As an experienced (scientific) participant in a great deal of EU projects I can assure you that this project is dead on arrival.
The EU commision has embarked on a path of extensive central planning and increased bureaucratic and political control of the projects that it funds. The reason is simple. Research is not the primary reason for funding research projects in the EU. In combination with a strong level of support for state subsidies to industry and general socialist practices this leads to a predictable outcome:
Projects fail miserably or need further life support from EU to stay alive.
And with regards to Cuba. Are you willing to forcibly reduce the doctors wages to $20 per month and physically prevent them from seeking abroad to earn more?
That's a bunch of crap, and here's why: If you have the money, you can still pay for care in cash if you want to. No one will stop you.
There is no reason why we should pay orders of magnitude more (even with "health insurance") for health care than people in other countries with the same life expectancy... for example, Cuba.
Well I guess the problem is that many people don't have the money if they have to pony up an extra 5-10% in taxes for universal health care.
And with regards to Cuba. Are you willing to forcibly reduce the doctors wages to $20 per month and physically prevent them from seeking abroad to earn more? Or in other words: Are you willing to turn USA into a giant prison camp to get cheap health care?
Are you also willing to implement a system of forced abortions to prevent the weak and sick from entering the world (make the countrys life expectancy drop medical expenses rise)?
I don't think you will establish a scientific culture by "throwing money at the problem". The problem in Saudi Arabia and many other muslim countries is not lack of scientific institutions it is lack of a rational world view.
If Saudi Arabia wants to do science they have to address that problem. This means abandoning and actively combatting many islamic doctrines (Quran is the word of God, religious critique must be punished and so on).
When people grow up in a culture and with a religion which discourages critical thinking and encourages superstition and persecution of critics they won't become scientists.
$1 per bag? It is closer to $0.5 in the shops I buy my groceries in.
"In the US, you guys are patenting your dependency on foreign oil."
70% of plastic bags are made using a by product of natural gas. The remaining 30% are made from naphtha (a by product in the distillation process of petroleum). I don't think that plastic bags are the main concern in relations to foreign oil dependency. Environmental concerns on the other hand are probably important.
Or you could ban them for the happiness of your nation;-)
"So there is going to be a higher cost for software in the EU in order to offset that. What I don't get though is why the cost difference is apparently that high."
Maybe it is because the hidden cost of regulation (not just the consumer protection part) is higher than most people think.
Another reason is the extensive consumer "protection" regulations from EU (and individual member countries). There is virtually no public debate when another regulation is added to the already existing mountain of regulations. Probably because this cost is not a direct tax but is hidden in the product price.
"War is all about over crowding and mal distribution of wealth. It will be with us for a while."
War is simply a way to violently impose the will of one government/nation upon another. Or the extension of diplomacy as Machiavelli wrote.
I do not agree that mal distribution of wealth is one of the main reasons for war. At least I haven't heard of many poor countries attacking richer countries to rob their wealth in recent times.
I also fail to see the link to over crowding (although not to fast population growth). If over crowding was really an issue you would expect countries like the Netherlands and Japan to be extremely aggressive (see link). In fact most conflicts are happening between countries that are not densely populated.
Historically major conflicts have arisen when a new regional or global power arises. At present the West is losing power while assertive powers like China, India, and various Islamic countries are rapidly gaining power. This is a recipe for conflict.
"Robo cars have great potential for us but limiting war is not part of the deal. As a matter of fact robo cars and robo weapons will make war far easier for the wealthier nations. No wounded troops to upset our side pacifies the public."
I agree, that assertion is simply naive. Alfred Nobel (inventor of dynamite) once stated: "My factories may make an end of war sooner than your congresses. The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops."
"I've been looking into this a bit, and the amazon option seemed the best."
I also looked a bit into Google and Amazons offerings for at Python project. Google was definitely the cheapest and if I could squeeze my project into the limitations they have established I would have chosen it. Unfortunately it is not possible to install C and Fortran extensions to Python (due to security reasons, you can install pure Python modules). This was a showstopper for me.
The critique of not providing access to a local file system is in my opinion misguided. One of the main strongpoints of the Google service is the Google File System (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html). If you do not want to use it, you are probably not building a scalable and distributed web application anyway.
I found the Amazon offering too expensive for my project at this point. I ended up using a minor hosting provider specialized in my type of Python applications (webfaction.com) which does a great job but miss the distributed aspects of cloud computing (not that I need that feature at this point).
As a non-american my impression is that the embargo was mainly put into place to prevent economic growth in Cuba which would have allowed Castro to buy or develop advanced weaponry targeted at the US. If that was/is the goal the embargo must be considered a success.
"A christian themed burial site would indicate a greater likelihood of intermingling with non-viking cultures from Southern Europe. This could be an indicator of genetic intermingling as well."
Are you sure? Prior to the introduction of christianity in Denmark my ancestors raided, conquered, traded and settled all over Europe and most likely brought back women as war booty or if returning home from a failed settlement.
After the introduction of christianity we pretty much stayed at home. One of the points in the article is also that the genetic diversity has decreased in the period following the Viking Age. How can that be if intermixing was higher for the christian elements?
The optimum price for media content is clearly different for Apple and the content providers. Apples main source of revenue is the hardware while the content providers main source of revenue is (tada!) the content. Since lower prices on content leads to higher hardware sales Apple will prefer lower prices than the content providers. The content providers on the other hand prefer to sell less content but at a higher price. Negotiations will then potentially lead to a price between the two optimums.
With that in mind Zuckers demand is not that unreasonable and could lessen the difference between their optimum prices.
"The far more likely case in any blind sampling is that reviewers had some error rate. If, for example, there were 3 errors on average in BT and 4 in WP, and we assume that the reviewers had as much as a 50% error rate in identifying errors,..."
I don't agree. In my opinion the constant error rate will most probably be per article and not be per perceived error. The assumption behind this is simply that there is a given probability that an article contains information that the reviewer(s) erroneously find to be false. Differently put, I assume a given probability that there is something in an article that the reviewer(s) have wrong information about.
Why do you think that blind sampling will always lead to a constant error rate per detected error? Personally, I can't see any statistical reason for believing it.
"Your assumption that errors in the evaluation would have changed the ratio pre-supposes that errors would exist ONLY in the Brittanica evaluations. Since these evaluations were done blind, that does not seem to be a reasonable default assumption."
No, my assumption is that the false positives occur at the same rate per article in both Brittanica and Wikipedia.
Last but not least: I don't claim that I _know_ there is a constant false positive rate per article - but I do claim that the distribution of the false positives will most likely have an impact on their conclusions (if the number is significant). And if it does'nt, then Nature must back it up by hard evidence.
"The key point in all of this is that the study was done blind. Reviewers did not know (though they COULD have checked) which source their article was from. Wikipedia showed more errors, but only 33% more per article than Brittanica at the rate of 4 per."
The 33% does not make much sense if we do not know the number of articles that we wrongly found to contain errors - even if the study was done blind.
My point is that if for example these false errors constitute one per article for both Wikipedia and Brittanica, then the difference would suddenly be 50% (2 errors per Brittanica article and 3 errors per Wikipedia art.).
In my opinion Nature has not refuted the critique against the study until they have quantified the number of false positives. Without this number they have no basis for claiming that "...the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."
"Just because the BSD license doesn't force companies to give back, doesn't mean they can't do it anyway."
But it is bad business sense to rely on it. A license states what you expect people to do with your software. If you want people to pay for using it in proprietary products - then you should choose a license that ensures just that using e.g. a dual licensing scheme (copyleft/proprietary).
I haven't paid for any of the great open source products that I have used but I have made some of my own code available under an open source license. Similarly Sun has not paid for OpenSSH code but they have released a lot of other code under open source licenses. I don't blame them for their choice.
Another issue to consider is that working with a laptop as a primary computer is more likely to cause health problems. Or as Cornell University Ergonomics Website explains it:
"The reason is simple - with a fixed design, if the keyboard is in an optimal position for the user, the screen isn't and if the screen is optimal the keyboard isn't. Consequently, laptops are excluded from current ergonomic design requirements because none of the designs satisfy this basic need."
"The issue is that the Danish newspaper culture editor who commissioned the drawings is in fact a devotee of Daniel Pipes, the rabidly anti-Muslim Zionist."
Flemming Rose the culture editor is a journalist who has once interviewed Daniel Pipes. Does that make him a devotee?
"The cartoons were commissioned specifically as a psyop to generate trouble."
They we commisioned because a danish author could not find any illustrators willing to illustrate his childrens book about Muhammed due to fear of reprisals from muslims. The newspaper wanted to challenge that situation and reveal what the muslim reactions would be.
"Many Muslims, including "moderates", are upset because the cartoons demonstrated that the West is indeed against their entire culture and religion."
Well, if you mean that the West is for freedom of speech and against censorship due to religious dogma you are right. If that is all Islam contains then I feel sorry for the muslims.
"In fact, the Queen of Denmark issued a statement some time back explicitly stating that "we need to show our opposition to Islam.""
This is blatantly false and is due to a wrong translation. The translator confused the two danish words "modstand" (opposition/resistance) and "modspil" (literally "play against", which has a much more peaceful meaning than "show our opposition to").
"Three years ago, the exact same paper REJECTED images of Jesus that the editor at the time claimed were offensive."
Someone sent in a drawing of Jesus. The editor rejected the drawing stating that he didn't think his readers would find it funny _and_ that it was offensive. Actually Jyllandsposten has printed a (offensive) cartoon of Jesus a couple of years ago (it is a secular newspaper - not a christian newspaper). Jesus is regularly ridiculed in Danish newspapers.
"And now that Iran has suggested running cartoons of the Holocaust, the current editor first said he would run them - and has now been overruled by the paper, which said yesterday they would NOT run them."
The cultural editor was overruled by the chief editor who stated that Jyllandsposten would allow itself to be used in a media stunt from the Iranian regime.
A funny fact is that how religious people are is in fact partially genetically determined. Furthermore strongly religious people have more children than non-religious people. The proportion of strongly religious people to less religious people will therefore become larger and larger thus supporting the theory of evolution. Is that ironic or what?
Unless of course non-religious people get their act together and start producing more offspring;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately ESA has a data policy which is lightyears behind that of NASA. While NASA data are just a click away, ESA data are tied up in red tape.
At least that was my experience some years ago.
button mashing:
Press a button as fast as you can to save your character.
Guess you weren't a big fan of Decathlon in the good old C64 days:
http://homepages.tesco.net/~parsonsp/html/decathlon.html
I still remember the pain in my fingers, hand and wrist after the final event, the dreaded 1500 m run;-)
As an experienced (scientific) participant in a great deal of EU projects I can assure you that this project is dead on arrival.
The EU commision has embarked on a path of extensive central planning and increased bureaucratic and political control of the projects that it funds. The reason is simple. Research is not the primary reason for funding research projects in the EU. In combination with a strong level of support for state subsidies to industry and general socialist practices this leads to a predictable outcome:
Projects fail miserably or need further life support from EU to stay alive.
And with regards to Cuba. Are you willing to forcibly reduce the doctors wages to $20 per month and physically prevent them from seeking abroad to earn more?
Does it means that those "3432 medical students from 23 nations" studying in their "first-class" medical schools are forced to work within the country?
No it means that Cuban citizens can't leave the country. I fail to see how admission of foreign medical students into Cuban schools affects that.
Most businesses care about being green when it means spending less of the green ones.
That's a bunch of crap, and here's why: If you have the money, you can still pay for care in cash if you want to. No one will stop you.
There is no reason why we should pay orders of magnitude more (even with "health insurance") for health care than people in other countries with the same life expectancy... for example, Cuba.
Well I guess the problem is that many people don't have the money if they have to pony up an extra 5-10% in taxes for universal health care.
And with regards to Cuba. Are you willing to forcibly reduce the doctors wages to $20 per month and physically prevent them from seeking abroad to earn more? Or in other words: Are you willing to turn USA into a giant prison camp to get cheap health care?
Are you also willing to implement a system of forced abortions to prevent the weak and sick from entering the world (make the countrys life expectancy drop medical expenses rise)?
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Story?id=3568278&page=2
http://www.despair.com/achievement.html
About four years ago, King Abdullah decided to throw money at the problem.
I don't think you will establish a scientific culture by "throwing money at the problem". The problem in Saudi Arabia and many other muslim countries is not lack of scientific institutions it is lack of a rational world view.
If Saudi Arabia wants to do science they have to address that problem. This means abandoning and actively combatting many islamic doctrines (Quran is the word of God, religious critique must be punished and so on).
When people grow up in a culture and with a religion which discourages critical thinking and encourages superstition and persecution of critics they won't become scientists.
$1 per bag? It is closer to $0.5 in the shops I buy my groceries in.
"In the US, you guys are patenting your dependency on foreign oil."
70% of plastic bags are made using a by product of natural gas. The remaining 30% are made from naphtha (a by product in the distillation process of petroleum). I don't think that plastic bags are the main concern in relations to foreign oil dependency. Environmental concerns on the other hand are probably important.
Or you could ban them for the happiness of your nation;-)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4782636.stm
(see image 6)
"So there is going to be a higher cost for software in the EU in order to offset that. What I don't get though is why the cost difference is apparently that high."
Maybe it is because the hidden cost of regulation (not just the consumer protection part) is higher than most people think.
Another reason is the extensive consumer "protection" regulations from EU (and individual member countries). There is virtually no public debate when another regulation is added to the already existing mountain of regulations. Probably because this cost is not a direct tax but is hidden in the product price.
"War is all about over crowding and mal distribution of wealth. It will be with us for a while."
War is simply a way to violently impose the will of one government/nation upon another. Or the extension of diplomacy as Machiavelli wrote.
I do not agree that mal distribution of wealth is one of the main reasons for war. At least I haven't heard of many poor countries attacking richer countries to rob their wealth in recent times.
I also fail to see the link to over crowding (although not to fast population growth). If over crowding was really an issue you would expect countries like the Netherlands and Japan to be extremely aggressive (see link). In fact most conflicts are happening between countries that are not densely populated.
http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-population-density.htm
Historically major conflicts have arisen when a new regional or global power arises. At present the West is losing power while assertive powers like China, India, and various Islamic countries are rapidly gaining power. This is a recipe for conflict.
"Robo cars have great potential for us but limiting war is not part of the deal. As a matter of fact robo cars and robo weapons will make war far easier for the wealthier nations. No wounded troops to upset our side pacifies the public."
I agree, that assertion is simply naive. Alfred Nobel (inventor of dynamite) once stated: "My factories may make an end of war sooner than your congresses. The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops."
"I've been looking into this a bit, and the amazon option seemed the best."
I also looked a bit into Google and Amazons offerings for at Python project. Google was definitely the cheapest and if I could squeeze my project into the limitations they have established I would have chosen it. Unfortunately it is not possible to install C and Fortran extensions to Python (due to security reasons, you can install pure Python modules). This was a showstopper for me.
The critique of not providing access to a local file system is in my opinion misguided. One of the main strongpoints of the Google service is the Google File System (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html). If you do not want to use it, you are probably not building a scalable and distributed web application anyway.
I found the Amazon offering too expensive for my project at this point. I ended up using a minor hosting provider specialized in my type of Python applications (webfaction.com) which does a great job but miss the distributed aspects of cloud computing (not that I need that feature at this point).
"It should not have existed."
As a non-american my impression is that the embargo was mainly put into place to prevent economic growth in Cuba which would have allowed Castro to buy or develop advanced weaponry targeted at the US. If that was/is the goal the embargo must be considered a success.
Thank you for the information. I believe it is peace for our time then.
"A christian themed burial site would indicate a greater likelihood of intermingling with non-viking cultures from Southern Europe. This could be an indicator of genetic intermingling as well."
Are you sure? Prior to the introduction of christianity in Denmark my ancestors raided, conquered, traded and settled all over Europe and most likely brought back women as war booty or if returning home from a failed settlement.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Viking_expansion.png
After the introduction of christianity we pretty much stayed at home. One of the points in the article is also that the genetic diversity has decreased in the period following the Viking Age. How can that be if intermixing was higher for the christian elements?
A much more interesting study would be to compare scientific production with time spent reading and commenting /.
Never mind, I better write that article instead...or maybe just read a couple more stories...
From Rational Choice Theory you can calculate how much a vote is worth for you (assuming that you are rational):
http://wikisum.com/w/Riker_and_Ordeshook:_A_theory_of_the_calculus_of_voting
The optimum price for media content is clearly different for Apple and the content providers. Apples main source of revenue is the hardware while the content providers main source of revenue is (tada!) the content. Since lower prices on content leads to higher hardware sales Apple will prefer lower prices than the content providers. The content providers on the other hand prefer to sell less content but at a higher price. Negotiations will then potentially lead to a price between the two optimums.
With that in mind Zuckers demand is not that unreasonable and could lessen the difference between their optimum prices.
"The far more likely case in any blind sampling is that reviewers had some error rate. If, for example, there were 3 errors on average in BT and 4 in WP, and we assume that the reviewers had as much as a 50% error rate in identifying errors,..."
I don't agree. In my opinion the constant error rate will most probably be per article and not be per perceived error. The assumption behind this is simply that there is a given probability that an article contains information that the reviewer(s) erroneously find to be false. Differently put, I assume a given probability that there is something in an article that the reviewer(s) have wrong information about.
Why do you think that blind sampling will always lead to a constant error rate per detected error? Personally, I can't see any statistical reason for believing it.
"Your assumption that errors in the evaluation would have changed the ratio pre-supposes that errors would exist ONLY in the Brittanica evaluations. Since these evaluations were done blind, that does not seem to be a reasonable default assumption."
No, my assumption is that the false positives occur at the same rate per article in both Brittanica and Wikipedia.
Last but not least: I don't claim that I _know_ there is a constant false positive rate per article - but I do claim that the distribution of the false positives will most likely have an impact on their conclusions (if the number is significant). And if it does'nt, then Nature must back it up by hard evidence.
"The key point in all of this is that the study was done blind. Reviewers did not know (though they COULD have checked) which source their article was from. Wikipedia showed more errors, but only 33% more per article than Brittanica at the rate of 4 per."
The 33% does not make much sense if we do not know the number of articles that we wrongly found to contain errors - even if the study was done blind.
My point is that if for example these false errors constitute one per article for both Wikipedia and Brittanica, then the difference would suddenly be 50% (2 errors per Brittanica article and 3 errors per Wikipedia art.).
In my opinion Nature has not refuted the critique against the study until they have quantified the number of false positives. Without this number they have no basis for claiming that "...the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."
"Just because the BSD license doesn't force companies to give back, doesn't mean they can't do it anyway."
But it is bad business sense to rely on it. A license states what you expect people to do with your software. If you want people to pay for using it in proprietary products - then you should choose a license that ensures just that using e.g. a dual licensing scheme (copyleft/proprietary).
I haven't paid for any of the great open source products that I have used but I have made some of my own code available under an open source license. Similarly Sun has not paid for OpenSSH code but they have released a lot of other code under open source licenses. I don't blame them for their choice.
Not to mention Rasmus Lerdorf the Danish-Canadian author of PHP.
Another issue to consider is that working with a laptop as a primary computer is more likely to cause health problems. Or as Cornell University Ergonomics Website explains it:
"The reason is simple - with a fixed design, if the keyboard is in an optimal position for the user, the screen isn't and if the screen is optimal the keyboard isn't. Consequently, laptops are excluded from current ergonomic design requirements because none of the designs satisfy this basic need."
http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/culaptoptips.html
But of course that is an issue that should be handled by the college board and not the IT department.
"The issue is that the Danish newspaper culture editor who commissioned the drawings is in fact a devotee of Daniel Pipes, the rabidly anti-Muslim Zionist."
Flemming Rose the culture editor is a journalist who has once interviewed Daniel Pipes. Does that make him a devotee?
"The cartoons were commissioned specifically as a psyop to generate trouble."
They we commisioned because a danish author could not find any illustrators willing to illustrate his childrens book about Muhammed due to fear of reprisals from muslims. The newspaper wanted to challenge that situation and reveal what the muslim reactions would be.
"Many Muslims, including "moderates", are upset because the cartoons demonstrated that the West is indeed against their entire culture and religion."
Well, if you mean that the West is for freedom of speech and against censorship due to religious dogma you are right. If that is all Islam contains then I feel sorry for the muslims.
"In fact, the Queen of Denmark issued a statement some time back explicitly stating that "we need to show our opposition to Islam.""
This is blatantly false and is due to a wrong translation. The translator confused the two danish words "modstand" (opposition/resistance) and "modspil" (literally "play against", which has a much more peaceful meaning than "show our opposition to").
"Three years ago, the exact same paper REJECTED images of Jesus that the editor at the time claimed were offensive."
Someone sent in a drawing of Jesus. The editor rejected the drawing stating that he didn't think his readers would find it funny _and_ that it was offensive. Actually Jyllandsposten has printed a (offensive) cartoon of Jesus a couple of years ago (it is a secular newspaper - not a christian newspaper). Jesus is regularly ridiculed in Danish newspapers.
"And now that Iran has suggested running cartoons of the Holocaust, the current editor first said he would run them - and has now been overruled by the paper, which said yesterday they would NOT run them."
The cultural editor was overruled by the chief editor who stated that Jyllandsposten would allow itself to be used in a media stunt from the Iranian regime.
"Double standards, anyone?"
Nope, just standards.
A funny fact is that how religious people are is in fact partially genetically determined. Furthermore strongly religious people have more children than non-religious people. The proportion of strongly religious people to less religious people will therefore become larger and larger thus supporting the theory of evolution. Is that ironic or what?
Unless of course non-religious people get their act together and start producing more offspring;-)