The "faith" of an atheist is not the same as the faith of a theist. You're conflating two different uses of the word. I have faith that there is no god in exactly the same way that I have faith that there is no Flying Spaghetti Monster, or that I have faith that Russel's teapot does not, in fact, exist. If you want to call that "faith," it's within the boundaries of English usage, but it's an entirely different faith than positive faith in a particular god.
And you clearly have no clue about scientific evidence. The default position is we assume things do not exist unless we are presented with positive evidence to the contrary. It's the theists who have the burden of proof, not the atheists. To this point, the theists have failed spectacularly.
AAAPIT (I am a psychometrician in training).
He clearly knows nothing about psychometrics, and is pretty much a fool for assuming that the people who put together the tests have never bothered to think about such elementary problems. There is well-developed statistical methodology behind the scoring of standardized tests. Most licensing tests these days are put together with Item Response Theory, which gives the test developer a very precise idea of how much of a role guessing plays in each question. (You might be surprised to find that the floor guessing parameter is not just based on the number of choices; it varies depending on the details of each question). IRT also yields a test information function that lets you see how much information the test is giving you along the range of ability levels.
The argument he makes about deducting fractions for incorrect answers (known as "formula scoring") is BS, because no standardized test ever reports just the raw score. Different forms of the test differ in difficulty, and so must be equated to one another. In the process, raw scores are converted to scaled scores, and the conversion is typically not a linear one.
Formula scoring results in lower raw scores than if you don't apply the penalty (dichotomously scored), but all that means is that the range between the lowest and the highest raw score is a less with the dichotomously scored test. If that range is too small, you can always add more questions.
Suppose you took two versions of the same test, one dichotomously scored and one with formula scoring. (Assume for the purposes of simplicity that there's no measurement error.) Yes, you would get a higher raw score on the dichotomously scored test, but so would the whole test-taking population. Your percentile rank would not change, and the scaled score would work out still be the same.
In addition to what others have mentioned, I have had serious problems with complex documents that contain many sections.
Opening such a document and doing certain kinds of reformatting cause Writer to blink furiously as it redraws the screen over and over; the more sections you have, the more times it blinks. When you have a lot of sections, it can take minutes for the blinking to subside. I've also found certain things in such documents, e.g., lines between columns, can disappear with no user intervention. (I've never been able to figure out the conditions under which it happens, but I've been bit by this repeatedly.)
Free speech, what a crock! Not all forms of verbal behavior are covered by the first amendment. Is sexual harassment licensed by free speech? The real issue hear is the scope of the school's powers. Clearly, they are entitled to try to stop bullying that occurs on school property. We would be outraged if they didn't, whether that bullying was physical or verbal. The real question is to what extent they have they right to take action when something occurs away from school.
Ethically, I agree with you. Legally, though, GP is right.
California's whistle-blower statute protects you if you report the illegal action to any law-enforcement agency or appropriate authority. There's also a hotline you can call to direct your report to the appropriate enforcement agency. Rightly or wrongly, it says nothing about going public. The relevant section of the California Civil code is here.
Another point worth noting: this wasn't a Diebold employee, it was someone who worked at their lawyer's office. In other words, he also seems to have violated attorney-client confidentiality, and that action is specifically exempted from protection. So even if this guy had called the whistleblower hotline, he would still be on the hook.
My guess is that it's that violation that has the DA's panties in a twist, rather than any Republican-controlled smackdown, as some other posters have suggested. After all, L.A., and California in general, is controlled by Democrats. But lawyers of all political stripes react poorly to violating attorney-client privilege.
If you read the whole FA that you linked, you'll find that the authors aren't claiming they can uniquely identify any computer on the net with this technique. In fact, they specifically disavow it (p. 13 of the PDF):
"For forensics, we anticipate that our techniques will be most useful when arguing that a given device what not involved in the recorded event. With respect to tracking individual devices, we stress that our techniques do not provide unique serial numbers for devices, but that our skew estimates do provide valuable bits of information that, when combined with other sorts of information such as operating system fingerprinting results, can help track individual devices on the internet."
So it's a bit less precise than a fingerprint or DNA testing. It would be nice to know how much less precise. The number of computers they tested was rather small.
This license allows you to fold files into larger projects with a different license. So I don't think it actually keeps stuff out of Linux, as long as you keep it in non-static libraries. That's a specific exception of GPL.
Yes on the distinction between tense and mood, but the active/passive distinction is called "voice," not "tongue."
In the strictest sense, English only has two tenses, present and past. The "future" is not a true tense in English but an example of a conditional mood. 'Will' is a present-tense verb.
The progressive system (e.g., "I am going") is also sometimes, inaccurately, called a tense, but it's more properly an aspect.
The perfective (e.g., "I have gone") is also usually considered an aspect by linguists, although again, it's frequently lumped in with the basic tenses.
Of course this test is not multiple-choice. They ask you to actually do something with software. On the surface, at least, this test looks like an attempt to come up with what's known as "authentic assessment." One of the biggest criticisms with multiple-choice exams is that they don't directly measure the skills that we really want to test. And many critics of standardized testing find the find the correlation between multiple-choice questions and real skills to be weak indeed.
The AP story linked in the article isn't particularly informative. It picked up on the old features of the story.
Linguists have been studying Nicaraguan Sign Language for over a decade now. The interesting thing about NSL is that older signers use it as a pidgen (no consistent grammar), but younger signers use it as a creole (i.e., they have created a fully-formed language with consistent grammatical structures.) This transition point has generally passed by the time scientists get around to studying the language.
This story from the economist:
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm? story_id=2441743
gives more details of the actual study, which apparently involves some tests of syntactic ability in older signers in comparison to younger ones. It's not ground-breaking stuff, but it does help fill out the big picture.
My Yahoo mail box was upgraded last night--cough. To -2048.0MB (sic). I then got a message telling me that my account had been suspended because I was way over my limit, having a whopping 0.0MB of mail stored.
I'm meditating on the metaphysics of negative storage space. Does this mean that I have to host their data?
If SCO's future is as bleak as everyone here seems to believe, then its stock is currently ridiculously over-valued. (It's up > 1000% over the last year.)
Sounds like a prime candidate for a short sell to me.
The latest numbers on Short interest (available here) indicate that short sales have spiked over the previous month, but are still at a relatively low ratio to the daily float. In other words, the players haven't yet jumped on this one in a big way.
It would be particularly satisfying to turn a tidy profit as the stock of these bastards goes to zero.
Clearly you've never looked at Turkish. Or any of the Bantu languages, which make the inflectional system of Latin or Greek look like child's play.
But the differences between inflectional systems in two languages is really part of a broader issue, namely that translation doesn't occur on the basis of a token-for-token replacement. One word in the source language may correspond to several in the target language, and vice-versa. This is a problem in alignment, and any MT system must deal with it, but that's a fairly well understood problem.
A system of this sort certainly would not just look at words as atomic units, but would have to look at parts words (i.e., their morphology)
Slashdot Mirror
The "faith" of an atheist is not the same as the faith of a theist. You're conflating two different uses of the word. I have faith that there is no god in exactly the same way that I have faith that there is no Flying Spaghetti Monster, or that I have faith that Russel's teapot does not, in fact, exist. If you want to call that "faith," it's within the boundaries of English usage, but it's an entirely different faith than positive faith in a particular god. And you clearly have no clue about scientific evidence. The default position is we assume things do not exist unless we are presented with positive evidence to the contrary. It's the theists who have the burden of proof, not the atheists. To this point, the theists have failed spectacularly.
AAAPIT (I am a psychometrician in training). He clearly knows nothing about psychometrics, and is pretty much a fool for assuming that the people who put together the tests have never bothered to think about such elementary problems. There is well-developed statistical methodology behind the scoring of standardized tests. Most licensing tests these days are put together with Item Response Theory, which gives the test developer a very precise idea of how much of a role guessing plays in each question. (You might be surprised to find that the floor guessing parameter is not just based on the number of choices; it varies depending on the details of each question). IRT also yields a test information function that lets you see how much information the test is giving you along the range of ability levels. The argument he makes about deducting fractions for incorrect answers (known as "formula scoring") is BS, because no standardized test ever reports just the raw score. Different forms of the test differ in difficulty, and so must be equated to one another. In the process, raw scores are converted to scaled scores, and the conversion is typically not a linear one. Formula scoring results in lower raw scores than if you don't apply the penalty (dichotomously scored), but all that means is that the range between the lowest and the highest raw score is a less with the dichotomously scored test. If that range is too small, you can always add more questions. Suppose you took two versions of the same test, one dichotomously scored and one with formula scoring. (Assume for the purposes of simplicity that there's no measurement error.) Yes, you would get a higher raw score on the dichotomously scored test, but so would the whole test-taking population. Your percentile rank would not change, and the scaled score would work out still be the same.
In addition to what others have mentioned, I have had serious problems with complex documents that contain many sections. Opening such a document and doing certain kinds of reformatting cause Writer to blink furiously as it redraws the screen over and over; the more sections you have, the more times it blinks. When you have a lot of sections, it can take minutes for the blinking to subside. I've also found certain things in such documents, e.g., lines between columns, can disappear with no user intervention. (I've never been able to figure out the conditions under which it happens, but I've been bit by this repeatedly.)
Free speech, what a crock! Not all forms of verbal behavior are covered by the first amendment. Is sexual harassment licensed by free speech? The real issue hear is the scope of the school's powers. Clearly, they are entitled to try to stop bullying that occurs on school property. We would be outraged if they didn't, whether that bullying was physical or verbal. The real question is to what extent they have they right to take action when something occurs away from school.
Try this page.
Ethically, I agree with you. Legally, though, GP is right. California's whistle-blower statute protects you if you report the illegal action to any law-enforcement agency or appropriate authority. There's also a hotline you can call to direct your report to the appropriate enforcement agency. Rightly or wrongly, it says nothing about going public. The relevant section of the California Civil code is here. Another point worth noting: this wasn't a Diebold employee, it was someone who worked at their lawyer's office. In other words, he also seems to have violated attorney-client confidentiality, and that action is specifically exempted from protection. So even if this guy had called the whistleblower hotline, he would still be on the hook. My guess is that it's that violation that has the DA's panties in a twist, rather than any Republican-controlled smackdown, as some other posters have suggested. After all, L.A., and California in general, is controlled by Democrats. But lawyers of all political stripes react poorly to violating attorney-client privilege.
If you read the whole FA that you linked, you'll find that the authors aren't claiming they can uniquely identify any computer on the net with this technique. In fact, they specifically disavow it (p. 13 of the PDF):
"For forensics, we anticipate that our techniques will be most useful when arguing that a given device what not involved in the recorded event. With respect to tracking individual devices, we stress that our techniques do not provide unique serial numbers for devices, but that our skew estimates do provide valuable bits of information that, when combined with other sorts of information such as operating system fingerprinting results, can help track individual devices on the internet."
So it's a bit less precise than a fingerprint or DNA testing. It would be nice to know how much less precise. The number of computers they tested was rather small.
Right. And we are starting to see the advent of drag-net phishing. Being a dolphin doesn't necessarily help much if they compromise a DNS server.
This license allows you to fold files into larger projects with a different license. So I don't think it actually keeps stuff out of Linux, as long as you keep it in non-static libraries. That's a specific exception of GPL.
Yes on the distinction between tense and mood, but the active/passive distinction is called "voice," not "tongue." In the strictest sense, English only has two tenses, present and past. The "future" is not a true tense in English but an example of a conditional mood. 'Will' is a present-tense verb. The progressive system (e.g., "I am going") is also sometimes, inaccurately, called a tense, but it's more properly an aspect. The perfective (e.g., "I have gone") is also usually considered an aspect by linguists, although again, it's frequently lumped in with the basic tenses.
Of course this test is not multiple-choice. They ask you to actually do something with software. On the surface, at least, this test looks like an attempt to come up with what's known as "authentic assessment." One of the biggest criticisms with multiple-choice exams is that they don't directly measure the skills that we really want to test. And many critics of standardized testing find the find the correlation between multiple-choice questions and real skills to be weak indeed.
The AP story linked in the article isn't particularly informative. It picked up on the old features of the story. Linguists have been studying Nicaraguan Sign Language for over a decade now. The interesting thing about NSL is that older signers use it as a pidgen (no consistent grammar), but younger signers use it as a creole (i.e., they have created a fully-formed language with consistent grammatical structures.) This transition point has generally passed by the time scientists get around to studying the language. This story from the economist: http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm? story_id=2441743
gives more details of the actual study, which apparently involves some tests of syntactic ability in older signers in comparison to younger ones. It's not ground-breaking stuff, but it does help fill out the big picture.
My Yahoo mail box was upgraded last night--cough. To -2048.0MB (sic). I then got a message telling me that my account had been suspended because I was way over my limit, having a whopping 0.0MB of mail stored. I'm meditating on the metaphysics of negative storage space. Does this mean that I have to host their data?
If SCO's future is as bleak as everyone here seems to believe, then its stock is currently ridiculously over-valued. (It's up > 1000% over the last year.) Sounds like a prime candidate for a short sell to me. The latest numbers on Short interest (available here) indicate that short sales have spiked over the previous month, but are still at a relatively low ratio to the daily float. In other words, the players haven't yet jumped on this one in a big way. It would be particularly satisfying to turn a tidy profit as the stock of these bastards goes to zero.
Clearly you've never looked at Turkish. Or any of the Bantu languages, which make the inflectional system of Latin or Greek look like child's play. But the differences between inflectional systems in two languages is really part of a broader issue, namely that translation doesn't occur on the basis of a token-for-token replacement. One word in the source language may correspond to several in the target language, and vice-versa. This is a problem in alignment, and any MT system must deal with it, but that's a fairly well understood problem. A system of this sort certainly would not just look at words as atomic units, but would have to look at parts words (i.e., their morphology)