I wish we would back a design like Skylon. Now that would be something to get really excited about and it would fill even the general population with a sense of awe to inspire a whole new generation of space exploration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon
Nice looking bird. Trading off very high specs at transition altitude shows a design philosophy has been well thought out. But that motor is a complexity nightmare http://www.astronautix.com/engines/sabre.htm . Great idea with too many details. Great Idea: Manipulating the motor cowling into the pressure wave at Mach 2 to transition from necessary cowling drag reduction to pressure feeding the intake. Complexification: Inserting a Brayton cycle power loop for heat exchange between air and fuel in order to reduce fuel flow. A lot of machinery with finicky operating parameters just to perform a simple function. There's got to be easier ways.
Of course Forbes is known as a health care consumer advocate, not a source of data useful for strategic and tactical planning by corporations. Therefore they've put this article together so that we, the consumers, will seek the best possible care by consenting to the genetic testing offered, allowing them to select the best drugs for us rather than waste our time with less effective ones. There's no way any of those health care sources could misuse such information because the law forbids it, so when they start ranking their drugs as to efficacy in various genotypes, they'll make it entirely our decision whether to pay for the best our insurance will allow us to have using shot in the dark medical treatment which would be considered experimentation on human subjects if it weren't so ingrained in our minds as acceptable medicine, or whether to request the genetic testing they make available as a service so they can help us select the most effective drug for us, something the insurance companies will be sure to support. And when the insurance companies decide it's time to raise the malpractice insurance rates again, those doctors who support genetic testing and use it to select medications will find that their policies will cost less if they take the precaution of testing their patients first rather than play Pharma roulette with their treatment.
Very, very few drugs do or can react differently enough according to the genetics to make it worth taking the trouble. But since a very few do, many will get tested. Whether or not there is a practical difference, a statistical difference can be forced making it seem as if more and more drugs can be dispensed according to this tactic. During the coming lobbyist/marketoid paroxysm of profit seeking wearing the Easter Bunny suit of consumer advocacy they enjoy so much, we will be bombarded with advertising (and the medical community with far more) showing us how this is all benefit to us, and care & concern on their part. Afterwards there will be genetics rankings on myriad products, and more and more treatment decisions will be based on these. There will be adequate statistical (as opposed to real) evidence supporting the use.
It will come from providers, and it will be our decision to accept it. They fully expect us to despite the fact this has been outlawed as long as it's their decision. There can be no huge FDA backlash because making them do an entire clinical series on the genetic aspect also will make drugs take even longer than the present too many years to get to market and cost yet another digit of price when they do. And when it is said and done, all medicine (after the gigantic increases in a few areas get smoothed out by filtering them through the industry) and treatment will cost more. How much more?
Enough to make up for what they'll lose in the coming health care 'reform' if they don't. This is, in effect, the health care industry acknowledging they lost the first battle in the war. They tried to say that prices and premiums would go up for the insured if this reform went through; they were called down on it since they are the one who set prices, making their statements essentially threats. That marketoid scheme backfired and cost them the battle. Now they're firing over our bow a tactic with which they can discredit as contrary to their stated purpose of saving consumer's money anyone who tries to stand between them and consumers, thereby forcing the appearance (at first) of alliance between them and consumers, stealing consumer hearts and minds back from the consumer advocacy groups and the few government officials that actually were trying to change things for the better. Once they're recaptured, re-enslaved and re-addicted enough consumers they can set this alternative plan in motion, and let the 'reform' go through. The alternative will allow them to make even greater profits within this new structure, polish their tarnished images in the public eye, forge new and reforge damaged bonds between themselves and key government agencies and
Why is NASA so bent on using the solid-fuel boosters, when the military already has the much cheaper Delta iV Heavy and Atlas V rockets that have been proven?
The military doesn't 'have' those boosters. They buy those boosters from Douglas and Lockheed Martin respectively, as NASA could (and has for other programs). The distinction is minor, but the accusations and criticisms continually leveled often hang on this too often repeated error that started out as an intentional misdirection by critics with no cleaner agenda than what NASA and Morton Thiokol are credited with having.
Similarly the answer to 'why' is a matter of public record, as the entire process was publicly announced and conducted. If the news media is to cumbersome to sift through, very even handed summaries are available at http://www.astronautix.com/
Or am I a 'hater' because I a a little sceptic about this project of NASA because you cannot understand discourse? Personally, I am much more impressed with SpaceX and Armadillo, who seem to come up with nice projects for much less money. Wasn't there a new SpaceX big rocket on the launchpad soon?
I'm much more impressed with the others also. However, Ares was never intended to be a 'new' vehicle. It was NASA's own call for proposals that specified the designs for the new vehicle be based as much as possible on existing designs and preferably existing hardware. When von Braun did this with Redstones and came up with the Saturn 1 booster he was called a genius and everyone remembers him for it. When NASA proposed and got a repeat based on shuttle parts everyone's critical and if they were ever aware of the fact this was a redesign project from the start, they apparently can't remember.
As a demonstration of US technical prowess, Ares I is pathetic; its got similar capabilities to Saturn I and took much longer to develop. It anything its a demonstration of US decline...
Since you are comparing launch vehicles rather than stage 1 boosters, I'll take it you mean Saturn C-1 which had the Saturn 1 first stage. It was the first of the Saturn family to fly. For comparison purposes we'll use that vs. the Ares 1-X CLV presently sitting on Pad 39B
Capabilities: Saturn C-1: 19,800 lbs to LEO Ares: 54,000 lbs to LEO
Development (proposal to first launch) Saturn: 'Proposal for a National Integrated Missile and Space Vehicle Development Plan'; Werner von Braun 30 DEC 1957, to 27 OCT 1961 = ~46 months Ares CLV: Initial design proposed September 2005 to (not yet flown but on pad 4 days ahead of schedule and awaiting a clear launch window) now = ~49 months
The 6.5% longer Ares development time is insignificant considering the August 2006 redesign from proven 4 segment SRB booster + shuttle main engine sustainer to untried 5 segment SRB derivative + J-2S sustainer. The C1 didn't change significantly during development from the originally proposed cluster of Redstone airframes/tanks and engines.
As an aside, if the parent was posted with prior knowledge of these facts, the post itself the being purposefully false with the intent to instigate otherwise unnecessary replies, it would be a 'troll'. If the parent was posted in ignorance of the facts but simply intended to initiate arguments, it would be 'flamebait'. Intentionally or not, parent is quite the opposite of 'informative'. Sadly we do not have a '-1 misinformative' mod.
I'll not speculate on your intentions or on your possible state of ignorance/intellectual impairment, as time will produce a result more definitive than my mere opinion. I will note that like both the dummy payload carrying Saturn C1 and Ares 1-X, you appear to be capable of accomplishing little more than blowing a lot of smoke out of your ass.
1. Go to Babes(or Dudes)OnCam. 2. Open a webcam window 3. Open a second instance of the same webcam 4. Size the the same and place them side by side. 5. Look at them cross eyed until you get a far more interesting pseudo-3D VR than some street view of someplace, without goggles, Googles, immersion, or Androids. 6. Or go blind. 7. Just kidding, that can't happen. 8. No, they won't get stuck either. 9. Mine? They've always been like this. 10. They have so. Really. 11. Wait, androids? That would be SOOOOO..... 12. What? oh. those. Nevermind.
In the beginning was Void. And a hand moved upon the face of the system monitor, writing
* 3D0G
and the command thus passed from monitor to Basic, and lo, the prompt was
]
And St. Woz saw this, and was pleased. The Fallen One, the Other Steve, was not so pleased, and what's new? But he hacketh not, so we careth not.
We are now (2009) exactly halfway between the Creation Event (1979) and the end of the Apple Calendar (2039) as has always been displayed upon my sacred terminal of IIgs and II's before it. As it is written, so let it be refreshed.
Scoff not, young ones, for what sort of entity might require you summon him with the command 3D0G, which is very nearly G0DS backwards? And why backwards if not for him to be able to read it from The Other Side?
The smugly self-satisfied refutations that sound just different enough to prove they're not just copying each other but should have been paying enough attention to each other so that their sheer numbers didn't make it look so much like they cared or at least coveted the loonies' public spotlight, now outnumber the loonies paying enough attention to smugly copying each other in the public spotlight so their stories differ just enough so that there is no single satisfactory refutation from which to sheer some coveted attention.
As for the Maya people, I'll bet most of the 7 million of them fully expect to still be here in 2013. I suspect of the few that even notice the scuedopsientific jircle cerk going on around them, at least a few secretly hope "their" predictions come true for much of the rest of us. Even though there are none. Predictions, that is, not Maya. There's a passle of them. Maya, not predictions.
There is a difference between something that is "highly" significant and something that is "barely" significant or "almost" significant.
The p-value is a measure of the probability that the result could be obtained by chance. Taking the conventional threshold (p=0.05) for significance, you might well say that a result where p=0.05 is "barely" significant, p=0.06 is "almost" significant and p=0.000000001 is "highly" significant.
Your comments re: multiple comparison are right on and so not quoted. I'm re-taking issue with the significance.
There most certainly is NOT any "highly", "barely" etc. significance. In your examples, 0.06 and 0.000000001 ARE the significance. They are exactly (more accurately they are less than or equal to) that number. You are comparing them to 0.05, having been told that it is the acceptable significance level. That is wrong as a football bat. There is absolutely nothing in statistics that says 0.05 is a limit of any decision making. That decision should come from the design and the data. Despite this complete lack in the field of statistics, we have psychology colleagues running around spouting and respouting this as if that will make it so. Question them as to why. If they understand statistics they will explain stuff like methodology vs. tradition and admit I'm right. If they don't, they will not explain anything, but will rather reword and repeat what they said, and start to get defensive. The only thing they can assert is that they choose to consider 0.05 acceptable a priori. They can then say a p value obtained is either greater than or less their arbitrary cut off point.
One of the coolest things about getting a doctorate is being given the ability to tell your teachers they're wrong, though you'd better be able to prove it. I took issue with this 'significance" thing, with the procedure of doing EEG analysis by first comparing hemispheres, then major lobes, etc. in a very ritual of baseless computation; and finally with how many samples should be required to do evoked potential analysis.
As to the first, my source was the statistics professor who teaches all graduate psych stats for us. He explained it as I have, but better and with real examples and numbers. For the other two I was given references. I looked them up. They said nothing like what I was told. In fact they both said essentially that a researcher should know what they're doing and why, should explain clearly what they're doing and why. They (one considered to be the department's in house stats expert) had been quoting each other since studentship and never once questioned what they were doing much less researched it and read the very works they "knew" by heart.
If 0.05 were "acceptable", and of course mediated with correction factors if necessary, the entire body of fMRI research would fall to pieces. The analysis technique, SPM (statistical probability mapping) uses p values as the scores used to say whether a voxel shows "activiation" and how much. Due to tens of thousands of comparisons, the correction factors are enormous, the raw 'acceptable' p value for each having 6 to 20 digits. One must balance alpha and beta errors and adjustable correction factors in order to get a reasonable looking result. Despite being confronted with proof that significance is a matter of design and data, not something a priori, many psychology people set aside their beliefs to get an fMRI pub out, then pick them back up later.
Science can be used to tell what's happening, how it's happening and sometimes why it happens. But that's investigations into nature. The researcher should be able to prove they know what they're talking about by telling why they are doing something. Not to do so is to admit they don;t know why, only what and how, and have no way to know whether those techniques are right, or waving dead chickens.
Given how often my colleagues will insist that continuous spatiotemporal transloction of gallus based design correction factor applicators are necessary, and will simply repeat this when asked why this is so, it is little wonder that people that know why they do what they do look a little sideways at psychology. The "modifier" significance issue is one of the top sideways looks.
Whether ignoring it or ignorant of it, the present research is not "another step towards 'rewiring' the brains and limbs of paralyzed patients", it's a step back from that very use.
Christopher Reeve credited FES with helping to regain what function and sensation he did.
Thew earliest use I know of was the case presented on 60 Minutes where a paralyzed woman had EMG signals produced by a bicycle-like device that would have been called FES had it had a name that long ago. These were recorded and later played back amplified into her muscles to artificially produce walking. She told Dan Rather than she would walk again within a year, and would walk down the aisle to get married. He reported on CBS Evening News only a month later that she had done exactly that. This was probably around 30 years ago because the stimulation/recording/playback was controlled by a shiny new Apple II computer.
Less than half the population of the planet has ready access to electricity, phones, adequate nutrition, clean water, and health care. That's due to developing nations having far more inadequacies per capita than developed.
You're not wrong as in incorrect, you're wrong as in assuming your priorities matter to the people in those countries, because they can't eat bandwidth.
And that other call things like behavioral persistance, behavioral momentum, priming, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, etc. He can call it whatever he wants, but that's not going to make the concept his.
"Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
Those are correlations, the magnitude and direction of co-variance of two measures. These are positive so they vary the same directions. Correlations, are often done using Pearson's technique and are then given the variable little r. A handy but of work with r is the ability to tell at a glance just how much of the observed variance can be explained by the scores. To do so, simply square them. So the amount of variance explained in these tests are 0.11 to 0.27 (11% to 27%). That means from 73% to 89% of the observed variance is unexplained. In practical terms, that's poor. I know in psychology we tend to accept such low r's as meaningful, but we're about the only ones.
As to "significance": there is no such thing as "highly" (or any other modifier) significant. The significance score, using the variable little p, is what it is, whether you have a program tell you it's equal to or less than a number calculated from the data, or you calculate it and find it to be less than some arbitrary cut off value. If p 0.001 or if p = 0.9, that is the significance level. You can't use the modifiers because significance depends on things like the number of subjects and/or samples, score variance, multiple comparisons between scores, etc. The significance changes. Even with the same data set, if you calculate a second result, you're doing a second comparison which requires a correction factor and that changes p. What significance means in one data set (how many times Mary punches the Bobo doll after watching Homer choke Bart) has nothing to do with another (how many meters depth on average the Earth's surface would be sterilized by all US vs. all Russian thermonuclear weapons), so some dangling, arbitrary "much much MUCH so" means even less, being of zero import but incorrectly suggesting there is.
So those (.33 to.52) are the r values, In calculating them p was also. It should have been reported. I have no idea of the author ever did or not because the references here consist of two blog posts about the guy's work and one about a book on this subject, and zero that I see on peer reviewed journal articles. Now, I'll be the first to tell you that last bit doesn't count for near what people think, but at least they see to it the formulae are followed, one being proper (as in APA format) quoting of statistics. I might have looked up an article to see if the author gets it right, but I'm not about to read a book by someone who either ignores or is ignorant of the fact that the concept he's examining has already been, in much greater depth and clarity than what's given here.
It's what now, 3 or 4 times a year we hear this same story? If there were something we really didn't want them to have, and I'm sure there's plenty, we'd put it where they couldn't get to it, ie. not networked/online.
Face it, they're the main supplier for the myriad crap consumables and durable goods we pick up the the People's Republic of Walmart. At the pries they're getting they can't afford to buy these 'secrets' and still come up to par with us. If we charged them, their businesses would never get the chance to take over the country, so we could buy them out and control them financially, like we did with Russia.
If we really wanted them to stop, they'd 'find' things that's scare the bamboo curtain back down.
I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work.
This is interesting, but have you validated this method of analysis by applying it to works of known authorship, say on fanfic sites or alt.politics newsgroups, which would be reasonable control sources--unedited outpourings of interested amateurs? That would tell you that works of the same author don't get flagged as different simply due to your reading-level split.
Ideally I'd like to see a p-value for your claim that "the work was written by at least two people" against the null hypothesis "only one person wrote the work". Without a p-value you really aren't saying anything. Presumably the plagiarism detection software produces a probability of works being by the same author. What you need to do is apply your reading-level split to a bunch of works and generate a distribution (histogram) of the probabilities that the two parts of each work are from different authors. Then ask the question: what are the odds that the probability I get from applying this analysis of Kaczynski was drawn from this distribution? That is your p-value. If it is very small, it is implausible that Kaczynski's work was written by one author.
There are still problems with your approach, but doing this would bring you into the realm of discourse where people could argue about your method, but not dispute the objectivity of your result given your assumptions.
Excellent points. In fact it was tested by and on members of several newsgroups, Fidonet echoes, and various members and sources of a university journalism class. The test barrage that resulted was used regularly to perform verbal forensics against some classic usenet trolls. Check usenet history for S.P.(U.T.U.)M.
A null hypothesis would be simply 'unable to support alternative hypothesis(-es)'. Saying it was shown to be one person would require support for an alternative hypothesis in the form of a correlation with acceptable power (alpha and beta levels for the sample size, etc.) or would be overstating a less than sufficiently supported test of differentiation.
Statistical testing would, I assume, be handled by the plagiarism software. Previously it was done as t tests on competing manifestations within the text. There was a negative correlation between linguistic and conceptual complexity. One expect a positive correlation, both dropping with increased affective component.
Still, statistical testing could still be done without the new software using a varimax rotation to differentiate the sections.
And a p value would indeed have been useful. Both FBI and independent investigators examined the work and his other writings, and while some concluded the were written by the same person, these two paragraphs appear in the search and arrest warrant:
204. Your affiant is aware that other individuals have conducted analyses of the UNABOM Manuscript __ determined that the Manuscript was written by another individual, not Kaczynski, who had also been a suspect in the investigation.
205. Numerous other opinions from experts have been provided as to the identity of the unabomb subject. None of those opinions named Theodore Kaczynski as a possible author.
Neither side attempted to make the case that although Kaczynski undoubtedly wrote some of it, a different person contributed other parts. The hypothesis here was developed based on the assumption that the FBI inserted some material. The reason it was developed is because Ted's brother had contributed other pieces of his writing for analysis to the FBI, and despite having been assured he'd remain anonymous, was outed by an internal FBI leak. The assumption was that this was done to try to pin the additional material on David's contributions if anyone became suspicious, so nobody would conclude the material was developed in house to bolster the case against Ted.
That's all there is to it. Age, searching, internet, none of that is relevant other than being conditions under which it can happen. Identical results can be had with kids doing stem completion tasks (E A _ _ _ = E A R T H), college students doing a Stroop task (words naming colors, in that color or a different one), and any brain you can get to sit still and problem solve while stuck inside a tube with horrible noises going on.
TFA is a prime example of someone doing a far too specific test on a general principle and either thinking or pretending to have discovered something. I'm going to go with "pretending" since the new results after practice were seen in the middle and interior frontal gyri, and he claims these results are due to two specific processing tasks, but neglects to mention that the two regions make up more than half the frontal lobes in which there are obviously a great number of things going on, many of which would be occurring during the task, their design is completely incapable of telling the difference between excitatory and inhibitory activation, and there is no word on whether the 'enhanced' neural activity correlated with improved ability to search and/or answer relevant questions, without which one could just as easily make a case that the increased activation was a sign of boredom for having to do the same damn stuff again that they've been doing the past two weeks at home.
Someone needs to do a study and see whether asking hard questions about this stuff of researchers giving talks on it when they clearly don't know enough about what they're doing makes their brains light up in the right places, because if you make people think, their brain works harder. Wouldn't have happened here, because they wouldn't have been forced to answer the questions -- this was just a poster. Anyone can get any poster into one of these conferences as long as it says fMRI on it.
Split the work into 2 parts, one with paragraph reading level ratings greater than the overall score, one with the scores less than overall.
Apply plagiarism testing software to compare these two halves and see whether it says they were written by the same or by different persons.
Before the creation of plagiarism testing software, we still had several different reading level testing programs available. I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work. Ted Kaczynski was never considered to have Multiple Personality Disorder, so if the results (still) say two people wrote it, each with their own style, then it's highly unlikely Kaczynski wrote it by himself.
(pun unintended, and frankly not very funny, so forget it; same for that pun)
1. The magazine h+ senior editor is RU Sirius. It is MONDO 2000, +20. Sirius is still Sirius, and seems to have foregone the +20 himself. He's actually no slouch, so when he senior-editorizes a magazine full of pseudoscience crap when he could have done better or at least different, I feel he's earned the right to the criticism rather than the fiction writers working as science article journalists. They start stupid, work stupid and produce stupid. He approves it for publication.
2. Other articles in the magazine are equally absurd. Some make claims about specific phenomena or theories which are anywhere from fraudulent to simply goofy. I took one such article, claiming that depression is lack of "fun" to task over at The Daily Grail. The article is just bullshit in its best parts. There's worse.
3. Using neurons in this design is enormously overly complex. There was an article in SciAm in which little battery powered cars were given photo-cells or photo-resistive cells as "eyes", those driving the back wheels on the same side, or on the other side, making 4 different designs that react to light. They approach fast and slow down, or slowly at first then rush in, or they zoom away and orbit the edges slowly or else creep away and at the outer area zoom around. The anthromorphization of their actions is multiplied when many of each 'species' are placed on th same floor with protruding light bulbs at several locations. It's not that the neurons don;t do the job, it's just that they're a computational device based far beyond the need, and that non-computational, analog increasing/decreasing voltage circuits do much more for much less.
4. Given the falsification of a different h+ article of equally strong claims, I serious(!)ly doubt the existence of the items in TFA. In fact I wouldn't believe anything I read in this magazine, if for no other reason than that the New Agey products in the ads are, while absurd themselves, more believable than the articles.
If 1/3 said the lower rate sounded better, they were probably guessing, because neither sounded better but they were in a forced choice situation. That being so, it's likely that as many people were guessing when they "chose" the 160k. Thus, it is most likely that 1/3 of the people, or less, could tell the difference.
And chances are if you played the samples back using desktop compact speakers or made them listen on ear buds, that last third would disappear as the guessers took over, half of them right, half of them wrong, and nobody hearing a bit of difference.
The main difference is in the very high frequency clipping, an effect noted by the audiophile crowd when CDs were first being introduced. It was proven then that the technology (which is essentially unchanged now) caused a high frequency noise which whether embedded in the music or removed and play by itself, grated on the nerves, made people cranky and made the listening less pleasant.
Why is everybody acting within their rights given by law an assault? Has WA legalized assault? Be careful what you wish for and twice for what you accuse.
From the very first codification of law, that of Hammurabi, marriage has been specified as a contract between two people. Nobody can block that on moral grounds and they'd be hard pressed to nullify a contract of partnership onany grounds without having the business community up in arms. The ceremonies are only that; next time, I'm jumping a broom.
The license is not a license to get married/contracted/etc., it's a tax stamp. It is the Fuck Tax. Nothing prevents you from fucking, but they want to tax it, same as nothing prevents you from parking your car in your driveway in Virginia, but you have to have your parking sticker up to date or you can get a parking ticket. They'll tax anything that lots of people want or what to do. Fuck the Fuck Tax. Paying a tax doesn't make a marriage "legal", it makes it paid up. A legal marriage is a binding contract of partnership between two people with possessions.
I am not a lawyer. But I can and have "legally" performed that ceremony for people, "legal" or not, "Fuck Tax" or none, and had to examine the relevant laws. By the way, you want to know how to qualify to "legally" marry people? Say so. The government has no right (they've specifically divorced themselevs from the ability) to dictate, determine or oversee who is and is not "qualified".
First, I am sick to death from seeing people try to claim some watered down form of a mental condition that excuses excessive behaviors they mostly wish they had and makes them seem special without having to put much efforts towards it or even understanding much about it. Understand this about autism/Aspergers and pretty much any state considered disordered as compared to the general population: meeting a diagnostic criteria includes having some persistent behavioral anomalies. Having some of the same persistent behavioral anomalies does not qualify one for the diagnosis. Very few of any who actually earn the diagnosis are capable of anything productive. And if one were to go with the behavioral criteria, the vast majority would earn themselves a far less appealing diagnosis or three, and which point they'd rebel against the process and disclaim any association with any disorder.
Now, we have in fact looked at 'weird' in psychology, but mostly as to what people think it is, rather than an objective state. I've looked at what kinds of people get that label and how. Programmers, or geeks/nerds in the technical literature, earn that label -- literally. They tend to start out more similar than most, and develop a specific quirk or three in order to exert individuality. They themselves keep each other within boundries of weirdness by approving or disapproving of others quirks, as often as not in how they're expressed rather than pure content. The effect is one of most people taking on the task of marking themselves an individual by developing an unusual, hopefully unique set of markings for their clothing. They appear to ignore the fact that the piece of clothing is a jacket collar. They appear to be unable to recognize that the collar is always on a Nehru jacket.
The defining word is "affectation". The evidence is in the desperation with which the concept is held and in how vehemently it is denied. A close analogy can be drawn with those who have strong anti-authoritarian rebelliousness early in life. It is not that they are anti-authoritarian, but rather than they are overly sensitive to it and dislike the fact that early in their life they are near the bottom of the ladder. They frequently end up at the other extreme. Likewise, the chronically similar act to differentiate themselves as soon as their situation allows, but only within a limited way, the rest remaining a recognizable part of the fairly closed group for which similarity of some sort remains more a badge than the differences. These too tend to evolve to the opposite end of the spectrum, common end states being either comparing swag t-shirts from conferences, or comparing their ties, the only major item of difference they would ever consider sporting having bought into management.
You may now feel free to mod me down as troll or flamebait just because I've answered the question with my own considered opinion which will no doubt prove unpopular. Refer back to "vehemence".
"Please wear this ribbon on your planetary system in order to help us raise awareness. Awareness is such a precious commodity in galaxies of all colors, shapes and sizes, that we feel it only proper to honor the awareness that is within us all by taking this opportunity to mark those systems with nascent awarenesses with a ribbon. Hopefully by comparing our pre-aware planetary systems we can come to appreciate our own awareness and the source of that awareness, whatever form you may believe that it takes. Remember, it takes a spiral arm to raise a planetary system. Thank you again for raising awareness with this ribbon."
The author states he tried to get the publisher to allow free reproduction of electronic copies. This indicates that he signed over his rights of electronic reproduction (e-rights) to them, and is aware he did so. He may retain ownership over the text, but he has signed over the right to reproduce it in this form.
This has been standard practice in publishing for some time. Unless one is big enough to dictate one's own contracts, one ends up signing a contract with things in it favorable to the publisher in ways that aren't clear at first. The problem here came to light for me in the early days of the SFWA exploring piracy, e-rights and such. While some said that publishers were simply getting the authors to sign over rights just in case the publisher could figure out how to make money at it, some claimed a more sinister intent. They said that the publisher's were asking for exclusive (temporary or not) e-rights, so that if they encountered cases of the text being pirated in this form, it fell to the author to prevent other release in this form and so guarantee the exclusivity offered to the publisher in the contract. In this way the publisher avoided having to pursue, requiring the author to do so. If the author did not, it was tacit permission given to the pirate to reproduce a form covered in the contract.
Avoiding having to pursue was not the worst accusation. It was also claimed that the way the contracts were written, if the author did not act to protect his work against infringenment and so protect the rights he signed over to the publisher, the publisher could void the contract and require return of advance, royalties, etc., and if not forthcoming could appropriate the rights to the work.
Now, could have and would have aside, I know of no cases where it occurred. But the possibility was enough to be at least part of the reason Harlan Ellison chose to pursue some pirates, AOL, and RemarQ. (No, he didn't need to, he was making a point on behalf of others who couldn't afford this). And even if this has never occurred previously, if the present author's contract is written to give e-rights to the publisher and he not only doesn't pursue but allows or encourages electronic piracy, he'll be liable and could end up losing far more than potential sales.
e-rights are of little value in most cases except as leverage such as this. If nobody said or did anything publicly, probably nobody would have cared. But to publicly encourage others to violate rights he signed over could bring it all back down on him as well as cause other publishers who've lightened up on the whole subject to clamp back down.
DNA looks like a rubik's cube made out of colored spaghetti.
I was reading all the responses to see if just this one comment got made. It's an excellent starting point to describe the function of the structure.
Both are designed so components can be far apart at one time, and after a manipulation (or X of them) are adjacent (or have some specific spatial relationship). Both require the manipulations follow a set of rules based on the structure. Most people know how the cube works, with its central rotating axis.
Imagine first that instead of that amazing little widget, collections of cube components were allowed to slide between other such collections and the central axis, IFF the one sliding under and the one being slid under matched. It complicates the familiar rules of the cube a bit but allows some much quicker solutions.
Once you grasp that, extend it by allowing the same sort of sliding-between to occur between outside surface and the set allowed to slide between from the first rule set change. And also one allowed to occur between that first slider-under and the central axis. Now you've got, going inside from the outside, the outside face components, a second generation set that slides under it, the first gen set, and the central axis.
This can be extended through as many iterations as necessary to get all the components to come into all the possible configurations. But is doesn't have to be because not all configurations are desired, only those that allow match-ups of specific components of interest. That constraint on the rules makes them less complex, which is good, but less flexible, which could be bad.
Except it's not bad, because although the entire structure is built (to reply here to the response just below) just like beads on a string, you are armed with (1) perfect knowledge of all the desired matches that are needed to occur as well as of (2) all the layers and pass-betweens needed in order to bring about all the desired configurations. Furthermore, you are (3) being allowed to preload the beads on the string in any configuration in order to make the matching process, including intermediate steps, as efficient as possible.
To compare it back to the cube, it is as if you are going to be required to solve it, but you'll know that the starting state will be 'solved' as well as what subset of the rules will be used in the scrambling, meaning those are all you'll need to re-solve it.
As to why this comes out fractal: you have knowledge/control over the design in terms of matches that need to happen, all the slide-through rules allowed, and over the pre-loading of the beads to make a specific design as efficient as possible. You can set it up any way you need to in order to make the design process as well as the decoding process efficient, but once done it can't be changed. Since the structure is one of beads on a string the underlying configuration is linear. Because you can pick and choose the rules governing that linear structure in order to make it efficient, you are optimizing a set of interdependent rules. And because once set they can't be changed, you are developing an invariant rule set.
You have three invariant and interdependent linear rules. At each step of the solution/folding process, it can be describe as: X in terms of Y and Z Y in terms of X and Z Z in terms of X and Y simultaneously (ie. describing its state) The next step in folding/solving will proceed the same way, all three set up and carried out simultaneously. At each step between fully folded/scrambled and fully matched/solved, the structure can be describes as a state of being closer or farther from being properly folded/solved (ie. farther = more scrambled than, as opposed to X steps from), while keeping in mind that some intermediate steps required to produce the desired end result are actually farther from the desired state than the start state or other intermediate states.
There was also no theoretical reason for monopoles _to_ exist. If charge exists, and moving electric charges create magnetic fields, who do you _need_ magnetic charges? Making the equations "symmetrical" for both electric and magnetic charges does not make them any more elegant or powerful, any more than not having "negative mass" makes Newton's equations any less valid.
"Discrete units of net magnetic charge" may be a quantum effect of aligned, moving electrical charges. I still see no need for monopoles.
If you have an analysis of Maxwell that explains the quantization of electrical charge without requiring the magnetic equivalent, you should show it to people. Dirac couldn't do it, so if you have it'd be well received. Not only did Dirac's equations require them, he predicted the magnetic charge quanta to be 68.5 times the electrical charge quanta. Proving Dirac wrong would have enormous consequences, since the 1983 theory of electroweak unification required them to exist and have the predicted charge magnitude, and the W+, W- and Z(0) intermediate vector bosons it predicted (based on the theory that required monopoles) have been detected. Not only that, they have precisely the charge magnitude predicted by the theory based on the predicted magnetic charge magnitude. And if you can show where Dirac went wrong, you can also show where t'Hooft and Polyakov went wrong, since they independently not only showed that any such unification theory required them, but also came to the same prediction of magnitude of magnetic charge as Dirac. Three independent theoretical analyses that make specific predictions which have been tested and shown to be correct would seem to be a tough nut to crack. But if you can show where these were all wrong, it'd be worth a Nobel, just as Weinberg, Salam, and Glashow shared one for the electroweak unification predictions that testing had subsequently and apparently mistakenly supported with data. In fact, if you can point to where Dirac et al. were wrong, you could save a lot of people a lot of money, since the search for the Higgs boson is based on symmetry breaking that requires the monopoles to exist and have a specific charge. If you could just point out where Dirac went wrong, say on the page at http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Magnetic+monopoles then we can call CERN and tell them to recalibrate the LHC because they followed Dirac's mistake when they built it. Or should they just trash it? It must really be hosed if it's based on a theory that predicts things, some of which have been detected exactly where they were supposed to be.
Oh, and while you're taking a balanced equation and unbalancing it, the answer to your other question is on that page too. An electrical charge in motion creates a closed magnetic field, so a magnetic charge in motion creates a closed electrical field. You may feel free to not see a need for it either, but by now it should be clear why you don't see these things as necessary. This latter result would seem at second look to be dismissable since it predicts an essentially perpetual motion. However, the perpetual motion machine it describes is available for examination in every electron orbiting every nucleus. This closed electrical current has been detected at a classical scale as a persistent flow such as a superconducting current, in a normal resistive metal ring. This was announced in Science magazine a week ago and mentioned in http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/10/1338210
Actually it is understandable that some people don;t see the "need" for monopoles any more than they see the need for scalar waves. This is because it has become common to teach the essentials of Maxwell's equations by arbitrarily ignoring some aspects. this is done by setting some of the necessary variables to zero. While this allows one to examine the isolated na
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I wish we would back a design like Skylon. Now that would be something to get really excited about and it would fill even the general population with a sense of awe to inspire a whole new generation of space exploration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon
Nice looking bird. Trading off very high specs at transition altitude shows a design philosophy has been well thought out. But that motor is a complexity nightmare http://www.astronautix.com/engines/sabre.htm . Great idea with too many details. Great Idea: Manipulating the motor cowling into the pressure wave at Mach 2 to transition from necessary cowling drag reduction to pressure feeding the intake. Complexification: Inserting a Brayton cycle power loop for heat exchange between air and fuel in order to reduce fuel flow. A lot of machinery with finicky operating parameters just to perform a simple function. There's got to be easier ways.
Of course Forbes is known as a health care consumer advocate, not a source of data useful for strategic and tactical planning by corporations. Therefore they've put this article together so that we, the consumers, will seek the best possible care by consenting to the genetic testing offered, allowing them to select the best drugs for us rather than waste our time with less effective ones. There's no way any of those health care sources could misuse such information because the law forbids it, so when they start ranking their drugs as to efficacy in various genotypes, they'll make it entirely our decision whether to pay for the best our insurance will allow us to have using shot in the dark medical treatment which would be considered experimentation on human subjects if it weren't so ingrained in our minds as acceptable medicine, or whether to request the genetic testing they make available as a service so they can help us select the most effective drug for us, something the insurance companies will be sure to support. And when the insurance companies decide it's time to raise the malpractice insurance rates again, those doctors who support genetic testing and use it to select medications will find that their policies will cost less if they take the precaution of testing their patients first rather than play Pharma roulette with their treatment.
Very, very few drugs do or can react differently enough according to the genetics to make it worth taking the trouble. But since a very few do, many will get tested. Whether or not there is a practical difference, a statistical difference can be forced making it seem as if more and more drugs can be dispensed according to this tactic. During the coming lobbyist/marketoid paroxysm of profit seeking wearing the Easter Bunny suit of consumer advocacy they enjoy so much, we will be bombarded with advertising (and the medical community with far more) showing us how this is all benefit to us, and care & concern on their part. Afterwards there will be genetics rankings on myriad products, and more and more treatment decisions will be based on these. There will be adequate statistical (as opposed to real) evidence supporting the use.
It will come from providers, and it will be our decision to accept it. They fully expect us to despite the fact this has been outlawed as long as it's their decision. There can be no huge FDA backlash because making them do an entire clinical series on the genetic aspect also will make drugs take even longer than the present too many years to get to market and cost yet another digit of price when they do. And when it is said and done, all medicine (after the gigantic increases in a few areas get smoothed out by filtering them through the industry) and treatment will cost more. How much more?
Enough to make up for what they'll lose in the coming health care 'reform' if they don't. This is, in effect, the health care industry acknowledging they lost the first battle in the war. They tried to say that prices and premiums would go up for the insured if this reform went through; they were called down on it since they are the one who set prices, making their statements essentially threats. That marketoid scheme backfired and cost them the battle. Now they're firing over our bow a tactic with which they can discredit as contrary to their stated purpose of saving consumer's money anyone who tries to stand between them and consumers, thereby forcing the appearance (at first) of alliance between them and consumers, stealing consumer hearts and minds back from the consumer advocacy groups and the few government officials that actually were trying to change things for the better. Once they're recaptured, re-enslaved and re-addicted enough consumers they can set this alternative plan in motion, and let the 'reform' go through. The alternative will allow them to make even greater profits within this new structure, polish their tarnished images in the public eye, forge new and reforge damaged bonds between themselves and key government agencies and
Why is NASA so bent on using the solid-fuel boosters, when the military already has the much cheaper Delta iV Heavy and Atlas V rockets that have been proven?
The military doesn't 'have' those boosters. They buy those boosters from Douglas and Lockheed Martin respectively, as NASA could (and has for other programs). The distinction is minor, but the accusations and criticisms continually leveled often hang on this too often repeated error that started out as an intentional misdirection by critics with no cleaner agenda than what NASA and Morton Thiokol are credited with having.
Similarly the answer to 'why' is a matter of public record, as the entire process was publicly announced and conducted. If the news media is to cumbersome to sift through, very even handed summaries are available at http://www.astronautix.com/
[Accurate design observations not quoted]
Or am I a 'hater' because I a a little sceptic about this project of NASA because you cannot understand discourse? Personally, I am much more impressed with SpaceX and Armadillo, who seem to come up with nice projects for much less money. Wasn't there a new SpaceX big rocket on the launchpad soon?
I'm much more impressed with the others also. However, Ares was never intended to be a 'new' vehicle. It was NASA's own call for proposals that specified the designs for the new vehicle be based as much as possible on existing designs and preferably existing hardware. When von Braun did this with Redstones and came up with the Saturn 1 booster he was called a genius and everyone remembers him for it. When NASA proposed and got a repeat based on shuttle parts everyone's critical and if they were ever aware of the fact this was a redesign project from the start, they apparently can't remember.
As a demonstration of US technical prowess, Ares I is pathetic; its got similar capabilities to Saturn I and took much longer to develop. It anything its a demonstration of US decline...
Since you are comparing launch vehicles rather than stage 1 boosters, I'll take it you mean Saturn C-1 which had the Saturn 1 first stage. It was the first of the Saturn family to fly. For comparison purposes we'll use that vs. the Ares 1-X CLV presently sitting on Pad 39B
Capabilities:
Saturn C-1: 19,800 lbs to LEO
Ares: 54,000 lbs to LEO
Development (proposal to first launch)
Saturn: 'Proposal for a National Integrated Missile and Space Vehicle Development Plan'; Werner von Braun 30 DEC 1957, to 27 OCT 1961 = ~46 months
Ares CLV: Initial design proposed September 2005 to (not yet flown but on pad 4 days ahead of schedule and awaiting a clear launch window) now = ~49 months
The 6.5% longer Ares development time is insignificant considering the August 2006 redesign from proven 4 segment SRB booster + shuttle main engine sustainer to untried 5 segment
SRB derivative + J-2S sustainer. The C1 didn't change significantly during development from the originally proposed cluster of Redstone airframes/tanks and engines.
As an aside, if the parent was posted with prior knowledge of these facts, the post itself the being purposefully false with the intent to instigate otherwise unnecessary replies, it would be a 'troll'. If the parent was posted in ignorance of the facts but simply intended to initiate arguments, it would be 'flamebait'. Intentionally or not, parent is quite the opposite of 'informative'. Sadly we do not have a '-1 misinformative' mod.
I'll not speculate on your intentions or on your possible state of ignorance/intellectual impairment, as time will produce a result more definitive than my mere opinion. I will note that like both the dummy payload carrying Saturn C1 and Ares 1-X, you appear to be capable of accomplishing little more than blowing a lot of smoke out of your ass.
1. Go to Babes(or Dudes)OnCam.
2. Open a webcam window
3. Open a second instance of the same webcam
4. Size the the same and place them side by side.
5. Look at them cross eyed until you get a far more interesting pseudo-3D VR than some street view of someplace, without goggles, Googles, immersion, or Androids.
6. Or go blind.
7. Just kidding, that can't happen.
8. No, they won't get stuck either.
9. Mine? They've always been like this.
10. They have so. Really.
11. Wait, androids? That would be SOOOOO.....
12. What? oh. those. Nevermind.
In the beginning was Void. And a hand moved upon the face of the system monitor, writing
* 3D0G
and the command thus passed from monitor to Basic, and lo, the prompt was
]
And St. Woz saw this, and was pleased. The Fallen One, the Other Steve, was not so pleased, and what's new? But he hacketh not, so we careth not.
We are now (2009) exactly halfway between the Creation Event (1979) and the end of the Apple Calendar (2039) as has always been displayed upon my sacred terminal of IIgs and II's before it. As it is written, so let it be refreshed.
Scoff not, young ones, for what sort of entity might require you summon him with the command 3D0G, which is very nearly G0DS backwards? And why backwards if not for him to be able to read it from The Other Side?
The smugly self-satisfied refutations that sound just different enough to prove they're not just copying each other but should have been paying enough attention to each other so that their sheer numbers didn't make it look so much like they cared or at least coveted the loonies' public spotlight, now outnumber the loonies paying enough attention to smugly copying each other in the public spotlight so their stories differ just enough so that there is no single satisfactory refutation from which to sheer some coveted attention.
As for the Maya people, I'll bet most of the 7 million of them fully expect to still be here in 2013. I suspect of the few that even notice the scuedopsientific jircle cerk going on around them, at least a few secretly hope "their" predictions come true for much of the rest of us. Even though there are none. Predictions, that is, not Maya. There's a passle of them. Maya, not predictions.
There is a difference between something that is "highly" significant and something that is "barely" significant or "almost" significant.
The p-value is a measure of the probability that the result could be obtained by chance. Taking the conventional threshold (p=0.05) for significance, you might well say that a result where p=0.05 is "barely" significant, p=0.06 is "almost" significant and p=0.000000001 is "highly" significant.
Your comments re: multiple comparison are right on and so not quoted. I'm re-taking issue with the significance.
There most certainly is NOT any "highly", "barely" etc. significance. In your examples, 0.06 and 0.000000001 ARE the significance. They are exactly (more accurately they are less than or equal to) that number. You are comparing them to 0.05, having been told that it is the acceptable significance level. That is wrong as a football bat. There is absolutely nothing in statistics that says 0.05 is a limit of any decision making. That decision should come from the design and the data. Despite this complete lack in the field of statistics, we have psychology colleagues running around spouting and respouting this as if that will make it so. Question them as to why. If they understand statistics they will explain stuff like methodology vs. tradition and admit I'm right. If they don't, they will not explain anything, but will rather reword and repeat what they said, and start to get defensive. The only thing they can assert is that they choose to consider 0.05 acceptable a priori. They can then say a p value obtained is either greater than or less their arbitrary cut off point.
One of the coolest things about getting a doctorate is being given the ability to tell your teachers they're wrong, though you'd better be able to prove it. I took issue with this 'significance" thing, with the procedure of doing EEG analysis by first comparing hemispheres, then major lobes, etc. in a very ritual of baseless computation; and finally with how many samples should be required to do evoked potential analysis.
As to the first, my source was the statistics professor who teaches all graduate psych stats for us. He explained it as I have, but better and with real examples and numbers. For the other two I was given references. I looked them up. They said nothing like what I was told. In fact they both said essentially that a researcher should know what they're doing and why, should explain clearly what they're doing and why. They (one considered to be the department's in house stats expert) had been quoting each other since studentship and never once questioned what they were doing much less researched it and read the very works they "knew" by heart.
If 0.05 were "acceptable", and of course mediated with correction factors if necessary, the entire body of fMRI research would fall to pieces. The analysis technique, SPM (statistical probability mapping) uses p values as the scores used to say whether a voxel shows "activiation" and how much. Due to tens of thousands of comparisons, the correction factors are enormous, the raw 'acceptable' p value for each having 6 to 20 digits. One must balance alpha and beta errors and adjustable correction factors in order to get a reasonable looking result. Despite being confronted with proof that significance is a matter of design and data, not something a priori, many psychology people set aside their beliefs to get an fMRI pub out, then pick them back up later.
Science can be used to tell what's happening, how it's happening and sometimes why it happens. But that's investigations into nature. The researcher should be able to prove they know what they're talking about by telling why they are doing something. Not to do so is to admit they don;t know why, only what and how, and have no way to know whether those techniques are right, or waving dead chickens.
Given how often my colleagues will insist that continuous spatiotemporal transloction of gallus based design correction factor applicators are necessary, and will simply repeat this when asked why this is so, it is little wonder that people that know why they do what they do look a little sideways at psychology. The "modifier" significance issue is one of the top sideways looks.
Whether ignoring it or ignorant of it, the present research is not "another step towards 'rewiring' the brains and limbs of paralyzed patients", it's a step back from that very use.
Christopher Reeve credited FES with helping to regain what function and sensation he did.
Thew earliest use I know of was the case presented on 60 Minutes where a paralyzed woman had EMG signals produced by a bicycle-like device that would have been called FES had it had a name that long ago. These were recorded and later played back amplified into her muscles to artificially produce walking. She told Dan Rather than she would walk again within a year, and would walk down the aisle to get married. He reported on CBS Evening News only a month later that she had done exactly that. This was probably around 30 years ago because the stimulation/recording/playback was controlled by a shiny new Apple II computer.
Less than half the population of the planet has ready access to electricity, phones, adequate nutrition, clean water, and health care. That's due to developing nations having far more inadequacies per capita than developed.
You're not wrong as in incorrect, you're wrong as in assuming your priorities matter to the people in those countries, because they can't eat bandwidth.
"something he calls "arbitrary coherence."
And that other call things like behavioral persistance, behavioral momentum, priming, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, etc. He can call it whatever he wants, but that's not going to make the concept his.
"Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
Those are correlations, the magnitude and direction of co-variance of two measures. These are positive so they vary the same directions. Correlations, are often done using Pearson's technique and are then given the variable little r. A handy but of work with r is the ability to tell at a glance just how much of the observed variance can be explained by the scores. To do so, simply square them. So the amount of variance explained in these tests are 0.11 to 0.27 (11% to 27%). That means from 73% to 89% of the observed variance is unexplained. In practical terms, that's poor. I know in psychology we tend to accept such low r's as meaningful, but we're about the only ones.
As to "significance": there is no such thing as "highly" (or any other modifier) significant. The significance score, using the variable little p, is what it is, whether you have a program tell you it's equal to or less than a number calculated from the data, or you calculate it and find it to be less than some arbitrary cut off value. If p 0.001 or if p = 0.9, that is the significance level. You can't use the modifiers because significance depends on things like the number of subjects and/or samples, score variance, multiple comparisons between scores, etc. The significance changes. Even with the same data set, if you calculate a second result, you're doing a second comparison which requires a correction factor and that changes p. What significance means in one data set (how many times Mary punches the Bobo doll after watching Homer choke Bart) has nothing to do with another (how many meters depth on average the Earth's surface would be sterilized by all US vs. all Russian thermonuclear weapons), so some dangling, arbitrary "much much MUCH so" means even less, being of zero import but incorrectly suggesting there is.
So those (.33 to .52) are the r values, In calculating them p was also. It should have been reported. I have no idea of the author ever did or not because the references here consist of two blog posts about the guy's work and one about a book on this subject, and zero that I see on peer reviewed journal articles. Now, I'll be the first to tell you that last bit doesn't count for near what people think, but at least they see to it the formulae are followed, one being proper (as in APA format) quoting of statistics. I might have looked up an article to see if the author gets it right, but I'm not about to read a book by someone who either ignores or is ignorant of the fact that the concept he's examining has already been, in much greater depth and clarity than what's given here.
It's what now, 3 or 4 times a year we hear this same story? If there were something we really didn't want them to have, and I'm sure there's plenty, we'd put it where they couldn't get to it, ie. not networked/online.
Face it, they're the main supplier for the myriad crap consumables and durable goods we pick up the the People's Republic of Walmart. At the pries they're getting they can't afford to buy these 'secrets' and still come up to par with us. If we charged them, their businesses would never get the chance to take over the country, so we could buy them out and control them financially, like we did with Russia.
If we really wanted them to stop, they'd 'find' things that's scare the bamboo curtain back down.
when you're happy and you know it, xenu hates you.
when you're happy and you know it, xenu hates you.
when you're happy and you know it, and you really want to show it, xenu hates you.
In all fairness, I should probably be forced to pay people royalties to people who hear my lyrics...
Be more fair than that. Make them unable to stop hearing your lyrics.
We're cheerful, have good diction,
and make accurate prediction.
But we're not science fiction,
the Hubbard Family.
Poor little clam (snap, snap)
stuck in a jam (snap, snap)
a hydrogen bomb
on top you and your mom
Xenu did cram (snap, snap)
If, like us, you knew you,
then you would let us do you.
If not, then we'll just sue you
into Sci-en-to-lo-gy (snap, snap).
I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work.
This is interesting, but have you validated this method of analysis by applying it to works of known authorship, say on fanfic sites or alt.politics newsgroups, which would be reasonable control sources--unedited outpourings of interested amateurs? That would tell you that works of the same author don't get flagged as different simply due to your reading-level split.
Ideally I'd like to see a p-value for your claim that "the work was written by at least two people" against the null hypothesis "only one person wrote the work". Without a p-value you really aren't saying anything. Presumably the plagiarism detection software produces a probability of works being by the same author. What you need to do is apply your reading-level split to a bunch of works and generate a distribution (histogram) of the probabilities that the two parts of each work are from different authors. Then ask the question: what are the odds that the probability I get from applying this analysis of Kaczynski was drawn from this distribution? That is your p-value. If it is very small, it is implausible that Kaczynski's work was written by one author.
There are still problems with your approach, but doing this would bring you into the realm of discourse where people could argue about your method, but not dispute the objectivity of your result given your assumptions.
Excellent points. In fact it was tested by and on members of several newsgroups, Fidonet echoes, and various members and sources of a university journalism class. The test barrage that resulted was used regularly to perform verbal forensics against some classic usenet trolls. Check usenet history for S.P.(U.T.U.)M.
A null hypothesis would be simply 'unable to support alternative hypothesis(-es)'. Saying it was shown to be one person would require support for an alternative hypothesis in the form of a correlation with acceptable power (alpha and beta levels for the sample size, etc.) or would be overstating a less than sufficiently supported test of differentiation.
Statistical testing would, I assume, be handled by the plagiarism software. Previously it was done as t tests on competing manifestations within the text. There was a negative correlation between linguistic and conceptual complexity. One expect a positive correlation, both dropping with increased affective component.
Still, statistical testing could still be done without the new software using a varimax rotation to differentiate the sections.
And a p value would indeed have been useful. Both FBI and independent investigators examined the work and his other writings, and while some concluded the were written by the same person, these two paragraphs appear in the search and arrest warrant:
204. Your affiant is aware that other individuals have conducted analyses of the UNABOM Manuscript __ determined that the Manuscript was written by another individual, not Kaczynski, who had also been a suspect in the investigation.
205. Numerous other opinions from experts have been provided as to the identity of the unabomb subject. None of those opinions named Theodore Kaczynski as a possible author.
Neither side attempted to make the case that although Kaczynski undoubtedly wrote some of it, a different person contributed other parts. The hypothesis here was developed based on the assumption that the FBI inserted some material. The reason it was developed is because Ted's brother had contributed other pieces of his writing for analysis to the FBI, and despite having been assured he'd remain anonymous, was outed by an internal FBI leak. The assumption was that this was done to try to pin the additional material on David's contributions if anyone became suspicious, so nobody would conclude the material was developed in house to bolster the case against Ted.
... their brain works more.
That's all there is to it. Age, searching, internet, none of that is relevant other than being conditions under which it can happen. Identical results can be had with kids doing stem completion tasks (E A _ _ _ = E A R T H), college students doing a Stroop task (words naming colors, in that color or a different one), and any brain you can get to sit still and problem solve while stuck inside a tube with horrible noises going on.
TFA is a prime example of someone doing a far too specific test on a general principle and either thinking or pretending to have discovered something. I'm going to go with "pretending" since the new results after practice were seen in the middle and interior frontal gyri, and he claims these results are due to two specific processing tasks, but neglects to mention that the two regions make up more than half the frontal lobes in which there are obviously a great number of things going on, many of which would be occurring during the task, their design is completely incapable of telling the difference between excitatory and inhibitory activation, and there is no word on whether the 'enhanced' neural activity correlated with improved ability to search and/or answer relevant questions, without which one could just as easily make a case that the increased activation was a sign of boredom for having to do the same damn stuff again that they've been doing the past two weeks at home.
Someone needs to do a study and see whether asking hard questions about this stuff of researchers giving talks on it when they clearly don't know enough about what they're doing makes their brains light up in the right places, because if you make people think, their brain works harder. Wouldn't have happened here, because they wouldn't have been forced to answer the questions -- this was just a poster. Anyone can get any poster into one of these conferences as long as it says fMRI on it.
Get a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto
http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
Rate the entire work, and each numbered paragraph, for reading level using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Formula
http://www.readabilityformulas.com/flesch-grade-level-readability-formula.php
Split the work into 2 parts, one with paragraph reading level ratings greater than the overall score, one with the scores less than overall.
Apply plagiarism testing software to compare these two halves and see whether it says they were written by the same or by different persons.
Before the creation of plagiarism testing software, we still had several different reading level testing programs available. I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work. Ted Kaczynski was never considered to have Multiple Personality Disorder, so if the results (still) say two people wrote it, each with their own style, then it's highly unlikely Kaczynski wrote it by himself.
(pun unintended, and frankly not very funny, so forget it; same for that pun)
1. The magazine h+ senior editor is RU Sirius. It is MONDO 2000, +20. Sirius is still Sirius, and seems to have foregone the +20 himself. He's actually no slouch, so when he senior-editorizes a magazine full of pseudoscience crap when he could have done better or at least different, I feel he's earned the right to the criticism rather than the fiction writers working as science article journalists. They start stupid, work stupid and produce stupid. He approves it for publication.
2. Other articles in the magazine are equally absurd. Some make claims about specific phenomena or theories which are anywhere from fraudulent to simply goofy. I took one such article, claiming that depression is lack of "fun" to task over at The Daily Grail. The article is just bullshit in its best parts. There's worse.
3. Using neurons in this design is enormously overly complex. There was an article in SciAm in which little battery powered cars were given photo-cells or photo-resistive cells as "eyes", those driving the back wheels on the same side, or on the other side, making 4 different designs that react to light. They approach fast and slow down, or slowly at first then rush in, or they zoom away and orbit the edges slowly or else creep away and at the outer area zoom around. The anthromorphization of their actions is multiplied when many of each 'species' are placed on th same floor with protruding light bulbs at several locations. It's not that the neurons don;t do the job, it's just that they're a computational device based far beyond the need, and that non-computational, analog increasing/decreasing voltage circuits do much more for much less.
4. Given the falsification of a different h+ article of equally strong claims, I serious(!)ly doubt the existence of the items in TFA. In fact I wouldn't believe anything I read in this magazine, if for no other reason than that the New Agey products in the ads are, while absurd themselves, more believable than the articles.
If 1/3 said the lower rate sounded better, they were probably guessing, because neither sounded better but they were in a forced choice situation. That being so, it's likely that as many people were guessing when they "chose" the 160k. Thus, it is most likely that 1/3 of the people, or less, could tell the difference.
And chances are if you played the samples back using desktop compact speakers or made them listen on ear buds, that last third would disappear as the guessers took over, half of them right, half of them wrong, and nobody hearing a bit of difference.
The main difference is in the very high frequency clipping, an effect noted by the audiophile crowd when CDs were first being introduced. It was proven then that the technology (which is essentially unchanged now) caused a high frequency noise which whether embedded in the music or removed and play by itself, grated on the nerves, made people cranky and made the listening less pleasant.
Why is everybody acting within their rights given by law an assault? Has WA legalized assault? Be careful what you wish for and twice for what you accuse.
From the very first codification of law, that of Hammurabi, marriage has been specified as a contract between two people. Nobody can block that on moral grounds and they'd be hard pressed to nullify a contract of partnership onany grounds without having the business community up in arms. The ceremonies are only that; next time, I'm jumping a broom.
The license is not a license to get married/contracted/etc., it's a tax stamp. It is the Fuck Tax. Nothing prevents you from fucking, but they want to tax it, same as nothing prevents you from parking your car in your driveway in Virginia, but you have to have your parking sticker up to date or you can get a parking ticket. They'll tax anything that lots of people want or what to do. Fuck the Fuck Tax. Paying a tax doesn't make a marriage "legal", it makes it paid up. A legal marriage is a binding contract of partnership between two people with possessions.
I am not a lawyer. But I can and have "legally" performed that ceremony for people, "legal" or not, "Fuck Tax" or none, and had to examine the relevant laws. By the way, you want to know how to qualify to "legally" marry people? Say so. The government has no right (they've specifically divorced themselevs from the ability) to dictate, determine or oversee who is and is not "qualified".
First, I am sick to death from seeing people try to claim some watered down form of a mental condition that excuses excessive behaviors they mostly wish they had and makes them seem special without having to put much efforts towards it or even understanding much about it. Understand this about autism/Aspergers and pretty much any state considered disordered as compared to the general population: meeting a diagnostic criteria includes having some persistent behavioral anomalies. Having some of the same persistent behavioral anomalies does not qualify one for the diagnosis. Very few of any who actually earn the diagnosis are capable of anything productive. And if one were to go with the behavioral criteria, the vast majority would earn themselves a far less appealing diagnosis or three, and which point they'd rebel against the process and disclaim any association with any disorder.
Now, we have in fact looked at 'weird' in psychology, but mostly as to what people think it is, rather than an objective state. I've looked at what kinds of people get that label and how. Programmers, or geeks/nerds in the technical literature, earn that label -- literally. They tend to start out more similar than most, and develop a specific quirk or three in order to exert individuality. They themselves keep each other within boundries of weirdness by approving or disapproving of others quirks, as often as not in how they're expressed rather than pure content. The effect is one of most people taking on the task of marking themselves an individual by developing an unusual, hopefully unique set of markings for their clothing. They appear to ignore the fact that the piece of clothing is a jacket collar. They appear to be unable to recognize that the collar is always on a Nehru jacket.
The defining word is "affectation". The evidence is in the desperation with which the concept is held and in how vehemently it is denied. A close analogy can be drawn with those who have strong anti-authoritarian rebelliousness early in life. It is not that they are anti-authoritarian, but rather than they are overly sensitive to it and dislike the fact that early in their life they are near the bottom of the ladder. They frequently end up at the other extreme. Likewise, the chronically similar act to differentiate themselves as soon as their situation allows, but only within a limited way, the rest remaining a recognizable part of the fairly closed group for which similarity of some sort remains more a badge than the differences. These too tend to evolve to the opposite end of the spectrum, common end states being either comparing swag t-shirts from conferences, or comparing their ties, the only major item of difference they would ever consider sporting having bought into management.
You may now feel free to mod me down as troll or flamebait just because I've answered the question with my own considered opinion which will no doubt prove unpopular. Refer back to "vehemence".
"Please wear this ribbon on your planetary system in order to help us raise awareness. Awareness is such a precious commodity in galaxies of all colors, shapes and sizes, that we feel it only proper to honor the awareness that is within us all by taking this opportunity to mark those systems with nascent awarenesses with a ribbon. Hopefully by comparing our pre-aware planetary systems we can come to appreciate our own awareness and the source of that awareness, whatever form you may believe that it takes. Remember, it takes a spiral arm to raise a planetary system. Thank you again for raising awareness with this ribbon."
The author states he tried to get the publisher to allow free reproduction of electronic copies. This indicates that he signed over his rights of electronic reproduction (e-rights) to them, and is aware he did so. He may retain ownership over the text, but he has signed over the right to reproduce it in this form.
This has been standard practice in publishing for some time. Unless one is big enough to dictate one's own contracts, one ends up signing a contract with things in it favorable to the publisher in ways that aren't clear at first. The problem here came to light for me in the early days of the SFWA exploring piracy, e-rights and such. While some said that publishers were simply getting the authors to sign over rights just in case the publisher could figure out how to make money at it, some claimed a more sinister intent. They said that the publisher's were asking for exclusive (temporary or not) e-rights, so that if they encountered cases of the text being pirated in this form, it fell to the author to prevent other release in this form and so guarantee the exclusivity offered to the publisher in the contract. In this way the publisher avoided having to pursue, requiring the author to do so. If the author did not, it was tacit permission given to the pirate to reproduce a form covered in the contract.
Avoiding having to pursue was not the worst accusation. It was also claimed that the way the contracts were written, if the author did not act to protect his work against infringenment and so protect the rights he signed over to the publisher, the publisher could void the contract and require return of advance, royalties, etc., and if not forthcoming could appropriate the rights to the work.
Now, could have and would have aside, I know of no cases where it occurred. But the possibility was enough to be at least part of the reason Harlan Ellison chose to pursue some pirates, AOL, and RemarQ. (No, he didn't need to, he was making a point on behalf of others who couldn't afford this). And even if this has never occurred previously, if the present author's contract is written to give e-rights to the publisher and he not only doesn't pursue but allows or encourages electronic piracy, he'll be liable and could end up losing far more than potential sales.
e-rights are of little value in most cases except as leverage such as this. If nobody said or did anything publicly, probably nobody would have cared. But to publicly encourage others to violate rights he signed over could bring it all back down on him as well as cause other publishers who've lightened up on the whole subject to clamp back down.
My take-away:
DNA looks like a rubik's cube made out of colored spaghetti.
I was reading all the responses to see if just this one comment got made. It's an excellent starting point to describe the function of the structure.
Both are designed so components can be far apart at one time, and after a manipulation (or X of them) are adjacent (or have some specific spatial relationship). Both require the manipulations follow a set of rules based on the structure. Most people know how the cube works, with its central rotating axis.
Imagine first that instead of that amazing little widget, collections of cube components were allowed to slide between other such collections and the central axis, IFF the one sliding under and the one being slid under matched. It complicates the familiar rules of the cube a bit but allows some much quicker solutions.
Once you grasp that, extend it by allowing the same sort of sliding-between to occur between outside surface and the set allowed to slide between from the first rule set change. And also one allowed to occur between that first slider-under and the central axis. Now you've got, going inside from the outside, the outside face components, a second generation set that slides under it, the first gen set, and the central axis.
This can be extended through as many iterations as necessary to get all the components to come into all the possible configurations. But is doesn't have to be because not all configurations are desired, only those that allow match-ups of specific components of interest. That constraint on the rules makes them less complex, which is good, but less flexible, which could be bad.
Except it's not bad, because although the entire structure is built (to reply here to the response just below) just like beads on a string, you are armed with (1) perfect knowledge of all the desired matches that are needed to occur as well as of (2) all the layers and pass-betweens needed in order to bring about all the desired configurations. Furthermore, you are (3) being allowed to preload the beads on the string in any configuration in order to make the matching process, including intermediate steps, as efficient as possible.
To compare it back to the cube, it is as if you are going to be required to solve it, but you'll know that the starting state will be 'solved' as well as what subset of the rules will be used in the scrambling, meaning those are all you'll need to re-solve it.
As to why this comes out fractal: you have knowledge/control over the design in terms of matches that need to happen, all the slide-through rules allowed, and over the pre-loading of the beads to make a specific design as efficient as possible. You can set it up any way you need to in order to make the design process as well as the decoding process efficient, but once done it can't be changed. Since the structure is one of beads on a string the underlying configuration is linear. Because you can pick and choose the rules governing that linear structure in order to make it efficient, you are optimizing a set of interdependent rules. And because once set they can't be changed, you are developing an invariant rule set.
You have three invariant and interdependent linear rules. At each step of the solution/folding process, it can be describe as:
X in terms of Y and Z
Y in terms of X and Z
Z in terms of X and Y
simultaneously (ie. describing its state)
The next step in folding/solving will proceed the same way, all three set up and carried out simultaneously. At each step between fully folded/scrambled and fully matched/solved, the structure can be describes as a state of being closer or farther from being properly folded/solved (ie. farther = more scrambled than, as opposed to X steps from), while keeping in mind that some intermediate steps required to produce the desired end result are actually farther from the desired state than the start state or other intermediate states.
Now, if you graph that scrambled
There was also no theoretical reason for monopoles _to_ exist. If charge exists, and moving electric charges create magnetic fields, who do you _need_ magnetic charges? Making the equations "symmetrical" for both electric and magnetic charges does not make them any more elegant or powerful, any more than not having "negative mass" makes Newton's equations any less valid.
"Discrete units of net magnetic charge" may be a quantum effect of aligned, moving electrical charges. I still see no need for monopoles.
If you have an analysis of Maxwell that explains the quantization of electrical charge without requiring the magnetic equivalent, you should show it to people. Dirac couldn't do it, so if you have it'd be well received. Not only did Dirac's equations require them, he predicted the magnetic charge quanta to be 68.5 times the electrical charge quanta. Proving Dirac wrong would have enormous consequences, since the 1983 theory of electroweak unification required them to exist and have the predicted charge magnitude, and the W+, W- and Z(0) intermediate vector bosons it predicted (based on the theory that required monopoles) have been detected. Not only that, they have precisely the charge magnitude predicted by the theory based on the predicted magnetic charge magnitude. And if you can show where Dirac went wrong, you can also show where t'Hooft and Polyakov went wrong, since they independently not only showed that any such unification theory required them, but also came to the same prediction of magnitude of magnetic charge as Dirac. Three independent theoretical analyses that make specific predictions which have been tested and shown to be correct would seem to be a tough nut to crack. But if you can show where these were all wrong, it'd be worth a Nobel, just as Weinberg, Salam, and Glashow shared one for the electroweak unification predictions that testing had subsequently and apparently mistakenly supported with data. In fact, if you can point to where Dirac et al. were wrong, you could save a lot of people a lot of money, since the search for the Higgs boson is based on symmetry breaking that requires the monopoles to exist and have a specific charge. If you could just point out where Dirac went wrong, say on the page at http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Magnetic+monopoles then we can call CERN and tell them to recalibrate the LHC because they followed Dirac's mistake when they built it. Or should they just trash it? It must really be hosed if it's based on a theory that predicts things, some of which have been detected exactly where they were supposed to be.
Oh, and while you're taking a balanced equation and unbalancing it, the answer to your other question is on that page too. An electrical charge in motion creates a closed magnetic field, so a magnetic charge in motion creates a closed electrical field. You may feel free to not see a need for it either, but by now it should be clear why you don't see these things as necessary. This latter result would seem at second look to be dismissable since it predicts an essentially perpetual motion. However, the perpetual motion machine it describes is available for examination in every electron orbiting every nucleus. This closed electrical current has been detected at a classical scale as a persistent flow such as a superconducting current, in a normal resistive metal ring. This was announced in Science magazine a week ago and mentioned in http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/10/1338210
Actually it is understandable that some people don;t see the "need" for monopoles any more than they see the need for scalar waves. This is because it has become common to teach the essentials of Maxwell's equations by arbitrarily ignoring some aspects. this is done by setting some of the necessary variables to zero. While this allows one to examine the isolated na