This has been happening in the UK for a couple of decades, basically a loan that you only repay once you are earning.
This is NOT the same as an ISA. The key point of an ISA is that you pay a fixed percentage of your income for a fixed amount of time. This means that high earners pay far more than their education costs and low earners pay far less. The UK system is a loan where, once a high earner has paid it off, they no longer pay anything more. As the article points out this has the effect of cancelling out the investment risk from low earners because high earners will pay a lot more back than the cost of their education while low earners will never repay the full amount.
The UK loan system has a huge problem in that lower earners may actually end up paying far more back because the slow repayment rate allows interest charges to build up. A high earner may end up paying it off in a few years, minimizing any interest accrued, and so pay less overall.
The weaponization of space if when there are weapons placed in space. The anti-satellite weapon was Earth-based. Currently, space is only used for intelligence gathering and so this is a means to potentially knock out another's ability to see what you are doing.
This sort of missile is already bad enough since destroying several satellites could create a huge amount of debris in orbit. However, putting weapons in space - which is usually what we mean by the weaponization of space - is a lot more troubling because, as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. So even if they are never used they could pose a real hazard and if they are ever used then the amount of lethal debris in orbit they would create might severely limit our future access to space.
Jif is a brand of toilet cleaner in the UK and elsewhere. Mind you given the taste of peanut butter I suppose it is possible it is just the same product repurposed.
Interestingly they tried to rename it "Cif" a few years ago but my family back in the UK still just calls it Jif so if the trend continues soon it won't matter what the first letter is, "?if" will always get pronounced "Jif".
Theorists develop the underlying theory of physics by suggesting extensions to existing laws to solve problems or by calculating what existing laws predict for given situations. These physicists have built, and are running, an experiment. They are collecting and analysing the data to test a theoretical prediction of a new model of physics which makes them experimentalists, not theorists.
The even bigger idiot driving at 95 mph? If it weren't for the danger to other drivers you could almost take the long term view and let evolution take care of it.
Not necessarily. An alternative approach would be to simply not build any more roads and then, by about 2050 Europe will probably have reached terminal gridlock. Traffic congestion is already credited with reducing some fatalities.
Probably not since 0 km/h is not a real speed limit. What is far more likely though is someone putting a 30 km/h School zone sign next to a motorway just "for a laugh" and then those cars with limiters will rapidly slow down while those without them will not likely causing serious accidents.
I think you can build in ethics to try and be kind to people
Ethics is not about being kind to people it is about doing the right thing. For example, a system to spot cheating on an exam is not going to be particularly kind to the people it catches and it would be highly unethical for it to be kind by ignoring the cheating. Since doing the "right thing" is subjective and extremely contextual any ethics in automated decision making is going to have to be directed by a human and, since people may vary on what they believe is ethical, very hard to get right.
Even something very basic like not killing people is not going to be easy to implement e.g. should an automated car prioritize the lives of the occupants over others or vice versa? It's made even harder by the fact that computer algorithms do not comprehend the ethical consequences of their choices: all the programmer does is tweak the parameters to make it behave in a way that they believe is ethical which ultimately means the "ethics" will be determined by large corporations or, if regulated, governments which is frankly rather a depressing thought givengovernments' and companies' past records on making ethical choices.
The paper indicates that one of three assumptions must be wrong with the other two being: free choice and non-locality. My bet is on the latter. However, one aspect of this particularly dense paper that I do not quite grasp yet is that it seems that the suggested experiment requires measuring the state of an entangled photon non-destructively which I understood to be impossible...but it is possible I misunderstood.
Boeing knew what they were doing, or this system wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Sorry but I simply do not believe that Boeing knew that this feature was absolutely critical to the safety of the plane and that, without it, planes would fall out of the sky and passengers would die. If they had known this then they would also know that the costs of not making it standard would vastly outweigh any extra money they make from making the feature optional so they would never have made the feature optional.
Clearly, Boeing made a mistake in massively underestimating how critical this system was to safety. However, this mistake has exposed a completely unacceptable system whereby manufacturers can charge extra for features which add a little safety and airlines can decide whether the cost is worth the small increase in safety for their passengers. This underlying system relies on the complicity of both manufacturer and airlines to put a price on passenger safety and that is what is wrong but it is a system in which both participants have some share of the blame.
That's actually a given in any experiment in any field: all uncertainties are themselves uncertain to some degree. However, this in no way stops you from being able to correctly interpret what a stated uncertainty means.
I agree. But Boeing clearly did not realize how critical this system was to the safety of the plane. This is the same error that the airlines made when they evaluated it. The problem I see here is not that they made that mistake - everyone fucks up from time to time - it is that both Boeing and the airlines must have know that there was some improvement to safety by installing this feature and, despite that, they chose to put profit over safety. They grossly underestimated how much safety the feature added but, as I see it, the real problem here is that there is some sort of trade-off going on between safety and cost with the deciding factor being how cheap a particular airline wants to be. So while I might agree that Boeing is perhaps more to blame the airlines involved made the same error and should share some of the culpability.
I agree that it is harder to quantify your uncertainties because you have so many variables but this is what leads to incorrect uncertainty values. What we are talking about here is the correct interpretation of a stated uncertainty which is an entirely different problem to whether the stated uncertainty is correct.
The airline managers may not understand such things
Agreed, but airlines contain more than managers: they have experienced pilots and highly trained engineers as well. If you left the decision about features up to some random business manager you'd probably end up with a plane without engines because it's more fuel efficient! That's my dilemma: airlines are not simple customers they must have evaluated the benefits of this feature themselves and decided the extra safety it provided was not worth the cost which is, in essence, exactly what Boeing did too when they made the feature optional.
If we were talking about a regular consumer product that you or I might buy, I would completely agree since we cannot be expected to be experts in all the products we purchase. But airlines are not simple customers. They are, or at least I really hope they are, fully aware of all the safety issues involved in flying aircraft and so at some level they must have evaluated this feature themselves and decided that the extra safety it added for their customers was not worth the expense. This is in essence exactly what Boeing did too so I do find it hard to find much difference between the two.
They literally nickel and dimed hundreds of people to death.
I agree this is appalling but I'm struggling with whom I should be most appalled by: Boeing for their willingness to sell planes without all the safety features or the airlines that refused to pay for the safety features.
We should never be banning things simply based on whether or not they are "cool" but rather on whether or not they are dangerous. The toxicology of e-cigarettes vs cigarettes does not seem to be well understood yet (although clearly, they are less healthy than not smoking at all) but the physical dangers of cigarettes from domestic fires suggests that cigarettes are far more dangerous. So if e-cigarettes are too dangerous to be sold then logically, so too are cigarettes.
I know, expecting a government to use objective evidence and logic when making decisions is certainly not "cool" at the moment...but by your logic that does at least mean it should be allowed!;-)
I have seen neither disposable lighters nor e-cigarettes go off in normal storage. So if we are going on what I have seen then both appear to be safe. However, doing a quick search only reveals one fatality and 195 'incidents' leading to 133 injuries between 2009-2016 for e-cigarettes.
For cigarettes the picture looks much, much worse. The average ANNUAL rate of house fires caused by smoking is 18,100 each year in the US which causes on average 590 deaths each year and 1,130 injuries. So the annual rate of injuries is about 60 times the rate of injuries from e-cigarettes and the death rate is about a thousand times higher (with a significant margin of error due to there only being one recorded incidence of death from an e-cigarette. Worse the domestic fires likely killed and injured people who were not smoking. At least with e-cigarettes the risk seems to be mainly confined to the person choosing to use the device.
If governments are passing laws then they need to look at hard, objective evidence when deciding to ban things not anecdotal stories. When it comes to banning things we have to use solid, objective arguments and not go on what we "feel" because I don't want things I enjoy doing to get banned simply because someone else "feels" that they are bad. The objective evidence is that e-cigarettes are far, far safer than regular smoking from an accidental death standpoint (the toxicology picture is not yet clear it seems) so banning them while allowing regular cigarettes is completely unwarranted.
It's about publishing Potsy. Something you would know if you were an actual researcher.
I am an actual researcher. Given your lack of understanding of statistics and reliance on ad hominem attacks, if you are a researcher too then you are clearly the target audience that this paper is trying to help by reducing your exposure to simple statistical concepts that you are likely to misinterpret.
I never said that they were calling for a ban on p-values, I said that they were calling for an end to "statistical significance". To quote:
We agree, and call for the entire concept of statistical significance to be abandoned.
This is just stupid. You do not stop using a valuable and sensible concept simply because some people who should know better do not properly understand it. Drawing a conclusion from your analysis is a fundamental part of doing science and it is completely proper that an author of a paper should make a statement of their conclusions based on the data. When this is whether a particular hypothesis is correct or not then you have to address the binary nature of the result otherwise you have not done your job. How strong a statement you can make will, of course, depend on how good your data are. This can vary from "the data are consistent with the Standard Model but do not rule out the presence of new physics" to "The $EXOTIC_NEW_PROCESS is ruled out at the 95% confidence level".
Reading is fundamental and you failed.
Please do not project your own failings onto others.
Plus they are almost all from biology or medicine. Just because their fields don't seem to understand what statistically significant means does not mean that the rest of us do not. Their example when two results measure the same value but one is within one sigma of a null result and the other is not they claim that people interpret this as two incompatible results!? I do not know of any physicist who would look at those data and make that assertion.
Their paper reads more like a "I wish our colleagues understood simple statistics". Banning certain terms is not going to address the underlying problem they clearly have. The solution to ignorance is education, not censorship as they really ought to know, working in universities!
...and yet smoking, particularly in bed, has caused numerous fires leading to far more fatalities than the one attributed to e-cigarettes plus lighters can fail and explode or catch fire just like batteries. So even if you consider this, cigarettes are still far more dangerous so it makes no sense to sell these and yet ban e-cigarettes. In fact, if you are concerned about batteries then you'd probably want to ban mobile phones too!
Even more than that though why are they banning e-cigarettes, whose health effects are not well known, without banning ordinary cigarette sales where the health effects are well known and are extremely bad? Banning e-cigarette sales makes no sense unless you ban the sale of all smoked tobacco products first.
In Australia perhaps but we'll need about 40C of global warming before that becomes an issue in Canada by which time kids in Australia probably won't know what water is either.
A perfect application for solar energy for a place surrounded by ocean...
Making more potable water is one approach. The other approach is to reduce the population by getting everyone to emigrate. Given the way Brexit is going, it's clear the latter method was chosen.
Slashdot Mirror
This has been happening in the UK for a couple of decades, basically a loan that you only repay once you are earning.
This is NOT the same as an ISA. The key point of an ISA is that you pay a fixed percentage of your income for a fixed amount of time. This means that high earners pay far more than their education costs and low earners pay far less. The UK system is a loan where, once a high earner has paid it off, they no longer pay anything more. As the article points out this has the effect of cancelling out the investment risk from low earners because high earners will pay a lot more back than the cost of their education while low earners will never repay the full amount.
The UK loan system has a huge problem in that lower earners may actually end up paying far more back because the slow repayment rate allows interest charges to build up. A high earner may end up paying it off in a few years, minimizing any interest accrued, and so pay less overall.
The weaponization of space if when there are weapons placed in space. The anti-satellite weapon was Earth-based. Currently, space is only used for intelligence gathering and so this is a means to potentially knock out another's ability to see what you are doing.
This sort of missile is already bad enough since destroying several satellites could create a huge amount of debris in orbit. However, putting weapons in space - which is usually what we mean by the weaponization of space - is a lot more troubling because, as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. So even if they are never used they could pose a real hazard and if they are ever used then the amount of lethal debris in orbit they would create might severely limit our future access to space.
Jif is a brand of toilet cleaner in the UK and elsewhere. Mind you given the taste of peanut butter I suppose it is possible it is just the same product repurposed.
Interestingly they tried to rename it "Cif" a few years ago but my family back in the UK still just calls it Jif so if the trend continues soon it won't matter what the first letter is, "?if" will always get pronounced "Jif".
Theorists develop the underlying theory of physics by suggesting extensions to existing laws to solve problems or by calculating what existing laws predict for given situations. These physicists have built, and are running, an experiment. They are collecting and analysing the data to test a theoretical prediction of a new model of physics which makes them experimentalists, not theorists.
The even bigger idiot driving at 95 mph? If it weren't for the danger to other drivers you could almost take the long term view and let evolution take care of it.
Unless we won't have roads anymore....
Not necessarily. An alternative approach would be to simply not build any more roads and then, by about 2050 Europe will probably have reached terminal gridlock. Traffic congestion is already credited with reducing some fatalities.
Probably not since 0 km/h is not a real speed limit. What is far more likely though is someone putting a 30 km/h School zone sign next to a motorway just "for a laugh" and then those cars with limiters will rapidly slow down while those without them will not likely causing serious accidents.
How is that going to stop them? All that would happen is that they would do 85mph in the third lane in torrential rain with the fog lamps off.
I think you can build in ethics to try and be kind to people
Ethics is not about being kind to people it is about doing the right thing. For example, a system to spot cheating on an exam is not going to be particularly kind to the people it catches and it would be highly unethical for it to be kind by ignoring the cheating. Since doing the "right thing" is subjective and extremely contextual any ethics in automated decision making is going to have to be directed by a human and, since people may vary on what they believe is ethical, very hard to get right.
Even something very basic like not killing people is not going to be easy to implement e.g. should an automated car prioritize the lives of the occupants over others or vice versa? It's made even harder by the fact that computer algorithms do not comprehend the ethical consequences of their choices: all the programmer does is tweak the parameters to make it behave in a way that they believe is ethical which ultimately means the "ethics" will be determined by large corporations or, if regulated, governments which is frankly rather a depressing thought givengovernments' and companies' past records on making ethical choices.
The paper indicates that one of three assumptions must be wrong with the other two being: free choice and non-locality. My bet is on the latter. However, one aspect of this particularly dense paper that I do not quite grasp yet is that it seems that the suggested experiment requires measuring the state of an entangled photon non-destructively which I understood to be impossible...but it is possible I misunderstood.
Boeing knew what they were doing, or this system wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Sorry but I simply do not believe that Boeing knew that this feature was absolutely critical to the safety of the plane and that, without it, planes would fall out of the sky and passengers would die. If they had known this then they would also know that the costs of not making it standard would vastly outweigh any extra money they make from making the feature optional so they would never have made the feature optional.
Clearly, Boeing made a mistake in massively underestimating how critical this system was to safety. However, this mistake has exposed a completely unacceptable system whereby manufacturers can charge extra for features which add a little safety and airlines can decide whether the cost is worth the small increase in safety for their passengers. This underlying system relies on the complicity of both manufacturer and airlines to put a price on passenger safety and that is what is wrong but it is a system in which both participants have some share of the blame.
That's actually a given in any experiment in any field: all uncertainties are themselves uncertain to some degree. However, this in no way stops you from being able to correctly interpret what a stated uncertainty means.
I agree. But Boeing clearly did not realize how critical this system was to the safety of the plane. This is the same error that the airlines made when they evaluated it. The problem I see here is not that they made that mistake - everyone fucks up from time to time - it is that both Boeing and the airlines must have know that there was some improvement to safety by installing this feature and, despite that, they chose to put profit over safety. They grossly underestimated how much safety the feature added but, as I see it, the real problem here is that there is some sort of trade-off going on between safety and cost with the deciding factor being how cheap a particular airline wants to be. So while I might agree that Boeing is perhaps more to blame the airlines involved made the same error and should share some of the culpability.
Statistics in medicine are inherently messier.
I agree that it is harder to quantify your uncertainties because you have so many variables but this is what leads to incorrect uncertainty values. What we are talking about here is the correct interpretation of a stated uncertainty which is an entirely different problem to whether the stated uncertainty is correct.
The airline managers may not understand such things
Agreed, but airlines contain more than managers: they have experienced pilots and highly trained engineers as well. If you left the decision about features up to some random business manager you'd probably end up with a plane without engines because it's more fuel efficient! That's my dilemma: airlines are not simple customers they must have evaluated the benefits of this feature themselves and decided the extra safety it provided was not worth the cost which is, in essence, exactly what Boeing did too when they made the feature optional.
If we were talking about a regular consumer product that you or I might buy, I would completely agree since we cannot be expected to be experts in all the products we purchase. But airlines are not simple customers. They are, or at least I really hope they are, fully aware of all the safety issues involved in flying aircraft and so at some level they must have evaluated this feature themselves and decided that the extra safety it added for their customers was not worth the expense. This is in essence exactly what Boeing did too so I do find it hard to find much difference between the two.
They literally nickel and dimed hundreds of people to death.
I agree this is appalling but I'm struggling with whom I should be most appalled by: Boeing for their willingness to sell planes without all the safety features or the airlines that refused to pay for the safety features.
We should never be banning things simply based on whether or not they are "cool" but rather on whether or not they are dangerous. The toxicology of e-cigarettes vs cigarettes does not seem to be well understood yet (although clearly, they are less healthy than not smoking at all) but the physical dangers of cigarettes from domestic fires suggests that cigarettes are far more dangerous. So if e-cigarettes are too dangerous to be sold then logically, so too are cigarettes.
;-)
I know, expecting a government to use objective evidence and logic when making decisions is certainly not "cool" at the moment...but by your logic that does at least mean it should be allowed!
I have seen neither disposable lighters nor e-cigarettes go off in normal storage. So if we are going on what I have seen then both appear to be safe. However, doing a quick search only reveals one fatality and 195 'incidents' leading to 133 injuries between 2009-2016 for e-cigarettes.
For cigarettes the picture looks much, much worse. The average ANNUAL rate of house fires caused by smoking is 18,100 each year in the US which causes on average 590 deaths each year and 1,130 injuries. So the annual rate of injuries is about 60 times the rate of injuries from e-cigarettes and the death rate is about a thousand times higher (with a significant margin of error due to there only being one recorded incidence of death from an e-cigarette. Worse the domestic fires likely killed and injured people who were not smoking. At least with e-cigarettes the risk seems to be mainly confined to the person choosing to use the device.
If governments are passing laws then they need to look at hard, objective evidence when deciding to ban things not anecdotal stories. When it comes to banning things we have to use solid, objective arguments and not go on what we "feel" because I don't want things I enjoy doing to get banned simply because someone else "feels" that they are bad. The objective evidence is that e-cigarettes are far, far safer than regular smoking from an accidental death standpoint (the toxicology picture is not yet clear it seems) so banning them while allowing regular cigarettes is completely unwarranted.
It's about publishing Potsy. Something you would know if you were an actual researcher.
I am an actual researcher. Given your lack of understanding of statistics and reliance on ad hominem attacks, if you are a researcher too then you are clearly the target audience that this paper is trying to help by reducing your exposure to simple statistical concepts that you are likely to misinterpret.
I never said that they were calling for a ban on p-values, I said that they were calling for an end to "statistical significance". To quote:
We agree, and call for the entire concept of statistical significance to be abandoned.
This is just stupid. You do not stop using a valuable and sensible concept simply because some people who should know better do not properly understand it. Drawing a conclusion from your analysis is a fundamental part of doing science and it is completely proper that an author of a paper should make a statement of their conclusions based on the data. When this is whether a particular hypothesis is correct or not then you have to address the binary nature of the result otherwise you have not done your job. How strong a statement you can make will, of course, depend on how good your data are. This can vary from "the data are consistent with the Standard Model but do not rule out the presence of new physics" to "The $EXOTIC_NEW_PROCESS is ruled out at the 95% confidence level".
Reading is fundamental and you failed.
Please do not project your own failings onto others.
Plus they are almost all from biology or medicine. Just because their fields don't seem to understand what statistically significant means does not mean that the rest of us do not. Their example when two results measure the same value but one is within one sigma of a null result and the other is not they claim that people interpret this as two incompatible results!? I do not know of any physicist who would look at those data and make that assertion.
Their paper reads more like a "I wish our colleagues understood simple statistics". Banning certain terms is not going to address the underlying problem they clearly have. The solution to ignorance is education, not censorship as they really ought to know, working in universities!
...and yet smoking, particularly in bed, has caused numerous fires leading to far more fatalities than the one attributed to e-cigarettes plus lighters can fail and explode or catch fire just like batteries. So even if you consider this, cigarettes are still far more dangerous so it makes no sense to sell these and yet ban e-cigarettes. In fact, if you are concerned about batteries then you'd probably want to ban mobile phones too!
Even more than that though why are they banning e-cigarettes, whose health effects are not well known, without banning ordinary cigarette sales where the health effects are well known and are extremely bad? Banning e-cigarette sales makes no sense unless you ban the sale of all smoked tobacco products first.
In Australia perhaps but we'll need about 40C of global warming before that becomes an issue in Canada by which time kids in Australia probably won't know what water is either.
A perfect application for solar energy for a place surrounded by ocean...
Making more potable water is one approach. The other approach is to reduce the population by getting everyone to emigrate. Given the way Brexit is going, it's clear the latter method was chosen.