Item response theory is the idea behind most adaptive standardized tests like the GRE. The basic premise is that an individual's underlying ability (as approximated by their GRE score) is being estimated after each question, and subsequent questions can test the soundness of that estimate. Each question is associated with a probability that a person with a certain underlying ability X will answer correctly, and so getting a hard question wrong is evidence that your ability is lower than that needed to answer the hard question correctly. As the test goes on, the estimate of the underlying ability becomes more precise (it narrows in on a smaller range of possible ability levels), and that is why the swings in difficulty get smaller as the test goes on. Usually, the duration of the test is set so that the precision of the estimate lies within a certain acceptable range.
Most people have an incorrect understanding of how this works, and so they get overly anxious about the hard questions (as if they carried more weight). It's true that getting them wrong leads to a lower estimate of their ability, but that's precisely the point-- if the test-taker truly had the ability to answer the question, they would have gotten it right.
Hallucinations, by definition, are perceptual experiences that aren't caused by an external stimulus. They too are associated with brain activity in the appropriate sensory areas. For example, see this paper by Ffytche et al. (1998), which describes activity in various parts of visual cortex during visual hallucinations. So even if you do detect activity in some sensory area, you wouldn't be able to rule out an internally-generated cause. Detecting activity would merely confirm that the perceiver's brain is acting as if it is perceiving something...
Skim on OS X. Does forms, embedded notes, highlighting, the works. It's much more powerful than Preview and only takes a tiny bit longer to start up. It seems to be updated very frequently.
Re:Securing a wireless router and using the NDS...
on
WEP Broken Even Worse
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· Score: 1
And can you actually make a wireless router accept both secured and unsecured connections (or WPA and WEP connections) at the same time? So, for instance, the laptops of the house would all use WPA and the NDS would use WEP?
Yes. The v24 beta version of dd-wrt allows multiple SSIDs with different security settings. However, there are some issues with isolating traffic to each SSID using virtual LANs. Besides that, there seem to be some strange issues with the beta versions. That being said, I'm going to try out v24 with a DS tomorrow.
Re:Still looking and waiting for download
on
Gnome 2.14 Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
Application shortcuts for GNOME or GNOME-friendly applications should have startup notification enabled by default. If not, you can enable it for applications that support it by inserting the line "StartupNotify=true" into the.desktop shortcut file. In 2.12 I believe that user-created shortcuts, created using "Create Launcher" on desktop context menu, do not have StartupNotify enabled, nor do they have an option to enable it. I don't understand why having notification isn't the default, assumed mode. Not sure if this behavior remains the same in 2.14.
If you're creating a shortcut to an application that's already in the GNOME menu, it's easier to just middle-click-drag that entry to the desktop to create a copy.
Unlike the US , where the rights of home owners using force against burglars are quite clear , in the UK this is a grey area.Home owners can use reasonable force only and that is decided by the courts.
The U.S. is a nation composed of 50 states, each with its own laws governing self-defense in the home. There are states with the so-called "castle laws" which allow the use of deadly force inside the home, but even these states might have a "retreat requirement" which requires that the homeowner retreat to a place of safety if but only if it is possible to do so in a safe manner.
In the US, the justifiability of a self-defense incident is still very much decided by a court. The mere availability of deadly weapons in this nation does not mean that gun-owning Americans can use them at will.
Funny or not, that's actually a valid argument against wearing things around your neck. The primary danger though, is from the cord getting caught on moving machinery.
To allow any neck chains to break away, one ought to use ball-chain necklaces (the chain on which a dog tag is hung).
The Republicans are trying to pin the blame on the Democrats, but according to an Utne Reader article this month it is the Bush adminstration that is quietly pushing for this.
HR163/S89 was a well-known attempt by Democratic Congressman Rangel to protest the war in Iraq (and also to elicit a negative reaction towards the current Administration from the American public). He very well knew that there would be no way for it to pass the House and the Senate, but sponsored it as a political statement.
It appears that the Selective Service system is gearing up for a new national draft, probably to be next spring. This draft is for both men and women from 18-25 but people with computer or medical training will probably be required to register them (and any new skills they acquire in these areas) until they turn 35.
Registration of training and skills, as far as I know, is something that occurs only once the draft has been implemented. What's technically required from the age of 18 to 35 is that the registrant inform the SSS of their current address, even though at the moment this is unenforced. Seriously, how many citizens remember to register their new address with the SSS when they move? The SSS had problems with tracking down registrants during the Vietnam-era draft.
Except for the issue of women in the draft (which Rep. Rangel included in the proposed bill to make it even more controversial), how has this changed from previous years? Are they really preparing for a "new national draft", or are you just saying so because you read the SSS's Annual Performance Plan? What exactly is it in the Performance Plan (and not Rangel's bill) that supports your claim?
The chances are the new draft... there will not be deferments for college
Another misleading statement. There haven't been college deferments since 1971. The only deferment possible is until the end of the college semester.
There is also quite a bit on the resumption of the draft in Bush's "National Security Strategy" report dated Sept 20, 2002
Here's a link to the report in question. There was absolutely no mention of a resumption of the draft in the report. Where exactly, could you point out, should I read between the lines?
What's with the funky capitalization? Maybe I'm missing out on some kind of joke, but assuming that you're serious, the "dark side" of the moon isn't dark all the time; it still receives light from the sun. It's just the side that doesn't face Earth.
The quiet buzzing when you're in a silent place is actually caused by the sound-sensitive cilia in your inner ear vibrating of their own accord when they don't have any external stimulation. This is a normal phenomenon.
Of course, this is different from the kind of hearing damage that you're referring to. Maybe you should wear earplugs while practising. I wear them at rock concerts. You ought to look into musician's plugs, which have specially tuned noise-dampening responses that are consistent in how they reduce noise levels at various frequencies.
During the summer, there's a regular movie screening on the side of a building in Baltimore's Little Italy. The picture is about as big as that in a regular movie theater. Plenty of residents and curious people bring lawn chairs to sit in the adjacent parking lot. The projectionists seem to show old Italian films, so I doubt anyone cares much.
I think guerilla movie screening would be more popular in cities, where you wouldn't have parking problems. Well, besides having to find a place to park your lawn chair.
But new technology is only favouring the second payment option with credit cards getting all this new fandangled tech, but bank cards aren't getting anything. Seems strange to me.
Maybe it hasn't hit your area yet, but I'd say that where they are implemented, RFID-based currency cards are mostly based on an account that you fill up every so often, not a credit account. I can see how credit card companies would want to push this technology, but in any case you could always use a credit card that's tied to a bank account so that you're not spending "credit".
The usual procedure after a theft of one's smart card is to cancel that particular card, just as one would cancel a credit card. However, since most smart cards are debit-based systems, there might not be any theft protection limit like that in regular credit cards (where the cardholder is responsible for $50, then the rest is taken care of by the company).
Since this is a credit card watch, I suppose the credit card company would treat it as regular card. In that case, the only reason that this would be a bad idea is that it most likely won't have the cardholder's signature on it for verification purposes, making it easier for the thief to use the card. Most clerks in America don't bother to check the signature anyway, so I don't see this as much of a problem.
The watch is easily stolen. Has been for years and years. That's what makes it so appealing to criminals.
If you're saying that it's just easy to steal a watch that is in plain view, I'd say that it's mostly expected that people carry around wallets and cell phones, so it doesn't make a thief more likely to rob a person wearing a watch. Unless, of course, they target people wearing fancy-looking watches. In that case, the ugly plastic quartz watch in the article will have the unexpected benefit of deterring thieves.
Who knows, he might be serious. He might pull a Michael Jackson on us, going from highly-respected kernel hacker to cosmetic surgery freak in a slow and spectacular 20-year fall from grace. That's right, he'll still be around 20 years from now, churning out mediocre rehashes of his old kernels and approaching bankruptcy as the result of extravagant spending habits. See, that new house is the first step.
Plus you gotta admit that with all the weirdos in the world, there has to be at least one person somewhere that would pay money to be surgically altered to look more like a penguin. What better candidate than the glorious leader of the Linux revolution?
Or maybe Linus is just being funny. Damn European humor... too refined for me.
Re:I actually...
on
Spam as Poetry
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· Score: 2, Interesting
E.E. Cummings actually did write some erotic poetry. I hate to take bits of Cummings out of context, but here's an example that looks like it was taken out of a naughty IRC channel or auto-generated spam email:
cheery-nose square pash eyes splut
tering warench ofscarlet on right-breast legs
monumentally aPart
(Girl)flagstuck in her breasts. she bent her neck and bit It
jam mingIt deeper--pink--complexion tooth gone left side red
we epingeye s CHUBBY
Sorry that there's no way to reproduce the original typesetting. Taken from "AnOther E.E. Cummings", a nice collection of some of his less-seen poetry and prose (Ed. Richard Kostelanetz).
Come to think of it, those also look like Skinny Puppy lyrics.
Oh yeah, one little pedantic point that I just have to mention after reading some of the replies to parent post: E.E. Cummings never actually signed his name as "e.e. cummings".
Nokia said the 3220's air messaging system could be used by friends to talk to each other across crowded rooms or open-air concerts.
So instead of picking up the phone and calling the other person, you're supposed to type in a 15-letter text message and wave your phone around in the air?! I can see how this can be fun... for 5 minutes.
Hm, the problem is that food is heavy. Even the freeze-dried camping food (which has the added complication of needing a source of hot water to prepare it).
For an average 180 lb. male doing strenuous activity for the whole day, not looking to have a net deficit of calories, it might take 5000+ calories a day. Camping food's efficiency is measured in calories per ounce. Anything having a calorie/oz. ratio greater than 100 is considered alright. The freeze-dried stuff usually has a ratio of around 100-120.
This means that a soldier or hiker would need about 50 ounces, or 3 pounds of food per day, not including the water that's necessary to prepare it. I know nothing about military supply trains, but for long-distance hiking, people hate carrying around extra water. Thus food preparation usually happens near water sources. My estimate is that each pound of freeze-dried food requires about a quart (or liter) of water to prepare, which means that carrying all that water would push the pounds of food per day to about 9 pounds.
Of course, all this water talk is moot if by camping food you meant dry trail mix, goop and the like. Yuck. But I guess that's always a possibility, carrying around 3 pounds of peanuts, cereal and berries for each day out in the field.
...University? Anyone else less than convinced by this scenario? Sounds like Americans are so crazy, they'd suspect anyone.
Why do you think American universities are open to international students?
It's so that there's an exchange of information between nations. Other nations' brain drain is America's brain gain. Besides that, it's a chance to disseminate American ideals (capitalism, freedom of speech, etc.).
What terrorists will be disrupting is the desire for foreign students to study in the US. In today's political atmosphere, I already see a disinclination towards having any association at all with America, for both personal security reasons (nobody wants to get blown up) and for more general ideological reasons (foreign media portrays the US as a bully; nobody likes a bully). A terrorist attack on a university and the ensuing response by the American authorities could only worsen the popular foreign perception of this situation.
Based on my experience with a Creative Muvo2, 2.6 seems to be way more compatible than 2.4 in terms of the player being detected as a USB storage device.
Upgrading the kernel is relatively painless... at least it's less painful than rebooting to Windows whenever you want to transfer files.
Just figure out your fstab line and it's quite easy to start moving music to the player. I believe the drive should show up at/dev/sdX.
Of course, I haven't had the chance to try a Jens, but I suspect that the interface should be rather similar if Windows can autodetect the drive without drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Item response theory is the idea behind most adaptive standardized tests like the GRE. The basic premise is that an individual's underlying ability (as approximated by their GRE score) is being estimated after each question, and subsequent questions can test the soundness of that estimate. Each question is associated with a probability that a person with a certain underlying ability X will answer correctly, and so getting a hard question wrong is evidence that your ability is lower than that needed to answer the hard question correctly. As the test goes on, the estimate of the underlying ability becomes more precise (it narrows in on a smaller range of possible ability levels), and that is why the swings in difficulty get smaller as the test goes on. Usually, the duration of the test is set so that the precision of the estimate lies within a certain acceptable range. Most people have an incorrect understanding of how this works, and so they get overly anxious about the hard questions (as if they carried more weight). It's true that getting them wrong leads to a lower estimate of their ability, but that's precisely the point-- if the test-taker truly had the ability to answer the question, they would have gotten it right.
Hallucinations, by definition, are perceptual experiences that aren't caused by an external stimulus. They too are associated with brain activity in the appropriate sensory areas. For example, see this paper by Ffytche et al. (1998), which describes activity in various parts of visual cortex during visual hallucinations. So even if you do detect activity in some sensory area, you wouldn't be able to rule out an internally-generated cause. Detecting activity would merely confirm that the perceiver's brain is acting as if it is perceiving something...
Skim on OS X. Does forms, embedded notes, highlighting, the works. It's much more powerful than Preview and only takes a tiny bit longer to start up. It seems to be updated very frequently.
Yes. The v24 beta version of dd-wrt allows multiple SSIDs with different security settings. However, there are some issues with isolating traffic to each SSID using virtual LANs. Besides that, there seem to be some strange issues with the beta versions. That being said, I'm going to try out v24 with a DS tomorrow.
Here's some relevant dd-wrt forum threads:
Create second wireless ssid with different security settings
v24 Virtual SSIDs, Nintendo DS, and AP Isolation
Application shortcuts for GNOME or GNOME-friendly applications should have startup notification enabled by default. If not, you can enable it for applications that support it by inserting the line "StartupNotify=true" into the .desktop shortcut file. In 2.12 I believe that user-created shortcuts, created using "Create Launcher" on desktop context menu, do not have StartupNotify enabled, nor do they have an option to enable it. I don't understand why having notification isn't the default, assumed mode. Not sure if this behavior remains the same in 2.14.
If you're creating a shortcut to an application that's already in the GNOME menu, it's easier to just middle-click-drag that entry to the desktop to create a copy.
The U.S. is a nation composed of 50 states, each with its own laws governing self-defense in the home. There are states with the so-called "castle laws" which allow the use of deadly force inside the home, but even these states might have a "retreat requirement" which requires that the homeowner retreat to a place of safety if but only if it is possible to do so in a safe manner.
In the US, the justifiability of a self-defense incident is still very much decided by a court. The mere availability of deadly weapons in this nation does not mean that gun-owning Americans can use them at will.
Funny or not, that's actually a valid argument against wearing things around your neck. The primary danger though, is from the cord getting caught on moving machinery.
To allow any neck chains to break away, one ought to use ball-chain necklaces (the chain on which a dog tag is hung).
Except for the issue of women in the draft (which Rep. Rangel included in the proposed bill to make it even more controversial), how has this changed from previous years? Are they really preparing for a "new national draft", or are you just saying so because you read the SSS's Annual Performance Plan? What exactly is it in the Performance Plan (and not Rangel's bill) that supports your claim?
Another misleading statement. There haven't been college deferments since 1971. The only deferment possible is until the end of the college semester. Here's a link to the report in question. There was absolutely no mention of a resumption of the draft in the report. Where exactly, could you point out, should I read between the lines?Both of them should cost about $100 with a 256MB stick.
What's with the funky capitalization? Maybe I'm missing out on some kind of joke, but assuming that you're serious, the "dark side" of the moon isn't dark all the time; it still receives light from the sun. It's just the side that doesn't face Earth.
The quiet buzzing when you're in a silent place is actually caused by the sound-sensitive cilia in your inner ear vibrating of their own accord when they don't have any external stimulation. This is a normal phenomenon.
Of course, this is different from the kind of hearing damage that you're referring to. Maybe you should wear earplugs while practising. I wear them at rock concerts. You ought to look into musician's plugs, which have specially tuned noise-dampening responses that are consistent in how they reduce noise levels at various frequencies.
Play all the mile-high CS that you want. Just don't be a terrorist on cs_747 or you're in for a mob beating!
Further down in the article there's more:
8. Tilted chest pockets with Velcro closure
.
10. Velcro sleeve cuff closure
11. Shoulder pockets with Velcro
The Army's new BDU's use velcro instead of snaps and zippers. Here's a Google cache link of the Army Times article. No pic though, sorry.
During the summer, there's a regular movie screening on the side of a building in Baltimore's Little Italy. The picture is about as big as that in a regular movie theater. Plenty of residents and curious people bring lawn chairs to sit in the adjacent parking lot. The projectionists seem to show old Italian films, so I doubt anyone cares much.
I think guerilla movie screening would be more popular in cities, where you wouldn't have parking problems. Well, besides having to find a place to park your lawn chair.
Sure, but only if she swallows!
Hm. It's perfectly fine to wear a ski mask while you run your daily errands. Until you get to the bank that is...
Maybe it hasn't hit your area yet, but I'd say that where they are implemented, RFID-based currency cards are mostly based on an account that you fill up every so often, not a credit account. I can see how credit card companies would want to push this technology, but in any case you could always use a credit card that's tied to a bank account so that you're not spending "credit".
Since this is a credit card watch, I suppose the credit card company would treat it as regular card. In that case, the only reason that this would be a bad idea is that it most likely won't have the cardholder's signature on it for verification purposes, making it easier for the thief to use the card. Most clerks in America don't bother to check the signature anyway, so I don't see this as much of a problem.
If you're saying that it's just easy to steal a watch that is in plain view, I'd say that it's mostly expected that people carry around wallets and cell phones, so it doesn't make a thief more likely to rob a person wearing a watch. Unless, of course, they target people wearing fancy-looking watches. In that case, the ugly plastic quartz watch in the article will have the unexpected benefit of deterring thieves.
Who knows, he might be serious. He might pull a Michael Jackson on us, going from highly-respected kernel hacker to cosmetic surgery freak in a slow and spectacular 20-year fall from grace. That's right, he'll still be around 20 years from now, churning out mediocre rehashes of his old kernels and approaching bankruptcy as the result of extravagant spending habits. See, that new house is the first step.
Plus you gotta admit that with all the weirdos in the world, there has to be at least one person somewhere that would pay money to be surgically altered to look more like a penguin. What better candidate than the glorious leader of the Linux revolution?
Or maybe Linus is just being funny. Damn European humor... too refined for me.
Sorry that there's no way to reproduce the original typesetting. Taken from "AnOther E.E. Cummings", a nice collection of some of his less-seen poetry and prose (Ed. Richard Kostelanetz).
Come to think of it, those also look like Skinny Puppy lyrics.
Oh yeah, one little pedantic point that I just have to mention after reading some of the replies to parent post: E.E. Cummings never actually signed his name as "e.e. cummings".
So instead of picking up the phone and calling the other person, you're supposed to type in a 15-letter text message and wave your phone around in the air?! I can see how this can be fun... for 5 minutes.
Hm, the problem is that food is heavy. Even the freeze-dried camping food (which has the added complication of needing a source of hot water to prepare it).
For an average 180 lb. male doing strenuous activity for the whole day, not looking to have a net deficit of calories, it might take 5000+ calories a day. Camping food's efficiency is measured in calories per ounce. Anything having a calorie/oz. ratio greater than 100 is considered alright. The freeze-dried stuff usually has a ratio of around 100-120.
This means that a soldier or hiker would need about 50 ounces, or 3 pounds of food per day, not including the water that's necessary to prepare it. I know nothing about military supply trains, but for long-distance hiking, people hate carrying around extra water. Thus food preparation usually happens near water sources. My estimate is that each pound of freeze-dried food requires about a quart (or liter) of water to prepare, which means that carrying all that water would push the pounds of food per day to about 9 pounds.
Of course, all this water talk is moot if by camping food you meant dry trail mix, goop and the like. Yuck. But I guess that's always a possibility, carrying around 3 pounds of peanuts, cereal and berries for each day out in the field.
Why do you think American universities are open to international students?
It's so that there's an exchange of information between nations. Other nations' brain drain is America's brain gain. Besides that, it's a chance to disseminate American ideals (capitalism, freedom of speech, etc.).
What terrorists will be disrupting is the desire for foreign students to study in the US. In today's political atmosphere, I already see a disinclination towards having any association at all with America, for both personal security reasons (nobody wants to get blown up) and for more general ideological reasons (foreign media portrays the US as a bully; nobody likes a bully). A terrorist attack on a university and the ensuing response by the American authorities could only worsen the popular foreign perception of this situation.
Based on my experience with a Creative Muvo2, 2.6 seems to be way more compatible than 2.4 in terms of the player being detected as a USB storage device.
/dev/sdX.
Upgrading the kernel is relatively painless... at least it's less painful than rebooting to Windows whenever you want to transfer files.
Just figure out your fstab line and it's quite easy to start moving music to the player. I believe the drive should show up at
Of course, I haven't had the chance to try a Jens, but I suspect that the interface should be rather similar if Windows can autodetect the drive without drivers.