If you read the PDFs, there's a lot of line-counting involved; apparently, all the works examined have similar concepts or tones at various portions of the way through. They then relate the tones of various passages to the Greek musical scale as understood at the time (harmonics, dissonance). Apparently they believe that the variance due to such things is within half a percent or so, and that they tend to balance each other out in each direction. The implication is that Plato was reasonably concerned with structuring his works to make pretty magic-number thingies happen. (It also might have helped that he was probably already planning how much space he would use when the scrolls were copied, since that was an expensive proposition at the time).
The line-counting tool works off the letter counts, and (among other things) observed that a discussion of the Golden Mean in one work took place 61.7% of the way through one work (the mean itself being.618033989). How convenient.
How long until someone exploits this? Well, I bet Google or some other vendor will try to sell it as part of an offering for businesses within the next 2 years. Remote software installs would be very useful in the enterprise.
Maybe they should, and maybe they shouldn't, but my understanding was that the "flash crash" problem wasn't really caused by high-frequency trading per se. It was caused because everyone was panicky about Europe and Greece's debt, and the market was falling, and people turned off computerized HFT systems, and no one had enough reasonable offers up on Proctor and Gamble stock, so when someone said "sell a bunch of my P&G now!" the exchange sold it to a bum on the street corner for a nickel (metaphorically) since that was the only offer around. And then people were like "oh no! major stock price drop!" and it went from there.
Old way: You give your cow to a servant to take it down to the market to sell it, and there's a bunch of people there who are willing to give him a fair price. Flash crash way: You tell the servant to take your cow down to to the market and sell it, but everyone's really busy and a little skittish, and since you told him to sell it now he sells it to a bum on the street corner for a nickel, then everyone panics: "the price of cows has fallen to a nickel! woe and ruin!" until some people wise up and realize they can buy cows on the cheap, and do so.
Yes yes! My geothermal plant design involves burrowing down through the core of the earth and out the other side to the center of the Sun, where it's always warm. I'm currently awaiting a grant to conduct further study, and with luck we can break ground by 2009.
An NPOV position which should make the truth clear enough could go something like "The Taliban executed him, stating that he was a spy; this has been decried as bloody murder by (identification of some groups doing the decrying, with citation)."
See? Not hard. Perhaps it's not as good at galvanizing people into righteous outrage as the phrase "brutally murdered" but that's just the price you pay sometimes. It's an encyclopedia. I don't think Britannica would use language quite so loaded either, you know?
Wikipedia's neutrality policy and its style isn't really just to have two sides on a matter write a paragraph of propaganda and hope it balances out. It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way. ("Planned Parenthood says this. The Catholic Church says that. Criticisms of the Catholic Church's position include X, Y, and Z, from organization J, K, and Q; for more information see the sub-article on this particular controversy so we don't detain the main article any further.") No one ever doubted that the one is a supporter and the other a detractor.
To take a page from Indiana Jones, it's about facts, not truth. If it's truth you're after, go study philosophy.
Neutral is identifying the men (or newspapers or whatever) who are stating the "facts", and stating that they are stating those facts, without stating that they're right. (The fight then becomes "whose opinions do we bother to list here, and whose are irrelevant?" and that's usually quite a bit less controversial. not controversy-free, but less controversial.)
Problem is, it's not. It's only about a 99.9% sure-fire way, give or take.:S
Re:H1b visas and the job market
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You might be able to make a case with this in terms of basic unskilled labor. (I'd have to consult my personal labor economist before making an informed response.) But I don't really see how this works when we're talking about science. There's no steam-engine or robotic equivalent of the guy with a Ph.D. in molecular biology, at least that I'm aware of. And I don't think supercomputer-clusters really come close, either.
The whole idea of research and science is scientific development. The idea that artificially raising the price of scientific development itself is somehow beneficial to scientific development seems silly, unless you're saying it will encourage us to develop scientific development itself (and I'd have to question whether there's even enough capacity to develop the efficacy of "science" to make up for the loss, and if so over what time frame.)
Re:H1b visas and the job market
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
The thing is, the alternative to bringing smart sciency H1-B types into the country to work on research isn't just "hiring Americans to do the same jobs for more money".... the alternative generally involves more research operations going on overseas, where it's eeeven cheaper, and probably subject to fewer taxes.
There's not really much you can do to stop it. We need to face the fact that people exist in countries outside the US and are perfectly willing to compete with Americans, and immigration controls in particular are a pretty lousy tool to prop up the wages of American scientists. (Trade controls, if you could do them right, miiight be a little more effective... but they have their own side-effects, and they matter less and less as other countries emerge on the world economic scene.)
While your point about marketing it as a toy being irresponsible and dangerous is a valid point, I think that saying a responsible company wouldn't sell one of these at all is taking it a bit too far. There are plenty of potential commercial and industrial applications which could benefit from a one-watt laser (people here are talking about putting it in a plotter and using it for some sort of etching). As for the regulations, they already exist. You need things like warning labels and a removable safety key. Regulations can only do so much to save us from ourselves, you know?
The idea that my grandmother's data is on her own equipment that she has no idea how to operate and is at risk of becoming a spambot-zombie isn't all that interesting to me either.
Also, are we talking about enterprise cloud or consumer cloud with this article?
Well, some people claim that they care about Environmental Issues and that this (Gulf) oil spill is the epitome of man's destruction of all that is good in the world blah blah et cetera. The outrage when it's in Nigeria, though, is strikingly muted. This demonstrates, again, how it's really the freakishly skewed perceptions of people playing politics that drive "environmentalism" as it is currently practiced, and it doesn't have much of anything to do with the real environment.
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The line-counting tool works off the letter counts, and (among other things) observed that a discussion of the Golden Mean in one work took place 61.7% of the way through one work (the mean itself being .618033989). How convenient.
If that were the case, I'd expect to see $omg_lawsuit hullabaloo against the guy who "leaked" this before the week's end. :b
The scary part is when you read, TRY OUR "HOT DOGS".
How long until someone exploits this? Well, I bet Google or some other vendor will try to sell it as part of an offering for businesses within the next 2 years. Remote software installs would be very useful in the enterprise.
That is a flying car. This is just an airplane that you can drive home to your garage so you don't have to pay exorbitant hangar fees.
"Real (artists|musicians) have a day job."
Maybe they should, and maybe they shouldn't, but my understanding was that the "flash crash" problem wasn't really caused by high-frequency trading per se. It was caused because everyone was panicky about Europe and Greece's debt, and the market was falling, and people turned off computerized HFT systems, and no one had enough reasonable offers up on Proctor and Gamble stock, so when someone said "sell a bunch of my P&G now!" the exchange sold it to a bum on the street corner for a nickel (metaphorically) since that was the only offer around. And then people were like "oh no! major stock price drop!" and it went from there.
Old way: You give your cow to a servant to take it down to the market to sell it, and there's a bunch of people there who are willing to give him a fair price. Flash crash way: You tell the servant to take your cow down to to the market and sell it, but everyone's really busy and a little skittish, and since you told him to sell it now he sells it to a bum on the street corner for a nickel, then everyone panics: "the price of cows has fallen to a nickel! woe and ruin!" until some people wise up and realize they can buy cows on the cheap, and do so.
Market orders. Go figure.
Yes yes! My geothermal plant design involves burrowing down through the core of the earth and out the other side to the center of the Sun, where it's always warm. I'm currently awaiting a grant to conduct further study, and with luck we can break ground by 2009.
What? Pay people more? Unthinkable.
The dollar's current valuation? Compared to what, the krona? Euros? Pounds sterling? Canadian dollars? Yen?
Maybe it should surprise you..... I mean, if you're in Australia you have an excuse...
Yeah? And to what effect? Nothing overly substantial, really. Certainly nothing which would shake the foundations of the policy or anything. :b
See? Not hard. Perhaps it's not as good at galvanizing people into righteous outrage as the phrase "brutally murdered" but that's just the price you pay sometimes. It's an encyclopedia. I don't think Britannica would use language quite so loaded either, you know?
I'll save you a click: For Neutral Point of View on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:NPOV.
Wikipedia's neutrality policy and its style isn't really just to have two sides on a matter write a paragraph of propaganda and hope it balances out. It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way. ("Planned Parenthood says this. The Catholic Church says that. Criticisms of the Catholic Church's position include X, Y, and Z, from organization J, K, and Q; for more information see the sub-article on this particular controversy so we don't detain the main article any further.") No one ever doubted that the one is a supporter and the other a detractor.
To take a page from Indiana Jones, it's about facts, not truth. If it's truth you're after, go study philosophy.
Neutral is identifying the men (or newspapers or whatever) who are stating the "facts", and stating that they are stating those facts, without stating that they're right. (The fight then becomes "whose opinions do we bother to list here, and whose are irrelevant?" and that's usually quite a bit less controversial. not controversy-free, but less controversial.)
Problem is, it's not. It's only about a 99.9% sure-fire way, give or take. :S
You might be able to make a case with this in terms of basic unskilled labor. (I'd have to consult my personal labor economist before making an informed response.) But I don't really see how this works when we're talking about science. There's no steam-engine or robotic equivalent of the guy with a Ph.D. in molecular biology, at least that I'm aware of. And I don't think supercomputer-clusters really come close, either.
The whole idea of research and science is scientific development. The idea that artificially raising the price of scientific development itself is somehow beneficial to scientific development seems silly, unless you're saying it will encourage us to develop scientific development itself (and I'd have to question whether there's even enough capacity to develop the efficacy of "science" to make up for the loss, and if so over what time frame.)
The thing is, the alternative to bringing smart sciency H1-B types into the country to work on research isn't just "hiring Americans to do the same jobs for more money".... the alternative generally involves more research operations going on overseas, where it's eeeven cheaper, and probably subject to fewer taxes.
There's not really much you can do to stop it. We need to face the fact that people exist in countries outside the US and are perfectly willing to compete with Americans, and immigration controls in particular are a pretty lousy tool to prop up the wages of American scientists. (Trade controls, if you could do them right, miiight be a little more effective... but they have their own side-effects, and they matter less and less as other countries emerge on the world economic scene.)
While your point about marketing it as a toy being irresponsible and dangerous is a valid point, I think that saying a responsible company wouldn't sell one of these at all is taking it a bit too far. There are plenty of potential commercial and industrial applications which could benefit from a one-watt laser (people here are talking about putting it in a plotter and using it for some sort of etching). As for the regulations, they already exist. You need things like warning labels and a removable safety key. Regulations can only do so much to save us from ourselves, you know?
GIMP has undo + redo functions; they're pretty easy to find. What it's missing are straightforward straight-line and square/rectangle/circle tools.
The idea that my grandmother's data is on her own equipment that she has no idea how to operate and is at risk of becoming a spambot-zombie isn't all that interesting to me either.
Also, are we talking about enterprise cloud or consumer cloud with this article?
"wreaks" just means to inflict. Most people don't wreak anything but havoc these days.
Well, some people claim that they care about Environmental Issues and that this (Gulf) oil spill is the epitome of man's destruction of all that is good in the world blah blah et cetera. The outrage when it's in Nigeria, though, is strikingly muted. This demonstrates, again, how it's really the freakishly skewed perceptions of people playing politics that drive "environmentalism" as it is currently practiced, and it doesn't have much of anything to do with the real environment.
Behold: reader Freddled.