To be fair, while the theory seems pretty sound to me, it still seems like it wouldn't work. Why this is, I cannot say.
Because he didn't provide any hard numbers, even back-of-the-envelope calculations, or quote an authority other than himself who thinks this is a good idea?
Note that's not to say it's a bad idea. It just means that it's just an interesting idea, but not worth getting excited about until someone has actually looked into it.
In Computer Science, top-tier conferences are higher quality than most journals. The admission is determined by a program committee, whom are carefully selected by the program chair because of what they'll bring to the table.
I've only served on one PC, but can't imagine trying to serve on a program committee they describe in the the paper, with 1/3 "rational" (i.e., self-serving) people and 1/3 "random" (i.e., can't tell a good paper from a bad). Of course you'd get essentially random. But if that happened, the program chairs have been failures at finding a good PC.
One of the comments later in the article addresses this -- talks about how the role of the journal editor in choosing reviewers is important. I bet if they added some kind of feedback mechanism, they'd get a system much more resilient to bad reviewers.
...focus on things that Microsoft would be sued for putting into their OS.
They're not trying to be "fair", they're evaluating someone's actual experience. They dinged Ubuntu for having to use the command-line to install Adobe AIR, and for not having iTunes in Linux. Those aren't Ubuntu's fault either, but it affects the overall user experience, so there you go.
Sounds like they were just making stuff up to make installing Linux sound more difficult than it is.
No, they were talking about installing Adobe AIR, so they could use it to run Tweetdeck, their favorite twitter client. It's not exactly Ubuntu's fault that Adobe made their Unix installer require command-line intervention.
But they seem to be taking an end-to-end approach: What will your experience be like using this system? You can't load music or upgrade the firmware on your iPhone either, but that's hardly Ubuntu's fault. Still, that's what someone coming to Ubuntu is going to experience, and it will be a disappointment, so that's how they rate it.
If you listen to the interview, they explored that thesis and discarded it. Left-wing groups which successfully used explosives did not have the same over-representation of engineers.
Think about it, and maybe then you'll see what the problem is.
Yes, that's one half of the dilemma. If you just look at that half, the answer is clear: don't allow networked devices. That's what GGP suggested.
However, GGP isn't helping solve the dilemma, because he left out the other half -- OP has students who rely on their "networked device" for language help and/or calculation. Disallowing them causes other problems. OP is looking for advice to solve both problems at once.
If they don't need the networked device for the test, there is no reason to allow it in the room in the first place.
Uum, did you read the summary? He has students who:
Have graphing calculators on their "networked device" (e.g., an iPhone app)
Have foreign language dictionaries on their "networked device" (e.g., an iPhone app)
The goal of the test is to see if they can get the right answer to the physic problem, not test their English ability or how fast they can figure out how to use a different graphing calculator.
You can argue that one inertial frame of reference is as good as any other, but the Earth is not an inertial frame.
Now, I just read Einstein's book on relativity, and it if I understood it properly, the whole point of General Relativity was that the earth (even though it's rotating) can be considered an inertial reference frame. To support his theory, he mentioned some early experiments where they were trying to measure changes in the speed of light due to the fact relative to the sun, the surface of the earth speeds up and slows down; but they were unable to find any difference, no matter what part of the earth's rotation they were on.
Unless it's a terminology thing, and by "inertial reference frame" you mean non-rotating. But of course, if people have a hard time grasping that the Earth goes around the sun, there's no way they're going to accept relativity.:-)
Peaceful muslims aren't interesting, though, any more than the 330,000 US churches who will not be burning Korans on Saturday are interesting.
Yes, there will be extremists and nut-jobs in any religion (or any ideology for that matter). That said, there is an awfully big difference between the teachings and position of Jesus and his early followers, and the teachings and position of Mohammed. Jesus, and all of the early church leaders, were not political powers; in fact, most of them were executed at the hands of the government. Mohammed was the leader of an army who grew, in part, by conquering territory. The teachings reflect that. I can't help but think that that has an effect on the the nature of the extremists.
When I was living in Turkey, I had a devoutly Muslim flat-mate; good guy. I gave him a Turkish copy of the New Testament, and he gave me an English copy of the Koran. Since Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet, but that the New Testament had been changed, he read through looking for bits that (he believed) had probably been changed. Rather to my surprise, one of the first things to catch his eye was this passage:
"But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat too. If a soldier demands that you carry his gear for a mile, carry it two miles....But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike." Matthew 5:39-41,44-45
He said that he thought this was wrong; that in Islam, you should be bold and fight. The concept of putting up with abuse, and being kind to someone who was your enemy, was so foreign to him that he identified it as something that must have been added afterwards. No Godly prophet would say something like that.
That was my first real introduction to the idea that although there are certainly analogies between religious experiences, there are still significant differences. Even the most crazed Christian, if they actually read their Bible, can't escape reading a huge number of passages just like that one. I didn't find anything like that in the Koran.
In most of the cases you mention, we're talking about publications self-censoring to avoid losing money. For example, from the very article you link to about Playboy Portugal: "Curiously, it wasn’t the Portuguese authorities who took action, but the parent company, Playboy Enterprises in the US. An outraged Theresa Hennessy, Playboy Enterprises’ Vice President of Public Relations, said: 'We did not see or approve the cover and pictorial in the July issue of Playboy Portugal. It is a shocking breach of our standards, and we would not have allowed it to be published if we had seen it in advance. As a result of this and other issues with the Portuguese publisher, we are in the process of terminating our agreement.' "
There's a big difference between a company choosing not to avoid a market for fear of losing sales, and companies not doing something for fear of violence.
There's also a big difference between that, and people living in fear of being burned alive.
People who would have no problem with someone burning a flag or Bible become apologists for repression in the name of religion.
FWIW, although I think they have a legal right to do whatever they want, I strongly oppose their actions for other reasons:
I think it's wrong for anyone to do something like this, Christian or not. If they really are Christians, I can't see how this is anywhere close to Christ's teachings.
I'm a Christian, and since they claim to be Christians, their actions reflect badly on me. This is going to impact all of my future relationships with Muslims.
"Do unto others..." Christians who live in predominantly Muslim countries face religious persecution constantly. Occasionally it's in a very extreme manner, but most often it's just antagonism. I can't help but think if any of the people at this church knew what it was like to be a religious minority, they'd never do something like this.
Weather forecasting seems to work most of the time
I think in the continental US this is true. When I lived in Michigan, you could pretty much rely on the 4-day weather report; the rain might get here Tuesday morning or Tuesday afternoon, but you knew it was going to rain Tuesday. And Tuesday morning, they could tell you within a 2-hour time window exactly when it was going to start raining.
I now live in Cambridge, England, and it's pretty much completely random. Several years ago a fellow American used to check four weather sites every morning to see if it was going to rain. (Since he had to cycle to the office either way, I'm not sure why he cared.) One would say rain in the morning, sunny in the afternoon; another would say sunny in the morning, rain in the afternoon; another would say rain all day; the last would say sunny all day. Remember, this is the morning of, not four days out.
What do you want the weather to be? You can find a website which will tell you that's what's going to happen.:-)
Not really -- the problem is with the base rate fallacy. Suppose that there's a test that will tell you whether or not you have a disease with 99% accuracy: if you have it, you're 99% likely to test positive; if you don't have it, you're 99% likely to test negative.
Now, you get a test and it's positive. What's your probability of having the disease?
The answer is, "There's not enough information to answer the question." The missing piece of information is the "base rate".
Suppose that 50% of the people have the disease. Then in testing 1 million people, 500K will have the disease, of which 495K will come back positive (true positive), and 5K the test will come back negative (false negatives). 500K will not have the disease, of which 495k will come back negative (true negative), and 5k will come back positive (false positive). If the test came back positive, you're either a true positive or a false positive. Since there are 500K positives, and 495K of those are true positives, your chances of having the disease are 99%.
Suppose instead that 1% of people have the disease. Then in testing 1 million people, 990K will not have the disease, and 10K will have it. Of the 990K, 980K will come back negative (true negative) and 10K will come back positive (false positive). Of the 10K, 9900 will come back positive (true positive), and 100 will come back negative (false negative). There are 19,900 who tested positive, of which only 9900 (less than half) actually have the disease. So if you tested positive, your chances are about 50%.
So even if the test itself is very accurate (and I think 99% is pretty accurate), if the base rate is low enough (and in autism I believe it's still less than 1%), a positive reading may not be conclusive. You'd have to correlate it with other symptoms to make sure.
Yet VMWare puts out a lot of very innovative products.
Um, like what? I think you proved the opposite point -- they pioneered server consolidation, and did an awesome job; but now they're still mainly tweaking and improving the thing that made them big 10 years ago.
That's true for the actual code. But when it comes to documenting code, describing algorithms, or discussing alternatives on a mailing list, having a decent typing speed will have a big impact.
But if your claims are factual, the overall tone of the post polite, and you back your points with references, you are much more likely to be upmodded even when advocating opinions that are unpopular here.
There seem to be some strange exceptions to that rule.
For instance, here's one of my comments, and another on the same subject that links to something clearly appropriate and illuminating to the discussion, that got marked "troll" instead of "informative". I have no idea why, other than that people don't want to believe what the link says.
would rather just kill it rather than deal with it.
...but if they sold it to anyone else, or started distributing the recordings themselves, you can bet there'd be an army of lawyers jumping on them. What a shame.
For 200 or so years, it has over all lead to a great economy.
Unfortunately, on the grand scale of things, 200 years isn't really that long. There are a myriad of civilizations that grew and flourished and lasted twice as long, but then collapsed and exist only as artifacts discovered by archeologists. I wouldn't say the US economic strategy (i.e., the use and organization of its people and natural resources) was effective until it had been sustained for 1000 years.
Some of the most accomplished scientists are often also the best teachers
And some of the most accomplished scientists are often also the worst teachers. And some of the best teachers are lousy scientists. The two abilities are pretty much independent.
The people inside the corporation have rights, but the actual corporation has no more natural, innate rights than a tree or rock.
I wouldn't mind corporations being "people" if they were like people in other ways. Imagine if when the corporation was convicted of a crime, every person in it (or at least all the stockholders) could be thrown in jail. Part of the breakdown of the whole system is that there's way too much distance between people who own a publicly-traded company and the effects their actions produce. You'd better believe that if stockholders were criminally liable for actions the company took, that "maximize shareholder value" would become 2nd priority to "avoid putting the shareholders in jail.".
computer science publications are mainly submissions to large conferences.
Yes; unlike the entire rest of academia, the main publishing venue is peer-reviewed conferences. The very top conferences are more selective than most journals -- along the lines of, 100+ papers submitted and 25 accepted.
First, it is good to publish with other people and second it more likely to be reviewed and get published.
Most of the conferences I've been involved with (submitted to or been on the program committee for) to are double-blind -- the program committee doesn't know who the authors are* or how many there are. So benefit from submitting together would only be if it improved the quality of the paper.
* If a paper follows on from previous work, you can usually guess which research group it came from. But if anything that makes it more challenging to get accepted, because the standards for novelty are higher. If it's new work, it could be from anyone.
So where should I send it to make it known by people on the respective fields and be taken seriously?
I'm not sure about the field of algorithms, but most quality systems conferences review submissions double-blind: the people on the program committee have no idea who wrote the paper, and the authors don't now exactly which reviewer said what about their paper. If the paper is a continuation of previous research, usually you can guess who wrote it. But if the paper they're reading is something new, there's no way for them to tell if it's a new direction from a prestigious research group at MIT, or written by a truck driver thinking about problems on the road and setting up experiments in the back of his truck. Each paper stands on its own merit, not the reputation of the author.
That said, there's definitely a cultural idea of what a "good paper" looks like, so reading Google Scholar is helpful.
Actually, if your work really is innovative, and you're keen to get it published, it might not hurt to find an algorithms professor in a local university, chat with him about your work, and see if he's willing to help you get the paper into publishable form.
I haven't looked at FB for six months because my conservative religious aunt found it, and then me, and I have to deal with her for the rest of her life so I'm not going to be posting about my anarchist friends' orgy.
The medium is part of the message, unrelated to the quality of a person's friends.
While I agree about twitter, with your FB example it's more like, "The community is the message." If your only friends on FB were the friends you had on BBS, you could post about the orgy. If your conservative aunt frequented your BBS networks, you'd be in the same bind.
Honestly, the simplest way to deal with it? Don't friend her. You don't have to. FB is a new technology, and as such the social conventions need to change because of it. In real life, you have plenty of time and space boundaries with people, so that you can easily spend some time with your conservative aunt while isolating her from your not-so-conservative lifestyle. On FB, you don't have those boundaries (or, they're trickier to implement). So if you really want to express your lifestyle on FB, don't friend people who would be offended by it. I probably refuse one or two friend requests a month from people that I know, but whom I don't really care to share my life with.
I'm in a good mood, so I'll feed the troll. It could not be an extended camera tripod. My wife is a professional photographer. I'm familiar with a lot of camera equipment, and that looked like nothing I've ever seen, either from her kit, her friends' kits, or what she used in school. I was also in the military, and so I'm familiar with a lot of military equipment. US military doesn't use RPGs, but it looks and hangs (and he was carrying it) exactly like a weapon.
My wife is a pro photographer, and also grew up on an Army base. When I showed my wife the video, her reaction was the same: "Ah, no way -- that's definitely an RPG."
Not to mention, a trained soldier who had seen dozens of RPGs identified it as an RPG.
Those are the credentials for our judgements. What are your credentials then?
Slashdot Mirror
Because he didn't provide any hard numbers, even back-of-the-envelope calculations, or quote an authority other than himself who thinks this is a good idea?
Note that's not to say it's a bad idea. It just means that it's just an interesting idea, but not worth getting excited about until someone has actually looked into it.
In Computer Science, top-tier conferences are higher quality than most journals. The admission is determined by a program committee, whom are carefully selected by the program chair because of what they'll bring to the table.
I've only served on one PC, but can't imagine trying to serve on a program committee they describe in the the paper, with 1/3 "rational" (i.e., self-serving) people and 1/3 "random" (i.e., can't tell a good paper from a bad). Of course you'd get essentially random. But if that happened, the program chairs have been failures at finding a good PC.
One of the comments later in the article addresses this -- talks about how the role of the journal editor in choosing reviewers is important. I bet if they added some kind of feedback mechanism, they'd get a system much more resilient to bad reviewers.
They're not trying to be "fair", they're evaluating someone's actual experience. They dinged Ubuntu for having to use the command-line to install Adobe AIR, and for not having iTunes in Linux. Those aren't Ubuntu's fault either, but it affects the overall user experience, so there you go.
No, they were talking about installing Adobe AIR, so they could use it to run Tweetdeck, their favorite twitter client. It's not exactly Ubuntu's fault that Adobe made their Unix installer require command-line intervention.
But they seem to be taking an end-to-end approach: What will your experience be like using this system? You can't load music or upgrade the firmware on your iPhone either, but that's hardly Ubuntu's fault. Still, that's what someone coming to Ubuntu is going to experience, and it will be a disappointment, so that's how they rate it.
If you listen to the interview, they explored that thesis and discarded it. Left-wing groups which successfully used explosives did not have the same over-representation of engineers.
Yes, that's one half of the dilemma. If you just look at that half, the answer is clear: don't allow networked devices. That's what GGP suggested.
However, GGP isn't helping solve the dilemma, because he left out the other half -- OP has students who rely on their "networked device" for language help and/or calculation. Disallowing them causes other problems. OP is looking for advice to solve both problems at once.
Uum, did you read the summary? He has students who:
The goal of the test is to see if they can get the right answer to the physic problem, not test their English ability or how fast they can figure out how to use a different graphing calculator.
Now, I just read Einstein's book on relativity, and it if I understood it properly, the whole point of General Relativity was that the earth (even though it's rotating) can be considered an inertial reference frame. To support his theory, he mentioned some early experiments where they were trying to measure changes in the speed of light due to the fact relative to the sun, the surface of the earth speeds up and slows down; but they were unable to find any difference, no matter what part of the earth's rotation they were on.
Unless it's a terminology thing, and by "inertial reference frame" you mean non-rotating. But of course, if people have a hard time grasping that the Earth goes around the sun, there's no way they're going to accept relativity. :-)
Yes, there will be extremists and nut-jobs in any religion (or any ideology for that matter). That said, there is an awfully big difference between the teachings and position of Jesus and his early followers, and the teachings and position of Mohammed. Jesus, and all of the early church leaders, were not political powers; in fact, most of them were executed at the hands of the government. Mohammed was the leader of an army who grew, in part, by conquering territory. The teachings reflect that. I can't help but think that that has an effect on the the nature of the extremists.
When I was living in Turkey, I had a devoutly Muslim flat-mate; good guy. I gave him a Turkish copy of the New Testament, and he gave me an English copy of the Koran. Since Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet, but that the New Testament had been changed, he read through looking for bits that (he believed) had probably been changed. Rather to my surprise, one of the first things to catch his eye was this passage:
"But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat too. If a soldier demands that you carry his gear for a mile, carry it two miles. ...But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike." Matthew 5:39-41,44-45
He said that he thought this was wrong; that in Islam, you should be bold and fight. The concept of putting up with abuse, and being kind to someone who was your enemy, was so foreign to him that he identified it as something that must have been added afterwards. No Godly prophet would say something like that.
That was my first real introduction to the idea that although there are certainly analogies between religious experiences, there are still significant differences. Even the most crazed Christian, if they actually read their Bible, can't escape reading a huge number of passages just like that one. I didn't find anything like that in the Koran.
In most of the cases you mention, we're talking about publications self-censoring to avoid losing money. For example, from the very article you link to about Playboy Portugal: "Curiously, it wasn’t the Portuguese authorities who took action, but the parent company, Playboy Enterprises in the US. An outraged Theresa Hennessy, Playboy Enterprises’ Vice President of Public Relations, said: 'We did not see or approve the cover and pictorial in the July issue of Playboy Portugal. It is a shocking breach of our standards, and we would not have allowed it to be published if we had seen it in advance. As a result of this and other issues with the Portuguese publisher, we are in the process of terminating our agreement.' "
There's a big difference between a company choosing not to avoid a market for fear of losing sales, and companies not doing something for fear of violence.
There's also a big difference between that, and people living in fear of being burned alive.
FWIW, although I think they have a legal right to do whatever they want, I strongly oppose their actions for other reasons:
I think in the continental US this is true. When I lived in Michigan, you could pretty much rely on the 4-day weather report; the rain might get here Tuesday morning or Tuesday afternoon, but you knew it was going to rain Tuesday. And Tuesday morning, they could tell you within a 2-hour time window exactly when it was going to start raining.
I now live in Cambridge, England, and it's pretty much completely random. Several years ago a fellow American used to check four weather sites every morning to see if it was going to rain. (Since he had to cycle to the office either way, I'm not sure why he cared.) One would say rain in the morning, sunny in the afternoon; another would say sunny in the morning, rain in the afternoon; another would say rain all day; the last would say sunny all day. Remember, this is the morning of, not four days out.
What do you want the weather to be? You can find a website which will tell you that's what's going to happen. :-)
Not really -- the problem is with the base rate fallacy. Suppose that there's a test that will tell you whether or not you have a disease with 99% accuracy: if you have it, you're 99% likely to test positive; if you don't have it, you're 99% likely to test negative.
Now, you get a test and it's positive. What's your probability of having the disease?
The answer is, "There's not enough information to answer the question." The missing piece of information is the "base rate".
Suppose that 50% of the people have the disease. Then in testing 1 million people, 500K will have the disease, of which 495K will come back positive (true positive), and 5K the test will come back negative (false negatives). 500K will not have the disease, of which 495k will come back negative (true negative), and 5k will come back positive (false positive). If the test came back positive, you're either a true positive or a false positive. Since there are 500K positives, and 495K of those are true positives, your chances of having the disease are 99%.
Suppose instead that 1% of people have the disease. Then in testing 1 million people, 990K will not have the disease, and 10K will have it. Of the 990K, 980K will come back negative (true negative) and 10K will come back positive (false positive). Of the 10K, 9900 will come back positive (true positive), and 100 will come back negative (false negative). There are 19,900 who tested positive, of which only 9900 (less than half) actually have the disease. So if you tested positive, your chances are about 50%.
So even if the test itself is very accurate (and I think 99% is pretty accurate), if the base rate is low enough (and in autism I believe it's still less than 1%), a positive reading may not be conclusive. You'd have to correlate it with other symptoms to make sure.
Um, like what? I think you proved the opposite point -- they pioneered server consolidation, and did an awesome job; but now they're still mainly tweaking and improving the thing that made them big 10 years ago.
That's true for the actual code. But when it comes to documenting code, describing algorithms, or discussing alternatives on a mailing list, having a decent typing speed will have a big impact.
There seem to be some strange exceptions to that rule.
For instance, here's one of my comments, and another on the same subject that links to something clearly appropriate and illuminating to the discussion, that got marked "troll" instead of "informative". I have no idea why, other than that people don't want to believe what the link says.
...but if they sold it to anyone else, or started distributing the recordings themselves, you can bet there'd be an army of lawyers jumping on them. What a shame.
That's why I think most people only make comments that will be inoffensive / appropriate to all of their cultural group contexts.
You must lead a very interesting life if saying, "Wow, beautiful scenery" on one of your friends' photos will offend and alienate another friend. :-)
Unfortunately, on the grand scale of things, 200 years isn't really that long. There are a myriad of civilizations that grew and flourished and lasted twice as long, but then collapsed and exist only as artifacts discovered by archeologists. I wouldn't say the US economic strategy (i.e., the use and organization of its people and natural resources) was effective until it had been sustained for 1000 years.
And some of the most accomplished scientists are often also the worst teachers. And some of the best teachers are lousy scientists. The two abilities are pretty much independent.
I wouldn't mind corporations being "people" if they were like people in other ways. Imagine if when the corporation was convicted of a crime, every person in it (or at least all the stockholders) could be thrown in jail. Part of the breakdown of the whole system is that there's way too much distance between people who own a publicly-traded company and the effects their actions produce. You'd better believe that if stockholders were criminally liable for actions the company took, that "maximize shareholder value" would become 2nd priority to "avoid putting the shareholders in jail.".
Yes; unlike the entire rest of academia, the main publishing venue is peer-reviewed conferences. The very top conferences are more selective than most journals -- along the lines of, 100+ papers submitted and 25 accepted.
Most of the conferences I've been involved with (submitted to or been on the program committee for) to are double-blind -- the program committee doesn't know who the authors are* or how many there are. So benefit from submitting together would only be if it improved the quality of the paper.
* If a paper follows on from previous work, you can usually guess which research group it came from. But if anything that makes it more challenging to get accepted, because the standards for novelty are higher. If it's new work, it could be from anyone.
I'm not sure about the field of algorithms, but most quality systems conferences review submissions double-blind: the people on the program committee have no idea who wrote the paper, and the authors don't now exactly which reviewer said what about their paper. If the paper is a continuation of previous research, usually you can guess who wrote it. But if the paper they're reading is something new, there's no way for them to tell if it's a new direction from a prestigious research group at MIT, or written by a truck driver thinking about problems on the road and setting up experiments in the back of his truck. Each paper stands on its own merit, not the reputation of the author.
That said, there's definitely a cultural idea of what a "good paper" looks like, so reading Google Scholar is helpful.
Actually, if your work really is innovative, and you're keen to get it published, it might not hurt to find an algorithms professor in a local university, chat with him about your work, and see if he's willing to help you get the paper into publishable form.
While I agree about twitter, with your FB example it's more like, "The community is the message." If your only friends on FB were the friends you had on BBS, you could post about the orgy. If your conservative aunt frequented your BBS networks, you'd be in the same bind.
Honestly, the simplest way to deal with it? Don't friend her. You don't have to. FB is a new technology, and as such the social conventions need to change because of it. In real life, you have plenty of time and space boundaries with people, so that you can easily spend some time with your conservative aunt while isolating her from your not-so-conservative lifestyle. On FB, you don't have those boundaries (or, they're trickier to implement). So if you really want to express your lifestyle on FB, don't friend people who would be offended by it. I probably refuse one or two friend requests a month from people that I know, but whom I don't really care to share my life with.
I'm in a good mood, so I'll feed the troll. It could not be an extended camera tripod. My wife is a professional photographer. I'm familiar with a lot of camera equipment, and that looked like nothing I've ever seen, either from her kit, her friends' kits, or what she used in school. I was also in the military, and so I'm familiar with a lot of military equipment. US military doesn't use RPGs, but it looks and hangs (and he was carrying it) exactly like a weapon.
My wife is a pro photographer, and also grew up on an Army base. When I showed my wife the video, her reaction was the same: "Ah, no way -- that's definitely an RPG."
Not to mention, a trained soldier who had seen dozens of RPGs identified it as an RPG.
Those are the credentials for our judgements. What are your credentials then?