion or some near proxy (eg. Marxism-Leninism) thereof. The implication that it is "impossible to live morally without religion" is quite different from "it is impossible for some people in a society to live morally without religion".
While I agree with your primary point, I'd like to point out that asking "What's north of the North Pole?" is not actually a nonsensical question. While it may appear so at first, it brings up the extremely important issue of frames of reference (as opposed to the question, "what is north of a north pole?").
Very Well. But that's not the Polanski case. The director pleaded guilty on a really light plea deal after raping and sodomizing a 13 year old girl. At the suggestion that he might actually have to go to prison for a few months, he fled, after pleading guilty. There is no doubt that in any country in Europe much less the US he would be in big trouble if he raped and sodomized a 13 year old today. But for some reason, perhaps a Bush hangover, much of the European media is trying to portray this as an old issue, a 'youthful' mistake made at 42, when he has never disputed the victim's testimony that he both raped her after she said she wanted to go home, but then decided to sodomize after worrying that he would get her pregnant.
This is the age of infinite access to music that is considered popularly or culturally relevant. In times before recording, music was played constantly, but to see the critical acclaimed required one to buy a fairly expensive ticket. In the age since recording, the popular and acclaimed required purchase of a fairly expensive to make medium. Recently, the price of access to popular or acclaimed music has been some technical savvy. While DRM and legislative action may eventually curtail access to popular or acclaimed music, it will do no such thing to indy, modern or any un-acclaimed pieces or groups, because in such an environment enforcement will be expensive.
I'd third this.. especially since Mathematica 8 is going to interface smoothly with wolfram alpha which already is pretty smart about turning typed equations into mathematica equations. But I personally still would recommend pencil and paper. Direct motor involvement is really important to learning.
What you just described is what started happening on wall street at least 20 years ago. Once an algorithm err.. VAR is part of measuring score.. err risk, the people involved settle into two camps: Since there is money to be made, the traders.. err students quickly learn the weaknesses of the algorithm and start to write essays that make a farce of the assumed Gaussian distribution. The Execs raking in options.. er.. I mean the test administrators and the Board Members er.. I mean trusted graders who are paid a fixed sum + part of the throughput quickly learn that their compensation er.. filthy lucre is all based on getting a check mark from the computer, since 'computers are objective.'
And in the end, a test much like the current SAT, GRE, etc etc emerges: Unless you're a very top or bottom scorer, connections not performance are the heart of the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess this is a case of weasel reporting or words. The Obama administration decided on a moratorium on drilling wells under more than 500ft of seawater. I note the Washington Times doesn't mention this limit in their article but conflates the limited ban with drilling any wells at all. Any member of the NAE would say they were against a total ban, but I'd doubt so many would are against a temporary ban on deeper drilling.
The problem with that is the relief well has exactly the same failure modes as the original well.. and if either is done shoddily, it increases the risk. So, increasing the safety factor for the main well is paramount. But that doesn't mean we can't 'mostly' drill relief wells to be ready if there's a spill.
Luckily, we have a case study to see whether those models are correct: Does Ireland or Spain recover faster? We'll see over the next several years.
Business School != Economics, and economics itself has a really big black eye right now.. and Harvard is a place for 'serious' people who toe the politically acceptable line. There is no worse place to turn to for authority after all the predictions and theories have been problematic to say the least. I checked the references in the paper you linked: The political side has the most references (1959 is the oldest) none of which are from economists.
On the economics side, the oldest reference is 1976, which is well after not only Friedman's important works but also after Black-Scholes was published in 1973. These contributions to our understanding of markets are ignored. Of course, this all misses the key difference: interest rates were not near zero within the time period of the data.
A paper that never cites Keynes and ignores mainstream scholarship (even if that scholarship is wrong), cannot credibly make claims upon Keynes' theories.
It's a difference in language (and/or translation) between civil and common law countries. To be 'indicted' in most civil law countries means that you are being formally investigated. Charges are provided at a later stage (traditionally called assizes). In common law countries on the other hand, it is not necessary to declare that an investigation is being undertaken. But any formal charges require an indictment, which means a grand jury has to find there is probable cause, reasonable suspicion or prima facie evidence to indict.
(Not a lawyer, but did major in world history)
If you're interested in a very well written history of early nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, I'd highly recommend Richard Rhodes book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It does a phenomenal job of covering the theory, experiments and engineering involved in big chunk of nuclear research. It is very well written and has compelling mini-biographies of several of the scientists. No Einstein lasers though.
In my initial post I used the term null hypothesis since it is familiar language, more so at least than the Bayesian terminology. This has led to some level of confusion, and you into the fallacy of rejecting null-hypothesis as an inferential test (eg. Rozeboom, 1960).
One must remember that rejecting the null hypothesis does not prove the alternative, nor does accepting the null hypothesis prove the contra-positive.
Your example of extra-solar planets is an excellent one to show why your 'semantic trick' doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There are several cases of possible extra-solar planets 100 years go. There might be planets that orbit another star, there might be planets that don't orbit any star but have periodic orbits (eg. galactic etc), and there might be planets that have no periodic orbits at all. Using the technology available 100 years ago, there was very little evidence available: no matter what your prior curve, the posterior was bound to be nearly flat, and no hypothesis could be confirmed or rejected. Today, we have considerably more evidence available, enough to confirm one of the above hypotheses: that there are extra-solar planets in orbit around other stars (and allows us to reject the equivalent of the null hypothesis: there are no extra-solar planets). The other cases do not have enough evidence to accept or reject.
If we apply this to the atheism argument, at first glance a similar situation ensues: There is little evidence either for the existence of one or more deities, and there is little evidence against the existence of any deity. Therefore regardless of the prior, the posterior is going to be nearly flat which would support the supposition “we don’t know if there is a deity or not”.
But we live in a world where there are a finite number of deities whose existence has been proposed. And in many of these cases, the proposal of the deity has been accompanied by claims of that deity’s powers, claims which are measurable. In this case, as we collect data that contradicts the supposed power of a given deity, it shifts the posterior curve against that proposed deity’s existence. And once this has been done enough (especially given that many of the proposed powers of various deities are not independent, but overlap) it raises the posterior probability that there are no deities sufficient to make an initial assessment. That assessment of course, must be revised if new data are collected that increase the posterior probability for the existence of one or more deities.
While some atheists may assert positively that there is no deity, many make a different claim: There is little evidence of a deity, and since asserting the existence of a deity is a rather bold claim, there should be evidence to back it up. In this context, there is nothing to disprove. Atheists need only evaluate whether the evidence for any particular deity is convincing or not. In that context, specific claims about a deity's intervention in the world which are measurable and don't pan out favor the null hypothesis -- that deity doesn't exist.
Indeed, because 100 years from now, the wetlands being destroyed today will most likely be under water due to global warming.... and who is it that funds much of the anti-global warming movement?
There area plenty of other ideas to deal with noisy chips.. I'd point out DARPA's SyNAPSE program as an example. Due to quantum constraints, the future of deterministic computation must eventually deal with the noise in a robust manner. The above efforts are focusing on memristor technology.
I don't know whether stochastic architectures do better than noisy memristor ones, but either way we'll have to learn how to program in an environment that the least predictable element is not the one at the console.
No, it means that in one of the few examples of a laissez-faire market in the modern world, Veblen was right. No matter what the economic system, the main engine of expanding commerce, inventors, get fucked.
(For those interested in original text, I would note that all his major works were published in the late period of the public domain, including The Theory of the Leisure class (pdf).
In terms of final market share, you're totally correct, and that's why the iPhone won't really try to compete directly with Android. I've been following Apple for quite a long time*, and while they've been successful, they've been much less concerned about total market share than their margin of diminishing returns. Apple is totally satisfied taking over a good chunk of the high margin market, rather than trying to compete in the low margin market. For Google, it makes sense to cater to the low margin market, get all the cellphone hardware companies competing and drive up ad revenue. For Apple, that approach is more problematic, and most likely doesn't make sense. They'd prefer taking as much of the market as they can without significantly lowering their margins, and leave it at that.
Apples major approach (again, under Steve) appears to be: make everything 'Just Work' well enough for users to notice the difference. This is both the reason behind OSX, and more aggressively with the iPhone. It's not that everything has to work, it just has to work NOTICEABLY better than the competitors (eg. JND, Weber's law).
For me, I still use a Mac laptop (and repeat frequently the motto: Mac's for work, PC's for play) as my primary computer. I use Ubuntu 8.04 on my workstation (works a hell of a lot better on Mathematica large RAM tasks than either OSX or Windows), and Windows XP x64 on my home desktop, which is mostly for gaming.
*My first computer was a Macintosh SE/30, my family owned an 128k mac (I think the first computer I ever put my grubby fingers on was a TRS-80)
Processors, memory and HD space have improved at an exponential rate. Word's feature set, not so much.
There are so many great poets that one can prefer from WWI. It is a good thing to remember all the talent, from poetry (eg. Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Seeger) to physics (eg. Moseley). But it is especially important to remember that it was all snuffed out in pursuit of national honor.
The pain is instantiated in the physical behavior of a group of neurons, not an 'imaginary' symptom -- the change in neural response is just as real as having a broken arm. Just because we don't understand how to accurately diagnose, alleviate or correct most problems that occur in neural circuitry doesn't mean they aren't just as physically real as those ailments that we do understand.
Indeed, NYC created a taxi monopoly in 1937, partially as a response to poorly maintained vehicles and their attendant dangers. The problem is, that the law which did so hasn't been revised since, we've only had several hundred new medallions issued (as far as I know given for hybrid cabs) since 1937, and are stuck with the same ~13k cabs. Since this has made the medallions extremely valuable ($500k+), there is obviously a significant lobbying interest to prevent the sale of new medallions. While I'm not a huge fan of gypsy cabs (which, for example, often don't have functioning seat belts) the idea that the current population is served by the same number of cabs as was available in 1937 is absurd.
And I would totally disagree. What you say has some truth for one particular type of college class: a lecture style class in a technical subject. In any other setting however, both the learning environment and student responses are often vital to the success of a class. This is particularly true in a seminar setting. By goofing off during discussions, when student responses to material or group work are regularly expected, you are hurting not just yourself, but the other students in the class.
Signing up for a college class is not simply "I pay you, you go regurgitate at the front of the room, and if I don't want to learn, it's my damned money." When you sign up for the class, you are obliged to comport yourself in a manner appropriate to the class and to engender an environment conducive to learning. It is unfair both for your fellow students and your professor if you do not do so, and the professor has both right and responsibility to ask you to leave the class or mark you down if they deem your behavior to be disruptive.
Ecuador's sig is from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, spoken by Salvor Hardin.
Both are needed for people to live functional lives.
I'd point out that it's quite different to say "both are needed for people to live functional lives" and "both are needed for a person to live a functional life." I am unaware of any society that has functioned without religion or some near proxy (eg. Marxism-Leninism) thereof. The implication that it is "impossible to live morally without religion" is quite different from "it is impossible for some people in a society to live morally without religion".
While I agree with your primary point, I'd like to point out that asking "What's north of the North Pole?" is not actually a nonsensical question. While it may appear so at first, it brings up the extremely important issue of frames of reference (as opposed to the question, "what is north of a north pole?").
The hardcore EQ players who I know are split about evenly between WoW and Vanguard (which has more complex EQ-like gameplay).
Very Well. But that's not the Polanski case. The director pleaded guilty on a really light plea deal after raping and sodomizing a 13 year old girl. At the suggestion that he might actually have to go to prison for a few months, he fled, after pleading guilty. There is no doubt that in any country in Europe much less the US he would be in big trouble if he raped and sodomized a 13 year old today. But for some reason, perhaps a Bush hangover, much of the European media is trying to portray this as an old issue, a 'youthful' mistake made at 42, when he has never disputed the victim's testimony that he both raped her after she said she wanted to go home, but then decided to sodomize after worrying that he would get her pregnant.
This is the age of infinite access to music that is considered popularly or culturally relevant. In times before recording, music was played constantly, but to see the critical acclaimed required one to buy a fairly expensive ticket. In the age since recording, the popular and acclaimed required purchase of a fairly expensive to make medium. Recently, the price of access to popular or acclaimed music has been some technical savvy. While DRM and legislative action may eventually curtail access to popular or acclaimed music, it will do no such thing to indy, modern or any un-acclaimed pieces or groups, because in such an environment enforcement will be expensive.
I'd third this.. especially since Mathematica 8 is going to interface smoothly with wolfram alpha which already is pretty smart about turning typed equations into mathematica equations. But I personally still would recommend pencil and paper. Direct motor involvement is really important to learning.
What you just described is what started happening on wall street at least 20 years ago. Once an algorithm err.. VAR is part of measuring score.. err risk, the people involved settle into two camps: Since there is money to be made, the traders.. err students quickly learn the weaknesses of the algorithm and start to write essays that make a farce of the assumed Gaussian distribution. The Execs raking in options.. er.. I mean the test administrators and the Board Members er.. I mean trusted graders who are paid a fixed sum + part of the throughput quickly learn that their compensation er.. filthy lucre is all based on getting a check mark from the computer, since 'computers are objective.'
And in the end, a test much like the current SAT, GRE, etc etc emerges: Unless you're a very top or bottom scorer, connections not performance are the heart of the matter.