Keep in mind that he wasn't looking for affordability overall, but affordability *by him*.
His criteria for "affordable" was "people living there on average make about the same amount of money that I do, so I can probably live there on my income."
I'm not so sure about that. I lived in Midtown for 3 years without a car. Grocery store was 4 blocks away, plenty of restaurants within walking distance including a great pub right across the street from me. The Atlanta Symphony, High Museum of Art, Shakespeare Tavern, and Piedmont Park were all within easy walking distance, and if I was willing to walk a bit further Centennial Park and Downtown Atlanta were only about half an hour walk. If I wanted to go further afield, there were two Marta stations within 3 blocks of me.
Compared to other places I've lived (Southern California, New Jersey, Far suburbs of Chicago), Midtown Atlanta was by far the most walkable and livable without a car.
Maybe a more accurate headline is "US Government Shutdown on temporary hiatus"? It's only a few months funding, and there's no guarantee we won't go through the entire thing again come January 15th...
But any competent marketing department would get the hint when 589,141 out of 668,872 people disliked a proposed change. You need to poll far less than 30% to get a statistically significant result representing the wishes of those 1,000,000,000 idiots.
"Statistically Significant" doesn't really make sense here...that sort of computation assumes that the people being surveyed are a representative sample of all users.
In this case we've got a pretty strong selection bias going on where people who are most upset about the new policy are the most likely to vote.
For me its just the opposite. An advertisement is an attempt to get me to trust the advertiser's word on their product. If they want to convince me, the way to start is by being honest about what they're doing and not try and disguise it as something else.
If the balance right now is Google's superior search vs. Amazon's superior convenience/prime shipping, I think that still gives the advantage to Amazon.
Amazon can improve their search mechanism over time, but it's much harder for Google to match Amazon's advantages.
Of the 35 five star reviews, about 30 were posted in a 1 week period by people who have no other reviews. Of course, each of those reviewers carefully voted up all the previous other 5 star reviews to promote them in the review rankings (so
For an epeeist, that's really terrific coverage. I know what I'm looking for, and the announcer/color commentary are just a distraction. For a non-fencer, it must have been terrible.
As a non-fencer, I actually found the epee much easier to follow than the other events (mainly because there was no need to worry about right of way). The other events were enjoyable to watch, but I did a lot of taking the scoring on faith/outright ignoring the scoring and just watching the fencing.
For me the lack of commentary (or in some cases the inclusion of feed commentators who weren't as biased as NBC's) was one of the best things about the streaming.
From the abstract of Tao's paper: Our argument relies on some previous numerical work, namely the verification of Richstein of the even Goldbach conjecture up to $4 \times 10^{14}$, and the verification of van de Lune and (independently) of Wedeniwski of the Riemann hypothesis up to height $3.29 \times 10^9$.
After all, it deals with a graph whose nodes and connections are already known exactly.
The more interesting part comes when you move to a graph like the link structure or underlying router structure of the internet, which is both orders of magnitude larger and changing rapidly -- even if you could take a perfect snapshot of it, by the time you finished analyzing that snapshot the network would have changed quite a bit in the meantime.
What Lovasz has been doing recently with his work on "graph limits" is providing a framework for analyzing such graphs. You can imagine global properties of the network approaching some sort of fixed equilibrium and hope to analyze that equilibrium without actually knowing the details of how the network is changing. I don't actually know if the work has been used in practical applications yet, but the concept goes far beyond just redrawing planar graphs.
So by my count the library's facing less than a 5% cut in its budget if every last cent of state funding is cut. And yet they're talking about eliminating books. This smells more like passing the blame to the state and/or trying to get publicity/sympathy rather than an actual budget crisis due to reduction in state funds.
Steroids, no. Other drugs, maybe. Top level chess games can last for 5-6 hours on end, and I could see players taking some sort of aid to keep concentration going for that long a period.
In Catholic Theology, the Immaculate Conception doesn't refer to the Virgin Birth of Jesus, but to the conception of Mary without original sin.
I guess it's possible that these baby boa constrictors are especially sinless, but you probably won't be able to decide on that issue by reading Biology Letters.
Over a century ago Edison was making sure Alternating Current was used in the Electric Chair, in order to make it seem more dangerous and associate it in people's minds with electrocution.
between this and Wikipedia is that each edit will be linked to an ID which in turn is linked to a known service(wo)man.
Combine this with the way that the final manual will be the product of review teams rather than the wiki-style entries themselves, and this seems as much a very efficient public feedback/comment system (using wiki software and formatting) as a true wiki.
Given a choice between creating an representative cross-section of America and an representative cross-section of their customer base, game makers are likely going to go with the people who are paying them money.
From the summary, it seems that they're defining "lost" as just "the voter intended to cast a vote for the office, but none registered", and include those caused by user error (the voter pulling out the voting card before confirming their vote, or failing to confirm their vote altogether).
In that sense, the problem seems not to be electronic voting so much as just a poor set of instructions. Poorly designed ballots in other places can lead to a similar level of "lost" votes -- for example in the U.S. state of North Carolina, about 2.5%-3% of ballots in presidential races fail to register a vote for President, compared to 1.1% in other states. The primary culprit? A poorly designed ballots where voters THINK they're casting a straight-ticket vote for every office, but in reality are casting one for every office except President.
Knowledge of whether or not there are infinitely many Mersenne primes would probably not be interesting even to most pure mathematicians -- it's sort of a bizarre question that seems disconnected from the rest of mathematics. What would be interesting would be the actual methods used to prove this. In practice almost every question involving the existence/non-existence of certain types of primes is one we already know the answer to.
The reason for this lies in the prime number theorem, which says that the proportion of numbers less than N which are prime is about 1/Log(N). Unless there's some compelling reason to believe otherwise, you can guess the answer to many problems involving primes by replacing them with a set randomly chosen with the same probability.
For example, a randomly chosen number near 2^p-1 will be prime with probability about proportional to 1/p. Since the sum of 1/p diverges, we expect there to be infinitely many Mersenne primes (and can even guess their number, though this requires a bit more careful analysis to take care of the observation that Mersenne numbers don't have small prime factors, but this should only increase their number).
The same trick allows us to guess the answer for twin primes (sum diverges, so there should be infinitely many) and Fermat primes (primes of the form 2^(2^n)+1 -- the sum converges, so there should be only finitely many). But none of these are really rigorous proofs, because they're all based on the fundamental assumption that the primes are somehow pseudorandom.
Depending on the method of attack, a proof of the infinitude of Mersenne Primes may also shed light on how accurate or inaccurate the pseudorandomness assumption is. I would consider that to be a VERY interesting question.
There's something I don't understand here. If n > 1, the number of images is 5n-5, or 5(n-1). As n must be an integer (You can't have a fraction of a massive object.) that means that the number of images must be a multiple of 5. And yet, there's a picture of a set of 4 images of a quasar in the article. Not only that, somebody links to the Wikipedia article on gravitational lensing, and that shows a picture of an "Einstein Cross:" four images of a quasar surrounding a galaxy between it and us. Four, in both cases, not five. Yes, I realize that in both cases n = 1, but can anybody explain how you end up with four in that case? As I understand it, the 5n-5 only describes the maximum number of images that can be seen. It doesn't mean that in general you will always see the full 5n-5, only that in some cases it is possible to see that many.
So the number you see doesn't have to be a multiple of 5 always, even for n>1.
They took a bunch of measured statistics, ran a simulation with outcomes biased using said statistics, and then acted surprised when the simulation results ended up pretty close to what actually happened? I think their point was that they took a set of numbers that were generally considered unremarkable (the overall statistical distribution of batting totals from the last 100+ years) and tried to show that a number that most people considered very unusual (the 56 game streak) was in fact also typical given this other, "unremarkable" set of data.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that he wasn't looking for affordability overall, but affordability *by him*.
His criteria for "affordable" was "people living there on average make about the same amount of money that I do, so I can probably live there on my income."
I'm not so sure about that. I lived in Midtown for 3 years without a car. Grocery store was 4 blocks away, plenty of restaurants within walking distance including a great pub right across the street from me. The Atlanta Symphony, High Museum of Art, Shakespeare Tavern, and Piedmont Park were all within easy walking distance, and if I was willing to walk a bit further Centennial Park and Downtown Atlanta were only about half an hour walk. If I wanted to go further afield, there were two Marta stations within 3 blocks of me.
Compared to other places I've lived (Southern California, New Jersey, Far suburbs of Chicago), Midtown Atlanta was by far the most walkable and livable without a car.
Reminds me of one of Lloyd Trefethen's maxims about numerical mathematics (http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/maxims.html ):
"If the answer is highly sensitive to perturbations, you have probably asked the wrong question."
Maybe a more accurate headline is "US Government Shutdown on temporary hiatus"? It's only a few months funding, and there's no guarantee we won't go through the entire thing again come January 15th...
But any competent marketing department would get the hint when 589,141 out of 668,872 people disliked a proposed change.
You need to poll far less than 30% to get a statistically significant result representing the wishes of those 1,000,000,000 idiots.
"Statistically Significant" doesn't really make sense here...that sort of computation assumes that the people being surveyed are a representative sample of all users.
In this case we've got a pretty strong selection bias going on where people who are most upset about the new policy are the most likely to vote.
For me its just the opposite. An advertisement is an attempt to get me to trust the advertiser's word on their product. If they want to convince me, the way to start is by being honest about what they're doing and not try and disguise it as something else.
If the balance right now is Google's superior search vs. Amazon's superior convenience/prime shipping, I think that still gives the advantage to Amazon.
Amazon can improve their search mechanism over time, but it's much harder for Google to match Amazon's advantages.
An example of Astroturfing on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Twelfth-Cliburn-Piano-Competition/product-reviews/B000BZ8IA8/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_4?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addFiveStar&pageNumber=4&showViewpoints=0
Of the 35 five star reviews, about 30 were posted in a 1 week period by people who have no other reviews. Of course, each of those reviewers carefully voted up all the previous other 5 star reviews to promote them in the review rankings (so
For an epeeist, that's really terrific coverage. I know what I'm looking for, and the announcer/color commentary are just a distraction. For a non-fencer, it must have been terrible.
As a non-fencer, I actually found the epee much easier to follow than the other events (mainly because there was no need to worry about right of way). The other events were enjoyable to watch, but I did a lot of taking the scoring on faith/outright ignoring the scoring and just watching the fencing.
For me the lack of commentary (or in some cases the inclusion of feed commentators who weren't as biased as NBC's) was one of the best things about the streaming.
From the abstract of Tao's paper: Our argument relies on some previous numerical work, namely the verification of Richstein of the even Goldbach conjecture up to $4 \times 10^{14}$, and the verification of van de Lune and (independently) of Wedeniwski of the Riemann hypothesis up to height $3.29 \times 10^9$.
Richstein's work (available at http://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/2001-70-236/S0025-5718-00-01290-4/S0025-5718-00-01290-4.pdf ) definitely involves a computer, and I assume the Riemann hypothesis verification does as well.
Tor has links to online versions of the nominees for Short Story, for Novellette and for four out of the five Novellas.
Of Ted Chiang's six stories written since 2001, four have won the Hugo award, one was nominated for the Hugo award before Chiang withdrew it from consideration (saying "The story that was published isn’t the story I wanted it to be."), and the sixth was a 1 page speculation for Nature magazine.
After all, it deals with a graph whose nodes and connections are already known exactly.
The more interesting part comes when you move to a graph like the link structure or underlying router structure of the internet, which is both orders of magnitude larger and changing rapidly -- even if you could take a perfect snapshot of it, by the time you finished analyzing that snapshot the network would have changed quite a bit in the meantime.
What Lovasz has been doing recently with his work on "graph limits" is providing a framework for analyzing such graphs. You can imagine global properties of the network approaching some sort of fixed equilibrium and hope to analyze that equilibrium without actually knowing the details of how the network is changing. I don't actually know if the work has been used in practical applications yet, but the concept goes far beyond just redrawing planar graphs.
In Newport Beach, the library receives roughly $318,000 in state funding (source http://articles.dailypilot.com/2011-01-14/news/tn-dpt-0115-library-20110114_1_library-budget-newport-library-library-funding ). I can't open the Newport Beach budget documents at the moment, but recently the city referred referred to $132,500 cut in library funding as a "2% reduction" in the library's budget (source http://www.newportbeachca.gov/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=4738 ).
So by my count the library's facing less than a 5% cut in its budget if every last cent of state funding is cut. And yet they're talking about eliminating books. This smells more like passing the blame to the state and/or trying to get publicity/sympathy rather than an actual budget crisis due to reduction in state funds.
Steroids, no. Other drugs, maybe. Top level chess games can last for 5-6 hours on end, and I could see players taking some sort of aid to keep concentration going for that long a period.
In Catholic Theology, the Immaculate Conception doesn't refer to the Virgin Birth of Jesus, but to the conception of Mary without original sin.
I guess it's possible that these baby boa constrictors are especially sinless, but you probably won't be able to decide on that issue by reading Biology Letters.
Over a century ago Edison was making sure Alternating Current was used in the Electric Chair, in order to make it seem more dangerous and associate it in people's minds with electrocution.
between this and Wikipedia is that each edit will be linked to an ID which in turn is linked to a known service(wo)man.
Combine this with the way that the final manual will be the product of review teams rather than the wiki-style entries themselves, and this seems as much a very efficient public feedback/comment system (using wiki software and formatting) as a true wiki.
Given a choice between creating an representative cross-section of America and an representative cross-section of their customer base, game makers are likely going to go with the people who are paying them money.
From the summary, it seems that they're defining "lost" as just "the voter intended to cast a vote for the office, but none registered", and include those caused by user error (the voter pulling out the voting card before confirming their vote, or failing to confirm their vote altogether).
In that sense, the problem seems not to be electronic voting so much as just a poor set of instructions. Poorly designed ballots in other places can lead to a similar level of "lost" votes -- for example in the U.S. state of North Carolina, about 2.5%-3% of ballots in presidential races fail to register a vote for President, compared to 1.1% in other states. The primary culprit? A poorly designed ballots where voters THINK they're casting a straight-ticket vote for every office, but in reality are casting one for every office except President.
Knowledge of whether or not there are infinitely many Mersenne primes would probably not be interesting even to most pure mathematicians -- it's sort of a bizarre question that seems disconnected from the rest of mathematics. What would be interesting would be the actual methods used to prove this. In practice almost every question involving the existence/non-existence of certain types of primes is one we already know the answer to.
The reason for this lies in the prime number theorem, which says that the proportion of numbers less than N which are prime is about 1/Log(N). Unless there's some compelling reason to believe otherwise, you can guess the answer to many problems involving primes by replacing them with a set randomly chosen with the same probability.
For example, a randomly chosen number near 2^p-1 will be prime with probability about proportional to 1/p. Since the sum of 1/p diverges, we expect there to be infinitely many Mersenne primes (and can even guess their number, though this requires a bit more careful analysis to take care of the observation that Mersenne numbers don't have small prime factors, but this should only increase their number).
The same trick allows us to guess the answer for twin primes (sum diverges, so there should be infinitely many) and Fermat primes (primes of the form 2^(2^n)+1 -- the sum converges, so there should be only finitely many). But none of these are really rigorous proofs, because they're all based on the fundamental assumption that the primes are somehow pseudorandom.
Depending on the method of attack, a proof of the infinitude of Mersenne Primes may also shed light on how accurate or inaccurate the pseudorandomness assumption is. I would consider that to be a VERY interesting question.
So the number you see doesn't have to be a multiple of 5 always, even for n>1.