Just trying out the Kite plugin for Atom and seems to work fine. Looks like they've worked hard to integrate with a number of popular editors and IDEs.
Anybody know if there's any (planned) support for Jupyter notebooks / Google Colab?
Tried searching on this and got nothin'.
"In one of their studies, 91 per cent of 1,000 American adults surveyed reported some level of opposition to GM foods."
By WHY are they opposed? Are all forms of opposition to GM foods the same, and due to lack of science knowledge? The "rural" people I know are opposed to GMOs, not because of some perception that the food itself is unsafe, but because of how they experience the legality and economics of the ways the patents and intellectual property are enforced and regulated -- that these are bad for farmers. When you hear about the evils of Monsanto (try Google*), you don't find as much about "GMO seeds are teh evil" per se, but that the requirements, the fees, the lock-you-into-a-contract stuff is deeply problematic. Thus one could indeed be fairly ignorant about genetics but well-informed about these economic and regulatory issues, and still have a reasonable justification for opposition to GMOs. It really depends on how these researchers asked their questions, and I can't find a link to the questions in TFA.
*Although this is a highly-contested area of internet space, with misinformation, sock-puppet accounts and more. So I'm not including any citations because the point is not whether these are correct, just whether the conversation re. opposition to GMOs is really about them being unhealthy vs. GMO-company economics being unhealthy.
(edit: why has/. removed my newline breaks?)
One can easily imagine some human HR person wringing their hands, complaining, "But it says 'data scientist' on the job announcement, and this person isn't a 'data scientist'! How am I supposed to check off the box?! This should go in the trash can..."
Meanwhile, internet dating scams targeting men have always existed, but don't seem to garner nearly the same media attention as those targeting women. Maybe because people just accept it as part of the 'reality of the internet'?
[Single photo of extremely attractive woman, poor use of English, etc, etc]..
One could argue that online dating sites themselves are scams targeting men, given the unfavorable gender-ratios involved.
The study was conducted not merely *by* Northwestern University, but *at* Northwestern University. Its universal application is not obvious, given the variety of colleges and tenure requirements available.
As has been mentioned already, such universities typically reward tenure on the basis of *research* emphasis, not teaching, so the results are hardly surprising.
I submit that these results will fail to generalize when so-called "teaching colleges" -- those whose primary means of performance review for promotion regards teaching evaluation -- are included in a study. Professors at this colleges honestly are interested in focusing on teaching, and as mentioned above it is often the older tenured faculty who accumulate awards and student accolades for excellence in teaching.
Some such teaching college are in the midst of increasing research requirements for faculty as regards promotion & tenure (as well as increasing class sized) -- in short, in efforts to become more like Northwestern. This study suggests that a loss of teaching effectiveness will result.
(Do you want the focus to be on teaching, or research? You can't say "both"; there are finite amounts of time and resources available.)
...mandating that students should be able to add fractions? My college students can't even manage that.
Can 'we as a culture' devote a little less time to the creationism/evolution circus, and at least make sure that basic scientific proficiency is getting through?
Well, I agree with your comment as it applies to science news coverage in general, but RTFA.
In this instance, all of these statements were made by "Dr Berhane Asfaw, anthropologist and co-research director of the project that found the remains".
Laying aside the whole evolution/creationism/design thing, the language used by these archaelogists is a big red flag.
Count the number of times they use language like "proved", and also words like "for the first time", "unambiguous", "It is the only place in the world",..."We have proved that one (species) is transforming into the other" [--- how did they manage to prove THAT, without even any mention of how the fossils were dated?]
This is not the language of careful scientists. These are people touting themselves, their research and their region in spectacular ways. It is grandstanding. It may be that the results are valid, but I think we have every right to be skeptical until other scientists weigh in.
Mac gaming is ALREADY dead!
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Hi, Mac user here. All these posts about "Why should a company develop for Mac when they know people can just dual boot? This will kill Mac games..."
C'mon. Mac gaming is ALREADY dead, by any measure. Look at the number of high-end demos posted on MacGameFiles.com over the past year, and you'll see that it's falled off to nearly zero in recent months. GameSpy stopped supporting Mac ladders a while ago. Go to a computer store, and if you can even find one that sells Mac games, you'll see that for all the shelves and shelves of PC games, there's only about 20% as many titles available for the Mac. Call of Duty 2? No. Battlefield 2? No? Half-Life,...the list goes on. And if a game DOES come out, it can be as much as a year since the PC version came out. And of the games that DO exist, the older ones (e.g. Medal of Honor) are *still* full price, whereas the same PC titles are half as much as they used to be or more. So, only one of 5 high-end titles (at best) and no bargain-bin games, makes the term "Mac gaming" kind of an oxymoron.
OS X is nice, but I really love the Mac hardware. I'm interested in buying a MacBook Pro and putting *only* Windows on it. To get work done (cygwin, virtualization) and to play GAMES.
This does not work for me. All I get is an error from the Preview application, saying "File Error. Couldn't open the file. It may be corrupt of a file format that Preview doesn't recognize."/OS 10.3.9
Correct me if I'm wrong, but all this means is that municipalities are not PROHIBITED from setting up wireless networks?
That means that, if you don't like the idea of a municipal wifi network in your area, you can STILL fight it via political activism in your local government?
I've seen a number of arguments in this thread about why muni-wifis are a bad idea (inefficiency, discourage competition, not an essential function of government, not a "need" of all citizens, etc), but I haven't read any actual advocacy for a state-wide ban prohibiting munipilatities from deciding for themselves whether to offer wi-fi or not... So, much of the "hubub" here seems misplaced.
Sounds like you're thinking that black hole formation results in a topology change (a "tear") in spacetime. For astrophysical black hole formation, in classical general relativity....eh, it seriously depends on your coordinate system, but maybe the most relevant answer is "no". Even so, we expect classical GR to break down anyway near the center of the black hole (the "singularity"), which is where any "rip" would occur.
Hi. We won't know for a while. LIGO is still working on data from the "S4" 4th science run, which ended in March...so S5 will take time.
Even so, I seriously doubt it'll show up in the data. Design sensitivity for LIGO has it (barely) detecting NS-NS mergers in Virgo, which is 50 million light years away. This GRB be was 2.2 billion light years away...
For the people asking about "haven't these things been detected before?:
This was an optical afterglow from a "very short duration" GRB.
Optical afterglows from OTHER, longer duration GRBs (e.g. GRB000630) HAVE been detected.
There are different types of GRBs, and this is the first time people detected an optical afterglow of this type. Here's some on this (cf. SWIFT):
* There are two classes of GRB: those that last less than about 2 seconds, and those that last longer than about 2 seconds
* The long bursts occur at cosmological distances; while distances of the short bursts have not been measured
* Given the distance of the long bursts, they must put out about 1053 ergs of energy (if they emit energy equally in all directions)
To get an idea of how much energy 1053 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 1033 ergs each second. It would take our Sun, then, 880 billion years to put out the same energy as a GRB! For perspective, our Sun will only live to be about 10 billion years, and our Universe is only about 12 billion years old.
Putting the facts together, astrophysicists have narrowed the field to two promising theories for the origin of GRBs: neutron star/neutron star mergers and hypernovae. The truth may lie between these two theories somewhere -- for example, the long bursts may be from hypernovae while the short bursts are from neutron star/neutron star mergers. However, it may also be that GRBs originate from something that astronomers haven't considered yet.
Neutron Star/Neutron Star Merger:
As two neutron stars orbit each other, they lose rotational energy to gravitational energy, thus decaying their orbit. (Actually, the orbit of any two bodies decays, but in the case of two neutron stars, it occurs much faster than it would in, say, the Earth-Moon or Sun-Earth system.) Eventually the two neutron stars will collide, forming a black hole and possibly radiating a large amount of energy.
Hypernovae:
At the end of a massive star's life (mass greater than about 10 Suns), it dies spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving behind a neutron star or black hole. Astronomers have known about supernovae for quite some time. However, if the star is very massive (mass greater than about 40 Suns) the collapse may appear different from a supernova, with an energy output greater than a regular supernova by about 100 times. Such large explosions are called hypernovae, and could be the source of at least some GRBs.
You are wrong in assuming I am a proponent of Intelligent Design, and you offer no evidence that I am, so I guess it's an epidemic. Your assumptions about me and what I'm saying (when was I "choosing to focus on the (perceived) weaknesses of evolution"??), as well as your assumptions about the development of the Intelligent Design movement illustrate that you are simply acting out of uninformed prejudice. All I did was argue for a proper definition of ID, and you go off and bring in all kinds of irrelevant assumptions about me. That's why I said you're not interested in reasoned dialogue.
I hate to dignify this with a response but: Behe, Johnson and Dembski were simply NOT Creationists who realized they'd have to take "God" language out of Creationism to get it taught in schools as you claimed. That's why your account is BS.
Now, while I'm not an ID proponent, I do have this critique of SOME evolutionists and yourself: Making up narratives of the past (be they about evolution or the origins of ID) that seem to strike you and your prejudices as plausible does NOT constitute science, and should NOT be taught in schools. The scientific merits of evolution theory (and there are MANY and they are COMPELLING) should be taught, but the prevelent little made-up stories of how some particular animal happened to wind up the way it is now (in cases where there is no clear fossil record) need to be labelled as the speculation they are. And when factual evidence exists which contradicts those speculations (as in the case of your assertions about the origin of ID), they need to be roughly tossed out and labelled as BS.
this is easy: Hubert Yockey.
And you're wrong about the origins of Intelligent Design (your account is actually total BS), but I can see you're not interested in reasoned dialogue, so I'll leave you to go study on your own...oh wait, you'd rather just make up stories. Pity.
No and no, but clearly your brain isn't functioning properly: You answer a post about correcting a definition of Intelligent Design with an out-of-the-blue question about a religious cult and an ad-hominem attack? You earn -1, Offtopic.
It should never have been "seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us", but rather "seeking explanations for the natural things what we observe around us" or some such.
Slashdot Mirror
Just trying out the Kite plugin for Atom and seems to work fine. Looks like they've worked hard to integrate with a number of popular editors and IDEs. Anybody know if there's any (planned) support for Jupyter notebooks / Google Colab? Tried searching on this and got nothin'.
"In one of their studies, 91 per cent of 1,000 American adults surveyed reported some level of opposition to GM foods." By WHY are they opposed? Are all forms of opposition to GM foods the same, and due to lack of science knowledge? The "rural" people I know are opposed to GMOs, not because of some perception that the food itself is unsafe, but because of how they experience the legality and economics of the ways the patents and intellectual property are enforced and regulated -- that these are bad for farmers. When you hear about the evils of Monsanto (try Google*), you don't find as much about "GMO seeds are teh evil" per se, but that the requirements, the fees, the lock-you-into-a-contract stuff is deeply problematic. Thus one could indeed be fairly ignorant about genetics but well-informed about these economic and regulatory issues, and still have a reasonable justification for opposition to GMOs. It really depends on how these researchers asked their questions, and I can't find a link to the questions in TFA. *Although this is a highly-contested area of internet space, with misinformation, sock-puppet accounts and more. So I'm not including any citations because the point is not whether these are correct, just whether the conversation re. opposition to GMOs is really about them being unhealthy vs. GMO-company economics being unhealthy. (edit: why has /. removed my newline breaks?)
One can easily imagine some human HR person wringing their hands, complaining, "But it says 'data scientist' on the job announcement, and this person isn't a 'data scientist'! How am I supposed to check off the box?! This should go in the trash can..."
"This content is available exclusively to Chronicle subscribers"
Meanwhile, internet dating scams targeting men have always existed, but don't seem to garner nearly the same media attention as those targeting women. Maybe because people just accept it as part of the 'reality of the internet'?
[Single photo of extremely attractive woman, poor use of English, etc, etc]..
One could argue that online dating sites themselves are scams targeting men, given the unfavorable gender-ratios involved.
....aaaand typos galore, above.
/tenured already, so who cares. ;-)
The study was conducted not merely *by* Northwestern University, but *at* Northwestern University. Its universal application is not obvious, given the variety of colleges and tenure requirements available.
As has been mentioned already, such universities typically reward tenure on the basis of *research* emphasis, not teaching, so the results are hardly surprising.
I submit that these results will fail to generalize when so-called "teaching colleges" -- those whose primary means of performance review for promotion regards teaching evaluation -- are included in a study. Professors at this colleges honestly are interested in focusing on teaching, and as mentioned above it is often the older tenured faculty who accumulate awards and student accolades for excellence in teaching. Some such teaching college are in the midst of increasing research requirements for faculty as regards promotion & tenure (as well as increasing class sized) -- in short, in efforts to become more like Northwestern. This study suggests that a loss of teaching effectiveness will result. (Do you want the focus to be on teaching, or research? You can't say "both"; there are finite amounts of time and resources available.)
...mandating that students should be able to add fractions? My college students can't even manage that. Can 'we as a culture' devote a little less time to the creationism/evolution circus, and at least make sure that basic scientific proficiency is getting through?
Can anyone suggest any sample apps that will make use of an internal magnetometer?
Well, I agree with your comment as it applies to science news coverage in general, but RTFA. In this instance, all of these statements were made by "Dr Berhane Asfaw, anthropologist and co-research director of the project that found the remains".
Laying aside the whole evolution/creationism/design thing, the language used by these archaelogists is a big red flag.
..."We have proved that one (species) is transforming into the other" [--- how did they manage to prove THAT, without even any mention of how the fossils were dated?]
Count the number of times they use language like "proved", and also words like "for the first time", "unambiguous", "It is the only place in the world",
This is not the language of careful scientists. These are people touting themselves, their research and their region in spectacular ways. It is grandstanding. It may be that the results are valid, but I think we have every right to be skeptical until other scientists weigh in.
Hi, Mac user here. All these posts about "Why should a company develop for Mac when they know people can just dual boot? This will kill Mac games..."
...the list goes on. And if a game DOES come out, it can be as much as a year since the PC version came out. And of the games that DO exist, the older ones (e.g. Medal of Honor) are *still* full price, whereas the same PC titles are half as much as they used to be or more. So, only one of 5 high-end titles (at best) and no bargain-bin games, makes the term "Mac gaming" kind of an oxymoron.
C'mon. Mac gaming is ALREADY dead, by any measure. Look at the number of high-end demos posted on MacGameFiles.com over the past year, and you'll see that it's falled off to nearly zero in recent months. GameSpy stopped supporting Mac ladders a while ago. Go to a computer store, and if you can even find one that sells Mac games, you'll see that for all the shelves and shelves of PC games, there's only about 20% as many titles available for the Mac. Call of Duty 2? No. Battlefield 2? No? Half-Life,
OS X is nice, but I really love the Mac hardware. I'm interested in buying a MacBook Pro and putting *only* Windows on it. To get work done (cygwin, virtualization) and to play GAMES.
This development has been a long time coming...
"Bladder late than never."
This does not work for me. All I get is an error from the Preview application, saying "File Error. Couldn't open the file. It may be corrupt of a file format that Preview doesn't recognize." /OS 10.3.9
I'm not sure what to think about this result. But I'll sleep on it and decide tomorrow...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but all this means is that municipalities are not PROHIBITED from setting up wireless networks?
That means that, if you don't like the idea of a municipal wifi network in your area, you can STILL fight it via political activism in your local government?
I've seen a number of arguments in this thread about why muni-wifis are a bad idea (inefficiency, discourage competition, not an essential function of government, not a "need" of all citizens, etc), but I haven't read any actual advocacy for a state-wide ban prohibiting munipilatities from deciding for themselves whether to offer wi-fi or not... So, much of the "hubub" here seems misplaced.
arrg. Didn't see that error.
It'd be nice if Firefox would include formatting info when you do the highlight-click thing.
Thanks for posting that!
Pretty much lacks any semblance of media-savvy glitz factor, which is probably why space.com went with the artist's rendering.
What, like a fart?
e ven18.jpeg
Sounds like you're thinking that black hole formation results in a topology change (a "tear") in spacetime. For astrophysical black hole formation, in classical general relativity....eh, it seriously depends on your coordinate system, but maybe the most relevant answer is "no". Even so, we expect classical GR to break down anyway near the center of the black hole (the "singularity"), which is where any "rip" would occur.
I'm looking on the web for a nice "Kruskal diagram" of astrophysical BH formation, and all I'm finding t right now is this one:
http://www-cosmosaf.iap.fr/MIT-RG7_fichiers/fig_s
Hi. We won't know for a while. LIGO is still working on data from the "S4" 4th science run, which ended in March...so S5 will take time.
Even so, I seriously doubt it'll show up in the data.
Design sensitivity for LIGO has it (barely) detecting NS-NS mergers in Virgo, which is 50 million light years away. This GRB be was 2.2 billion light years away...
For the people asking about "haven't these things been detected before?:
This was an optical afterglow from a "very short duration" GRB.
Optical afterglows from OTHER, longer duration GRBs (e.g. GRB000630) HAVE been detected.
There are different types of GRBs, and this is the first time people detected an optical afterglow of this type. Here's some on this (cf. SWIFT):
* There are two classes of GRB: those that last less than about 2 seconds, and those that last longer than about 2 seconds
* The long bursts occur at cosmological distances; while distances of the short bursts have not been measured
* Given the distance of the long bursts, they must put out about 1053 ergs of energy (if they emit energy equally in all directions)
To get an idea of how much energy 1053 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 1033 ergs each second. It would take our Sun, then, 880 billion years to put out the same energy as a GRB! For perspective, our Sun will only live to be about 10 billion years, and our Universe is only about 12 billion years old.
Putting the facts together, astrophysicists have narrowed the field to two promising theories for the origin of GRBs: neutron star/neutron star mergers and hypernovae. The truth may lie between these two theories somewhere -- for example, the long bursts may be from hypernovae while the short bursts are from neutron star/neutron star mergers. However, it may also be that GRBs originate from something that astronomers haven't considered yet.
Neutron Star/Neutron Star Merger:
As two neutron stars orbit each other, they lose rotational energy to gravitational energy, thus decaying their orbit. (Actually, the orbit of any two bodies decays, but in the case of two neutron stars, it occurs much faster than it would in, say, the Earth-Moon or Sun-Earth system.) Eventually the two neutron stars will collide, forming a black hole and possibly radiating a large amount of energy.
Hypernovae:
At the end of a massive star's life (mass greater than about 10 Suns), it dies spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving behind a neutron star or black hole. Astronomers have known about supernovae for quite some time. However, if the star is very massive (mass greater than about 40 Suns) the collapse may appear different from a supernova, with an energy output greater than a regular supernova by about 100 times. Such large explosions are called hypernovae, and could be the source of at least some GRBs.
You are wrong in assuming I am a proponent of Intelligent Design, and you offer no evidence that I am, so I guess it's an epidemic. Your assumptions about me and what I'm saying (when was I "choosing to focus on the (perceived) weaknesses of evolution"??), as well as your assumptions about the development of the Intelligent Design movement illustrate that you are simply acting out of uninformed prejudice. All I did was argue for a proper definition of ID, and you go off and bring in all kinds of irrelevant assumptions about me. That's why I said you're not interested in reasoned dialogue.
I hate to dignify this with a response but: Behe, Johnson and Dembski were simply NOT Creationists who realized they'd have to take "God" language out of Creationism to get it taught in schools as you claimed. That's why your account is BS.
Now, while I'm not an ID proponent, I do have this critique of SOME evolutionists and yourself: Making up narratives of the past (be they about evolution or the origins of ID) that seem to strike you and your prejudices as plausible does NOT constitute science, and should NOT be taught in schools. The scientific merits of evolution theory (and there are MANY and they are COMPELLING) should be taught, but the prevelent little made-up stories of how some particular animal happened to wind up the way it is now (in cases where there is no clear fossil record) need to be labelled as the speculation they are. And when factual evidence exists which contradicts those speculations (as in the case of your assertions about the origin of ID), they need to be roughly tossed out and labelled as BS.
this is easy: Hubert Yockey. And you're wrong about the origins of Intelligent Design (your account is actually total BS), but I can see you're not interested in reasoned dialogue, so I'll leave you to go study on your own...oh wait, you'd rather just make up stories. Pity.
No and no, but clearly your brain isn't functioning properly: You answer a post about correcting a definition of Intelligent Design with an out-of-the-blue question about a religious cult and an ad-hominem attack?
You earn -1, Offtopic.
It should never have been "seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us", but rather "seeking explanations for the natural things what we observe around us" or some such.