Yea check out this Wikipedia article. It seems a lot of the confusion is that people use the terms call-by-value and call-by-reference inconsistently. It might be more a matter of vocabulary instead of actual confusion of what happens.
Pointers - you don't need them in Javascript. what's a situation where you'd like to use a pointer but can't, and it makes the code significantly more complex? No points to you if you give the `swap(int *a, int *b);` example.
Who says no information travels faster than light? It always seemed arbitrary to me. I didn't have a very intensive physics education though so I'm open to hear why in terms a layman would understand.
"antitrust" basically means "one or more of your competitors managed to convince some people in the government to give you some trouble for their own benefit". What a great system we have here in America.
After I readthe paper, the headline seems even more misleading. The headline is "Research Reveals Low Exposure of Excellent Work By Female Scientists". However, the paper actually says that out of 1022 participants to a symposium they studied, only the "invited speakers" category of 73 participants showed an under-representation. The other 949 participants were of a fair ratio. Further, the ratio of *initially invited* speakers was also fair. It only became an under-representation because 50% of the initially invited female speakers declined to give a talk (vs. 26% of initially invited male speakers declining).
Reading comprehension fail. I thought that sentence was saying that there were also less women than men among world-class scientists, not that they took the ratio into account.
This got me to actually looking through the paper. I concluded that: I wish they would make the raw data available. It would be easier to make sense of than long sentences with numbers strewn in. But yes it seems they accounted for this.
Reading the paper, it seems that this underrepresentation was only out of the invited speakers, which were 73 out of the 1022 contributors to the symposium. In the other categories that were applied for (regular speakers, "regular posters", and "essence posters"), the ratio was fair given the baseline population ratio. Interestingly, it seems the only valid reason the authors found for this being the case in terms of the invited speakers is that women turned down more invitations than men. That is:
The process of selecting invited speakers was relatively unbiased: 23% of all initially invited speakers were women. This was similar to most of our baseline sex ratios [...] this shows that, by our measures, the number of women invited initially to ESEB 2011 was not biased.
Further:
A large body of evidence highlights the existence of implicit bias against women in science [...] However, it is reassuring that the overall sex ratio of initially invited speakers [...] was comparable to most of the sex ratios of our baseline populations.
This was also good to read:
Additionally, the presence or absence of female organizers within a symposium did not influence the sex ratio of their invited speakers.
So it seems the discrepancy was due to women freely making decisions (to decline invitations to talk), not out of any inherent bias in that scientific community. That is, both their hypotheses have been falsified:
We hypothesize that because the scientific achievements of women may be less visible than the achievements of men [...] female scientists may be overlooked more often for invitations to talk. [...] We therefore expect that symposia organized only by men will have fewer female invited speakers than symposia that have at least one female organizer.
The title makes it sound like they took excellent papers authored by men, and excellent papers of equivalent quality authored by women, and found that those papers authored by women, though they were of the same quality, did not have as much exposure. This would indeed be an interesting finding and would point to sexism in the sciences, as it would show that the same product (paper of a certain quality) was being treated differently solely because of the sex of the author. This of course assuming the measure of equivalent quality was a good one.
However it seems like all they did is "analyze" (read: count) the number of male and female speakers and found that there were less female speakers. From this they say women are "underrepresented". Hardly a sound conclusion. What if 20% of all scientists are women, and 80% are men? Then a fair (neither over- nor under-) representation would be 20% female speakers and 80% male speakers. Then you'd have to go see the reasons why there are less women scientists than male scientists, which can be many. The pregnancy thing mentioned in the article is likely a big one, at least.
Yea ultimately it's a matter of taste. I am happy and productive programming in Python so I know that I like it =). I agree with the spaces thing. That's the one downside I can think of for having the space-indentation.
Actually, having something like `len(x)` instead of `x.len()` has some benefits. Check out Guido's rationale for why it was done that way in python:
There are two bits of “Python rationale” that I’d like to explain first.
First of all, I chose len(x) over x.len() for HCI reasons (def __len__() came much later). There are two intertwined reasons actually, both HCI:
(a) For some operations, prefix notation just reads better than postfix — prefix (and infix!) operations have a long tradition in mathematics which likes notations where the visuals help the mathematician thinking about a problem. Compare the easy with which we rewrite a formula like x*(a+b) into x*a + x*b to the clumsiness of doing the same thing using a raw OO notation.
(b) When I read code that says len(x) I know that it is asking for the length of something. This tells me two things: the result is an integer, and the argument is some kind of container. To the contrary, when I read x.len(), I have to already know that x is some kind of container implementing an interface or inheriting from a class that has a standard len(). Witness the confusion we occasionally have when a class that is not implementing a mapping has a get() or keys() method, or something that isn’t a file has a write() method.
Saying the same thing in another way, I see ‘len‘ as a built-in operation. I’d hate to lose that.//
1) New previously-unexploited market opportunity is discovered/developed (e.g. HFT).
2) Initial enterers into said market start making bucketloads of money.
3) People complain and say this should be regulated, its not fair to X, Y, and Z, this is a plague on society, etc.
a) This of course conveniently ignores the fact that when trades are done voluntarily they are only done because both parties think they will benefit[*].
4) If we're lucky and the market doesn't get regulated too much, more people enter said market, reducing the profit margin while providing more benefit to people in said market. Eventually there isn't much money to be made in it at all and it's just another product/service everyone takes for granted.
b) If we're unlucky then the market gets regulated too much, stunting its eventual development of another taken-for-granted product/service, leaving it prone to disruption whenever the regulations change.
[*] People above have already given many reasons why HFT ends up benefiting the market, for example punker's post.
First, figure out how the code gets loaded and runs. Find the equivalent of the 'main' function. Then start tracing it, seeing what functions get called, how things are loaded, etc. What really helps here is an editor you can CTRL+click on a function on to go to its definition. When you hit a function that doesn't call any other unknown functions, then you can start understanding what it does without having to step into it. These are the basic functionality units. Then when you know enough of those, you can start going a level up, etc. Eventually a picture forms in your mind of just how things work. You can optionally skip over functions for preference of looking at them later if it seems pretty clear what they do based on the name & how they're called, but you might find important stuff in there later.
This is how I go about it, anyway. It can be very frustrating and very confusing at first, but eventually the picture starts making sense, then things click in a most satisfying manner.
That being said, the above is also the reason I can dislike complicated frameworks. There's so much indirection that it can take quite a while indeed until you hit something concrete. The mark of a good framework is, either it doesn't do that, or it does but soon enough you figure out its parts and then you can treat it intuitively.
We figured out the time travel, guys. All is well here. Give Dmitry Itskov all your money or I'll stop existing, which would release an energy so tremendous as to destroy everything in the spacetime 1000 years (both light- and time-) around where I am, which is only 900 years into your future.
They can be expressed as a *fraction* - "sqrt(2)/2" is a *fraction* - but they can't be expressed as *a ratio between two numbers that are both integers*. BAM! Double-out-pedanted.
You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past.
This is positively and absolutely the answer. The reason is to protect the innocent, not to protect the guilty. Short example deriving from the video (which you absolutely have to watch): Say a murder was committed in your neighborhood (not by you) at 10PM last Sunday. The police can ask you: what were you doing on 10PM last Sunday? Maybe you were actually taking a stroll in your neighborhood, as you usually do, though you didn't see anything/know about the murder 'till later. If you tell the police that you were out taking a stroll, alone, in that same region, they can easily use that to build a convincing case against you and put you away for a long time. If you say you weren't taking a stroll, and later it is found out you were, then that's obstruction of justice, which comes with its own penalties. Best thing to do is to REMAIN SILENT and get your ass to a lawyer!
"...in part due to Shakespeare standardizing the grammer." Brilliant. You left that in intentionally didn't you? Although I guess that's spelling, not grammar.
Well, having unregulated taxis wouldn't make people stop coming to new york. The only way that would happen is if it was so bad that everybody knew about it. But if everyone knows it happens then they can look up what the market price should be and only hire the more legitimate businesses that offer rides at that price. In the meantime everybody (tourists & residents alike) suffers from poorer quality taxi service.
I didn't mean they should be disallowed from running rough-shod over the populace. I meant the government should not restrict entry into the market any more than it already is by the natural entry costs. Then it wouldn't matter if companies ran rough-shod over the populace because they would go out of business. I only want it one way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea check out this Wikipedia article. It seems a lot of the confusion is that people use the terms call-by-value and call-by-reference inconsistently. It might be more a matter of vocabulary instead of actual confusion of what happens.
Hmm, according to the Wikipedia, Java is indeed call-by-object for object parameters, and I think it must be call by value for primitives.
Pointers - you don't need them in Javascript. what's a situation where you'd like to use a pointer but can't, and it makes the code significantly more complex? No points to you if you give the `swap(int *a, int *b);` example.
Actually, Python doesn't pass objects as references. It's call by object. It might take a few read-throughs to grok it but it's well worth it.
Who says no information travels faster than light? It always seemed arbitrary to me. I didn't have a very intensive physics education though so I'm open to hear why in terms a layman would understand.
Problem: if I have to open my iPhone one day, it'll be annoying. Solution: Go through the pain of doing that *right now*!
"antitrust" basically means "one or more of your competitors managed to convince some people in the government to give you some trouble for their own benefit". What a great system we have here in America.
After I read the paper, the headline seems even more misleading. The headline is "Research Reveals Low Exposure of Excellent Work By Female Scientists". However, the paper actually says that out of 1022 participants to a symposium they studied, only the "invited speakers" category of 73 participants showed an under-representation. The other 949 participants were of a fair ratio. Further, the ratio of *initially invited* speakers was also fair. It only became an under-representation because 50% of the initially invited female speakers declined to give a talk (vs. 26% of initially invited male speakers declining).
This got me to actually looking through the paper. I concluded that: I wish they would make the raw data available. It would be easier to make sense of than long sentences with numbers strewn in. But yes it seems they accounted for this.
Reading the paper, it seems that this underrepresentation was only out of the invited speakers, which were 73 out of the 1022 contributors to the symposium. In the other categories that were applied for (regular speakers, "regular posters", and "essence posters"), the ratio was fair given the baseline population ratio. Interestingly, it seems the only valid reason the authors found for this being the case in terms of the invited speakers is that women turned down more invitations than men. That is:
The process of selecting invited speakers was relatively unbiased: 23% of all initially invited speakers were women. This was similar to most of our baseline sex ratios [...] this shows that, by our measures, the number of women invited initially to ESEB 2011 was not biased.
Further:
A large body of evidence highlights the existence of implicit bias against women in science [...] However, it is reassuring that the overall sex ratio of initially invited speakers [...] was comparable to most of the sex ratios of our baseline populations.
This was also good to read:
Additionally, the presence or absence of female organizers within a symposium did not influence the sex ratio of their invited speakers.
So it seems the discrepancy was due to women freely making decisions (to decline invitations to talk), not out of any inherent bias in that scientific community. That is, both their hypotheses have been falsified:
We hypothesize that because the scientific achievements of women may be less visible than the achievements of men [...] female scientists may be overlooked more often for invitations to talk. [...] We therefore expect that symposia organized only by men will have fewer female invited speakers than symposia that have at least one female organizer.
That's great news!
The title makes it sound like they took excellent papers authored by men, and excellent papers of equivalent quality authored by women, and found that those papers authored by women, though they were of the same quality, did not have as much exposure. This would indeed be an interesting finding and would point to sexism in the sciences, as it would show that the same product (paper of a certain quality) was being treated differently solely because of the sex of the author. This of course assuming the measure of equivalent quality was a good one.
However it seems like all they did is "analyze" (read: count) the number of male and female speakers and found that there were less female speakers. From this they say women are "underrepresented". Hardly a sound conclusion. What if 20% of all scientists are women, and 80% are men? Then a fair (neither over- nor under-) representation would be 20% female speakers and 80% male speakers. Then you'd have to go see the reasons why there are less women scientists than male scientists, which can be many. The pregnancy thing mentioned in the article is likely a big one, at least.
Yea ultimately it's a matter of taste. I am happy and productive programming in Python so I know that I like it =). I agree with the spaces thing. That's the one downside I can think of for having the space-indentation.
There are two bits of “Python rationale” that I’d like to explain first.
//
First of all, I chose len(x) over x.len() for HCI reasons (def __len__() came much later). There are two intertwined reasons actually, both HCI:
(a) For some operations, prefix notation just reads better than postfix — prefix (and infix!) operations have a long tradition in mathematics which likes notations where the visuals help the mathematician thinking about a problem. Compare the easy with which we rewrite a formula like x*(a+b) into x*a + x*b to the clumsiness of doing the same thing using a raw OO notation.
(b) When I read code that says len(x) I know that it is asking for the length of something. This tells me two things: the result is an integer, and the argument is some kind of container. To the contrary, when I read x.len(), I have to already know that x is some kind of container implementing an interface or inheriting from a class that has a standard len(). Witness the confusion we occasionally have when a class that is not implementing a mapping has a get() or keys() method, or something that isn’t a file has a write() method.
Saying the same thing in another way, I see ‘len‘ as a built-in operation. I’d hate to lose that.
*facepalm*
1) New previously-unexploited market opportunity is discovered/developed (e.g. HFT).
2) Initial enterers into said market start making bucketloads of money.
3) People complain and say this should be regulated, its not fair to X, Y, and Z, this is a plague on society, etc.
a) This of course conveniently ignores the fact that when trades are done voluntarily they are only done because both parties think they will benefit[*].
4) If we're lucky and the market doesn't get regulated too much, more people enter said market, reducing the profit margin while providing more benefit to people in said market. Eventually there isn't much money to be made in it at all and it's just another product/service everyone takes for granted.
b) If we're unlucky then the market gets regulated too much, stunting its eventual development of another taken-for-granted product/service, leaving it prone to disruption whenever the regulations change.
[*] People above have already given many reasons why HFT ends up benefiting the market, for example punker's post.
First, figure out how the code gets loaded and runs. Find the equivalent of the 'main' function. Then start tracing it, seeing what functions get called, how things are loaded, etc. What really helps here is an editor you can CTRL+click on a function on to go to its definition. When you hit a function that doesn't call any other unknown functions, then you can start understanding what it does without having to step into it. These are the basic functionality units. Then when you know enough of those, you can start going a level up, etc. Eventually a picture forms in your mind of just how things work. You can optionally skip over functions for preference of looking at them later if it seems pretty clear what they do based on the name & how they're called, but you might find important stuff in there later. This is how I go about it, anyway. It can be very frustrating and very confusing at first, but eventually the picture starts making sense, then things click in a most satisfying manner. That being said, the above is also the reason I can dislike complicated frameworks. There's so much indirection that it can take quite a while indeed until you hit something concrete. The mark of a good framework is, either it doesn't do that, or it does but soon enough you figure out its parts and then you can treat it intuitively.
We figured out the time travel, guys. All is well here. Give Dmitry Itskov all your money or I'll stop existing, which would release an energy so tremendous as to destroy everything in the spacetime 1000 years (both light- and time-) around where I am, which is only 900 years into your future.
They can be expressed as a *fraction* - "sqrt(2)/2" is a *fraction* - but they can't be expressed as *a ratio between two numbers that are both integers*. BAM! Double-out-pedanted.
You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past.
Trolling is when you intend to annoy people. I intended to amuse people =).
His Majesty King Bhumibol is the most respected one! The monarchy brings great glory to Thailand! Long live the King!
This is positively and absolutely the answer. The reason is to protect the innocent, not to protect the guilty. Short example deriving from the video (which you absolutely have to watch): Say a murder was committed in your neighborhood (not by you) at 10PM last Sunday. The police can ask you: what were you doing on 10PM last Sunday? Maybe you were actually taking a stroll in your neighborhood, as you usually do, though you didn't see anything/know about the murder 'till later. If you tell the police that you were out taking a stroll, alone, in that same region, they can easily use that to build a convincing case against you and put you away for a long time. If you say you weren't taking a stroll, and later it is found out you were, then that's obstruction of justice, which comes with its own penalties. Best thing to do is to REMAIN SILENT and get your ass to a lawyer!
What? Nooo..
"...in part due to Shakespeare standardizing the grammer." Brilliant. You left that in intentionally didn't you? Although I guess that's spelling, not grammar.
Well, having unregulated taxis wouldn't make people stop coming to new york. The only way that would happen is if it was so bad that everybody knew about it. But if everyone knows it happens then they can look up what the market price should be and only hire the more legitimate businesses that offer rides at that price. In the meantime everybody (tourists & residents alike) suffers from poorer quality taxi service.
I didn't mean they should be disallowed from running rough-shod over the populace. I meant the government should not restrict entry into the market any more than it already is by the natural entry costs. Then it wouldn't matter if companies ran rough-shod over the populace because they would go out of business. I only want it one way.