The newspaper industry has historically had one of the highest profit margins of any market, and while some forces have shifted, they are not really in serious danger provided they are willing to adapt. Newspapers have readily taken up internet mediums, and continue to sell dead tree format.
Interestingly, a 2007 study analyzed over a decade of financial data and concluded that newspaper profits are more closely linked to story quality than circulation. This decision allows big media to rely on circulation and de-facto market saturation to maintain their profits instead of competition in the area of high quality investigative journalism. The fact that investigative journalism also tends to uncover all sorts of corruption and other "uncomfortable" topics is a nice benefit that sweetens the deal all around.
It's no secret that FCC commissioners get hired for obscene salaries by media conglomerates as soon as they step down. Make no mistake, Kevin Martin will be rewarded handsomely for delivering this decision to the tune of millions. This is nothing short of criminal bribery.
Watching the public commentary sessions was interesting, too. Not only was all this information laid out in plain view, but people were just tearing into commissioner Martin -- and people coming from all parts of the political spectrum.
It is actually fairly common for these things to be mounted on an automated pan-tilt platform--moving the beam actually makes a pretty interesting effect as it reflects off whatever surface it hits. I can't say if that is the case here but it is possible.
At least one study has concluded these things are basically harmless to human ears, but they do use ultrasonic sound at extremely high power levels (>150 db SPL). Acoustics in air are non-linear at this level, and by modulating the carrier, wave interference forms a "generation region" that induces audible frequencies.
By the way these are no good for music as the low cutoff is about 1khz.
For an isochronous endpoint, the USB device descriptor can list a number of alternative configurations along with the bandwidth requirements of each one. The host knows how much bandwidth is available, not the device -- remember that USB is a host-centric design, nothing gets to talk until the host controller gives the signal -- so the host is responsible for selecting the appropriate mode that fits within the capabilities of the current bus configuration. A typical use case is a video camera offering several different settings of compression/framerate/size etc having a range of bandwidth needs.
Not unique to Firewire -- USB also has an isochronous transfer mode with guaranteed bandwidth and bounded latency, which is used by audio and video devices. If the device supports it, the host can also select which endpoint configuration to use depending on how much bandwidth is available.
All valid points considering the situation of today, but on a future multi-core processor, the CPU expense may not be such an issue, e.g. with 16 cores, one can easily be spared just to deal with data bussing. This may be commonplace by the time USB3 matures.
This will be officially IEEE 1394c. FWIW, USB 3.0 will be ratified at about the same time (mid 2008) and have a speed of up to 5 Gbps on an optical link. The USB people are claiming to have found some workaround for their historically crappy performance (high interrupt overhead) as well, but this remains to be seen...
Not true; there are many "expression" marks put into the score, the interpretation of which requires the player/conductor to be familiar with appropriate idiomatic interpretations of the time period. In fact this has always existed, but hasn't always been explicitly written. e.g. baroque era pieces don't have any expressive indicators at all, but *did* have specific interpretations as they typically went with specific dances requiring particular tempos and so on.
Furthermore much of the work that a musician does involves subtle modifications to the rendition that enhance the clarity of the structure. e.g. microtiming deviations in the melody and subtle tonal inflections are a major part of what makes multiple voices traceable to your perception in polyphonic music -- with strict timing it is *much* more difficult to hear out any polyphonic structure. These effects can be measured quantitatively, by the way, but are far too complex to notate in any score intended for humans to read, and for the most part are too complex for an experience musician to be fully conscious of. (It is possible, however, to program a computer to reproduce them using machine learning).
Finally there is in fact an emotional aspect of music that is actually a consequence of some neural structure or other brain process. This is an active research topic. Likely it is a type of synaesthesia (e.g. mint flavor -> cool sensation). In other words the emotional response to music isn't just the performer "making it up", it's sort of short-circuit in the brain of the listener. Since this is basically a universal effect among humans it would be silly to think that the composer wasn't aware of it as well.
Doesn't congress call various expert witnesses to give opinions on issues like this? Ostensibly it is their job to weigh the testimony of experts and make a decision...
It does not follow that NASA would be better at finishing projects if allowed to set their own priorities. That might be the case, but there is no evidence to support the claim, because NASA has never been in this position. At any rate it's probably not a good idea to give out that much money without asking for something in return.
In fact arguably their biggest accomplishment to date, getting people to the moon, was a strict mandate from congress. And, by the way, on a budget that is about the same as what they get now.
It has been pointed out that getting humans to Mars isn't really that hard. There are feasible approaches with low risk and reasonable technological sophistication. But no one has actually had the courage to tell NASA to make it a priority. Bush makes noise about it occasionally, but it's clear that he doesn't actually care because he hasn't done anything concrete.
So, yes -- NASA's lackluster results *do* follow from congressional bickering over their projects, but what we need to do is fix our idiotic government, not cut NASA loose to play with their toys.
Forgot to add; in the case of the voltage wave, the high propagation speed is due to the orbit velocity of the electron at the speed of light which, similar to a high temperature, has an average velocity of zero. So, it is a very, very small time before one electron pushes on the next (in particular for a metal where they all orbit in a sort of cloud).
So, you can think of the speed of sound as the amount of time before one particle hits another. Greater density or pressure decreases the distance between particles. Increasing temperature increases the rate that they travel across the gap, so also decreases the total propagation time.
The interplanetary medium is very low density but has a very high temperature of about 100000K. It is also pressurized by the solar wind. I find that temperatures in space are very non-intuitive... just remember that its a measure of random motion having average zero velocity -- it has nothing to do with "getting burned" per say.
Sound is a pressure-velocity wave but the velocity component is negligible for most cases (it also drops off as 1/r^2 whereas pressure drops off as 1/r, spherically, which is why the ear can still hear things using pressure sensing). Anyways, the wave propagates at a speed much faster than the particle drift velocity, and the speed of sound is determined by the joint temperature and density/pressure of the medium (and its elasticity and a few other things for various materials).
Something similar is essentially the case in a typical electronic circuit where the drift velocity of electrons is tiny (~ mm/sec) compared to the propagation of the voltage wave at near the speed of light.
Actually one or two high-ranking Al-Qaeda guys were taken out by air strikes, including one by a missile launched from a UAV (can't remember exactly who right now).
Then again we bombed the hell out of some marketplace in Iraq based on a rumor that Saddam might have been there
Looks like one presses ctrl+shift (or equivalent) then some key indicating which accent you want, which induces a modal change. The next character typed acquires the selected accent. This avoids the need to have an accented version of each character, which would be way too many keys for a multi-lingual setup.
The XO's layouts appear to have the same generic accenting facility, though their layout is totally different.
Overall the feature is not all that different from the modal use of formatting such as subscript and superscript, except those are not usually labeled, and don't automatically switch back to the default mode after one character. However, I'd guess that many engineers would come up with the same solution in isolation.
Actually it would be nice to have this on standard US keyboards also; it would make it easier to type the occasional email in French or whatever.
The plantiffs asked the court to mandate that Google hand over the IP. Then Google agreed to an out-of-court "settlement" where they provided the IP directly to the plantiff, based on a "hint" (TFA's words) from the judge that it was OK to do so.
Now it seems likely that this was going to happen eventually, but why the rush? This blogger had been at it for an entire *year* already, and suddenly it becomes a 72-hour emergency? That makes no sense. Why not wait for the mandate and do the thing that is *technically* correct -- morally and legally unquestionable? Were there terms to the settlement that are undisclosed? Was there money involved? We will probably never know. The whole thing just looks bad, bad bad... I hope some heads roll at Google, because they screwed this one up in a big way.
- Reader price, probably will happen eventually. - Book price: I agree fully; also I noted that while Amazon has a decent price for bestsellers (9.99), many technical books are just as absurdly expensive as they are now ($50-70 and up). I think I'll just stick to the library... - Backups: Amazon backs up all your purchases automatically (unlike Apple iTunes, I might add). - Resell; probably won't happen, but rental/checkout might. If this gets popular the universities will demand bulk subscriptions (e.g. I have unlimited access to Safari Bookshelf through the Univ. library).
Actually the probability of a major asteroid strike is 100% certain. Since the solar system is mostly disk-like, our orbit intersects with quite a lot of objects. Eventually the phase of the orbits will line up and there is a collision. The only question is when, so we might estimate that the probability is fairly low of a significant impact over the next 100 years, but over the next million years, that probability is significant.
Regressive is a technical term that describes the function of individual contribution relative to total income. The other two types are progressive and flat. Sales tax is regressive. Even when rich boy buys a Rolex or a Lexus or whatever, the total tax paid relative to income is a smaller percentage compared to the other 98% of the population buying a Timex. Income tax is progressive, up to a point, and then flat.
The fairness of each -- and how its structure relates to what it provides and who gets it, is a subject of debate.
IMHO, wealth is created by standing on the backs of others. That isn't necessarily wrong per say, but I do think it creates a certain debt. However, one can notice quite readily that propositions that fund programs with sales tax (or bonds, but thats another subject), pass easily, while any increase in income tax is fought tooth-and-nail by ultra-wealthy lobbyists.
30 mins times 4 just isn't very much. Treadmills are also boring as all hell... any sort of sport or outdoor activity is way more rewarding for the time spent.
I usually aim to get at least 8 hours of moderate to high intensity workout per week.
I also think that people tend to not appreciate how slowly the body actually changes. It takes at least 2 years of persistent effort to significantly alter body shape, regardless of the goal (losing weight, gaining muscle etc) (discounting use of drugs etc).
It's not the *only* alternative as there are lots of ways to tax things. Hopefully we won't be paying it off with a regressive tax such as sales tax, though that often seems to be the way things go...
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
Thanks--I'll look for the Halmos book (I need to brush up on linear algebra anyways...)
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
Just curious if you have actually read the documentation for NIntegrate[] (it is about 100 pages long, by the way) or if you are making a blanket statement.
I understand that selection of the appropriate hypothesis distribution for estimating the bayes integral is a hard problem, but I'd say the MM6 NIntegrate function is pretty far from "useless except for trivial problems".
AFAIK people are still making the black box prediction... so apparently those receptions were not sufficiently embarassing.:)
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately I can't make much of your link -- most of it is in German, which I can't read, and there is a huge amount of material that would take me a decade to process. I have no idea where I'd even begin to make a comparison.
I have yet to see a specific example of a dead field that is not superceeded by some other field that answers the same questions in a better way, or made trivial by computers (both of these cases I would consider to be compression of knowledge). Please do point one out if you know of such an example.
FWIW the in the example I cited the author discusses explicitly the goal of compressing proofs and explanations.
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
Most of the kernel and core is a variant of C, though not vanilla C so I wouldn't say that it necessarily has the same bug-rates. There is also use of Compile[] etc. The front-end is a separate application. The packages are entirely readable code.
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
Right you are; it's really just the packages under AddOns that are readable source (~ 180000 lines).
Slashdot Mirror
The newspaper industry has historically had one of the highest profit margins of any market, and while some forces have shifted, they are not really in serious danger provided they are willing to adapt. Newspapers have readily taken up internet mediums, and continue to sell dead tree format.
Interestingly, a 2007 study analyzed over a decade of financial data and concluded that newspaper profits are more closely linked to story quality than circulation. This decision allows big media to rely on circulation and de-facto market saturation to maintain their profits instead of competition in the area of high quality investigative journalism. The fact that investigative journalism also tends to uncover all sorts of corruption and other "uncomfortable" topics is a nice benefit that sweetens the deal all around.
It's no secret that FCC commissioners get hired for obscene salaries by media conglomerates as soon as they step down. Make no mistake, Kevin Martin will be rewarded handsomely for delivering this decision to the tune of millions. This is nothing short of criminal bribery.
Watching the public commentary sessions was interesting, too. Not only was all this information laid out in plain view, but people were just tearing into commissioner Martin -- and people coming from all parts of the political spectrum.
It is actually fairly common for these things to be mounted on an automated pan-tilt platform--moving the beam actually makes a pretty interesting effect as it reflects off whatever surface it hits. I can't say if that is the case here but it is possible.
At least one study has concluded these things are basically harmless to human ears, but they do use ultrasonic sound at extremely high power levels (>150 db SPL). Acoustics in air are non-linear at this level, and by modulating the carrier, wave interference forms a "generation region" that induces audible frequencies.
By the way these are no good for music as the low cutoff is about 1khz.
For an isochronous endpoint, the USB device descriptor can list a number of alternative configurations along with the bandwidth requirements of each one. The host knows how much bandwidth is available, not the device -- remember that USB is a host-centric design, nothing gets to talk until the host controller gives the signal -- so the host is responsible for selecting the appropriate mode that fits within the capabilities of the current bus configuration. A typical use case is a video camera offering several different settings of compression/framerate/size etc having a range of bandwidth needs.
Not unique to Firewire -- USB also has an isochronous transfer mode with guaranteed bandwidth and bounded latency, which is used by audio and video devices. If the device supports it, the host can also select which endpoint configuration to use depending on how much bandwidth is available.
All valid points considering the situation of today, but on a future multi-core processor, the CPU expense may not be such an issue, e.g. with 16 cores, one can easily be spared just to deal with data bussing. This may be commonplace by the time USB3 matures.
This will be officially IEEE 1394c. FWIW, USB 3.0 will be ratified at about the same time (mid 2008) and have a speed of up to 5 Gbps on an optical link. The USB people are claiming to have found some workaround for their historically crappy performance (high interrupt overhead) as well, but this remains to be seen...
Not true; there are many "expression" marks put into the score, the interpretation of which requires the player/conductor to be familiar with appropriate idiomatic interpretations of the time period. In fact this has always existed, but hasn't always been explicitly written. e.g. baroque era pieces don't have any expressive indicators at all, but *did* have specific interpretations as they typically went with specific dances requiring particular tempos and so on.
Furthermore much of the work that a musician does involves subtle modifications to the rendition that enhance the clarity of the structure. e.g. microtiming deviations in the melody and subtle tonal inflections are a major part of what makes multiple voices traceable to your perception in polyphonic music -- with strict timing it is *much* more difficult to hear out any polyphonic structure. These effects can be measured quantitatively, by the way, but are far too complex to notate in any score intended for humans to read, and for the most part are too complex for an experience musician to be fully conscious of. (It is possible, however, to program a computer to reproduce them using machine learning).
Finally there is in fact an emotional aspect of music that is actually a consequence of some neural structure or other brain process. This is an active research topic. Likely it is a type of synaesthesia (e.g. mint flavor -> cool sensation). In other words the emotional response to music isn't just the performer "making it up", it's sort of short-circuit in the brain of the listener. Since this is basically a universal effect among humans it would be silly to think that the composer wasn't aware of it as well.
Doesn't congress call various expert witnesses to give opinions on issues like this? Ostensibly it is their job to weigh the testimony of experts and make a decision...
It does not follow that NASA would be better at finishing projects if allowed to set their own priorities. That might be the case, but there is no evidence to support the claim, because NASA has never been in this position. At any rate it's probably not a good idea to give out that much money without asking for something in return.
In fact arguably their biggest accomplishment to date, getting people to the moon, was a strict mandate from congress. And, by the way, on a budget that is about the same as what they get now.
It has been pointed out that getting humans to Mars isn't really that hard. There are feasible approaches with low risk and reasonable technological sophistication. But no one has actually had the courage to tell NASA to make it a priority. Bush makes noise about it occasionally, but it's clear that he doesn't actually care because he hasn't done anything concrete.
So, yes -- NASA's lackluster results *do* follow from congressional bickering over their projects, but what we need to do is fix our idiotic government, not cut NASA loose to play with their toys.
Forgot to add; in the case of the voltage wave, the high propagation speed is due to the orbit velocity of the electron at the speed of light which, similar to a high temperature, has an average velocity of zero. So, it is a very, very small time before one electron pushes on the next (in particular for a metal where they all orbit in a sort of cloud).
So, you can think of the speed of sound as the amount of time before one particle hits another. Greater density or pressure decreases the distance between particles. Increasing temperature increases the rate that they travel across the gap, so also decreases the total propagation time.
The interplanetary medium is very low density but has a very high temperature of about 100000K. It is also pressurized by the solar wind. I find that temperatures in space are very non-intuitive... just remember that its a measure of random motion having average zero velocity -- it has nothing to do with "getting burned" per say.
Sound is a pressure-velocity wave but the velocity component is negligible for most cases (it also drops off as 1/r^2 whereas pressure drops off as 1/r, spherically, which is why the ear can still hear things using pressure sensing). Anyways, the wave propagates at a speed much faster than the particle drift velocity, and the speed of sound is determined by the joint temperature and density/pressure of the medium (and its elasticity and a few other things for various materials).
Something similar is essentially the case in a typical electronic circuit where the drift velocity of electrons is tiny (~ mm/sec) compared to the propagation of the voltage wave at near the speed of light.
Actually one or two high-ranking Al-Qaeda guys were taken out by air strikes, including one by a missile launched from a UAV (can't remember exactly who right now).
Then again we bombed the hell out of some marketplace in Iraq based on a rumor that Saddam might have been there
Looks like one presses ctrl+shift (or equivalent) then some key indicating which accent you want, which induces a modal change. The next character typed acquires the selected accent. This avoids the need to have an accented version of each character, which would be way too many keys for a multi-lingual setup.
The XO's layouts appear to have the same generic accenting facility, though their layout is totally different.
Overall the feature is not all that different from the modal use of formatting such as subscript and superscript, except those are not usually labeled, and don't automatically switch back to the default mode after one character. However, I'd guess that many engineers would come up with the same solution in isolation.
Actually it would be nice to have this on standard US keyboards also; it would make it easier to type the occasional email in French or whatever.
The plantiffs asked the court to mandate that Google hand over the IP. Then Google agreed to an out-of-court "settlement" where they provided the IP directly to the plantiff, based on a "hint" (TFA's words) from the judge that it was OK to do so.
Now it seems likely that this was going to happen eventually, but why the rush? This blogger had been at it for an entire *year* already, and suddenly it becomes a 72-hour emergency? That makes no sense. Why not wait for the mandate and do the thing that is *technically* correct -- morally and legally unquestionable? Were there terms to the settlement that are undisclosed? Was there money involved? We will probably never know. The whole thing just looks bad, bad bad... I hope some heads roll at Google, because they screwed this one up in a big way.
- Reader price, probably will happen eventually.
- Book price: I agree fully; also I noted that while Amazon has a decent price for bestsellers (9.99), many technical books are just as absurdly expensive as they are now ($50-70 and up). I think I'll just stick to the library...
- Backups: Amazon backs up all your purchases automatically (unlike Apple iTunes, I might add).
- Resell; probably won't happen, but rental/checkout might. If this gets popular the universities will demand bulk subscriptions (e.g. I have unlimited access to Safari Bookshelf through the Univ. library).
Actually the probability of a major asteroid strike is 100% certain. Since the solar system is mostly disk-like, our orbit intersects with quite a lot of objects. Eventually the phase of the orbits will line up and there is a collision. The only question is when, so we might estimate that the probability is fairly low of a significant impact over the next 100 years, but over the next million years, that probability is significant.
For more information: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
Regressive is a technical term that describes the function of individual contribution relative to total income. The other two types are progressive and flat. Sales tax is regressive. Even when rich boy buys a Rolex or a Lexus or whatever, the total tax paid relative to income is a smaller percentage compared to the other 98% of the population buying a Timex. Income tax is progressive, up to a point, and then flat.
The fairness of each -- and how its structure relates to what it provides and who gets it, is a subject of debate.
IMHO, wealth is created by standing on the backs of others. That isn't necessarily wrong per say, but I do think it creates a certain debt. However, one can notice quite readily that propositions that fund programs with sales tax (or bonds, but thats another subject), pass easily, while any increase in income tax is fought tooth-and-nail by ultra-wealthy lobbyists.
30 mins times 4 just isn't very much. Treadmills are also boring as all hell... any sort of sport or outdoor activity is way more rewarding for the time spent.
I usually aim to get at least 8 hours of moderate to high intensity workout per week.
I also think that people tend to not appreciate how slowly the body actually changes. It takes at least 2 years of persistent effort to significantly alter body shape, regardless of the goal (losing weight, gaining muscle etc) (discounting use of drugs etc).
So.... what state is that?
It's not the *only* alternative as there are lots of ways to tax things. Hopefully we won't be paying it off with a regressive tax such as sales tax, though that often seems to be the way things go...
Thanks--I'll look for the Halmos book (I need to brush up on linear algebra anyways...)
Just curious if you have actually read the documentation for NIntegrate[] (it is about 100 pages long, by the way) or if you are making a blanket statement.
:)
I understand that selection of the appropriate hypothesis distribution for estimating the bayes integral is a hard problem, but I'd say the MM6 NIntegrate function is pretty far from "useless except for trivial problems".
AFAIK people are still making the black box prediction... so apparently those receptions were not sufficiently embarassing.
Unfortunately I can't make much of your link -- most of it is in German, which I can't read, and there is a huge amount of material that would take me a decade to process. I have no idea where I'd even begin to make a comparison.
I have yet to see a specific example of a dead field that is not superceeded by some other field that answers the same questions in a better way, or made trivial by computers (both of these cases I would consider to be compression of knowledge). Please do point one out if you know of such an example.
FWIW the in the example I cited the author discusses explicitly the goal of compressing proofs and explanations.
Sorry, some corrections; http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/TheSoftwareEngineeringOfMathematica.html
Most of the kernel and core is a variant of C, though not vanilla C so I wouldn't say that it necessarily has the same bug-rates. There is also use of Compile[] etc. The front-end is a separate application. The packages are entirely readable code.
Right you are; it's really just the packages under AddOns that are readable source (~ 180000 lines).