Assuming that what the conclusion (p. 21) reports as "like-sign dimuon charge asymmetry of semileptonic b-hadron decays" is the number we're looking for, they do give a margin of error that's smaller than the asymmetry observed. They report the asymmetry as:
A = -0.00957 +/- 0.00251 (stat) +/- 0.00146 (syst)
I believe the two errors are there because they breaking out the statistical margin of error (due to sampling) and systemic margin of error (due to accuracy of apparatus and setup).
In theory, as a non-profit charity dedicated to reducing the incidence and impact of heart disease, the AHA should be making its endorsements on the basis of some sort of measure of validity, not selling the rights to use the AHA logo as a purely commercial transaction.
Now presumably they did actually evaluate these games, but it sure gives the appearance of something being a bit more commercial than charitable if they gave their endorsement of these games in return for a $1.5 million donation.
Thomas voting in favor of a habeas appeal is somewhat unusual, since he tends to come down on the side of the government and law-and-order more often (though not as consistently as Rehnquist did). Scalia I agree isn't surprising.
Early on, yes (and I've been around since then, too). My comment is mostly referring to the past five years. The autofellatio and Sanger-editing incidents were in 2005, and incidentally, he didn't prevail on the latter one. The Rachel Madsen incident happened in 2007, and he did pretty much the opposite of prevailing on that one.
Somehow I doubt Sangers actually feared being prosecuted. I agree the laws are nonsense, but when something's being openly hosted and accessed by thousands of people, the most likely people to be prosecuted are those hosting it, and Wikimedia had not been prosecuted for hosting any materials despite having these up for a long time. That makes the likelihood of some random visitor being prosecuted quite small, and I find it unlikely Sangers really believed he was in danger of being prosecuted. More likely, he: 1) hates Wikipedia, so wants to do anything he can to bring it down; and 2) is a media whore.
In the other direction, though, Wales has not in recent memory had unlimited use of any of those powers in practice. He had some bits set that gave him a bunch of admin privileges, but if he ever tried to use them, as he did here, you can see what the result would be: he was reverted and forced to back down. So I don't think the removal of bits is a particularly important change; then, as now, his primary power is soft-power.
I'm guessing Sanger certainly hoped for some sort of media frenzy. He's spent the past eight years since he quit working on Wikipedia mostly trying to trade off the fact that he used to be involved in it.
He wasn't even lecturing about it to students, if his protest letter is accurate. He was sharing it with a colleague, which I assume means another professor, a research scientist, or some other variety of non-student researcher, in the context of "an ongoing debate with the colleague in question about the relevance of evolutionary biology to human behaviour, and in particular about the dubiousness of many claims for human uniqueness". Seems rather relevant, and strange to object to.
I don't think it's purely to make it look better. Dispersants are usually used in large spills, on the theory that a lot of the damage we most want to avoid (and that costs most to clean up) is large oil slicks washing up on shores, and dispersing the oil is one way of preventing that.
It's actually a reasonably common idiomatic expression, especially w.r.t. computers, despite not making a lot of sense. See these examples. I've also seen "dog-slow". My guess is that they're slips from "sick as a dog" and "dog-tired", respectively.
As far as I can tell, they aren't actually proposing a wholesale fork, with a new community to do general browser development and replace Firefox. It looks like it's just a project to release variant builds of Firefox with additional features added, and will otherwise track mainline FF development.
Yeah, I agree the summary's bad, though it is somewhat unpleasant that the judge in the case appears to consider the instructions themselves also illegal:
Judge John Milford expressed surprise that the Anarchist's Cookbook was still available to buy on the Amazon website, and asked the authorities to look into it.
I don't think you can generally patent an invention that already existed solely because you were the first to mass produce it inexpensively enough to make it a viable consumer product. If, in doing so, you came up with some novel innovation, you can patent that, but the innovation can't be as simple as combining the parts and then making manufacturing improvements to bring down the cost/size.
Is that still the case? Publicly explaining the invention was of course part of the original idea, but patents tend to be written in a fairly obfuscated style these days, so I'd suspect it's hard to reimplement most patents from the patent document alone.
Whoa, Papert in 1998 feels like some sort of ghostly communication. But yeah, I agree, there was a lot of crap. Mostly, though, I feel the 80s form of edutainment has been unfairly maligned. I'd trace a lot of my personal engagement with CS and mathematics to Apple ][ edutainment software, some of it even fitting the mold people seem to dismiss (i.e. you do some math problems, and you get some sort of reward). Stuff like Number Munchers was both fun and improved my arithmetic!
And some of it depends a lot on how you measure. For example, I'd bet there's a whole generation of students who know what "Chimney Rock" is solely because of Oregon Trail. How highly do you value that as geographical and historical knowledge? Seems like a pretty subjective question...
Partly because it's straightforward in principle, but takes some time in practice. There are at least two levels of language knowledge: having some idea of how to write things in the language, and knowing the languages's quirks, best practices, pitfalls, and, generally, pragmatics. The first is the stuff that anyone with a strong CS background should be able to pick up. But the latter requires just a lot of experience. If you take a complex language like C++, how does one learn which of the (many) features interact subtly with each other, and where the (many) pitfalls lie? More or less, through experience. If someone on your C++ team is a smart person with a strong CS background but has programmed C++ for less than 6 months, you should suspect they haven't yet picked up all the pragmatics, no matter how smart they are. That's just how things work.
Indeed, if you look at Supreme Court decisions, and even important Circuit Court decisions, you'll see a decent number of them include a phrase like, "on appeal from summary judgment", so there are certainly appeals from them.
(Mainly that's because questions that are interesting for the higher courts are mainly pure questions of law, and those are usually reached at the summary-judgment stage.)
Oil is really valuable, so there's a very high bar for the monetary cost of disaster to be not worth it, on a purely profits-vs-cleanup-costs basis.
Some back-of-the-envelope estimates. Say this disaster ends up costing BP $10 billion. Say that any given rig has a 1% chance of causing a disaster of that magnitude. So we assign a $100 million amortized cost per rig, to cover the "chance this rig will catastrophically blow up". Is it still worth drilling in that case? Well, it actually barely changes the economics at all: these deep-water wells cost about $500-600 million to drill and put into production to begin with. So add to $100m to that and total costs are basically still on the same order of magnitude.
In particular, these rigs can produce a lot of oil. BP's Thunder Horse rig in the gulf produces 250,000 barrels per day. Even if they make only $10/barrel operating profit (probably a low estimate), that's $2.5m per day in profits from the well, i.e. almost a billion dollars per year. Unless fully 10% of such wells incur $10b catastrophic cleanup costs every year, BP comes out ahead.
This doesn't really answer why it's not a problem in Alaska, but the temperatures aren't actually much different. Alaskan offshore drilling is in relatively shallow water, which at those latitudes is somewhere in the low single digits C once you get below the ice pack; while this operation in the Gulf was at about 1700 meters depth, where the temperatures are also in the low single digits C. (There's lots of complicating factors, but this graph of depth v. temperature for three different latitudes gives an idea.) There's differences in pressure, which might matter, but also big differences in geology.
Since these methane hydrates contain a significant amount of methane (i.e. natural gas), in the years since it was discovered that there are large deposits of them, they've periodically been touted as something we should actively drill for, as e.g. in this 1997 PopSci article.
Considering that supposedly "low-grade" edutainment was also demonstrated to be effective in improving learning outcomes, it seems strange to dismiss it just to bolster some industry's claims to novelty. See, for example, Lepper & Malone's 1987 paper, "Intrinsic motivation and instructional effectiveness in computer-based education".
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Assuming that what the conclusion (p. 21) reports as "like-sign dimuon charge asymmetry of semileptonic b-hadron decays" is the number we're looking for, they do give a margin of error that's smaller than the asymmetry observed. They report the asymmetry as:
A = -0.00957 +/- 0.00251 (stat) +/- 0.00146 (syst)
I believe the two errors are there because they breaking out the statistical margin of error (due to sampling) and systemic margin of error (due to accuracy of apparatus and setup).
In theory, as a non-profit charity dedicated to reducing the incidence and impact of heart disease, the AHA should be making its endorsements on the basis of some sort of measure of validity, not selling the rights to use the AHA logo as a purely commercial transaction.
Now presumably they did actually evaluate these games, but it sure gives the appearance of something being a bit more commercial than charitable if they gave their endorsement of these games in return for a $1.5 million donation.
Thomas voting in favor of a habeas appeal is somewhat unusual, since he tends to come down on the side of the government and law-and-order more often (though not as consistently as Rehnquist did). Scalia I agree isn't surprising.
Early on, yes (and I've been around since then, too). My comment is mostly referring to the past five years. The autofellatio and Sanger-editing incidents were in 2005, and incidentally, he didn't prevail on the latter one. The Rachel Madsen incident happened in 2007, and he did pretty much the opposite of prevailing on that one.
Somehow I doubt Sangers actually feared being prosecuted. I agree the laws are nonsense, but when something's being openly hosted and accessed by thousands of people, the most likely people to be prosecuted are those hosting it, and Wikimedia had not been prosecuted for hosting any materials despite having these up for a long time. That makes the likelihood of some random visitor being prosecuted quite small, and I find it unlikely Sangers really believed he was in danger of being prosecuted. More likely, he: 1) hates Wikipedia, so wants to do anything he can to bring it down; and 2) is a media whore.
In the other direction, though, Wales has not in recent memory had unlimited use of any of those powers in practice. He had some bits set that gave him a bunch of admin privileges, but if he ever tried to use them, as he did here, you can see what the result would be: he was reverted and forced to back down. So I don't think the removal of bits is a particularly important change; then, as now, his primary power is soft-power.
I'm guessing Sanger certainly hoped for some sort of media frenzy. He's spent the past eight years since he quit working on Wikipedia mostly trying to trade off the fact that he used to be involved in it.
He wasn't even lecturing about it to students, if his protest letter is accurate. He was sharing it with a colleague, which I assume means another professor, a research scientist, or some other variety of non-student researcher, in the context of "an ongoing debate with the colleague in question about the relevance of evolutionary biology to human behaviour, and in particular about the dubiousness of many claims for human uniqueness". Seems rather relevant, and strange to object to.
I don't think it's purely to make it look better. Dispersants are usually used in large spills, on the theory that a lot of the damage we most want to avoid (and that costs most to clean up) is large oil slicks washing up on shores, and dispersing the oil is one way of preventing that.
Yeah, and it was enough of a merger that for the first few years it was actually named BP Amoco. Then the Amoco got dropped a bit later.
It's actually a reasonably common idiomatic expression, especially w.r.t. computers, despite not making a lot of sense. See these examples. I've also seen "dog-slow". My guess is that they're slips from "sick as a dog" and "dog-tired", respectively.
As far as I can tell, they aren't actually proposing a wholesale fork, with a new community to do general browser development and replace Firefox. It looks like it's just a project to release variant builds of Firefox with additional features added, and will otherwise track mainline FF development.
Yeah, I agree the summary's bad, though it is somewhat unpleasant that the judge in the case appears to consider the instructions themselves also illegal:
I don't think you can generally patent an invention that already existed solely because you were the first to mass produce it inexpensively enough to make it a viable consumer product. If, in doing so, you came up with some novel innovation, you can patent that, but the innovation can't be as simple as combining the parts and then making manufacturing improvements to bring down the cost/size.
Is that still the case? Publicly explaining the invention was of course part of the original idea, but patents tend to be written in a fairly obfuscated style these days, so I'd suspect it's hard to reimplement most patents from the patent document alone.
Yeah, but even that supports the no-extinction point! "A third of the living creatures in the sea died" implies, of course, that two thirds did not.
Indeed: debugging subtle bugs in the C preprocessor gives one an important insight into computer science and software engineering.
Whoa, Papert in 1998 feels like some sort of ghostly communication. But yeah, I agree, there was a lot of crap. Mostly, though, I feel the 80s form of edutainment has been unfairly maligned. I'd trace a lot of my personal engagement with CS and mathematics to Apple ][ edutainment software, some of it even fitting the mold people seem to dismiss (i.e. you do some math problems, and you get some sort of reward). Stuff like Number Munchers was both fun and improved my arithmetic!
And some of it depends a lot on how you measure. For example, I'd bet there's a whole generation of students who know what "Chimney Rock" is solely because of Oregon Trail. How highly do you value that as geographical and historical knowledge? Seems like a pretty subjective question...
Partly because it's straightforward in principle, but takes some time in practice. There are at least two levels of language knowledge: having some idea of how to write things in the language, and knowing the languages's quirks, best practices, pitfalls, and, generally, pragmatics. The first is the stuff that anyone with a strong CS background should be able to pick up. But the latter requires just a lot of experience. If you take a complex language like C++, how does one learn which of the (many) features interact subtly with each other, and where the (many) pitfalls lie? More or less, through experience. If someone on your C++ team is a smart person with a strong CS background but has programmed C++ for less than 6 months, you should suspect they haven't yet picked up all the pragmatics, no matter how smart they are. That's just how things work.
Indeed, if you look at Supreme Court decisions, and even important Circuit Court decisions, you'll see a decent number of them include a phrase like, "on appeal from summary judgment", so there are certainly appeals from them.
(Mainly that's because questions that are interesting for the higher courts are mainly pure questions of law, and those are usually reached at the summary-judgment stage.)
Gotta say though, I liked the previous look better. The belt really worked well with the red spot, while now it's just a big mess there.
Oil is really valuable, so there's a very high bar for the monetary cost of disaster to be not worth it, on a purely profits-vs-cleanup-costs basis.
Some back-of-the-envelope estimates. Say this disaster ends up costing BP $10 billion. Say that any given rig has a 1% chance of causing a disaster of that magnitude. So we assign a $100 million amortized cost per rig, to cover the "chance this rig will catastrophically blow up". Is it still worth drilling in that case? Well, it actually barely changes the economics at all: these deep-water wells cost about $500-600 million to drill and put into production to begin with. So add to $100m to that and total costs are basically still on the same order of magnitude.
In particular, these rigs can produce a lot of oil. BP's Thunder Horse rig in the gulf produces 250,000 barrels per day. Even if they make only $10/barrel operating profit (probably a low estimate), that's $2.5m per day in profits from the well, i.e. almost a billion dollars per year. Unless fully 10% of such wells incur $10b catastrophic cleanup costs every year, BP comes out ahead.
This doesn't really answer why it's not a problem in Alaska, but the temperatures aren't actually much different. Alaskan offshore drilling is in relatively shallow water, which at those latitudes is somewhere in the low single digits C once you get below the ice pack; while this operation in the Gulf was at about 1700 meters depth, where the temperatures are also in the low single digits C. (There's lots of complicating factors, but this graph of depth v. temperature for three different latitudes gives an idea.) There's differences in pressure, which might matter, but also big differences in geology.
Since these methane hydrates contain a significant amount of methane (i.e. natural gas), in the years since it was discovered that there are large deposits of them, they've periodically been touted as something we should actively drill for, as e.g. in this 1997 PopSci article.
Considering that supposedly "low-grade" edutainment was also demonstrated to be effective in improving learning outcomes, it seems strange to dismiss it just to bolster some industry's claims to novelty. See, for example, Lepper & Malone's 1987 paper, "Intrinsic motivation and instructional effectiveness in computer-based education".