I wonder how Eric would like it if someone "modded" his article to change the conclusion and then posted it on their website?
I think this is a more interesting question than everyone else who has yet responded to the thread.
First of all, even a literal quotation with certain small twists in a serious work has been accepted as "satire" by U.S. courts. The question is, when the work infringes commercially with potential profit in the same target audience market then the work is no longer considered satire. But satire is some of the most protected speech in the U.S. (unless it is directed against judges or law enforcement, which gives the authors a much rougher time.)
Second of all, the fair use doctrine of the Berne convention and U.S. law allows the extensive literal reproduction of and derivation from news articles. Many nonprofit and commercial sites take advantage of this fact. You could claim that a changed conclusion results in a derivative work, even if you copied all the quotes and facts verbatim.
Third of all, every single reporter in the world LOVES it when his or her work shows up in thousands of email inboxes, even in edited or truncated form. The only real problems in this realm occured when freelance work with limited publication rights started ending up verbatim in LEXIS/NEXIS, which was a big messy lawsuit around 1995 or so. If anyone is losing anything in article redistribution, it's the publishers, not the reporters, and even the publishers in practice acknoledge that the free advertising from widely-disseminated quality work is worth a lot more than the possible market value loss.
Fourth of all, I think this is a remarkably good idea. Why don't you do it and ask the author what he thinks of it?
I have a feeling that there is more to the question than was meant to be in it. An interesting experiment awaits!
I was playing with a pipette, sucking mercury into it. Then I felt the heavy little droplet hit the back of my throat! I swallowed it! Should I be concerned?
Pure metalic mercury is not very bioabsorbable in mamillian digestive tracts, unless it had been significantly oxidized. Most of it probably went right through you, and apparently what you did absorb wasn't enough to damage your nervous system enough to keep you from posting to Slashdot. Although mercury accumulates, it is also slowly flushed by the kidneys and liver, so if it was more than a couple years ago you're probably clean, too.
I'd think an easier solution would be to call 1 800 555-1212, get Southwest's toll-free number from them, and then call that number. I'd think the same information is available that way as is available through their website
Nope, Southwest always has plenty of incentive deals for those using the website, apparently because using the phone costs customer rep time while the website is much lower overhead.
This would seem to be a necessary condition for the suit. IANAL, but it would be if I were on the jury!
Who cares where the y axis starts? In order to know how much the concentration affects temperatures, you need to know the coefficient of atmospheric energy forcing. A proportion of volume is just a number and the graph says nothing about how much energy is actually retained by the atmosphere at different concentrations.
If you want a real scare. Take a look at the r^2 ~= 99%, meaning all but 1% of the variation is explained by the four variables of the curve.
You did research all the criteria [electionmethods.org] that voting systems should pass, right?
Yes, and as in much election theory, I found the stated criteria filled with universal quantifiers ("must never," "must always," etc.) which as a practical matter refer to extremely rare events. The discussion at the end concerning the difficulty of counting IRV ballots is contrary to the actual experience of districts in Massachussets, Louisiana, Ireland, Australia, and many other places which use IRV. Who picked these criterion, anyway? They are certainly not from the American Political Science Association, which uses IRV to elect its officers.
Example: So you step up to the polls. You know candidate B (who you could stand) is neck and neck with candidate C (who you really hate). You really prefer candidate A, but are scared to death that C could get in if you don't give B your top support.
What would the average voter do in this situation?
The answer could not be simpler than with IRV: Rank A first and B second. When A is eliminated, your support will transfer to B. Under no conditions will your ballot be counted in support of C.
Contrast that to the Approval method, where you would be forced to support B to the same extent that you support A if you want to counter C at all.
Personally, I don't like the concept of having to rank any candidate I hate over any other candidate I hate.
IRV does not require that you do so. Rank only those of whom you approve, and leave the others unranked, if you like. However, you are more than welcome to continue ranking from least to most distasteful, if you so choose.
Surely you can see from that simple case that you can send much more information about your preferences to be used for election with an IRV ballot than with an AV ballot. As a practical matter, preference ballots also allow you to implement more complicated systems such as Condorcet and general proportional represenation for multi-member districts. As much as I like the Condorcet scheme from a theoretical perspective, counting Condorcet votes is absurdly expensive.
[approval voting] allows for far better representation than either One-Person-One-Vote or IRV.
No, it does not. You can see from a purely information-theoretical perspective that IRV is more powerful than AV.
As for the simplicity of implementation, the Australian and Irish parliments have been doing just fine for a long time, and after a recent sudden conversion to IRV, respectivly.
On the contrary, IRV is the least expensive voting method which removes the spoiler effect -- the largest source of gross inaccuracy in plurality voting, bar none.
Condorcet is absurdly expensive for large elections. Can you imagine how long it would take to do a Condorcet count for the Governor of California, even from punch card ballots? (Hint: all of the ballot preferences have to be colected and centralized before the count can begin.) On the other hand, many districts in Canada do IRV counts of paper ballots, by hand. And they finish it by midnight, in most elections. Try doing that with Condorcet.
Approval is so different from the traditional plurality method that it is unlikely to be adopted for anything bigger than city council elections (for which it is already used in many districts, including my own.) Approval is already widely used for corporate board elections -- not exactly known as bastions of democracy, those.
Sure, from a purely theoretical point of view. No real-world system is going to be perfectly accurate.
However, as a practical matter, the pareto imbalances upon which the proof of Arrow's theorem depends are very rare. When they do occur in practice, it usually means that the situation is similar to the 2000 U.S. presidential race, where the difference in the top candidates' votes is much smaller than the election's margin of error.
The fact is that IRV is the least expensive system that precludes the spoiler effect, and in doing so relieves the all-too-common prevalance of completely inaccurate outcomes, is the big win. I'll take a big jump in accuracy at a minimal cost any day of the week.
Approval voting is widely used in the U.S. for electing corporate boards of directors -- not known as bastions of democracy by any means.
People like to pick a first choice as "their" candidate. Approval makes you say yes to some set, and no to the rest. I agree it has some mathematical elegances, but I prefer IRV and so do the majority of reform activists judging by the initiative measures which have actually made it onto the ballots.
Calculus is much more useful in everyday life and for a wider variety of people than C Programming is.
I don't think so. I've only used calculus a few times in ten years of system administration and programming, including quite a bit of DSP work.
As for programming, there are a lot of people who would benefit in knowing how simple algorithms and data structures work -- so much of life is computerized and not enough people know what's under the hood. Think about all the hapless clerks and tradesmen who might otherwise be able to automate some aspect(s) of their work if they only knew how.
Growing up in Colorado during the '70s, Algebra was optinal in seventh grade and mandatory by ninth. Here in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, there is a big fuss because the state's new high school exit exam includes algebra, and many high school seniors never took it.
The way the indignant parents act about this is the worst of all. If it were up to me, a probability and statistics course on top of trig (including spherical trig) and a C programming course (but not calculus) would be mandatory to graduate high school.
The way parents get all huffy about their kids homework, taking their own ignorance personally I suspect, it is unlikely to come to pass.
Are there any other states where it is possible to graduate high school without algebra?
already available in handheld units
on
Speaking in Tongues
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A St. Petersburg, Russia company called Ectaco has been selling bidirectional handheld speech recognition-based translation systems called Universal Translators.
They have them in English-Russian and English-German at present, but apparently plan to add more languages all the time. Their unidirectional models ("UT-103") handle about eight languages currently.
If you want to use conformal coat, get something that conducts heat without conducting electricity, and can be molded with appropriate surface area (like a heat sink surface.)
There are some specialized resin-ceramic coats that have this property, and some of them aren't brittle at all, adding to the shock-absorption of the coated components.
How about nonelectrically-conductive, nonbrittle, heat conductive, and transparent; has that been achieved yet?
How about lucite with only heat sink surfaces exposed? If the heat sink and the lucite had the same thermal expansion properties, then the thing would be likely to stay sealed. Otherwise you would need some gasketing compound at their boundaries.
West Nile virus is also carried by birds. Are they now terrorists?
No, but they are poor. The spectrum of animal life includes humans, but not all humans have enough literacy to enable them to provide for the running water, nutrition, and other essential elements of hygine and quality of life. Those elements directly impact the quality of life of the rich. The most direct link is that the illiterate are ineffectively employable (not simply ineffective.) That makes a big difference to the World Bank, for example.
If a kid brings a C compiler to school - he's likely to be branded as a hacker/terrorist.
The value of tools depends on what the tools are being used for. If a kid brings a powerful speech recognition software development system to school that just happens to include language tools, it is very unlikely that
will result in a negative stigma.
Computers have gone form a complex tool to be experimented with, to a mostly passive form of media. Hopefully, with cheaper computing this will change again.
Bandwidths have been going up in both directions, and computers have allowed outbound bandwidths to more closely match inbound bandwidths. Again, it's what they're used for that really matters.
Yes, I would be glad to cite statistics. Let's start with the World Health Organization's monitoring of the epidemiology of virulent diseases. For example, West Nile virus, a bird full of which was recently found on the white house lawn.
Sure the poor are pised, but they are ineffective.
On the contrary, the poor are effective at spreading virulent diseases when they become too poor, whether they want to or not. This is why the Republican party is proposing an expanded medicare drug benefit for seniors. Are they supporting socialization of medical care? Of course they are, and if you care about the quality of life measures that most people say they care about, then you can count your lucky library finds and use them to promote sustainable technologies.
I support the use of economic incentives to encourage the development of educational technologies appropriate for the prevailing circumstances.
The truth of the fact that terrorism is caused by poverty is well established. A few pathological statistical outliers doesn't change the fact. The argument stands.
The argument goes like this: terrorism is bred by poverty, and the only way out of poverty is literacy.
Yes, it is that simple. Now, if I could only get a computer-assisted oral reading system to fit in 4MB on a 85 MTOPS handheld, we could actually afford to package them in with Meals Ready To Eat and such humanitarian packages. If you doubt the inevetability of this, just plot Moore's law and ask how much a Texas Instruments Speak-n-Spell would set you back on eBay these days.
Eventually, educational computer systems (which may or may not have other features like email and web browsing) will be very inexpensive and commonplace. Just like cellphones are springing up in the poorest nations that still can't afford wires. As long as speech software, computer, and communications engineers are striving for improvements, things will head generally in the direction leading up to it.
As someone who has designed software at that cutting edge, for some of the largest language learning software companies in the world, I can say with some certainty that I need more money.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a more interesting question than everyone else who has yet responded to the thread.
First of all, even a literal quotation with certain small twists in a serious work has been accepted as "satire" by U.S. courts. The question is, when the work infringes commercially with potential profit in the same target audience market then the work is no longer considered satire. But satire is some of the most protected speech in the U.S. (unless it is directed against judges or law enforcement, which gives the authors a much rougher time.)
Second of all, the fair use doctrine of the Berne convention and U.S. law allows the extensive literal reproduction of and derivation from news articles. Many nonprofit and commercial sites take advantage of this fact. You could claim that a changed conclusion results in a derivative work, even if you copied all the quotes and facts verbatim.
Third of all, every single reporter in the world LOVES it when his or her work shows up in thousands of email inboxes, even in edited or truncated form. The only real problems in this realm occured when freelance work with limited publication rights started ending up verbatim in LEXIS/NEXIS, which was a big messy lawsuit around 1995 or so. If anyone is losing anything in article redistribution, it's the publishers, not the reporters, and even the publishers in practice acknoledge that the free advertising from widely-disseminated quality work is worth a lot more than the possible market value loss.
Fourth of all, I think this is a remarkably good idea. Why don't you do it and ask the author what he thinks of it?
I have a feeling that there is more to the question than was meant to be in it. An interesting experiment awaits!
Pure metalic mercury is not very bioabsorbable in mamillian digestive tracts, unless it had been significantly oxidized. Most of it probably went right through you, and apparently what you did absorb wasn't enough to damage your nervous system enough to keep you from posting to Slashdot. Although mercury accumulates, it is also slowly flushed by the kidneys and liver, so if it was more than a couple years ago you're probably clean, too.
Nope, Southwest always has plenty of incentive deals for those using the website, apparently because using the phone costs customer rep time while the website is much lower overhead.
This would seem to be a necessary condition for the suit. IANAL, but it would be if I were on the jury!
If you want a real scare. Take a look at the r^2 ~= 99%, meaning all but 1% of the variation is explained by the four variables of the curve.
Here's hoping you're wrong.
Yes, and as in much election theory, I found the stated criteria filled with universal quantifiers ("must never," "must always," etc.) which as a practical matter refer to extremely rare events. The discussion at the end concerning the difficulty of counting IRV ballots is contrary to the actual experience of districts in Massachussets, Louisiana, Ireland, Australia, and many other places which use IRV. Who picked these criterion, anyway? They are certainly not from the American Political Science Association, which uses IRV to elect its officers.
The answer could not be simpler than with IRV: Rank A first and B second. When A is eliminated, your support will transfer to B. Under no conditions will your ballot be counted in support of C.
Contrast that to the Approval method, where you would be forced to support B to the same extent that you support A if you want to counter C at all.
IRV does not require that you do so. Rank only those of whom you approve, and leave the others unranked, if you like. However, you are more than welcome to continue ranking from least to most distasteful, if you so choose.
Surely you can see from that simple case that you can send much more information about your preferences to be used for election with an IRV ballot than with an AV ballot. As a practical matter, preference ballots also allow you to implement more complicated systems such as Condorcet and general proportional represenation for multi-member districts. As much as I like the Condorcet scheme from a theoretical perspective, counting Condorcet votes is absurdly expensive.
No, it does not. You can see from a purely information-theoretical perspective that IRV is more powerful than AV.
As for the simplicity of implementation, the Australian and Irish parliments have been doing just fine for a long time, and after a recent sudden conversion to IRV, respectivly.
Condorcet is absurdly expensive for large elections. Can you imagine how long it would take to do a Condorcet count for the Governor of California, even from punch card ballots? (Hint: all of the ballot preferences have to be colected and centralized before the count can begin.) On the other hand, many districts in Canada do IRV counts of paper ballots, by hand. And they finish it by midnight, in most elections. Try doing that with Condorcet.
Approval is so different from the traditional plurality method that it is unlikely to be adopted for anything bigger than city council elections (for which it is already used in many districts, including my own.) Approval is already widely used for corporate board elections -- not exactly known as bastions of democracy, those.
Sure, from a purely theoretical point of view. No real-world system is going to be perfectly accurate.
However, as a practical matter, the pareto imbalances upon which the proof of Arrow's theorem depends are very rare. When they do occur in practice, it usually means that the situation is similar to the 2000 U.S. presidential race, where the difference in the top candidates' votes is much smaller than the election's margin of error.
The fact is that IRV is the least expensive system that precludes the spoiler effect, and in doing so relieves the all-too-common prevalance of completely inaccurate outcomes, is the big win. I'll take a big jump in accuracy at a minimal cost any day of the week.
People like to pick a first choice as "their" candidate. Approval makes you say yes to some set, and no to the rest. I agree it has some mathematical elegances, but I prefer IRV and so do the majority of reform activists judging by the initiative measures which have actually made it onto the ballots.
What really matters is that they use Instant Runoff Voting; please see:
The Center for Voting and Democracy
the Instantrunoff mailing list
and the California Instant Runoff Voting Coalition for an example of a good local activism site.
P.S. You can create your own web-based IRV web surveys with DemoChoice.org (also includes free downloadable php scripts for your own site.)
I don't think so. I've only used calculus a few times in ten years of system administration and programming, including quite a bit of DSP work.
As for programming, there are a lot of people who would benefit in knowing how simple algorithms and data structures work -- so much of life is computerized and not enough people know what's under the hood. Think about all the hapless clerks and tradesmen who might otherwise be able to automate some aspect(s) of their work if they only knew how.
The way the indignant parents act about this is the worst of all. If it were up to me, a probability and statistics course on top of trig (including spherical trig) and a C programming course (but not calculus) would be mandatory to graduate high school. The way parents get all huffy about their kids homework, taking their own ignorance personally I suspect, it is unlikely to come to pass.
Are there any other states where it is possible to graduate high school without algebra?
You are correct to be scared. There seems to be little hope.
They have them in English-Russian and English-German at present, but apparently plan to add more languages all the time. Their unidirectional models ("UT-103") handle about eight languages currently.
There are some specialized resin-ceramic coats that have this property, and some of them aren't brittle at all, adding to the shock-absorption of the coated components.
How about nonelectrically-conductive, nonbrittle, heat conductive, and transparent; has that been achieved yet?
How about lucite with only heat sink surfaces exposed? If the heat sink and the lucite had the same thermal expansion properties, then the thing would be likely to stay sealed. Otherwise you would need some gasketing compound at their boundaries.
No, but they are poor. The spectrum of animal life includes humans, but not all humans have enough literacy to enable them to provide for the running water, nutrition, and other essential elements of hygine and quality of life. Those elements directly impact the quality of life of the rich. The most direct link is that the illiterate are ineffectively employable (not simply ineffective.) That makes a big difference to the World Bank, for example.
The value of tools depends on what the tools are being used for. If a kid brings a powerful speech recognition software development system to school that just happens to include language tools, it is very unlikely that will result in a negative stigma.
Bandwidths have been going up in both directions, and computers have allowed outbound bandwidths to more closely match inbound bandwidths. Again, it's what they're used for that really matters.
On the contrary, the poor are effective at spreading virulent diseases when they become too poor, whether they want to or not. This is why the Republican party is proposing an expanded medicare drug benefit for seniors. Are they supporting socialization of medical care? Of course they are, and if you care about the quality of life measures that most people say they care about, then you can count your lucky library finds and use them to promote sustainable technologies.
I support the use of economic incentives to encourage the development of educational technologies appropriate for the prevailing circumstances.
Stanford's TIQIT (Linux/Wintel)
the UK's SOLO (ARM RISC, but comes with solar panels)
As an A.C. posted, the Russians have the Universal Translator
This has as much to do with science as your local new-age scientoligist e-metering fruitcake.
The truth of the fact that terrorism is caused by poverty is well established. A few pathological statistical outliers doesn't change the fact. The argument stands.
for detail on the present state of such progress, click here
The only solution leading to peace is education.
The argument goes like this: terrorism is bred by poverty, and the only way out of poverty is literacy.
Yes, it is that simple. Now, if I could only get a computer-assisted oral reading system to fit in 4MB on a 85 MTOPS handheld, we could actually afford to package them in with Meals Ready To Eat and such humanitarian packages. If you doubt the inevetability of this, just plot Moore's law and ask how much a Texas Instruments Speak-n-Spell would set you back on eBay these days.
Eventually, educational computer systems (which may or may not have other features like email and web browsing) will be very inexpensive and commonplace. Just like cellphones are springing up in the poorest nations that still can't afford wires. As long as speech software, computer, and communications engineers are striving for improvements, things will head generally in the direction leading up to it.
As someone who has designed software at that cutting edge, for some of the largest language learning software companies in the world, I can say with some certainty that I need more money.
Hear, hear!