Man, have you tried to use a recent build of Firefox on a 5-year-old machine lately? It's barely usable unless you have at least 512mb of RAM and a fairly fast CPU.
A disproportionate number of top universities, relative to population, are in rural areas and small towns: Ithaca, New York; Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; Hanover, New Hampshire; Durham, North Carolina; Terre Haute, Indiana; etc.
Many of those that do find themselves in large cities were actually founded way out in the countryside, too, but have since been swallowed---Columbia was sort of in the middle of nowhere in far-upper Manhattan, most of the Boston universities are in Cambridge rather than Boston proper, Stanford was way off from San Francisco, Caltech was considerably outside Los Angeles, etc.
Wikipedia confirms, but since being made a life peer in 1983, that's now Baron King to you.
Which of course requires a similarly flippant American comment about how in the UK, "industrial baron" and "robber baron" and so on aren't just figures of speech!
Maybe I got lucky or something, but my root canal (in a back molar with about 4 canals) didn't hurt at all. It hurt before because of the infection, but a bunch of ibuprofen plus local anaesthetic seemed to do the trick during, and it didn't really hurt at all afterwards (just somewhat sore, but not enough for me to need any painkillers).
While I agree that some of the Mac shareware culture is kind of ridiculous, along the lines of trying to charge $20 for every variation of a digital clock, the fact that people are willing and used to paying $10-50 for a downloadable piece of software from an independent development company is good for indie-game companies, whose development model is exactly that.
I don't have any numbers, but I've heard anecdotally from folks like Chronic Logic that the number of Mac users who will shell out $10-20 for the full version of a game after trying out the free demo is much higher than what you'd expect from just Mac vs. Windows market share. Of course, there are other factors at work there too, like Mac users having fewer gaming choices overall, making the market less competitive.
Standardized, regulated exchanges usually come about when a market already existed before, but it would be desirable to have a more transparent, reliable market clearinghouse. With stocks, people invented shares long before anyone opened an actual stock-exchange: you write out a contract on paper agreeing that, in return for $x, so-and-so now owns 1 share of your company, and you have a contract somewhere specifying how many total shares there are, when/if new shares can be issued, etc. It's basically what happens when you try to expand a small partnership to more than a few people and bring in investors.
Once you get enough of these fractional-ownership certificates floating around, each with slightly different rules, and disputes start arising about who owns what and what that means, the logical next step is to agree on some relatively standardized method of fractional ownership, and a central clearinghouse to trade the certificates. Which is what stock markets are.
On the other hand, moving that sort of business to stock markets also increases the number of market participants and frequency of transactions by reducing entry and transaction costs---it's impossible, for example, to "day-trade" paper stock certificates in person directly with their owners thousands of times per day. That has positive and negative effects---positive in that it increases available capital and gives retail investors more parity of access compared to large investors, and negative in that it makes the whole system more volatile and sensitive to chaotic-systems effects.
Private universities mostly have campus security, but a lot of public universities' security forces are actual police departments with official jurisdiction for the portion of the city that makes up the campus. That's the case at least for the University of California campuses, Georgia Tech, University of Texas campuses, etc.
For partly historical reasons, railroad police of the larger railroads in the US and Canada are actual police officers rather than merely private security forces, with full law-enforcement jurisdiction. See also Wikipedia on the Amtrak Police.
These distributed models work best if it's a large team, which potentially has more than one level of hierarchical structure.
You do typically have a canonical central repository managed by the project lead (in the Linux kernel's case, Linus's tree). But then sub-section leads might have their own canonical repository for that sub-section, and merge in their team members' changes into a stable state that they approve of before asking for those changes to get merged into the central branch. Or they might bundle up some particularly important set of changes for early merging "upstream", making sure they cleanly apply against the current central repo. That's all a nightmare to manage in SVN, which conceives of branches as something you do occasionally and keep around for a while, not as a hierarchical project-management tool.
On the other hand, if you have a relatively small or flat team, or one where the sub-sections break down really cleanly so each one can have its own central repo, it might not buy you much. I'm working on a small project with 4 people at the moment, and SVN is perfectly fine, and I can't really imagine what I'd do with a distributed version control system (I'd just use it like a centralized one, pushing everything to the one repo everyone pulls from).
I stand corrected; T-Mobile's offer is reasonably good, and gives the others some competition.
AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon all do offer only the same $60/mo, 5-GB limit plan for data cards, though. Well, Verizon also offers a useless 50-MB limit one, for $40/mo.
There are a lot of identical prices/features in the plans the major 4 providers offer, so much so that it seems like an odd coincidence if this is truly a competitive market between non-collusive entities.
For example, say I want to buy a laptop cell-phone modem, and buy a wireless data plan. There are four providers who will sell me that, so you'd think I might have a choice of packages, maybe some carriers offering higher data limits for a higher price, others structuring their service with multiple tiers, etc. Instead, every provider offers exactly one plan, and all four have identical terms and prices: $60/mo for 5GB of data.
Most of the fighting about network neutrality is over whether an ISP should be able to charge a content provider to deliver their content (or pass it with higher priority). But it seems fairly similar for a content provider to be trying to use ability of an ISP's subscribers to access its content as a way of forcing the ISP-owning company to purchase some other product. What next, Google requiring Time Warner to sign up for Premium Google or its subscribers don't get the Calendar anymore?
Amtrak is basically a rural subsidy, linking together far-flung towns across thousands of miles of track, stopping frequently, because serving those towns is its main point, and the main reason that, politically, it hasn't been killed off yet.
Britain's rail system, by contrast, serves a densely populated, geographically miniscule island, more akin to creating a regional-scale system like Acela than a continental-scale system like Amtrak.
Which America was it where rail was still a viable and widely-used transportation method up until Reagan killed it? In your corner of America, people didn't drive places in 1979, but took trains everywhere?
In the actual US, rail was mostly killed in the 1940s and 50s.
The authors of the interactive drama Facade collaborated with some augmented-reality people to build an AR version of the game, and found that although it did make people feel more "present" in an immersive virtual world, they actually engaged less with the game as a result, which went against the assumption in the AR field that more-immersive = more-good.
Another thing that makes it different is that this is a no-name startup conference in China with editors and a program committee nobody has ever heard of, whereas Sokal got his paper accepted to a well-known journal in the field, edited by some of its luminaries. If this paper had gotten accepted to say, Communications of the ACM, and fooled Donald Knuth into thinking it was genuine, it would've been more analogous.
These seem to be testing different things. One of Sokal's claims, which he intended to demonstrate, was that gibberish and "postmodernist" academic writing are indistinguishable, even by people in the field. This was done especially through the wordplay connections of e.g. the "axiom of choice" with pro-choice politics, which is a fairly common but kind of weird tactic in a certain subset of that milieu. He more or less demonstrated that claim by his experiment especially the fact that at least one of the journal editors, months later, refused to believe that it was actually a hoax: he suggested instead that Sokal had been pressured/embarrassed into retroactively claiming a legitimate paper was a hoax, in order to avoid ridicule by the conservative physics establishment.
This paper, on the other hand, demonstrates a different academic flaw: the proliferation of low-quality, minimal-to-no-review computer-science conferences. It is quite likely that nobody actually read this paper, and that the conference was not really run as a legitimate attempt to foster academic discourse, but as a way to either get money for someone, or pad a CV line for some editors/organizers, or both.
A grad student wouldn't even be hired as a tenure-track professor with only 3 top-tier publications at most institutions in CS. This is partly because CS mainly uses a conference publication model, not a journal model: you distribute your work in 6- to 10-page bite-sized pieces. You might sometimes collect some of these into a 30-page journal article, but often people skip that step entirely (why bother re-writing-up your research when it's already out there in some form).
A grad student looking to be competitive as a hire at a top-tier research university typically is expected to have 4-5 publications in top-tier conferences or journals (journals don't actually usually get more cache; in some areas, they get less). This is somewhat mitigated if you're in an area that only has one, very competitive top conference: so a graphics grad student obviously doesn't need 5 SIGGRAPH papers to be a competitive candidate. But an AI student should have a good smattering of AAAI and IJCAI papers, plus a few in the top tier conference of their specific area (ICML, IUI, AAMAS, etc.). A professor looking to get tenure at a top institution typically will have 10-30 publications at such venues.
This is kind-of an IEEE conference. There are core IEEE conferences, which are run by the IEEE, which this isn't. Then there are other conferences (lots of them), which the IEEE sponsors in one way or another, and indexes the proceedings of. They often see the latter as a free (or at least cheap) way of getting their name associated with something that might take off. On the other hand, as this shows, it can get their name associated in the other sort of manner as well.
This seems to be a conference in China that was just founded, which leads me to believe the IEEE (like many stock investors) was duped in a rush to get their foot in the door of the Next Big Thing In China.
Lots of organizations do something vaguely like that, although the IEEE does seem to be worse than most. Even if you look only at their own, "branded" journals (IEEE Transactions on Foo), they seem to be founding new ones ever other week, which range in quality all the way from well respected in their field, to kooky. If they aren't careful, they're going to start getting an Elsevier-level reputation.
Citation indices like citeseer distinguish self-citations from non-self-citations; if you pick some random paper that has both, you'll see a tally like "81 citations -- 7 self". Does Thomson Scientific not actually bother to do that in computing its impact factor?
That always struck me as somewhat funny about the term "impact factor". Having an impact is in normal speech an impact on something. These factors seem to be trying to avoid the question of what you're measuring an impact on by choosing something really broad, like "impact on the advance of science". But it shouldn't be a surprise that that's more or less unmeasurable.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, have you tried to use a recent build of Firefox on a 5-year-old machine lately? It's barely usable unless you have at least 512mb of RAM and a fairly fast CPU.
There are at least a few protocols that I suspect were designed after some sixpacks.
A disproportionate number of top universities, relative to population, are in rural areas and small towns: Ithaca, New York; Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; Hanover, New Hampshire; Durham, North Carolina; Terre Haute, Indiana; etc.
Many of those that do find themselves in large cities were actually founded way out in the countryside, too, but have since been swallowed---Columbia was sort of in the middle of nowhere in far-upper Manhattan, most of the Boston universities are in Cambridge rather than Boston proper, Stanford was way off from San Francisco, Caltech was considerably outside Los Angeles, etc.
Wikipedia confirms, but since being made a life peer in 1983, that's now Baron King to you.
Which of course requires a similarly flippant American comment about how in the UK, "industrial baron" and "robber baron" and so on aren't just figures of speech!
Because all the other Anglo-Saxon countries still have the visage of a hereditary monarch on their coins. ;-)
Maybe I got lucky or something, but my root canal (in a back molar with about 4 canals) didn't hurt at all. It hurt before because of the infection, but a bunch of ibuprofen plus local anaesthetic seemed to do the trick during, and it didn't really hurt at all afterwards (just somewhat sore, but not enough for me to need any painkillers).
While I agree that some of the Mac shareware culture is kind of ridiculous, along the lines of trying to charge $20 for every variation of a digital clock, the fact that people are willing and used to paying $10-50 for a downloadable piece of software from an independent development company is good for indie-game companies, whose development model is exactly that.
I don't have any numbers, but I've heard anecdotally from folks like Chronic Logic that the number of Mac users who will shell out $10-20 for the full version of a game after trying out the free demo is much higher than what you'd expect from just Mac vs. Windows market share. Of course, there are other factors at work there too, like Mac users having fewer gaming choices overall, making the market less competitive.
Standardized, regulated exchanges usually come about when a market already existed before, but it would be desirable to have a more transparent, reliable market clearinghouse. With stocks, people invented shares long before anyone opened an actual stock-exchange: you write out a contract on paper agreeing that, in return for $x, so-and-so now owns 1 share of your company, and you have a contract somewhere specifying how many total shares there are, when/if new shares can be issued, etc. It's basically what happens when you try to expand a small partnership to more than a few people and bring in investors.
Once you get enough of these fractional-ownership certificates floating around, each with slightly different rules, and disputes start arising about who owns what and what that means, the logical next step is to agree on some relatively standardized method of fractional ownership, and a central clearinghouse to trade the certificates. Which is what stock markets are.
On the other hand, moving that sort of business to stock markets also increases the number of market participants and frequency of transactions by reducing entry and transaction costs---it's impossible, for example, to "day-trade" paper stock certificates in person directly with their owners thousands of times per day. That has positive and negative effects---positive in that it increases available capital and gives retail investors more parity of access compared to large investors, and negative in that it makes the whole system more volatile and sensitive to chaotic-systems effects.
Private universities mostly have campus security, but a lot of public universities' security forces are actual police departments with official jurisdiction for the portion of the city that makes up the campus. That's the case at least for the University of California campuses, Georgia Tech, University of Texas campuses, etc.
For partly historical reasons, railroad police of the larger railroads in the US and Canada are actual police officers rather than merely private security forces, with full law-enforcement jurisdiction. See also Wikipedia on the Amtrak Police.
These distributed models work best if it's a large team, which potentially has more than one level of hierarchical structure.
You do typically have a canonical central repository managed by the project lead (in the Linux kernel's case, Linus's tree). But then sub-section leads might have their own canonical repository for that sub-section, and merge in their team members' changes into a stable state that they approve of before asking for those changes to get merged into the central branch. Or they might bundle up some particularly important set of changes for early merging "upstream", making sure they cleanly apply against the current central repo. That's all a nightmare to manage in SVN, which conceives of branches as something you do occasionally and keep around for a while, not as a hierarchical project-management tool.
On the other hand, if you have a relatively small or flat team, or one where the sub-sections break down really cleanly so each one can have its own central repo, it might not buy you much. I'm working on a small project with 4 people at the moment, and SVN is perfectly fine, and I can't really imagine what I'd do with a distributed version control system (I'd just use it like a centralized one, pushing everything to the one repo everyone pulls from).
I stand corrected; T-Mobile's offer is reasonably good, and gives the others some competition.
AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon all do offer only the same $60/mo, 5-GB limit plan for data cards, though. Well, Verizon also offers a useless 50-MB limit one, for $40/mo.
There are a lot of identical prices/features in the plans the major 4 providers offer, so much so that it seems like an odd coincidence if this is truly a competitive market between non-collusive entities.
For example, say I want to buy a laptop cell-phone modem, and buy a wireless data plan. There are four providers who will sell me that, so you'd think I might have a choice of packages, maybe some carriers offering higher data limits for a higher price, others structuring their service with multiple tiers, etc. Instead, every provider offers exactly one plan, and all four have identical terms and prices: $60/mo for 5GB of data.
Most of the fighting about network neutrality is over whether an ISP should be able to charge a content provider to deliver their content (or pass it with higher priority). But it seems fairly similar for a content provider to be trying to use ability of an ISP's subscribers to access its content as a way of forcing the ISP-owning company to purchase some other product. What next, Google requiring Time Warner to sign up for Premium Google or its subscribers don't get the Calendar anymore?
I don't see a link to a print option on the page, and when I click on your link, it just redirects me back to the multi-page version.
and when I mail items overseas or receive them from overseas, I never mark them as "gift" if they were actually purchases
Amtrak is basically a rural subsidy, linking together far-flung towns across thousands of miles of track, stopping frequently, because serving those towns is its main point, and the main reason that, politically, it hasn't been killed off yet.
Britain's rail system, by contrast, serves a densely populated, geographically miniscule island, more akin to creating a regional-scale system like Acela than a continental-scale system like Amtrak.
Which America was it where rail was still a viable and widely-used transportation method up until Reagan killed it? In your corner of America, people didn't drive places in 1979, but took trains everywhere?
In the actual US, rail was mostly killed in the 1940s and 50s.
The authors of the interactive drama Facade collaborated with some augmented-reality people to build an AR version of the game, and found that although it did make people feel more "present" in an immersive virtual world, they actually engaged less with the game as a result, which went against the assumption in the AR field that more-immersive = more-good.
Another thing that makes it different is that this is a no-name startup conference in China with editors and a program committee nobody has ever heard of, whereas Sokal got his paper accepted to a well-known journal in the field, edited by some of its luminaries. If this paper had gotten accepted to say, Communications of the ACM, and fooled Donald Knuth into thinking it was genuine, it would've been more analogous.
These seem to be testing different things. One of Sokal's claims, which he intended to demonstrate, was that gibberish and "postmodernist" academic writing are indistinguishable, even by people in the field. This was done especially through the wordplay connections of e.g. the "axiom of choice" with pro-choice politics, which is a fairly common but kind of weird tactic in a certain subset of that milieu. He more or less demonstrated that claim by his experiment especially the fact that at least one of the journal editors, months later, refused to believe that it was actually a hoax: he suggested instead that Sokal had been pressured/embarrassed into retroactively claiming a legitimate paper was a hoax, in order to avoid ridicule by the conservative physics establishment.
This paper, on the other hand, demonstrates a different academic flaw: the proliferation of low-quality, minimal-to-no-review computer-science conferences. It is quite likely that nobody actually read this paper, and that the conference was not really run as a legitimate attempt to foster academic discourse, but as a way to either get money for someone, or pad a CV line for some editors/organizers, or both.
A grad student wouldn't even be hired as a tenure-track professor with only 3 top-tier publications at most institutions in CS. This is partly because CS mainly uses a conference publication model, not a journal model: you distribute your work in 6- to 10-page bite-sized pieces. You might sometimes collect some of these into a 30-page journal article, but often people skip that step entirely (why bother re-writing-up your research when it's already out there in some form).
A grad student looking to be competitive as a hire at a top-tier research university typically is expected to have 4-5 publications in top-tier conferences or journals (journals don't actually usually get more cache; in some areas, they get less). This is somewhat mitigated if you're in an area that only has one, very competitive top conference: so a graphics grad student obviously doesn't need 5 SIGGRAPH papers to be a competitive candidate. But an AI student should have a good smattering of AAAI and IJCAI papers, plus a few in the top tier conference of their specific area (ICML, IUI, AAMAS, etc.). A professor looking to get tenure at a top institution typically will have 10-30 publications at such venues.
This is kind-of an IEEE conference. There are core IEEE conferences, which are run by the IEEE, which this isn't. Then there are other conferences (lots of them), which the IEEE sponsors in one way or another, and indexes the proceedings of. They often see the latter as a free (or at least cheap) way of getting their name associated with something that might take off. On the other hand, as this shows, it can get their name associated in the other sort of manner as well.
This seems to be a conference in China that was just founded, which leads me to believe the IEEE (like many stock investors) was duped in a rush to get their foot in the door of the Next Big Thing In China.
Lots of organizations do something vaguely like that, although the IEEE does seem to be worse than most. Even if you look only at their own, "branded" journals (IEEE Transactions on Foo), they seem to be founding new ones ever other week, which range in quality all the way from well respected in their field, to kooky. If they aren't careful, they're going to start getting an Elsevier-level reputation.
Citation indices like citeseer distinguish self-citations from non-self-citations; if you pick some random paper that has both, you'll see a tally like "81 citations -- 7 self". Does Thomson Scientific not actually bother to do that in computing its impact factor?
That always struck me as somewhat funny about the term "impact factor". Having an impact is in normal speech an impact on something. These factors seem to be trying to avoid the question of what you're measuring an impact on by choosing something really broad, like "impact on the advance of science". But it shouldn't be a surprise that that's more or less unmeasurable.