Actually, the constant updating is a major reason why scientists don't want to use Wikipedia as a primary reference source. It's unstable. A Wikipedia article that you cite can be altered, migrated, or deleted. Refereed journal articles are therefore a much more reliable choice for citations.
Ruby is 20+ years old. I wouldn't call that a fad language.
Heck, I'm old enough to remember when people said the same thing about C and Perl relative to FORTRAN, PL/I, and COBOL.
Because maybe the phone will lead to other connections, people willing to do the same violent act...?
I don't know about you, but the only contacts I have on my phone are people I call. I'm highly confident that the carrier has already given the FBI the phone logs, so the address book on the phone would yield no new info.
The number of tech employees there is small compared to Silicon Valley, Research Triangle, or the Northeast Corridor. Each additional employee in Minn. is therefore a larger proportional addition.
When you start with a small denominator, small changes in the numerator show as large proportions or high growth rates. This is why politicians like to point to trough-to-peak numbers when talking about their own records and peak-to-trough when talking about their political opponents. It's why some little rinky-dink county in New Mexico has the highest recorded per-capita death rate from traffic accidents—there was one fatal car crash there at a time when the county population was half a dozen people. It's why a high-school science project reported a 66.7% mortality rate when supplements were added to frog's diets—only one of the frogs lived.
As a wise fictional character once said, "May have [picked] the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." Not sure that applies to the Zune, though, although it was brown...
The problem with the Zune wasn't solely that it was brown. It was brown and it squirted!
I remember it, and loved it! A friend who invested heavily in Improv-related technology told me he found out (after losing his shirt) that Lotus had shut Improv down because it was eating into 1-2-3's market share, and they considered the latter their bread and butter product. So they ditched Improv, stuck with 1-2-3, and got their clocks cleaned by Microsoft.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a student about a dozen years ago. GPS was all shiny and new in the civilian world, and he was an ex Army Ranger. I thought he'd be really gung-ho about GPS, but he said he preferred a paper map. When I asked him his reasons, he said "A GPS unit with a bullet hole through it is a door stop. A map with a bullet hole through it is still a map."
Ever since then I've operated in the belief that robust technologies trump cool technologies.
Python libraries are simultaneously advantageous and disadvantageous. Yes, they give a lot of leverage to solving a broad variety of problems, but last I checked many of them remained available only in Python 2. The success of the Python library ecosystem has actually interfered with the adoption of Python 3.
Buying influence in politics is bad enough without people trying to make scientific issues political.
Scientific issues are political. Anything with the potential to impact the health, wealth, and well-being of humans, or to sort them into "winners" and "losers", is inherently political. Science can do all of those things.
The reason the story is interesting to non-statisticians is because anti-Tea Party stereotypes are proven wrong.
No, they're not. Bad analysis => cannot draw conclusions either way.
I have focused on Simpson's paradox in this thread because somebody else brought up controlling for education level, but it's not the only problem I noticed. I don't have any desire to go into a deep technical discussion of p-values and their interpretation, but I'll leave you with the thought that even with purely random data a proportion of them will be below your "critical threshold" alpha due to sheer chance - by definition alpha is the false positive rate for classifying effects as significant. If you try out a whole bunch of models at random, some of them will meet the alpha threshold even though they're not actually significant. The Yale professor strongly inferred that this was his methodology - he took a data set gathered for other purposes and tried things out until he got an interesting "significant" result. The fact that it's a "controversial" result is getting him lots of media attention. In the long run he may or may not turn out to be right, but this isn't good science.
Bottom line, since the analysis was done improperly (in several ways), you can't actually draw conclusions either way.
What does this have to do with whether Tea Party sympathizers understand science or not? What is the precise benefit of controlling for years of education? Do we care whether Tea Party people have more or less science knowledge than non-Tea Party people with the same number of years of formal education? Why?
Because it is possible to have both of these statements be true at the same time: "Tea Party people on average know more science than non-Tea Party People" and "At every education level the Tea Party people know less about science than the non-Tea Party people". The correct conclusion would then be that if you want to know how much somebody knows about science, look at their education but then adjust downwards if they are Tea Party people. Note that I'm not saying that that is the case. I'm saying rather that we can't tell whether the Tea Party identification has a positive or negative effect because the stupid social scientist did an improper statistical analysis. The more dominant education is in determining the outcome, the more important it is that you take it into account when considering the impact of other factors.
Do you want to condemn the Tea Party as being above average, but less above average than some other group of people? Who? And why?
I'm not condemning anybody except the Yale professor. I'm just a professional statistician who refuses to get suckered into drawing a conclusion one way or the other at this point based on shoddy analysis, and I'm trying to alert other/.'ers to the fact that the impact could actually still go either way if what you and I both agree is a major factor, education level, is properly accounted for.
Notwithstanding Simpson's Paradox, I'm still pretty sure science knowledge mostly comes from education.
Then you're not understanding Simpson's Paradox - this is exactly why you want to control for education.
Consider something floating on the water. Its movement will be a vector sum of wind effects and current effects. Suppose you happen to get a sample where the wind and the current are in opposite directions, and you try to estimate the effect of wind only, i.e., you leave current out of your model. At a minimum you will underestimate the impact of the wind, and if the current happened to be dominant in a large proportion of your sample you might even draw the false conclusion that free-floating objects move in the opposite direction from the wind! That's Simpson's Paradox - by omitting an important effect, you can actually end up drawing a conclusion that is the opposite of the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
That summary sounds like the problem is with Verizon, not with Apple.
Actually, the constant updating is a major reason why scientists don't want to use Wikipedia as a primary reference source. It's unstable. A Wikipedia article that you cite can be altered, migrated, or deleted. Refereed journal articles are therefore a much more reliable choice for citations.
Ruby is 20+ years old. I wouldn't call that a fad language. Heck, I'm old enough to remember when people said the same thing about C and Perl relative to FORTRAN, PL/I, and COBOL.
Line numbers, to start with.
Are you kidding? Everybody old enough to remember knows that the real purpose of BASIC was to teach Dartmouth students how to count by tens!
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” — Charles Bukowski
Because maybe the phone will lead to other connections, people willing to do the same violent act...?
I don't know about you, but the only contacts I have on my phone are people I call. I'm highly confident that the carrier has already given the FBI the phone logs, so the address book on the phone would yield no new info.
You could also ask which is better, vi or emacs.
The number of tech employees there is small compared to Silicon Valley, Research Triangle, or the Northeast Corridor. Each additional employee in Minn. is therefore a larger proportional addition.
When you start with a small denominator, small changes in the numerator show as large proportions or high growth rates. This is why politicians like to point to trough-to-peak numbers when talking about their own records and peak-to-trough when talking about their political opponents. It's why some little rinky-dink county in New Mexico has the highest recorded per-capita death rate from traffic accidents—there was one fatal car crash there at a time when the county population was half a dozen people. It's why a high-school science project reported a 66.7% mortality rate when supplements were added to frog's diets—only one of the frogs lived.
As a wise fictional character once said, "May have [picked] the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." Not sure that applies to the Zune, though, although it was brown...
The problem with the Zune wasn't solely that it was brown. It was brown and it squirted!
Total zeroes certainly favor AND.
Nobody writing new C++ code writes it like it was written decades ago.
Nobody? We vintage programmers can not only make our C++ look like it was written decades ago, we can even make it look like FORTRAN!
You kids goto off my lawn!
How exactly is version control useful for writing documents?
Are you kidding? Version control is invaluable if you collaborate with co-authors. Most science these days is done collaboratively.
I remember it, and loved it! A friend who invested heavily in Improv-related technology told me he found out (after losing his shirt) that Lotus had shut Improv down because it was eating into 1-2-3's market share, and they considered the latter their bread and butter product. So they ditched Improv, stuck with 1-2-3, and got their clocks cleaned by Microsoft.
Truth? That's easy! Truth is that which inconveniently refuses to change in order to conform to your prejudices.
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." - Obi Wan Kenobi
Wow, that statement reeks of absolutism!
Yeah, and on top of the observation that this isn't a binary choice it should be noted that "equality" can be assessed along many dimensions.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a student about a dozen years ago. GPS was all shiny and new in the civilian world, and he was an ex Army Ranger. I thought he'd be really gung-ho about GPS, but he said he preferred a paper map. When I asked him his reasons, he said "A GPS unit with a bullet hole through it is a door stop. A map with a bullet hole through it is still a map."
Ever since then I've operated in the belief that robust technologies trump cool technologies.
Python libraries are simultaneously advantageous and disadvantageous. Yes, they give a lot of leverage to solving a broad variety of problems, but last I checked many of them remained available only in Python 2. The success of the Python library ecosystem has actually interfered with the adoption of Python 3.
NYC, the new Venice!
Buying influence in politics is bad enough without people trying to make scientific issues political.
Scientific issues are political. Anything with the potential to impact the health, wealth, and well-being of humans, or to sort them into "winners" and "losers", is inherently political. Science can do all of those things.
Are fusion ramjets that magnetically scoop interstellar gas & dust implausible? Curse Larry Niven for making a mockery of my childhood dreams!
The reason the story is interesting to non-statisticians is because anti-Tea Party stereotypes are proven wrong.
No, they're not. Bad analysis => cannot draw conclusions either way.
I have focused on Simpson's paradox in this thread because somebody else brought up controlling for education level, but it's not the only problem I noticed. I don't have any desire to go into a deep technical discussion of p-values and their interpretation, but I'll leave you with the thought that even with purely random data a proportion of them will be below your "critical threshold" alpha due to sheer chance - by definition alpha is the false positive rate for classifying effects as significant. If you try out a whole bunch of models at random, some of them will meet the alpha threshold even though they're not actually significant. The Yale professor strongly inferred that this was his methodology - he took a data set gathered for other purposes and tried things out until he got an interesting "significant" result. The fact that it's a "controversial" result is getting him lots of media attention. In the long run he may or may not turn out to be right, but this isn't good science.
Bottom line, since the analysis was done improperly (in several ways), you can't actually draw conclusions either way.
What does this have to do with whether Tea Party sympathizers understand science or not? What is the precise benefit of controlling for years of education? Do we care whether Tea Party people have more or less science knowledge than non-Tea Party people with the same number of years of formal education? Why?
Because it is possible to have both of these statements be true at the same time: "Tea Party people on average know more science than non-Tea Party People" and "At every education level the Tea Party people know less about science than the non-Tea Party people". The correct conclusion would then be that if you want to know how much somebody knows about science, look at their education but then adjust downwards if they are Tea Party people. Note that I'm not saying that that is the case. I'm saying rather that we can't tell whether the Tea Party identification has a positive or negative effect because the stupid social scientist did an improper statistical analysis. The more dominant education is in determining the outcome, the more important it is that you take it into account when considering the impact of other factors.
Do you want to condemn the Tea Party as being above average, but less above average than some other group of people? Who? And why?
I'm not condemning anybody except the Yale professor. I'm just a professional statistician who refuses to get suckered into drawing a conclusion one way or the other at this point based on shoddy analysis, and I'm trying to alert other /.'ers to the fact that the impact could actually still go either way if what you and I both agree is a major factor, education level, is properly accounted for.
Notwithstanding Simpson's Paradox, I'm still pretty sure science knowledge mostly comes from education.
Then you're not understanding Simpson's Paradox - this is exactly why you want to control for education.
Consider something floating on the water. Its movement will be a vector sum of wind effects and current effects. Suppose you happen to get a sample where the wind and the current are in opposite directions, and you try to estimate the effect of wind only, i.e., you leave current out of your model. At a minimum you will underestimate the impact of the wind, and if the current happened to be dominant in a large proportion of your sample you might even draw the false conclusion that free-floating objects move in the opposite direction from the wind! That's Simpson's Paradox - by omitting an important effect, you can actually end up drawing a conclusion that is the opposite of the truth.