Actually you *can* do that kind of multi-dimensional filtering, equivalent to multiple AND statements followed by a GROUP BY. There are different data sets here, with different usage models. Perhaps most interesting is the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). Docs here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/data_documentation/public_use_microdata_sample/
PUMS contains records representing individual responses to the American Community Survey (ACS). These individual responses include detailed data including housing data (# rooms, heating fuel, property value, mortgage, age of house, etc) and personal data (family income, vehicles, employments status, # children, language spoken, etc). Now, ACS is a sample, not a full enumeration like the decennial census, but the sampling is done carefully in an attempt to be representative. Full record definition here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/data_documentation/pums/DataDict/PUMS_Data_Dictionary_2006-2010.pdf
Back to the confidentiality question: this detailed data is carefully altered to protect individual privacy while still being correct at an aggregate level. Here's what the site says about this protection:
"As required by federal law, the confidentiality of ACS respondents is protected through a variety of steps to disguise or suppress original data while making sure the results are still useful. The first means of protecting is the suppression of all personal identification, such as name and address, from each record. In addition, a small number of records are switched with similar records from a neighboring area or receive another collection of characteristics developed by using a modeling technique. Age perturbation is one example of procedures that disguise original data by randomly adjusting the reported ages for a subset of individuals. The answers to open-ended questions, where an extreme value might identify an individual, are top-coded. Top coded questions include age, income, and housing unit value. In addition to modifying the individual records, respondents' confidentiality is protected because only large geographic areas are identified in the PUMS."
That's right, and even at the block level data may be swapped around between block or obfuscated in other ways that protect individuals while still keeping the data accurate at an aggregate level. I know it is easy to be concerned about this when looking at it for the first time, but Census has been seriously working for years on how to protect confidentiality while releasing quality data at as low a level as possible.
But more relevant is this link to the American Statistical Association, which goes into significant depth on the techniques used to protect confidentiality:
http://www.amstat.org/committees/pc/index.html
On this page
http://www.fcsm.gov/working-papers/spwp22.html
we find a working paper from the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, which has deeper details on actual operations.
From that page, the "Statistical Disclosure Limitation: A Primer" document has an interesting section defining inferential disclosure - "occurs when individual information can be inferred with high confidence from statistical properties of the released data."
And the "Current Federal Statistical Agency Practices" describes the multi-dimensional linear programming used to prevent that, along with other techniques including geographic thresholds, population thresholds and coarsening.
So the summary is: Yes, it is a serious issue to be concerned about, but Census is taking it seriously, applying some real science and math to it, and it looks like they are doing a good job.
I've actually toured this facility, and it was pretty damn cool. A few points that stuck in my memory:
The generally do one shot each night. They prep it during the day, then they all go home and it goes off at night with not many people there, because that's safer.
The electricity usage is intense but very short, lasting only around 20 billionths of a second. They do this by charging up their capacitors and then discharging them very rapidly. They said the air conditioning for the building actually uses more power than the laser.
They talk about the "seven wonders of NIF", which are seven advances in materials and technology that were made during the project which made it all possible. I thought the rapid crystal growing was pretty wicked. Info on them here: https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/seven_wonders.php
In the actual ignition step itself, while you might think you shine the powerful laser on the thing you want to heat up, that's actually not how it works. They have the thing they want to heat, and near it (like 1mm) is this little metallic trough thing. They blast the laser into the trough thing and when the light hits that it creates microwaves, and the microwaves heat the target. Of course by the time it's done all those parts are completely vaporized.
Also of interest, around April this year the place was shut down for maintenance for a month. For about two weeks during that period some filming for the next Star Trek movie took place inside the NIF facility. So check out the pix and see if you can spot the NIF scenes when the movie comes out. It does kinda look like the engine room of a starship: https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/photo_gallery/target_area/?id=5&category=target_area
Obviously, the whole lab is full of nerds who like Star Trek, but they were not allowed to see what was going on.
Well said.
Also, NIF defines "ignition" as "achieving nuclear fusion burn and gain", i.e. getting more energy out than you put in. They create fusion all the time, they just have not passed that breakeven point yet.
There is lots of great info on their site: https://lasers.llnl.gov/
This makes me feel sad. They were a great part of Saturday mornings.
I know they are up at retirement age, but I hope they find some other projects that help them share their wit and wisdom.
Click and Clack Rock.
There is great value in knowing which things we (i.e. humanity and the scientific community) understand and which we don't. To me this is the primary message and the joy of reading/listening to Feynman. Over and over again he sketches out what we understand in a field and then highlights the questions that remain, and shares his enthusiasm and wonder for those unanswered questions that are waiting out there for a sharp mind grasp. This focus on the unanswered question is what makes his work so inspirational. It makes you want to become a physicist so you can go out and solve some of those mysteries. And that also is what differentiates Feynman's approach from how science is taught in most places. It's taught with a focus on what we know, which unintentionally gives the student the impression that we mostly understand things, which is completely wrong.
On another note, as a computer scientist and architect of large systems, it is important for me to know what is do-able and what is not, which problems we have solutions for, which are intractable nonstarters, and which we have a chance to solve in the right situation with the right brainpower applied. The details of why are less important. For example, I don't need to understand deep crypto to know what we can encrypt the comms between these two components. I know it's a solved problem, what it can and cannot do, and that's all that matters to me. Put it in my toolbox along with sorting, hash tables, full-text indexing, AJAX, machine learning, and hundreds of other techniques, each of which is its own deep field, and I can use this knowledge to design systems with high confidence that they are going to work as planned.
...published in the 1960s and I don't think have ever really been brought up to date...
They have been updated. From wikipedia:
"Also released in 2005, was a "Definitive Edition" of the lectures which includes corrections to the original text."
And the Amazon page says: "The revised edition of Feynman's legendary lectures includes extensive corrections and updates collated by Feynman and his colleagues. A new foreword by Kip Thorne, the current Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, discusses the relevance of the new edition to today’s readers."
Freedom isn't free! It cost folks like you and me.
And if we don't all chip in, we'll never pay that bill.
Freedom isn't free! No there's a hefty fucking fee.
And if you don't throw in your buck o'five who will?
If you don't throw in your buck o'five who will?
Ooh... buck o'five
Freedom cost a buck o'five
(please visualize this sung by marionettes.)
Parker and Stone 'Putting The "F" Back In Freedom'
Seems like this would have big potential for use in all-optical routing, but I did not see any mention of that in the articles. Any optical routing pros out there who can tell us if this tech is applicable?
I hear google is starting a new service where you get your electricity for free, but they get to keep all the usage data and do whatever they want with it. As a first test of the utility of this they are modeling when people are home and when they are not, then door-to-door sales organizations get to participate in an auction to buy time segments of people at home. Rumor has it that the Girl Scouts and the Jehovah's Witnesses were having a bidding war for your house at 6:45-7:15 PM next tuesday. Next they will target your computer with ads for porn when you are using the laptop after 11PM and the wife has set her alarm earlier than 7AM and turned off the upstairs lights. Other applications to follow.
We blew a big opportunity with the body disposal.
Here's what they should have done with the body:
Cremate him, grind the ashes up extra-fine, then add them to a batch of 50,000 or so of those cakes that go in urinals. Optionally print a picture of his face on the cake. Distribute evenly across the US. Good times ensue. Some measure of karmic justice is achieved. Being eaten by fish just doesn't have the same impact.
I'm acutally surprised how that the price tag for something like this is so low. Also, I wonder where it has been. TFA says they buyer will be returning it to Russia, and hopes to put it in a museum. So where has it been and how did it fall into private hands? TFA doesn't say anythign about that. But I bet the answer is a dirty, dirty story.
Bingo. There are *lots* of studies. The author of this article is speaking from ignorance.
A quick look through the publications from Virginia Tech's
HCI group,
viz group
and
gigapixelproject
shows an abundance of work on this. And that is just one university. I'm sure there are *many* other examples.
So it's in California, Superior Court of San Diego County.
And he was nabbed "less than two weeks after his annual review on a prior offense of shooting a person with a pellet gun."
Excellent point. For more support on that point check out this video (
part_1,
part_2 )
in which Professor James Duane of the Regent University School of Law tell us why even supposedly law-abiding innocent people should never talk to the police. One of his points is that there because of the complexity of our laws there really is no way to know whether you have broken any laws. As an example of this, we have treaties that incoporate the laws of foreign countries into our own by reference. This was a big eye-opener for me.
I got an
Infrant ReadyNAS NV
, before the company was bought up by NetGear. It's pretty awesome, though not perfect. Real hot-swappable RAID, dynamic reconfiguration, and lots of other good management tools. Looks pretty sweet, fairly quiet. Using it as a print server has always been problematic, tho.
Also, they seem to have gone up in
price
*quite* a bit. This site says the no-disk one is $1049. I think mine was around $600. I got one with no disks, and found a good deal on two 500GB disks (which were on their approved h/w list) and still ended up under $1200, and that was two or three years ago. But mine didn't have gigabit ethernet. I guess that explains some of the cost increase.
I set mine up with 500GB of storage, mirrored, and two open bays. I started offloading pix and video and backing up everything else, and a couple years later have not yet had to fill the other bays. But I like knowing I can expand to 1.5TB in RAID5 when I need the space.
I'm not saying I would trust the software - as a software developer I have seen and learned too much to ever implicitly trust *any* complex software - but I would take my chances with software *long* before I would go up into the air with the yahoos I see on the road every day. Talking on their cell phones, or worse yet, texting, while they tailgate, in the rain, at night. Some of those people are dangerous even when they are *trying* to pay attention. Letting them fly might have a positive Darwinian effect, but I don't want to be anywhere near that when it happens. If you are going to open the airspace up to the general public, automation, with all its faults, is the only possible way.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you *can* do that kind of multi-dimensional filtering, equivalent to multiple AND statements followed by a GROUP BY. There are different data sets here, with different usage models. Perhaps most interesting is the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). Docs here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/data_documentation/public_use_microdata_sample/
PUMS contains records representing individual responses to the American Community Survey (ACS). These individual responses include detailed data including housing data (# rooms, heating fuel, property value, mortgage, age of house, etc) and personal data (family income, vehicles, employments status, # children, language spoken, etc). Now, ACS is a sample, not a full enumeration like the decennial census, but the sampling is done carefully in an attempt to be representative. Full record definition here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/data_documentation/pums/DataDict/PUMS_Data_Dictionary_2006-2010.pdf
Back to the confidentiality question: this detailed data is carefully altered to protect individual privacy while still being correct at an aggregate level. Here's what the site says about this protection:
The Census site has a little info about this: http://www.census.gov/privacy/data_protection/statistical_safeguards.html
But more relevant is this link to the American Statistical Association, which goes into significant depth on the techniques used to protect confidentiality: http://www.amstat.org/committees/pc/index.html
On this page http://www.fcsm.gov/working-papers/spwp22.html we find a working paper from the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, which has deeper details on actual operations.
From that page, the "Statistical Disclosure Limitation: A Primer" document has an interesting section defining inferential disclosure - "occurs when individual information can be inferred with high confidence from statistical properties of the released data."
And the "Current Federal Statistical Agency Practices" describes the multi-dimensional linear programming used to prevent that, along with other techniques including geographic thresholds, population thresholds and coarsening.
So the summary is: Yes, it is a serious issue to be concerned about, but Census is taking it seriously, applying some real science and math to it, and it looks like they are doing a good job.
Seeing a lot of discussion, but not much real information here, so I'll contribute.
For starters, here is the website: https://lasers.llnl.gov/
And here is a page of that site that has some explanation about how it works: https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/nic/icf/how_icf_works.php
I've actually toured this facility, and it was pretty damn cool. A few points that stuck in my memory:
The generally do one shot each night. They prep it during the day, then they all go home and it goes off at night with not many people there, because that's safer.
The electricity usage is intense but very short, lasting only around 20 billionths of a second. They do this by charging up their capacitors and then discharging them very rapidly. They said the air conditioning for the building actually uses more power than the laser.
They talk about the "seven wonders of NIF", which are seven advances in materials and technology that were made during the project which made it all possible. I thought the rapid crystal growing was pretty wicked. Info on them here: https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/seven_wonders.php
In the actual ignition step itself, while you might think you shine the powerful laser on the thing you want to heat up, that's actually not how it works. They have the thing they want to heat, and near it (like 1mm) is this little metallic trough thing. They blast the laser into the trough thing and when the light hits that it creates microwaves, and the microwaves heat the target. Of course by the time it's done all those parts are completely vaporized.
Also of interest, around April this year the place was shut down for maintenance for a month. For about two weeks during that period some filming for the next Star Trek movie took place inside the NIF facility. So check out the pix and see if you can spot the NIF scenes when the movie comes out. It does kinda look like the engine room of a starship: https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/photo_gallery/target_area/?id=5&category=target_area Obviously, the whole lab is full of nerds who like Star Trek, but they were not allowed to see what was going on.
Well said. Also, NIF defines "ignition" as "achieving nuclear fusion burn and gain", i.e. getting more energy out than you put in. They create fusion all the time, they just have not passed that breakeven point yet. There is lots of great info on their site: https://lasers.llnl.gov/
http://www.cartalk.com/content/time-get-even-lazier
This makes me feel sad. They were a great part of Saturday mornings. I know they are up at retirement age, but I hope they find some other projects that help them share their wit and wisdom. Click and Clack Rock.
Can we call these "somewhere between PCs and tablets" machines "lap-tabs"? It's just snappy.
and Behold the Mystical Power of EXPONENTS!! Prepare to be amazed!! We will magically create numbers so big they are Unimaginable!!
Agreed.
There is great value in knowing which things we (i.e. humanity and the scientific community) understand and which we don't. To me this is the primary message and the joy of reading/listening to Feynman. Over and over again he sketches out what we understand in a field and then highlights the questions that remain, and shares his enthusiasm and wonder for those unanswered questions that are waiting out there for a sharp mind grasp. This focus on the unanswered question is what makes his work so inspirational. It makes you want to become a physicist so you can go out and solve some of those mysteries. And that also is what differentiates Feynman's approach from how science is taught in most places. It's taught with a focus on what we know, which unintentionally gives the student the impression that we mostly understand things, which is completely wrong.
On another note, as a computer scientist and architect of large systems, it is important for me to know what is do-able and what is not, which problems we have solutions for, which are intractable nonstarters, and which we have a chance to solve in the right situation with the right brainpower applied. The details of why are less important. For example, I don't need to understand deep crypto to know what we can encrypt the comms between these two components. I know it's a solved problem, what it can and cannot do, and that's all that matters to me. Put it in my toolbox along with sorting, hash tables, full-text indexing, AJAX, machine learning, and hundreds of other techniques, each of which is its own deep field, and I can use this knowledge to design systems with high confidence that they are going to work as planned.
...published in the 1960s and I don't think have ever really been brought up to date...
They have been updated. From wikipedia: "Also released in 2005, was a "Definitive Edition" of the lectures which includes corrections to the original text."
And the Amazon page says: "The revised edition of Feynman's legendary lectures includes extensive corrections and updates collated by Feynman and his colleagues. A new foreword by Kip Thorne, the current Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, discusses the relevance of the new edition to today’s readers."
Freedom isn't free! It cost folks like you and me.
And if we don't all chip in, we'll never pay that bill.
Freedom isn't free! No there's a hefty fucking fee.
And if you don't throw in your buck o'five who will?
If you don't throw in your buck o'five who will?
Ooh... buck o'five
Freedom cost a buck o'five
(please visualize this sung by marionettes.)
Parker and Stone 'Putting The "F" Back In Freedom'
Seems like this would have big potential for use in all-optical routing, but I did not see any mention of that in the articles. Any optical routing pros out there who can tell us if this tech is applicable?
Also "Friday". Full of interesting ideas and just plain fun.
Not all that obscure, but worth a mention. So many great books to choose from, but start with "Time Enough for Love" and "Stranger in a Strange Land."
But a month after the patent is public you'll be able to go to China and get it cheap.
Why is "Europe's Spaceport" in South America? Isn't that South America's Spaceport?
I hear google is starting a new service where you get your electricity for free, but they get to keep all the usage data and do whatever they want with it. As a first test of the utility of this they are modeling when people are home and when they are not, then door-to-door sales organizations get to participate in an auction to buy time segments of people at home. Rumor has it that the Girl Scouts and the Jehovah's Witnesses were having a bidding war for your house at 6:45-7:15 PM next tuesday. Next they will target your computer with ads for porn when you are using the laptop after 11PM and the wife has set her alarm earlier than 7AM and turned off the upstairs lights. Other applications to follow.
Ok, ok, i just made that up.
We blew a big opportunity with the body disposal. Here's what they should have done with the body: Cremate him, grind the ashes up extra-fine, then add them to a batch of 50,000 or so of those cakes that go in urinals. Optionally print a picture of his face on the cake. Distribute evenly across the US. Good times ensue. Some measure of karmic justice is achieved. Being eaten by fish just doesn't have the same impact.
I'm acutally surprised how that the price tag for something like this is so low. Also, I wonder where it has been. TFA says they buyer will be returning it to Russia, and hopes to put it in a museum. So where has it been and how did it fall into private hands? TFA doesn't say anythign about that. But I bet the answer is a dirty, dirty story.
Bingo. There are *lots* of studies. The author of this article is speaking from ignorance. A quick look through the publications from Virginia Tech's HCI group, viz group and gigapixel project shows an abundance of work on this. And that is just one university. I'm sure there are *many* other examples.
So it's in California, Superior Court of San Diego County. And he was nabbed "less than two weeks after his annual review on a prior offense of shooting a person with a pellet gun."
Excellent point. For more support on that point check out this video ( part_1, part_2 ) in which Professor James Duane of the Regent University School of Law tell us why even supposedly law-abiding innocent people should never talk to the police. One of his points is that there because of the complexity of our laws there really is no way to know whether you have broken any laws. As an example of this, we have treaties that incoporate the laws of foreign countries into our own by reference. This was a big eye-opener for me.
I got an Infrant ReadyNAS NV , before the company was bought up by NetGear. It's pretty awesome, though not perfect. Real hot-swappable RAID, dynamic reconfiguration, and lots of other good management tools. Looks pretty sweet, fairly quiet. Using it as a print server has always been problematic, tho.
Also, they seem to have gone up in price *quite* a bit. This site says the no-disk one is $1049. I think mine was around $600. I got one with no disks, and found a good deal on two 500GB disks (which were on their approved h/w list) and still ended up under $1200, and that was two or three years ago. But mine didn't have gigabit ethernet. I guess that explains some of the cost increase.
I set mine up with 500GB of storage, mirrored, and two open bays. I started offloading pix and video and backing up everything else, and a couple years later have not yet had to fill the other bays. But I like knowing I can expand to 1.5TB in RAID5 when I need the space.
Since when is Aerospace Engineer or Scientist an IT job?
Scott is an IT guy.
I think that being the author of "Linux Core Kernel Commentary" , "the most in-depth guide to the core code of the linux kernel", which was review here on slashdot, gives him a smidge of tech credibility.
And you, mister Anonymous Coward, do you have any similar publications?
I'm not saying I would trust the software - as a software developer I have seen and learned too much to ever implicitly trust *any* complex software - but I would take my chances with software *long* before I would go up into the air with the yahoos I see on the road every day. Talking on their cell phones, or worse yet, texting, while they tailgate, in the rain, at night. Some of those people are dangerous even when they are *trying* to pay attention. Letting them fly might have a positive Darwinian effect, but I don't want to be anywhere near that when it happens. If you are going to open the airspace up to the general public, automation, with all its faults, is the only possible way.