other response are technically correct, but from a theoretical perspective, the bookie (less bid/ask spread) is computing a risk neutral price based on actual betting behavior. the optimal odds are the same ratio as the # of bets placed on each side. this guarantees the bookie doesn't lose money. add some extra fee for placing the bet and you always make money. the original odds might be set based on some empirical estimate, but the final odds used are always based on ratios of bets placed.
I think an easier way to look at it is that it applies to the government, in that the articles place restrictions on what agents of the government can and cannot it. e.g.:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
First of all, what's unrealistic about it? And it's not even a claim, i.e. as a result of using their service, they claim a particular result. It's the service itself they are talking about and they do not deliver.
the major problem I see with all of these services is that even if it finds music you might like, it doesn't mean it can create a good playlist based on what sounds good together. I haven't seen anything short of an experienced radio DJ be able to do this well. This is why I like radio paradise (www.radioparadise.com). It's 24 hour commercial free radio with an eclectic taste that's DJ'ed, so it doesn't sound disjointed.
Having worked with a variety of headhunters, and interviewed at companies that work with a lot of headhunters, the companies do not expect the head hunters to be honest, but they certainly expect you to be. the first thing I do at the beginning of every interview I go on is give them a copy of my resume I know is correct and basically say "I don't know what the headhunter gave you, but here's a correct copy."
Also, you can work with more than one head hunter at a time; there's no reason to work with only one. If the lying one keeps getting you good interviews, then ask him not to "fix" your resume, but I wouldn't worry about it too much.
That being said, there are plenty of headhunters that do what I call "marking their territory." A lot of companies maintain a database of potential candidates and their resumes. If and when you get a position, they pay the headhunter who found you, but oftentimes they will pay whoever put you into the system first. So, headhunters will scour job boards and tell you about wonderful positions they've found and how they have a really good relationship with the hiring manager (who they don't know) and ask you if you're OK with them talking to company. When you agree, they simply submit your resume to the companies candidate database. Other recruiters will know this and will therefore have no incentive to work with you. If you are in need of a job or you might have liked it anyway, everyone wins, but most of the time it's just a way to squeeze their competition and it can really screw you because plenty of companies won't "expire" the candidate entry for a year or two. When you need a job down the road a little, recruiters won't work with you because someone else has basically excluded you (for their purposes) from a number of good places.
If you suspect your headhunter may be doing this, then tell them sternly that you do not permit them to submit your resume anymore ANYWHERE.
Then you'll have a heart attack when I tell you that the projects for the OS course I took at Cornell were all to expected be done either in Java or C# (although you could use another language if you pleased). There was also surprisingly little discussion of existing kernels.
This post, any many other replies to the original question, stink of one thing-- sexism. And frankly, as someone married and a linux/math/science geek too, that's one thing to be wary of. Many geeks end up in extremely male dominated professions and inadvertently it becomes difficult to view women as equals in the workplace for the one reason that there aren't very many of them and the ones that are there are not peers. I think the reason many successful women end up single is because of the men in their lives. I think, unfortunately, that many guys want to be looked up to, not the other way around and have trouble accepting that their SOs are making more money than them or generally more successful... and society reinforces this stereotype. So, the one piece of advice I would give is to always remember that you and your spouse are equals and that women and men process things differently. Talking to your guy buddies about a girl problem isn't necessarily going to help you a understand a problem you're having any better. And please, don't be someone your wife looks up to-- be someone she's proud of:)
My whole point was that sexism is to a large degree not conscious and hugely dependent on the societal f of the perceived value of women. So yes, in some sense, there is some uniform level of sexism across men and women due to framing and I think this accounts for the differences and why the employment "market" isn't efficient in this sense.
I think the issue has little to do with trying to equalize the balance of men and women so much as equalizing the balance in the opportunities to pursue the fields that people want. I think that the general agreement is that (especially since the percentages have been changing quite dramatically in recent decades) women don't have the same opportunity as men do. There are various studies showing that women make less than men for the same jobs, and this is blatant discrimination. I don't think anyone is arguing that men have less opportunities in veterinary medicine (although I think there is some framing that goes one as I mentioned below).
This reminds me of the way orchestra auditions have changed over time (described in "Blink"). Before, candidates would play in front of the judges and the judges would decide-- seems harmless enough. However, women have been consistently under-represented in orchestras, and especially on instruments deemed "better" for men (e.g. french horn). Now, candidates perform behind a curtain, so that the judges can't see the candidates, only hear them. Almost overnight, the number of women skyrocketed. I think it's essentially the same thing with women in math and science. People are predisposed to think that men are better than women at certain tasks/professions (even if it's subconscious) and this is reflected in the number of women we see in various industries. I don't think anyone is really immune from this, and in math and science, I think the framing effect is rather strong. Just read some of the blogs of women in science (e.g. http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/) and you'll see that there is still an opportunity gap.
Also, it's not entirely the fault of men. I think women have almost just as much to do with the problem. From mothers telling their daughters they're not smart enough to do science to an example from aforementioned blog: Isis took her toddler to daycare and the caretaker asked what she did; she said "I work at the hospital" and the response was "oh, a lot of the other mommies are nurses too." This does not help the problem...
I'm not sure I get what you mean by "truth". As the GP said, physics is about making useful predictions within constraints. Under whatever definition of truth you choose to use (it's hard to tell from your post), it would inherently require contradictions to abound. I certainly don't like any definition that allows us to derive contradictions, since that means we can derive anything, which is certainly pretty useless.
One of the biggest advances in scientific thinking in the 20th century is Popper's analysis of falsification and that induction doesn't exist (or at least doesn't really work). Philosophers have struggled for centuries to come to some understanding regarding when induction works and when it doesn't. Not letting scientific theories ever be "true" solved a LOT of problems, since once you prove something true, it can never be false-- and this isn't just a cop out; from a logical standpoint, proving something true and falsifying it are asymmetrical. To prove something true requires you to show validity for an infinite set of cases, whereas falsification only requires you to find one counterexample, and this is why designing experiments that can potentially falsify your theory is so useful (and also why string theory is criticized for not predicting anything that can be tested). Scientists have moved away from the old definition of truth (as you seem to understand it) for good reason.
I think your view of functional languages is pretty backwards. Part of the reason C/C++ are hard to parallelize is because the data flow is so complex. Many functional languages have a) extremely simple data flow, since it's relatively easy to program without side-effects and b) allow you to use the language's higher level optimization features to help with speed, e.g. programming using tail recursion that is easily optimized into a tight loop. Ultimately, multi-core optimization requires good parallelization capabilities, and none of what you are saying really helps with that. Erlang, as mentioned elsewhere, is a great example of a high level functional language which parallelizes much better than C/C++, even when using all the features you are talking about.
As much as I praise this move, since I believe that any sort of standardization is good, the problems were not with the code. Also, it's not like you'll be able to do any of the things you are claiming. Even the best models are entirely dependent on their inputs and interpretation of the input/resulting values. You don't just run this code as is and get out a price; you'd have to replicate all the assumptions that were being made. Under the right assumptions, the output of the model might even be pretty good.
It might not be, but the models themselves have been well known for a while, and while things like copula analysis and constant correlation assumptions were certainly bad and didn't do a good job of expressing the quantities/risks the banks really wanted to express, the code doesn't really help you.
You are correct about it not necessarily being about technical advances, but who cares? Why are technical advances so important? Did Ubuntu have some great technical advances that caused it to gain in popularity? Perhaps... but I don't think that's why most people like it, or at the very last, many of the people who use it probably can't point to any technical advance as a reason for why they use it. Market cap is a measure of the company's perceived worth, and in that sense, surpassing Sun is significant in that it suggests that Sun's business model is not in line with its revenue stream.
I think the answer to your last question is that Word is *not* perceived as a tool of the trade-- people need to communicate, not necessarily write long documents, and that's it. I know plenty of people who refuse to switch to office 2003 because the interface is so different that they don't want to spend the time to learn it, and to some extent, I get their point. They are just trying to communicate, and Word in their case is just a replacement for pen & paper, so why should they spend time learning an alternative?
Although this might seem an unfair blow, trying to replace Word is probably considerably less important than trying to replace Excel. In finance, for example, everyone uses Excel out of habit (and due to a lack of a good replacement, too), but in many cases because replacements do not support the add-ons they are used to (e.g. Bloomberg add-ons), without which many would be useless.
This is the exact same type of hurdle that Linux faces with support for hardware. Companies don't want to support it, and it's taken a really long time to write drivers. If Excel is replaced with a good alternative, I think Word would easily follow, even if the interface were radically different.
A bookmark is just a reference to something you've looked at and might be interested in in the future. Your browsing experience would become far too cluttered if everything was always kept open. As much as the desktop paradigm has limits to its power as an analogy, I think it's applicable in this situation. You don't keep 20 books lying open at the pages you care about-- you put stickies on them and put them away-- to keep clutter manageable. the same goes for browser bookmarks. even if the contents of the page for each bookmark was stored with it (which is essentially what you are suggesting), there is a difference between what you happen to be looking at at a particular moment (which may or may not be important), and a bookmark, which signifies a certain level of importance. in your scheme, everything is equally important. either way, bookmarks are a useful concept, regardless of resources.
Your 1+1=2 is only true in certain groups. Context, context, context. You can describe the "banana group" as having certain properties. I think there is more to it than you are saying. If physical systems behave ideally like groups with certain properties, then we can use this and there is, indeed, a connection. As one of the other comments points out, "1 black hole + 1 black hole != 2 black holes." In that case, the group in question is idempotent. If you say that the "black hole group" is idempotent, that has a very particular meaning, making it very different from the "banana group."
Imagine an infinite checker board. At the time of the big bang, the size of each square is 0. The size of each square grows with time. So, it can be said to be expanding, infinite and without a center.
Slashdot Mirror
other response are technically correct, but from a theoretical perspective, the bookie (less bid/ask spread) is computing a risk neutral price based on actual betting behavior. the optimal odds are the same ratio as the # of bets placed on each side. this guarantees the bookie doesn't lose money. add some extra fee for placing the bet and you always make money. the original odds might be set based on some empirical estimate, but the final odds used are always based on ratios of bets placed.
as mentioned earlier, why should someone be accountable for the results of deliberate attacks? no other industry does that.
I think an easier way to look at it is that it applies to the government, in that the articles place restrictions on what agents of the government can and cannot it. e.g.:
...by the government
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
First of all, what's unrealistic about it? And it's not even a claim, i.e. as a result of using their service, they claim a particular result. It's the service itself they are talking about and they do not deliver.
the major problem I see with all of these services is that even if it finds music you might like, it doesn't mean it can create a good playlist based on what sounds good together. I haven't seen anything short of an experienced radio DJ be able to do this well. This is why I like radio paradise (www.radioparadise.com). It's 24 hour commercial free radio with an eclectic taste that's DJ'ed, so it doesn't sound disjointed.
Many of the books seem to be ~$11; this is 10% more than the kindle. That adds up pretty quickly.
Having worked with a variety of headhunters, and interviewed at companies that work with a lot of headhunters, the companies do not expect the head hunters to be honest, but they certainly expect you to be. the first thing I do at the beginning of every interview I go on is give them a copy of my resume I know is correct and basically say "I don't know what the headhunter gave you, but here's a correct copy."
Also, you can work with more than one head hunter at a time; there's no reason to work with only one. If the lying one keeps getting you good interviews, then ask him not to "fix" your resume, but I wouldn't worry about it too much.
That being said, there are plenty of headhunters that do what I call "marking their territory." A lot of companies maintain a database of potential candidates and their resumes. If and when you get a position, they pay the headhunter who found you, but oftentimes they will pay whoever put you into the system first. So, headhunters will scour job boards and tell you about wonderful positions they've found and how they have a really good relationship with the hiring manager (who they don't know) and ask you if you're OK with them talking to company. When you agree, they simply submit your resume to the companies candidate database. Other recruiters will know this and will therefore have no incentive to work with you. If you are in need of a job or you might have liked it anyway, everyone wins, but most of the time it's just a way to squeeze their competition and it can really screw you because plenty of companies won't "expire" the candidate entry for a year or two. When you need a job down the road a little, recruiters won't work with you because someone else has basically excluded you (for their purposes) from a number of good places.
If you suspect your headhunter may be doing this, then tell them sternly that you do not permit them to submit your resume anymore ANYWHERE.
Amen to that. Maybe he secretly spends all his time working on R (which rocks). That being said, why does SAS suck so much?
Fahrenheit 451 = 233 C. It makes sense that cardboard is a little higher
Then you'll have a heart attack when I tell you that the projects for the OS course I took at Cornell were all to expected be done either in Java or C# (although you could use another language if you pleased). There was also surprisingly little discussion of existing kernels.
Or perl.
This post, any many other replies to the original question, stink of one thing-- sexism. And frankly, as someone married and a linux/math/science geek too, that's one thing to be wary of. Many geeks end up in extremely male dominated professions and inadvertently it becomes difficult to view women as equals in the workplace for the one reason that there aren't very many of them and the ones that are there are not peers. I think the reason many successful women end up single is because of the men in their lives. I think, unfortunately, that many guys want to be looked up to, not the other way around and have trouble accepting that their SOs are making more money than them or generally more successful... and society reinforces this stereotype. So, the one piece of advice I would give is to always remember that you and your spouse are equals and that women and men process things differently. Talking to your guy buddies about a girl problem isn't necessarily going to help you a understand a problem you're having any better. And please, don't be someone your wife looks up to-- be someone she's proud of :)
My whole point was that sexism is to a large degree not conscious and hugely dependent on the societal f of the perceived value of women. So yes, in some sense, there is some uniform level of sexism across men and women due to framing and I think this accounts for the differences and why the employment "market" isn't efficient in this sense.
I think the issue has little to do with trying to equalize the balance of men and women so much as equalizing the balance in the opportunities to pursue the fields that people want. I think that the general agreement is that (especially since the percentages have been changing quite dramatically in recent decades) women don't have the same opportunity as men do. There are various studies showing that women make less than men for the same jobs, and this is blatant discrimination. I don't think anyone is arguing that men have less opportunities in veterinary medicine (although I think there is some framing that goes one as I mentioned below).
This reminds me of the way orchestra auditions have changed over time (described in "Blink"). Before, candidates would play in front of the judges and the judges would decide-- seems harmless enough. However, women have been consistently under-represented in orchestras, and especially on instruments deemed "better" for men (e.g. french horn). Now, candidates perform behind a curtain, so that the judges can't see the candidates, only hear them. Almost overnight, the number of women skyrocketed. I think it's essentially the same thing with women in math and science. People are predisposed to think that men are better than women at certain tasks/professions (even if it's subconscious) and this is reflected in the number of women we see in various industries. I don't think anyone is really immune from this, and in math and science, I think the framing effect is rather strong. Just read some of the blogs of women in science (e.g. http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/) and you'll see that there is still an opportunity gap.
Also, it's not entirely the fault of men. I think women have almost just as much to do with the problem. From mothers telling their daughters they're not smart enough to do science to an example from aforementioned blog: Isis took her toddler to daycare and the caretaker asked what she did; she said "I work at the hospital" and the response was "oh, a lot of the other mommies are nurses too." This does not help the problem...
I'm not sure I get what you mean by "truth". As the GP said, physics is about making useful predictions within constraints. Under whatever definition of truth you choose to use (it's hard to tell from your post), it would inherently require contradictions to abound. I certainly don't like any definition that allows us to derive contradictions, since that means we can derive anything, which is certainly pretty useless.
One of the biggest advances in scientific thinking in the 20th century is Popper's analysis of falsification and that induction doesn't exist (or at least doesn't really work). Philosophers have struggled for centuries to come to some understanding regarding when induction works and when it doesn't. Not letting scientific theories ever be "true" solved a LOT of problems, since once you prove something true, it can never be false-- and this isn't just a cop out; from a logical standpoint, proving something true and falsifying it are asymmetrical. To prove something true requires you to show validity for an infinite set of cases, whereas falsification only requires you to find one counterexample, and this is why designing experiments that can potentially falsify your theory is so useful (and also why string theory is criticized for not predicting anything that can be tested). Scientists have moved away from the old definition of truth (as you seem to understand it) for good reason.
I think your view of functional languages is pretty backwards. Part of the reason C/C++ are hard to parallelize is because the data flow is so complex. Many functional languages have a) extremely simple data flow, since it's relatively easy to program without side-effects and b) allow you to use the language's higher level optimization features to help with speed, e.g. programming using tail recursion that is easily optimized into a tight loop. Ultimately, multi-core optimization requires good parallelization capabilities, and none of what you are saying really helps with that. Erlang, as mentioned elsewhere, is a great example of a high level functional language which parallelizes much better than C/C++, even when using all the features you are talking about.
As much as I praise this move, since I believe that any sort of standardization is good, the problems were not with the code. Also, it's not like you'll be able to do any of the things you are claiming. Even the best models are entirely dependent on their inputs and interpretation of the input/resulting values. You don't just run this code as is and get out a price; you'd have to replicate all the assumptions that were being made. Under the right assumptions, the output of the model might even be pretty good.
It might not be, but the models themselves have been well known for a while, and while things like copula analysis and constant correlation assumptions were certainly bad and didn't do a good job of expressing the quantities/risks the banks really wanted to express, the code doesn't really help you.
For all our sakes, stop reading Slashdot at work!
..I kid, I kid
You are correct about it not necessarily being about technical advances, but who cares? Why are technical advances so important? Did Ubuntu have some great technical advances that caused it to gain in popularity? Perhaps... but I don't think that's why most people like it, or at the very last, many of the people who use it probably can't point to any technical advance as a reason for why they use it. Market cap is a measure of the company's perceived worth, and in that sense, surpassing Sun is significant in that it suggests that Sun's business model is not in line with its revenue stream.
I think the answer to your last question is that Word is *not* perceived as a tool of the trade-- people need to communicate, not necessarily write long documents, and that's it. I know plenty of people who refuse to switch to office 2003 because the interface is so different that they don't want to spend the time to learn it, and to some extent, I get their point. They are just trying to communicate, and Word in their case is just a replacement for pen & paper, so why should they spend time learning an alternative?
Although this might seem an unfair blow, trying to replace Word is probably considerably less important than trying to replace Excel. In finance, for example, everyone uses Excel out of habit (and due to a lack of a good replacement, too), but in many cases because replacements do not support the add-ons they are used to (e.g. Bloomberg add-ons), without which many would be useless.
This is the exact same type of hurdle that Linux faces with support for hardware. Companies don't want to support it, and it's taken a really long time to write drivers. If Excel is replaced with a good alternative, I think Word would easily follow, even if the interface were radically different.
Just a thought
A bookmark is just a reference to something you've looked at and might be interested in in the future. Your browsing experience would become far too cluttered if everything was always kept open. As much as the desktop paradigm has limits to its power as an analogy, I think it's applicable in this situation. You don't keep 20 books lying open at the pages you care about-- you put stickies on them and put them away-- to keep clutter manageable. the same goes for browser bookmarks. even if the contents of the page for each bookmark was stored with it (which is essentially what you are suggesting), there is a difference between what you happen to be looking at at a particular moment (which may or may not be important), and a bookmark, which signifies a certain level of importance. in your scheme, everything is equally important. either way, bookmarks are a useful concept, regardless of resources.
I think you meant Don Knuth
Your 1+1=2 is only true in certain groups. Context, context, context. You can describe the "banana group" as having certain properties. I think there is more to it than you are saying. If physical systems behave ideally like groups with certain properties, then we can use this and there is, indeed, a connection. As one of the other comments points out, "1 black hole + 1 black hole != 2 black holes." In that case, the group in question is idempotent. If you say that the "black hole group" is idempotent, that has a very particular meaning, making it very different from the "banana group."
I slightly better analogy (same idea, though)--
Imagine an infinite checker board. At the time of the big bang, the size of each square is 0. The size of each square grows with time. So, it can be said to be expanding, infinite and without a center.