A good writer would have found a way to make Palpatine's plot more devious, more plausible... so inescapable that even Padme would have to agree to it. There are plenty of examples to draw on from recent American history, from McCarthyism to the present.
Quiet, you fool! Babylon 5 DVDs cost too much with the current level of demand. Don't publicize them any more!
That's a well known algorithm called "Bogosort" in the Jargon File.
Interesting thing about it is that it is one of the few algorithms that has an expected running time of O(n!). If you're teaching an intro algorithms class it's easy to come up with examples of O(lg n), O(n), O(n lg n), O(n^2), and O(2^n) in lecture but O(n!) is tricky. Useful as an extra credit question.
How could Cray be wrong. I mean just becuase linuxis running some of the top 500 computers there is no reason to consider HPC right. What a self serving statement Cray makes....they still dont get it.... there way is a dead-end...
That's right. Dataflow vector processing has been shown to be a dead end. The fact that fastest computer in the world is a dataflow machine is a statistical anomaly, right?
...extraordinary claims DO NOT demand extraordinary proof, and it annoys me every time I read that... According to the scientific method of empirical research, after enough tests come out positive, a hypothesis becomes a working theory.
I suspect you've just misunderstood what's meant by "extraordinary proof". You say yourself that a hypothesis requires "enough" positive tests to be considered a working theory. I don't think you mean six or twelve or two when you say "enough". I think you mean "compelling" tests or "convincing" tests, without considering an a priori number of them.
Now, should it surprise us that certain tests are more compelling than others? Suppose we take magician who can make a someone disappear on stage and ask him to perform in a brightly lit lab with infrared cameras running from every angle. I'd consider the second disappearing act much more credible than doing it onstage. It would be even better if a seperate group of investigators could take the magician to their independent lab and have him repeat it there, because then we'd be more certain that we didn't screw up the test somehow. Independently reproducible results are a hallmark of science; why do you think your ninth grade Chem teacher was so insistent that you document your procedure in your lab notebook so meticulously?
But why would we bother to test the magician? Why don't we just take him at his word that he can make people disappear? Or trust the stage show? Well, because we're being asked to swallow an explanation that 1) contradicts all of our previous experience with people regularly not disappearing and 2) is more complicated than the explanation that there's some sleight of hand involved. In other words, it's a pretty extraordinary claim.
Contrast this with the ordinary claim that the magician does some tricks with smoke and mirrors. While it might take rigorous experiments to convince people that the magician can do real magic, it would probably only take an ajar stage trapdoor to persuade people that he's an ordinary stage magician. Of course, we could find the trap door, guess that he's ordinary, and then have our hypothesis refuted by him disappearing people in the carefully controlled tests. Nothing wrong with iterating through better approximate explanations- it's called the Scientific Method- but the burden of proof is on the claims that rewrite current beliefs.
You say you're a scientist, so you remember that the Einstein's General Theory of Relativity took a decade to be accepted, that Darwin's Evolution needed a mechanism for heredity before it was accepted, that Cold Fusion wasn't. People take time, evidence, explanations, and frameworks to accept new claims as facts. You say that
"It doesn't matter how extraordinary the claim is, there is no scientific 'raising of the bar' for one claim versus another claim. If there was, we probably couldn't get any science done because we would have to examine every hypothesis for its 'extraordinaryness' and set the bar accordingly." I say that this happens everyday. I say this happens everytime you read an article, understand its claims, and decide if you're convinced that that is the way the world actually works.
After all, after everything is said and done, you can't DISPROVE God; absence of proof is not proof of absence. Since you can't disprove it, you have to take into account that God is possible. Belief in God is just as credible -- not more than, and not less than (and that's the key point) -- as my belief that God does not actually exist, and is in fact a creation of our own minds.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
When I say that I don't believe in unicorns, I don't mean that I will never believe in unicorns, even if you show me a herd of them with foals being born. I reserve the right to update my opinions in the face of new evidence... that is the scientific way, after all. Nor can I offer a proof of the nonexistence of unicorns, showing conclusively that they cannot or do not exist. However, I'm still quite comfortable saying that unicorns don't exist. Furthermore, I claim that to believe in them is not "just as credible" as to believe in their nonexistence given the general scarcity of unicorn herds in zoos or unicorn fillets on menus (not to mention their unbelievable powers (virginity detection among other things)). The childrens' stories about them that are the bulk of proof for their existence are not sufficient evidence in support of their existence.
A parallel argument for the non-existence of God is left as an exercise to the reader. (Hint: s/unicorn/God gets you nearly there.)
Intuitive, eh? I guess nobody remembers that segment in second grade where you had to learn to read an analog display. The mental map between "Big hand on 2 and little hand on 6" to 2:30 is non-trivial... I mean, did you catch that that time is actually ten minutes after six? It's the reason why kids start out with digital watches.
What analog watches do display intuitively is the amount of time between two events, at least for differences less than an hour (or half hour). It would be interesting to make a linear clock, where you could see tiny slivers of five minutes versus chunks of half hours, and ask kids how easy it is to use versus standard round analog or digital displays.
It would be nice if, in parallel to the Internet, another network was developed to hold only symantically organized knowledge. That network would be free of marketing and commercial business, and would ostensibly be the largest repository of organized knowledge in the planet. Think Internet2, based entirely in XML.
Yeah, it would be nice. It would also be nice if there weren't spammers or PageRank hijackers or any of the myriad problems with the current Web. The difficulty isn't that it's undesirable to have a clean complete net, it's that there's no way to enforce clarity or completeness. People dotry to build these understandable information networks, but you'll always be hampered by the limited number of people who are willing to spend the time and effort to mark up their pages.
He also has an interesting article dealing specifically with biometrics in airports, specifically facial recognition. Without explicitly showing the math, he applies Bayes rule to calculate the false positive rate of a fantastically accurate system. Since the frequency of terrorists is quite small, the rate of false positives is incredibly high and it such a system would simply train the human operators to ignore its positives.
This boils down to the classic argument about speed cameras - they don't prove a driver, just a vehicle.
Parking tickets work the same way. Since my car is registered to me, I end up getting my asshat friend's parking tickets. Solution? I steal their food from the fridge! That'll show 'em!
These zig-zags add length to the traces so that they have the same length as other traces within the same bus, and all the signals on that bus arrive at the same time... Power consumption is also related... Stray capacitance and inductance...slow their ability to switch instantaneously.
Perhaps now is a reasonable time to mention asynchronous computing. Instead of running a whole system with a single synchronize() block, each of the logical sections synchronizes with it's own producers and consumers. Computation occurs as soon as the required data is available, which yields average-time performance, instead of every piece of silicon waiting for the slowest one on the chip. Furthermore, if a chunk of transistors isn't being used it's not powered, which means less power consumption and less heat dissipation.
...Torvalds has a bigger team -- the millions who use Linux and continue to tinker with it...
The author pulls some sleight-of-word here, lumping two quite different groups together. There are certainly "millions who use Linux" but there are far fewer who "tinker with it", a claim supported by looking at the difference between the number of downloads or users with the number of patch submitters or CVS commit privilege holders. This disparity is a natural one; few people have the skill, time, or inclination to contribute, even to tools they find useful.
Doubtlessly people will reply that the number of users directly contributes to bug detection which is a valid point. However the utility of a bug-report and of a patch are certainly not equal. Furthermore, the same analysis can be done in this case by comparing the number of people who experience bugs to the number who file bug reports (not to mention the fact that Microsoft has millions of users to detect bugs as well. Why do you think they have automated bug reports these days?). I'm not discounting the value of many eyes on a product but the article is using an optimistic metric.
Linux's advantage isn't in the millions of users (since Windows has many more) but in the thousands of patch submitters. Indeed, this may be why creating linux-for-the-masses is a hard problem: Ease of use, polish, and intuitive design aren't something captured in twenty-line fixes; they need to be woven through entire user interface. It is certainly possible to make Unix "just work" but, so far, it's taken professional designers paid by Apple to do so.
For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little--only a bright idea by another set of geeks--to lose the lead.
Unconvincing. Search engines these days tailor their search results based on user input. The fact that Google is the market leader by such a large margin means that it has much more click-through data. It can use this advantage to return better tuned or more timely results. People's queries tell google what is currently interesting and important. NeoSearchEngine X doesn't have that same advantage.
They bought Blogger for the same reason. People hand Google information daily for which Your Friendly Marketting Division would kill.
Exactly correct; hydrogen decouples the automotives from the oil (which turn out to be one of the biggest consumers of oil in America).
Furthermore, think about the efficiency of burning oil in your SUV versus in the massive and precision engineered powerplants (which also don't have to be designed to go off-roading, even if 90% never do).
You think the situation in the Middle East is bad now? Wait until the world no longer relies on them for their oil and their economies fall apart. It will be a complete disaster. I would like to not have to rely on oil as much as the next guy, but I think it's going to cause just as many social problems as it will solve environmental problems.
And not just in the Middle East. The US has a huge deficit, which it supports by priniting copious amount of money. Other contries with our levels of deficit and debt are places like Argentina, which has rioting in the streets... but we're saved from that kind of hyper-inflation because people around the world demand the dollar and they'll buy them up nearly as quickly as we can print them. George Monbiot points this out and covers some of the reasons for it, like the fact that the world's oil supply is priced in dollars, which means that people need our dollars to buy oil.
So, while the Middle East is dependent on us for it's economic welfare, it turns out that we're dependent on it as well. What America needs to do is keep oil prices in dollars and convince China to hit the crude-oil crackpipe. Otherwise we may have to pay off our debts...and I'm not going to find my share of 6 trillion dollars lost beneath the couch cushions.
The exact same argument shows that a person can't play perfect chess which means that we give up on that goal. The relevant question is, "Can the fast evaluation speed of the computer make up for its shoddy evaluation algorithm?"
This is an open question, which is why people are still writing programs (and articles and slashdot threads) like these.
95% of all software companies disagree, including giants like IBM and Microsoft.
Actually, companies like IBM, Microsoft, and HP have been making strong pushed to move to a services-based model. It's called
on-demand computing and is the point of all of that computing-as-a-utility and grid-computing hoopla that we've seen in ads and articles recently.
Will they still sell their own operating systems and hardware? Sure. But, as we heard in
Jim Gray's talk, the real money is in people's time, which translates to a service model.
This is exactly correct. This is exactly why open source systems will never replace commercial ones, as shown in other complex pieces of code such as operating systems.... or large servers... or compilers... or.... Wait, what was the question?
The government has a fair number of programs that are intended to fund small companies transferring research into products. In particular are the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. While, these particular ones require PhDs or Professors (respectively) to head the projects, you could look at their applications to get an idea of what you ought to put in your proposal.
Since you're doing medical research, the National Institute of Health's SBIR program seems most relevant. You can also find the application forms and guidelines if you look around.
Slashdot Mirror
Preview that post next time, doofus.
Quiet, you fool! Babylon 5 DVDs cost too much with the current level of demand. Don't publicize them any more!
Interesting thing about it is that it is one of the few algorithms that has an expected running time of O(n!). If you're teaching an intro algorithms class it's easy to come up with examples of O(lg n), O(n), O(n lg n), O(n^2), and O(2^n) in lecture but O(n!) is tricky. Useful as an extra credit question.
Been done.
Oh, here's the TOP500 list, btw.
I suspect you've just misunderstood what's meant by "extraordinary proof". You say yourself that a hypothesis requires "enough" positive tests to be considered a working theory. I don't think you mean six or twelve or two when you say "enough". I think you mean "compelling" tests or "convincing" tests, without considering an a priori number of them.
Now, should it surprise us that certain tests are more compelling than others? Suppose we take magician who can make a someone disappear on stage and ask him to perform in a brightly lit lab with infrared cameras running from every angle. I'd consider the second disappearing act much more credible than doing it onstage. It would be even better if a seperate group of investigators could take the magician to their independent lab and have him repeat it there, because then we'd be more certain that we didn't screw up the test somehow. Independently reproducible results are a hallmark of science; why do you think your ninth grade Chem teacher was so insistent that you document your procedure in your lab notebook so meticulously?
But why would we bother to test the magician? Why don't we just take him at his word that he can make people disappear? Or trust the stage show? Well, because we're being asked to swallow an explanation that 1) contradicts all of our previous experience with people regularly not disappearing and 2) is more complicated than the explanation that there's some sleight of hand involved. In other words, it's a pretty extraordinary claim.
Contrast this with the ordinary claim that the magician does some tricks with smoke and mirrors. While it might take rigorous experiments to convince people that the magician can do real magic, it would probably only take an ajar stage trapdoor to persuade people that he's an ordinary stage magician. Of course, we could find the trap door, guess that he's ordinary, and then have our hypothesis refuted by him disappearing people in the carefully controlled tests. Nothing wrong with iterating through better approximate explanations- it's called the Scientific Method- but the burden of proof is on the claims that rewrite current beliefs.
You say you're a scientist, so you remember that the Einstein's General Theory of Relativity took a decade to be accepted, that Darwin's Evolution needed a mechanism for heredity before it was accepted, that Cold Fusion wasn't. People take time, evidence, explanations, and frameworks to accept new claims as facts. You say that "It doesn't matter how extraordinary the claim is, there is no scientific 'raising of the bar' for one claim versus another claim. If there was, we probably couldn't get any science done because we would have to examine every hypothesis for its 'extraordinaryness' and set the bar accordingly." I say that this happens everyday. I say this happens everytime you read an article, understand its claims, and decide if you're convinced that that is the way the world actually works.
When I say that I don't believe in unicorns, I don't mean that I will never believe in unicorns, even if you show me a herd of them with foals being born. I reserve the right to update my opinions in the face of new evidence... that is the scientific way, after all. Nor can I offer a proof of the nonexistence of unicorns, showing conclusively that they cannot or do not exist. However, I'm still quite comfortable saying that unicorns don't exist. Furthermore, I claim that to believe in them is not "just as credible" as to believe in their nonexistence given the general scarcity of unicorn herds in zoos or unicorn fillets on menus (not to mention their unbelievable powers (virginity detection among other things)). The childrens' stories about them that are the bulk of proof for their existence are not sufficient evidence in support of their existence.
A parallel argument for the non-existence of God is left as an exercise to the reader. (Hint: s/unicorn/God gets you nearly there.)
Intuitive, eh? I guess nobody remembers that segment in second grade where you had to learn to read an analog display. The mental map between "Big hand on 2 and little hand on 6" to 2:30 is non-trivial... I mean, did you catch that that time is actually ten minutes after six? It's the reason why kids start out with digital watches.
What analog watches do display intuitively is the amount of time between two events, at least for differences less than an hour (or half hour). It would be interesting to make a linear clock, where you could see tiny slivers of five minutes versus chunks of half hours, and ask kids how easy it is to use versus standard round analog or digital displays.
You sounds like Ernie Cline.
Yeah, it would be nice. It would also be nice if there weren't spammers or PageRank hijackers or any of the myriad problems with the current Web. The difficulty isn't that it's undesirable to have a clean complete net, it's that there's no way to enforce clarity or completeness. People do try to build these understandable information networks, but you'll always be hampered by the limited number of people who are willing to spend the time and effort to mark up their pages.
He also has an interesting article dealing specifically with biometrics in airports, specifically facial recognition. Without explicitly showing the math, he applies Bayes rule to calculate the false positive rate of a fantastically accurate system. Since the frequency of terrorists is quite small, the rate of false positives is incredibly high and it such a system would simply train the human operators to ignore its positives.
And I thought Slashdot meant this paper.
It's still a research problem, but businesses are looking in to it.
Well, we saw that it can *render* like no one's business. Harharhar.
The author pulls some sleight-of-word here, lumping two quite different groups together. There are certainly "millions who use Linux" but there are far fewer who "tinker with it", a claim supported by looking at the difference between the number of downloads or users with the number of patch submitters or CVS commit privilege holders. This disparity is a natural one; few people have the skill, time, or inclination to contribute, even to tools they find useful.
Doubtlessly people will reply that the number of users directly contributes to bug detection which is a valid point. However the utility of a bug-report and of a patch are certainly not equal. Furthermore, the same analysis can be done in this case by comparing the number of people who experience bugs to the number who file bug reports (not to mention the fact that Microsoft has millions of users to detect bugs as well. Why do you think they have automated bug reports these days?). I'm not discounting the value of many eyes on a product but the article is using an optimistic metric.
Linux's advantage isn't in the millions of users (since Windows has many more) but in the thousands of patch submitters. Indeed, this may be why creating linux-for-the-masses is a hard problem: Ease of use, polish, and intuitive design aren't something captured in twenty-line fixes; they need to be woven through entire user interface. It is certainly possible to make Unix "just work" but, so far, it's taken professional designers paid by Apple to do so.
Unconvincing. Search engines these days tailor their search results based on user input. The fact that Google is the market leader by such a large margin means that it has much more click-through data. It can use this advantage to return better tuned or more timely results. People's queries tell google what is currently interesting and important. NeoSearchEngine X doesn't have that same advantage.
They bought Blogger for the same reason. People hand Google information daily for which Your Friendly Marketting Division would kill.
How about the UK? I'm an American, and even I've heard of them! They must be important: Revenues: $565 billion Expenditures: $540 billion Hmm...looks like there's no deficit there.
Ok, how's about a country that's really had troubles, like Russia. I mean, we won right? Go Democracy! Revenues: $70 billion Expenditures: $62 billion Damn!
Let's try again...this time with a true socialist country! I've often heard they don't know how to run an economy! Heeeeeeere's Norway! Revenues: $71.7 billion Expenditures: $57.6 billion
Well, crap. It looks like there are countries other than Germany that have good fiscal policy.
Furthermore, think about the efficiency of burning oil in your SUV versus in the massive and precision engineered powerplants (which also don't have to be designed to go off-roading, even if 90% never do).
And not just in the Middle East. The US has a huge deficit, which it supports by priniting copious amount of money. Other contries with our levels of deficit and debt are places like Argentina, which has rioting in the streets... but we're saved from that kind of hyper-inflation because people around the world demand the dollar and they'll buy them up nearly as quickly as we can print them. George Monbiot points this out and covers some of the reasons for it, like the fact that the world's oil supply is priced in dollars, which means that people need our dollars to buy oil.
So, while the Middle East is dependent on us for it's economic welfare, it turns out that we're dependent on it as well. What America needs to do is keep oil prices in dollars and convince China to hit the crude-oil crackpipe. Otherwise we may have to pay off our debts...and I'm not going to find my share of 6 trillion dollars lost beneath the couch cushions.
This is an open question, which is why people are still writing programs (and articles and slashdot threads) like these.
Actually, companies like IBM, Microsoft, and HP have been making strong pushed to move to a services-based model. It's called on-demand computing and is the point of all of that computing-as-a-utility and grid-computing hoopla that we've seen in ads and articles recently.
Will they still sell their own operating systems and hardware? Sure. But, as we heard in Jim Gray's talk, the real money is in people's time, which translates to a service model.
This is exactly correct. This is exactly why open source systems will never replace commercial ones, as shown in other complex pieces of code such as operating systems.... or large servers... or compilers... or.... Wait, what was the question?
Since you're doing medical research, the National Institute of Health's SBIR program seems most relevant. You can also find the application forms and guidelines if you look around.