Having one person like einstein in your sample would scew the mean, but not the median.
There is no way to "define" IQ in such a way that a situation like that makes the mean and median different.
*Sigh.* Yes, there is. First, you are mixing the concept of a population, a parametric model, and a sample. A population is the large, effectively infinite pool from which samples are drawn. A parametric model is devised which fits the samples.
No, the actual population *isn't* Gaussian (as I admitted in my previous post), but IQ is fit to a parametric form, and is defined so that the median and mean IQ is 100. Note that Gaussian distribtutions are symmetric. For about 3 sigma off the center, this holds pretty well. Also note that Einstein is a whole lot more sigma than that, and it is not surprising that the model breaks down.
Recall, however, that Einstein is only 1 person, and since the population of earth is 1 billion, he doesn't skew anything much on his own. Also, for every Einstein, there's someone completely retarded as well.
Note, I am not saying the mean and median IQ aren't the same. Im just saying if they ARE the same, it has more to do with the way intelligence is distributed among the populace, and not with the way IQ was defined.
You've got the cart before the horse. IQ was defined that way to fit a populace whose intelligence is pretty well Gaussian. It's not coincidence, it's simply the choice of an effective model.
I think you meant to say "median" there, since the mean IQ is just the simple average across the population. The median value is the dividing line of the two halves.
The IQ scheme was set up assuming an approximately Gaussian distribution, for which the mean and median are the same. 15 IQ points = 1 standard deviation.
Naturally, that's horseshit, but 100 was at least designed to be the median and the mean, by definition.
In the end, I think email will be like IM, you'll have to 'approve' what email you'll accept, like you have to 'approve' additions to your buddy list now. ...whitelist. They've been around for a while. They also don't work so hot.
Upon first glance at that story one could point out a handful of blatantly false statements that the 'journalist' had embellished upon the presumed press release. To start with, the caption on the bizzare first image ignored atomic carbon (carbon black), nanotubes and the veritable zoo of non-C60 fullerenes.
Yeah, that aggravated me too. Actually, even chemists consider buckys to be a third allotrope as carbon. As a chemist, I consider it bullshit for the same reason you mention. For what it's worth, Carbon-black is not pure carbon - it's a misture of large polynuclear hydrocarbons. It's graphite-like, but does contain hydrogen.
These are not difficult diagrams. Diamond and graphite are simple to draw, where's the new one?
I was annoyed by the same - fortunately, my school has a subscription to Science. Graphite, of course, is a planar, sp2 hybridized structure that forms layers of sheets. The sheets are staggered by half a ring, so that half of the carbons are centered over another carbon, and half are centered over the middle of a ring. Under high enough pressure, the carbons that are right over each other form a sigma bond. According to the article, this happens gradually over a range of like 10-20 GPa, with theoretically half the carbons ultimately forming interplane sigma bonds if one considered a two-plane system.
Unfortunately, even the Science article was stingy on the details (as they tend to be).
Is that because you personally don't believe that anyone out there would be using radio signals, or that there's nobody out there? I mean, you obviously have a belief structure in place to produce that opinion...
Wow are *you* guessing...wrong I might add. I never said there are no aliens. Simply that the differences between us would probably preclude us from recognizing a large fraction of what something else might call communication.
One could say this same thing about the Higgs Boson...noones found it yet, so why bother looking. But this is the basis of scientific enquiry; you just happen to be colouring it with a sure knowledge that it's a waste of time..
A bit different. The Higgs boson theory is the product of an actual theory that is tested and based on many rounds of hypothesis/test/revise/repeat. SETI isn't. It's simply the conjecture that there might be something out there. As Rutherford would have said, that's basically stamp collecting. There's no application of the scientific theory there. There has yet to be collected ANY evidence at all. The Higgs *would* be the same if it were the first particle to be searched for using quantum theory, but it isn't - that method has yielded a ton of quarks, other leptons, bosons, mesons, etc. SETI has yielded shit.
Just so I'm clear - I don't presume to know if aliens *exist*. I simply think that, based on probabilities, looking for them is a complete waste of time.
But not only is the SCO share price rising, but there are a lot of shares being traded too. The markets back SCO at the moment and not us.
Yes, in the same way they backed Enron. Looking deeper, *45%* of SCO's stock is held by insiders. Only about 15% is held by institutions, the rest is basically your average day-trader. So in other words, the pros are treating SCO like plague. It's clearly overspeculation, and the numbers bear this out.
Now consider their short position. Assuming that institutions and insiders aren't the ones shorting, then that means that about *31%* of the stock held by other groups is being shorted. That's phenomenal. Similar stats for, say, P&G? about 50% institutional owned, and a few percent short. Also, SCO's short shares have nearly doubled in a month. P&G is up about 20%, as is most of the market, thanks to the recent runup. But that can't explain SCO.
I think you have a lot of people playing SCO like it was Monopoly money - but it ain't the pros. That's what I see from those numbers. People who know what the hell they're doing must be laughing at this.
Nobody signed a contract here, so the only problem is copyright law, which is protecting code that may be there. Copyright is unnatural and thus should be abolished.
Fucking farm animals is unnatural too, but you don't seem to have a problem with that. Hypocrite!
Perrin didn't get experimental evidence
on
Happy Birthday, Atom
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· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, by Rutherford's time the atomic theory was well established experimentally by Jean Perrin Rutherford contributed to the nuclear theory of the atom (i.e. that it is composed of a nucleus which holds most of the atom's mass and orbiting electrons of opposite charges).
Not really. Perrin did work complementary to that of Thomson regarding the negative nature of part of the atom (ie, cathode rays). He also *proposed* a solar-system model for the atom in 1901, but wasn't able to substantiate this. Later, he did some work on Brownian motion, and that's what he got the prize for (as mentioned in your link, actually). But he didn't get any experimental evidence for the heavy nucleus surrounded by a very undense region. Rutherford did, in 1909, with his alpha-particle backscattering experiment. Without that experiment, which was certainly not redundant, it's hard to imagine how established atomic theory could possibly have been.
Really, atomic theory wasn't well established at least until Millikan did his oil-drop experiment, establishing the charge/mass ratio of the electron, and by deduction, the proton as well.
First, it was a joke, and pissing off the SETI crowd is just too fun and easy. But, between SETI and his shitty books, Sagan has always been on the frontier of pseudoscience. Just seems a bit much, and seeing a quote regarding scientific bullshit from Sagan is hilarious.
Second of all, are you saying the Drake Equation is crap? That there's simply nothing out there?
Now, if you want to really evaluate this, Drake's missing a term, as I see it. Namely, the the probability that we would recognize a signal if we saw it.
Ultimately, I just don't see SETI as anything that could be really called science, as they haven't yet collected any real evidence - just the absence of it. And this can never prove or disprove a hypothesis. So it's not so much about not believing in the existence of aliens - it's more the faith that we wouldn't know an alien signal if it smacked us in the ass.
Read "The Borderlands Of Science" by Michael Shermer for further discussion about SETI and what sets it apart from the frothing conspiracy fools.
Not the point. They're not frothing conspirators because they have nothing to froth about. I simply see SETI as a frivolous, Quixotic waste of time and money.
In short, SETI is a shot in the dark, and based on a premise for which there is no proof - life on other worlds - but it is done in the same way we discovered germs or broke the sound barrier, by adhering to scientific principles.
Not really. In those cases, there was the actual ability to devise, evaluate, and revise theories/methods (breaking the sound barrier was engineering, not science). With SETI, it's not a full scientific method yet because they haven't finished a single iteration yet. They STILL don't have any evidence. And until they have anything real, they're pretty much playing with themselves.
they knew the war was a fake and they stuck to their stance while UK/USA continue to evade and dodge the truth
If you think Sadaam didn't have weapons, you've got your head up your ass. Why didn't he let in inspectors without stalling for weeks at a time? Why did he eventually stop letting them in? Why would he rather do the above and be deposed than stay in power?
All France did was waste time, allowing him to get their shit either A) destroyed or B) out of Iraq. I'm not surprised we haven't found anything real, they had months to destroy it.
As for France's motive, they were cuddling up to Sadaam. They had been building Iraq's infrastructure for years (phone, etc) and were pushing to do the same for oil pipelines - hence their wish to end the embargo despite Sadaam's not abiding by the 1991 treaty.
If our motive was oil, so was France's - and they had an interest in keeping Sadaam in power.
And can I have some? This thread is talking about using a credit card that was sent to you in unauthorized fashion to intentionally receive actual merchandise from a real store, without intending to pay for same. That is, in fact, theft and fraud, no matter what some crack-smoking fool tells you.
You have to wonder if someone decided that they could get money if they did a study that they already knew the results of.
Sir, I hope you are not disparaging the objective science bought, er, *sponsored* by the NEC Monitor company. I see no reason why they should be biased against not using lots of monitors in the workplace.
Font Book, a new application that provides system-level font management with double-click font preview, one-click installation and an intuitive interface for managing font collections, and activating or deactivating fonts;
Jeff Bezos will have Apple's ass over that one. Everyone knows that all operations completed with at least one but fewer than two clicks is 0wnz0r3D by Amazon.
MRI is a great application but how much it is due to the actual theory? Incidently, the inventors of MRI already got their prize this year.
I think this prize was given out too early anyway. The jury is still out when it comes to the widespread applicability of high temperature superconductors.
So you want two things: 1) for the discovery to be a fundamental theory, and 2) for there to be applications available. But applications doesn't mean something you buy off the shelves. There are a NUMBER of situations where the phenomena involved for the award have been used for products or other research.
Fundamental research doesn't usually end up with an off-the-shelf product in one step.
As an experimentalist this annoys me to no end. Maths is only a language and the most elegant Physics papers are those in which the experimental results themselves speak for themselves. What is the added-value in complicated calculations in such studies?
Because if you don't understand what's going on, you're not doing science. This doesn't mean you need an endless string of differential equations, but unless you arrange your data in some fashion that it obeys some underlying theory or rule, then you aren't a scientist, you're a technician.
Yet, if you submit good purely experimental papers to respected journals the reviewers will bitch at you for not doing any theoretical calculations "to gain a holistic view". That's total bullshit. When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?
It didn't. I don't know of any time in the last 50 years where you could submit a bunch of data and experimental descriptions without an understanding of what happened and get published. Now that's not to say that doing theory without data is a good idea either (what would be the point)?
Ultimately, science is the (1) formulation of a theory that fits data, then the testing of that theory, and if the new data doesn't fit the theory, GOTO (1).
Also, if you're trying to publish something, and you keep getting the same response from a number of different reviewers, that might tell you something, no offense. If you like, post a link to whatever you are trying to publish, and hell, I'll look at it.
You see, anytime that any American entity does something that restricts personal freedom, making a smartassed comment about it results in a +1 Funny/Insightful. Doing the same about any other country, particularly when the poster admits to the crime of being an American, is modded -1 Troll/Flamebait, or if the mod is feeling nice, -1 Offtopic.
Just come to grips with this and everything will be fine.
Messing up with the compression doesn't just mean that this particular frame doesn't look right. It could look ok, but use up too much space so there is less available for the rest of the film, where it's needed more (ie action scenes).
At most, it could come out completely uncompressed. For that to affect the ultimate compression ratio, there would have to be a massive amount of these little blips. Additionally, that tactic would work best if they were unobtrusive and on every third frame, not large but rare. I don't think that's the ultimate aim, as the collateral damage to their own movies would be too high and the ultimate impact too low.
Because movie compression is lossy, and the dots were too small to discern the actual code before. They're enlarging the dots so they can still read the code when the movie has been lossily compressed.
If that's the case, then the article's wrong. If the code comes through unscathed and viewable, then the compression wasn't effectively messed with - the original will be just as messed up as the compressed version. I'd like to see an example of compressed/uncompressed images to compare.
You mean like WMWare? Why would this require a hardware solution?
Hardware solutions are almost invariably faster. If you can natively run two OS's at once, why wouldn't you, compared to running one in hardware and putting a VM wrapper around the other? Whenever you virtualize hardware, you'll lose speed and, to a degree, incompatibility. For a trivial example, try gaming through vmware. As of 3.0, directX wouldn't even run (Win 2K vm in a linux host).
They need to enlarge them so that the blobs are still visible and identifiable to them in a low-res compressed format that might be circulating around the internet. If the blobs were small, they could be completely lost during the compression.
If that was their goal, they'd need to make them persist for more frames, moreso than size. The problem is that the spike is one with regard to signal vs time. The derivative d(signal)/dt is too sharp, and screws up the compression algorithms. If it successfully does that, then the info is NOT successfully being preserved - I believe the two concepts are mutually exclusive. So either the things are being used for something other than the caps now (ie, compression screwing), or else the phenomenon described, messing up the compression, isn't actually occurring.
These cap codes have been in film forever - but only recently have they been enlarged enough so that they show up in low resolution computer encoded video.
As pointed out beautifully in the article you should have read. Now ask yourself - why would they NEED to enlarge them, if not to screw with compression, in the same way the RIAA has done with sound recordings? RIAA put spikes in that don't play badly, but that really screw with attempts to rip to mp3, resulting in pops and cracks. The MPAA is just combining two technologies here.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way to "define" IQ in such a way that a situation like that makes the mean and median different.
*Sigh.* Yes, there is. First, you are mixing the concept of a population, a parametric model, and a sample. A population is the large, effectively infinite pool from which samples are drawn. A parametric model is devised which fits the samples.
No, the actual population *isn't* Gaussian (as I admitted in my previous post), but IQ is fit to a parametric form, and is defined so that the median and mean IQ is 100. Note that Gaussian distribtutions are symmetric. For about 3 sigma off the center, this holds pretty well. Also note that Einstein is a whole lot more sigma than that, and it is not surprising that the model breaks down.
Recall, however, that Einstein is only 1 person, and since the population of earth is 1 billion, he doesn't skew anything much on his own. Also, for every Einstein, there's someone completely retarded as well.
Note, I am not saying the mean and median IQ aren't the same. Im just saying if they ARE the same, it has more to do with the way intelligence is distributed among the populace, and not with the way IQ was defined.
You've got the cart before the horse. IQ was defined that way to fit a populace whose intelligence is pretty well Gaussian. It's not coincidence, it's simply the choice of an effective model.
The IQ scheme was set up assuming an approximately Gaussian distribution, for which the mean and median are the same. 15 IQ points = 1 standard deviation.
Naturally, that's horseshit, but 100 was at least designed to be the median and the mean, by definition.
In the end, I think email will be like IM, you'll have to 'approve' what email you'll accept, like you have to 'approve' additions to your buddy list now. ...whitelist. They've been around for a while. They also don't work so hot.
OS X blows. Use Amiga.
Yeah, that aggravated me too. Actually, even chemists consider buckys to be a third allotrope as carbon. As a chemist, I consider it bullshit for the same reason you mention. For what it's worth, Carbon-black is not pure carbon - it's a misture of large polynuclear hydrocarbons. It's graphite-like, but does contain hydrogen.
These are not difficult diagrams. Diamond and graphite are simple to draw, where's the new one?
I was annoyed by the same - fortunately, my school has a subscription to Science. Graphite, of course, is a planar, sp2 hybridized structure that forms layers of sheets. The sheets are staggered by half a ring, so that half of the carbons are centered over another carbon, and half are centered over the middle of a ring. Under high enough pressure, the carbons that are right over each other form a sigma bond. According to the article, this happens gradually over a range of like 10-20 GPa, with theoretically half the carbons ultimately forming interplane sigma bonds if one considered a two-plane system.
Unfortunately, even the Science article was stingy on the details (as they tend to be).
Wow are *you* guessing...wrong I might add. I never said there are no aliens. Simply that the differences between us would probably preclude us from recognizing a large fraction of what something else might call communication.
One could say this same thing about the Higgs Boson...noones found it yet, so why bother looking. But this is the basis of scientific enquiry; you just happen to be colouring it with a sure knowledge that it's a waste of time..
A bit different. The Higgs boson theory is the product of an actual theory that is tested and based on many rounds of hypothesis/test/revise/repeat. SETI isn't. It's simply the conjecture that there might be something out there. As Rutherford would have said, that's basically stamp collecting. There's no application of the scientific theory there. There has yet to be collected ANY evidence at all. The Higgs *would* be the same if it were the first particle to be searched for using quantum theory, but it isn't - that method has yielded a ton of quarks, other leptons, bosons, mesons, etc. SETI has yielded shit.
Just so I'm clear - I don't presume to know if aliens *exist*. I simply think that, based on probabilities, looking for them is a complete waste of time.
Yes, in the same way they backed Enron. Looking deeper, *45%* of SCO's stock is held by insiders. Only about 15% is held by institutions, the rest is basically your average day-trader. So in other words, the pros are treating SCO like plague. It's clearly overspeculation, and the numbers bear this out.
Now consider their short position. Assuming that institutions and insiders aren't the ones shorting, then that means that about *31%* of the stock held by other groups is being shorted. That's phenomenal. Similar stats for, say, P&G? about 50% institutional owned, and a few percent short. Also, SCO's short shares have nearly doubled in a month. P&G is up about 20%, as is most of the market, thanks to the recent runup. But that can't explain SCO.
I think you have a lot of people playing SCO like it was Monopoly money - but it ain't the pros. That's what I see from those numbers. People who know what the hell they're doing must be laughing at this.
Fucking farm animals is unnatural too, but you don't seem to have a problem with that. Hypocrite!
Not really. Perrin did work complementary to that of Thomson regarding the negative nature of part of the atom (ie, cathode rays). He also *proposed* a solar-system model for the atom in 1901, but wasn't able to substantiate this. Later, he did some work on Brownian motion, and that's what he got the prize for (as mentioned in your link, actually). But he didn't get any experimental evidence for the heavy nucleus surrounded by a very undense region. Rutherford did, in 1909, with his alpha-particle backscattering experiment. Without that experiment, which was certainly not redundant, it's hard to imagine how established atomic theory could possibly have been.
Really, atomic theory wasn't well established at least until Millikan did his oil-drop experiment, establishing the charge/mass ratio of the electron, and by deduction, the proton as well.
First, it was a joke, and pissing off the SETI crowd is just too fun and easy. But, between SETI and his shitty books, Sagan has always been on the frontier of pseudoscience. Just seems a bit much, and seeing a quote regarding scientific bullshit from Sagan is hilarious.
Second of all, are you saying the Drake Equation is crap? That there's simply nothing out there?
Now, if you want to really evaluate this, Drake's missing a term, as I see it. Namely, the the probability that we would recognize a signal if we saw it.
Ultimately, I just don't see SETI as anything that could be really called science, as they haven't yet collected any real evidence - just the absence of it. And this can never prove or disprove a hypothesis. So it's not so much about not believing in the existence of aliens - it's more the faith that we wouldn't know an alien signal if it smacked us in the ass.
Read "The Borderlands Of Science" by Michael Shermer for further discussion about SETI and what sets it apart from the frothing conspiracy fools.
Not the point. They're not frothing conspirators because they have nothing to froth about. I simply see SETI as a frivolous, Quixotic waste of time and money.
In short, SETI is a shot in the dark, and based on a premise for which there is no proof - life on other worlds - but it is done in the same way we discovered germs or broke the sound barrier, by adhering to scientific principles.
Not really. In those cases, there was the actual ability to devise, evaluate, and revise theories/methods (breaking the sound barrier was engineering, not science). With SETI, it's not a full scientific method yet because they haven't finished a single iteration yet. They STILL don't have any evidence. And until they have anything real, they're pretty much playing with themselves.
You don't like it, block science stories. It's easy, and then you won't have to tax your widdle bwain.
Right, this from the guy who helped establish SETI. He wouldn't know Bologna if he was having a large stick of it rammed up his ass.
You do know that was not actually about war, right? It was about some crazy fuck who was compelled to kill a lady he pawned some crap to.
If you think Sadaam didn't have weapons, you've got your head up your ass. Why didn't he let in inspectors without stalling for weeks at a time? Why did he eventually stop letting them in? Why would he rather do the above and be deposed than stay in power?
All France did was waste time, allowing him to get their shit either A) destroyed or B) out of Iraq. I'm not surprised we haven't found anything real, they had months to destroy it.
As for France's motive, they were cuddling up to Sadaam. They had been building Iraq's infrastructure for years (phone, etc) and were pushing to do the same for oil pipelines - hence their wish to end the embargo despite Sadaam's not abiding by the 1991 treaty.
If our motive was oil, so was France's - and they had an interest in keeping Sadaam in power.
And can I have some? This thread is talking about using a credit card that was sent to you in unauthorized fashion to intentionally receive actual merchandise from a real store, without intending to pay for same. That is, in fact, theft and fraud, no matter what some crack-smoking fool tells you.
Sir, I hope you are not disparaging the objective science bought, er, *sponsored* by the NEC Monitor company. I see no reason why they should be biased against not using lots of monitors in the workplace.
...and you just found them all!
Font Book, a new application that provides system-level font management with double-click font preview, one-click installation and an intuitive interface for managing font collections, and activating or deactivating fonts;
Jeff Bezos will have Apple's ass over that one. Everyone knows that all operations completed with at least one but fewer than two clicks is 0wnz0r3D by Amazon.
I think this prize was given out too early anyway. The jury is still out when it comes to the widespread applicability of high temperature superconductors.
So you want two things: 1) for the discovery to be a fundamental theory, and 2) for there to be applications available. But applications doesn't mean something you buy off the shelves. There are a NUMBER of situations where the phenomena involved for the award have been used for products or other research.
Fundamental research doesn't usually end up with an off-the-shelf product in one step.
As an experimentalist this annoys me to no end. Maths is only a language and the most elegant Physics papers are those in which the experimental results themselves speak for themselves. What is the added-value in complicated calculations in such studies?
Because if you don't understand what's going on, you're not doing science. This doesn't mean you need an endless string of differential equations, but unless you arrange your data in some fashion that it obeys some underlying theory or rule, then you aren't a scientist, you're a technician.
Yet, if you submit good purely experimental papers to respected journals the reviewers will bitch at you for not doing any theoretical calculations "to gain a holistic view". That's total bullshit. When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?
It didn't. I don't know of any time in the last 50 years where you could submit a bunch of data and experimental descriptions without an understanding of what happened and get published. Now that's not to say that doing theory without data is a good idea either (what would be the point)?
Ultimately, science is the (1) formulation of a theory that fits data, then the testing of that theory, and if the new data doesn't fit the theory, GOTO (1).
Also, if you're trying to publish something, and you keep getting the same response from a number of different reviewers, that might tell you something, no offense. If you like, post a link to whatever you are trying to publish, and hell, I'll look at it.
Just come to grips with this and everything will be fine.
At most, it could come out completely uncompressed. For that to affect the ultimate compression ratio, there would have to be a massive amount of these little blips. Additionally, that tactic would work best if they were unobtrusive and on every third frame, not large but rare. I don't think that's the ultimate aim, as the collateral damage to their own movies would be too high and the ultimate impact too low.
If that's the case, then the article's wrong. If the code comes through unscathed and viewable, then the compression wasn't effectively messed with - the original will be just as messed up as the compressed version. I'd like to see an example of compressed/uncompressed images to compare.
Hardware solutions are almost invariably faster. If you can natively run two OS's at once, why wouldn't you, compared to running one in hardware and putting a VM wrapper around the other? Whenever you virtualize hardware, you'll lose speed and, to a degree, incompatibility. For a trivial example, try gaming through vmware. As of 3.0, directX wouldn't even run (Win 2K vm in a linux host).
If that was their goal, they'd need to make them persist for more frames, moreso than size. The problem is that the spike is one with regard to signal vs time. The derivative d(signal)/dt is too sharp, and screws up the compression algorithms. If it successfully does that, then the info is NOT successfully being preserved - I believe the two concepts are mutually exclusive. So either the things are being used for something other than the caps now (ie, compression screwing), or else the phenomenon described, messing up the compression, isn't actually occurring.
As pointed out beautifully in the article you should have read. Now ask yourself - why would they NEED to enlarge them, if not to screw with compression, in the same way the RIAA has done with sound recordings? RIAA put spikes in that don't play badly, but that really screw with attempts to rip to mp3, resulting in pops and cracks. The MPAA is just combining two technologies here.