Actually you can do the same sort of operation to unblur a license plate. In fact that was a lab exercise in one of my college signal processing courses:-) The main concern I'd see with the license plate problem would be ensuring your camera sampled the data fast enough to meet the Nyquist criterion. But if you did, you'd have all the information content in the image you'd need.
The degree of blurring isn't really the issue, unless you start to lose information due to quantization losses. Short of that, it's a matter of A) being able to guess or approximate the original blur operation, and B) the fact that "blur" operations are generally reversible (they're simple linear shift-invariant filters, and you're not losing information in that process). So you just apply the inverse filter to the image (or subset of the image). If you don't know the exact original blur, you can attack the problem by brute force and just try inverses of many different blurs until one looks fairly good.
If you really want to obscure something in a non-reversible way, remove the data from the image (overwrite it with a black box or something). That's far more reliable than applying even the heaviest of blurring filters.
You may be right that the fear of outsourcing is why Americans are staying away. The media certainly make it seem like all the computer jobs are disappearing. But the actual data show an increasing demand for Americans in software engineering.
That's been borne out by my own experience interviewing software engineering applicants. We have a lot of demand, but there just aren't that many good engineers looking to switch jobs. Thus the competition for those few engineers is pretty intense, and companies in our area work hard to retain the people they have.
I don't think it's necessarily as simple as finding something more interesting than sex in absolute terms. I suspect it's more of a marginal-utility effect.
I've seen previous studies that claimed people often have sex because they are bored, rather than out of a specific desire for sex at that moment. Obviously sometimes you really just want sex, and in those cases I doubt you'll see anyone skipping it in favor of the Internet. But if the internet is just making people less bored, thus causing a reduction in sex-as-default-boredom-reliever, that's not necessarily a sign of anything bad. Nor that sex is somehow less valued than before.
This sort of effect could probably be teased out by asking people how satisfied they are with the amount of sex they have. For those unsatisified, they're probably not likely to skip out on sex for the internet. But those who are getting "enough" may well be willing to spend more of time online. That seems perfectly healthy to me.
Allowing in another group of people who can't get in on their merits wouldn't make the system better, it would make it worse.
And affirmative action in college admissions isn't doing anyone any favors. Recent research shows that those who get in someplace because of affirmative action are actually worse off than if they'd have gone to a school matching their abilities. It seems to be because they tend to fall behind their classmates who got in on merit, when if they'd gone to a slightly less selective school they would have had classes at an appropriate pace, and thus learned more. (The study was with respect to law students and odds of passing the bar exam, but it seems likely that this would apply to general college admissions as well).
The real solution is to make admission purely merit-based.
The problem, as it stands now, with most users is that they don't care because its 'not their problem' when things go down I can't speak for your workplace, but at mine the users damn well do care. When things go down, we can't do our work, and it's incredibly frustrating. And most of the time, things we have going down are not due to users doing something inappropriate.
I think that the real problem is responsibility. The responsibility needs to cut both ways. Power users often want privileges on their machines because the default configuration is so locked down that it's barely usable, and even trivial modifications require helpdesk tickets to be created. That's a sign that IT is failing its responsibility to provide a productive IT environment. Companies need to find the right balance between preventing users from shooting themselves (or others) in the foot, yet enabling them to shoot at their target. Too often this balance is tilted way too far in favor of risk avoidance at the expense of productivity.
Obviously that balance is going to vary depending on the user community. For example, where I work IT has gradually come around to the idea of allowing the users (generally software engineers) administrative rights on their PC when desired. To their credit they don't ask you to "absolve the IT department of responsibility" - but they do ask you to sign something that basically says you'll be responsible. This works out to the benefit of both sides - simple individual needs can be often taken care of by the user immediately, which makes users happier and frees up IT to handle the more complex tasks. If someone abuses their administrative rights they could be revoked, but that's generally not necessary.
You say that you are tired of IT thinking that they know more about your job than you do, but really that is exactly what you are doing to IT when you have already selected whatever software that you are going to use lock stock and barrel without consulting IT first Consulting IT is a Good Thing. But suppose after consultation IT and a user have a difference of opinion over which application is the "best" - at the end of the day, who gets to make the decision - the user who has to use it, or the IT person who has to install/maintain it?
The IT person is presumably a technical expert, but the user is the expert about their needs.
The 95% accuracy number typically represents the probability that the test result matches the real-world situation. For example:
Suppose you have a test for a disease that is 95% accurate. Say the disease occurs in 0.1% of the population. Let: A = person has the disease B = test result says they have the disease
Then Probability(B GIVEN A) =.95, and Probability(not-B GIVEN non-A) =.95. But this isn't really the piece of information you want if you're someone who just got a positive result on the test. You really want to know Probability(A GIVEN B), the probability that you have the disease given the positive test result you just got back.
To calculate that, you need to use Bayes' Rule, and the Probability(A), which we defined above to be 0.1%, or 0.001.
P(A GIVEN B) = ( P(B GIVEN A) * P(A) ) / P(B) P(A GIVEN B) = ( P(B GIVEN A) * P(A) ) / ( P(B GIVEN A)*P(A) + P(B GIVEN not-A)*P(not-A) )
=.95 *.001 / (.95*.001 + (1-.95)*(1-.001) )
= 0.0187
So receiving a positive result on a 95% accurate test means you have less than a 2% chance of actually having the disease, basically because the disease is rare. It's one of the classic examples of having to be careful about which probabilities you're discussing - the results aren't always intuitive. The scary part is when they test doctors on this and most of them get it wrong.
Coming back to our discussion of the DarkWeb, they claim a 95% accuracy too. Presumably this means:
A = poster of terrorist message was Mr. X B = DarkWeb identified the poster of the message as Mr. X
P(B GIVEN A) =.95, P(not-B GIVEN not-A) =.95.
So the question is, what is Probability(A)? Because that's what's going to drive the item of real interest, which is Probability(A GIVEN B). If the authorities can narrow the field of candidates enough before performing the test, such that Probability(A) is fairly high, then the test is probably pretty useful. You can distinguish between a few terrorist authors fairly well. But if it's low (say they put in *everyone*, of which probably even fewer than our 0.1% number are terrorists), then the test will not really tell you anything at all useful.
The next question is, will the people using this test understand enough statistics to know when it's probably telling them something useful, versus when it's not? That's where I would be concerned.
This is why ISPs are in the best position to deal with this issue. They can detect the vulnerable machine at a local level, upon accessing the ISP, rather than requiring scans that span (and flood) the network.
Now, with the caveat that I've only given this a moment's thought, and I'm sure there are plenty of devils in the details, possible approaches:
The ISP could periodically scan your PC, and could do it frequently because it's at a local level, such that the ISP is far more likely to be the first to detect the vulnerability (versus a worm that also patches the hole to protect the worm). If the ISP detects a serious vulnerability for which a patch exists, it could block all traffic inbound to that PC except from the patch servers (and maybe place you an automated voice call or voicemail letting you know this has occurred).
Alternatively a subscriber could agree in advance that the ISP is allowed to exploit any such vulnerability for the sole purpose of installing the vendor-approved patch. (I suspect this may make some folks uncomfortable, and with some good reason, but those folks probably are already keeping their machines patched).
ISPs could even sell this as a consumer-protection feature (you don't want your identity/credit cards/etc stolen off your PC, do you?). And it is, even though much of the benefit would come once enough ISPs starting doing this to create herd immunity. And the ISP would benefit from reduced bandwidth usage, now that fewer machines are infected.
Of course, all of the above assumes that it's economically worthwhile for the ISP to do this. It's not clear that would be the case. You would essentially be creating an immune system for the Internet, which could be costly to maintain, and for best effect you'd want all ISPs in on the action. So you've got a competition problem: all would benefit if all implement it, but if the cost is sufficiently high to outweigh the marketing benefits, then individual ISPs may see it as a competitive disadvantage to implement if others aren't doing it too.
I disagree that knowledge of data structure performance characteristics is "specific knowledge". It's fundamentals. You'll need that knowledge for just about any performance-sensitive application. Heck, even if the application isn't that performance sensitive, you should be using an appropriate data structure, especially if you have a standard library implementation that's made it easy to do.
I wouldn't expect someone to reinvent the standard library in an interview. But I *would* expect they can give a logical explanation for which of the standard library data structures they would select for a given problem. An array, a list, a tree, a hash table? Not all are suitable for all problems. If someone can't explain to me why using a linked list to store 2 gazillion elements of data that need speedy random access is a bad idea... that's not good. This kind of consideration comes up all the time in real world programming scenarios.
But, to your point: don't you think that support from family in studying and learning a pro-education attitude at home counts the most? It absolutely does. But if your kid is attending a school where most are struggling just to graduate, more advanced opportunities are unlikely to be available (whether it's the arts, AP classes, etc). Even the most educated and dedicated parents aren't going to be able to provide the variety and depth of educational opportunities that a good school system can.
I went to a small-town school that was by no means bad. And I've done well for myself, largely a result of good upbringing and support by my parents, so no complaints really. But having lived in some different places after graduating college, particularly some high-population, well-to-do districts, the opportunities kids in these schools have blow me away. I would've have loved to have that available at my school. Having seen what's not just possible but being done in other places, it's something I'll look for in a town when I have kids.
To abuse the old saying, one man's McMansion is another's comfortably-sized house. Different people will have different views on just how big is living "responsibly" - having a large but well-built/insulated home is not necessarily a negative impact to future generations, the environment, etc.
From what I can tell, the people unhappy about "McMansions" (however one may define that) are usually unhappy about the character of their neighborhood being changed from underneath them, rather than the house size per se. When someone puts down a house three times larger than all its neighbors, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And people willing to stick out like a sore thumb may not be the type of neighbors you want.
I suspect if these owners built their houses in neighborhoods where they would fit in, nobody would be talking about McMansions.
Don't need the internet for that. For some surgeries, it's actually cheaper to fly to India, have the surgery and recovery period there, and fly back, than to have the same surgery in the US. This has been getting much more popular - Google "medical tourism". Popular among those without health insurance, not just the low-income.
There can be quality-of-care advantages too (i.e. because costs are lower, there's not a rush to get you out of the hospital prematurely).
You make a lot of valid points, and I agree we shouldn't knock reporters too much. I'm sure most are genuinely trying to do the best job they can with the increasingly limited time and resources they have. And it's certainly not possible for them to be experts in everything, so some mistakes will be made.
But the GP's larger point is still valid, namely that we have a system in which the organizations responsible for informing and educating the populace about current events are doing a generally poor job. For every excellent organization like the Washington Post, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal, we've got dozens of embarrassingly poor newspapers in smaller markets. And even those are better than the 24-hour news networks. Despite being free of the space constraints of physical publishers, they manage to produce even less detailed stories, which they then simply repeat ad infinitum throughout the day. I've almost given up on watching them at all.
I happen to think that reporters are more concerned with this problem than most people. I've often heard them lament the shrinking budgets for serious news reporting, versus coverage of celebrity misbehaviors and other classic tabloid fare. But how do we address the problem? Would media consolidation allow economies of scale to support better reporting, or would it just turn new outlets into the equivalent of Clear Channel?
There's a neat trick you can play with Markov chains to generate this sort of text. It may not be as good as your handcrafted version, but it makes it easier to generate larger texts.
The algorithm basically works by feeding in a sample text, from which you generate a statistical model of what words are likely to follow any given N-word sequence. Then you select at random which of the possible suffix words to output given the previous N output words. (Obviously you need to provide the initial conditions, i.e. the first N words of output, to the algorithm). If you allow punctuation to be considered part of a word, it seems to produce reasonably grammatical sentences too.
Picking N=2 seems to work pretty well. I imagine if we fed in a bunch of buzzword-laded management texts we'd get some great results.
Your post ignores what I actually said. If you go back a few posts, you'll see that I stated that I *agreed* that there are differences between the parties. What I said was that the policy of doing nothing about the problem has been common to both parties. If we ever get around to actually doing something about Social Security, then I'm sure the other differences will show themselves again.
To suggest that failing to fix the impending Social Security crisis is somehow "saving" Social Security is completely ridiculous. Without a fix the system will eventually run out of funds and be unable to pay its promised benefits. "Saving" the system would mean putting it back on sound financial footing. Saving it would be implementing the lockbox that Al Gore suggested. Saving it could be any number of possible reforms to the system. But NOTHING has been done, by either party, to fix it. Hell, for all of Bush's countless leadership flaws, and the flaws in his proposed solution, at least he TRIED to get Congress to face up to the problem. But Republicans and Democrats alike insisted on doing absolutely nothing. They may have done so for different reasons (Democrats for fear of a privatized system, and Republicans for fear of changing anything with a popular entitlement program), but the end result was the same.
Personal attacks such as the ones you made, accusing someone who disagrees with you of being dishonest, is exactly the sort of foolishness that has produced an inept and paralyzed federal government. When disagreements are turned into personal hatreds, it's awfully difficult to come to honest and respectful discussions, much less compromises that both sides could accept.
I find it incredibly amusing that you assume I'm a Republican (I'm not, and tend to vote for candidates of both parties). I try to understand the positions and concerns of both sides, in the hopes that maybe I'll learn something, and so that I can give both sides a fair shake. Maybe if you laid off the assumption that everyone who voices a different opinion must be a dishonest and radical person, you'd realize there's a huge number of independents out there who just want government to do its damn job. The fact that the government has not been doing its job is exactly why Republicans have been losing the support you mentioned. They've been running the show, and badly, and independents (even some Republicans) are pissed off about it.
I'm not trying to move the goalposts. Merely to note that the Democrats, like Republicans, have done their fair share to make the Social Security problem worse than it needed to be.
While some Republicans do favor privatizing Social Security, others don't. After all, Social Security is arguably the most popular federal government program in existence.
Regardless, we need to do something about the fact that:
1) The program is structured idiotically, given that our population is inevitably getting older. The ratio of workers paying in to workers taking out keeps getting smaller and smaller, which is not sustainable. 2) The current system encourages politicians to rob Social Security to pay for whatever else they like, so the deficit doesn't seem as large as it really is. So instead we have a whole bunch of IOUs to ourselves sitting in the Social Security trust funds, instead of actual cash or investments. 3) By spending the money as soon as we take it in, we fail to use the power of compound interest to our advantage.
IMO, we need a system whereby each generation's Social Security taxes go towards paying for its own retirement. Maybe every year the government sets up a new account where the folks born in that year will have their Social Security taxes invested. That way the money from those taxes is in a "lockbox" that can't tempt Congress to spend it on other things, and the funds could be invested using a smart strategy to get decent returns rather than sitting around and losing ground to inflation (it could work like those lifecycle funds you can get in 401k plans, where the mix becomes more and more conservative as retirement gets closer). And then an aging population is no longer a big problem, because each generation has already paid for itself, rather than relying on a relatively smaller and smaller pool of young workers.
First of all, who says that people who oppose abortion don't donate a weekend a year volunteering with adoption or motherhood support groups? And in fact many anti-abortion folks do advocate adoption as an alternative to abortion.
Secondly, adoption only helps those children who were fortunate enough not to be aborted. Thus if your goal is to stop abortions, helping existing kids find adoptive families, while noble and worthy, does nothing to further that goal. Most people aren't getting abortions because they're worried the kid won't be adopted. Especially given the demand for babies to adopt in this country (the waiting time to get an American baby is so long that many couples end up going abroad to adopt).
Many of the hardcore anti-abortion types really are "up in arms" about embryos discarded by medical clinics, or used for medical research. Hence the controversy over embryonic stem cells.
I can't speak for those supporting "abstinence-only" education, as I fail to see how keeping kids ignorant helps them make wise choices, and since every scientific study seems to show such "education" is completely ineffective at its stated goal. But not everyone opposed to abortion agrees with hiding contraceptive information from teens.
It's all a quite convenient for you to demand that women who cannot afford, whether financially or socially, to bear and raise a child should destroy their life, and the life of that child Anti-abortion advocates aren't saying the woman should raise the child, with the associated costs. They're saying she should let it live to be adopted. Especially since except in cases of rape, it was her (and her partner's) decision to take that risk of creating a child in the first place.
Based on your unproveable assertion that the new embryo is a person who can be murdered, and not a medically problematic appendage like a amputatable leg. I assume that you would be willing to concede that a baby that was just born is indeed a person, rather than a problematic appendage. So what about the day before it's born - is it a person then? Physically it's virtually identical, the only difference is where it's located. If you go back in time one day at a time, at what point does it stop being a person?
I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of a ball of cells smaller than I can see being considered a full person. But I also struggle with the question I just asked you. The religious conservatives who answer "it doesn't stop being a person" at least have a solid answer.
It's also convenient for you to find that Democrats have not protected Social Security or other Gore policies, when Republicans have not only held the power monopoly trifecta since Gore's election, but have abused it to extremes, like offering the "nuclear option" to destroy minority protections. Even as Democratic resistance in Congress is the only reason Social Security is still intact, right as the rest of the Republican economy collapses under the counterproductive debt that created the illusion of even minimal growth. Prior to the "Republican revolution" the Democrats had control of Congress for decades. During that whole time they spent Social Security money on other things. The Republicans have been doing the same. Now that the Democrats are in control again, I doubt we'll see them suddenly start deciding to start actually taking the "lockbox" approach. If they did, then they'd either have to raise taxes, cut other government programs, or increase the deficit, none of which is politically popular.
Of course it is. So is "woman's right to choose", as if the choice being made were of no more consequence than what to have for dinner tonight. Political discussions tend to use politically loaded terms, especially since framing the debate gives an edge on how people will view it. Liberals and conservatives alike do this all the time, and usually even the most biased terms capture some element of what really matters to each side.
I notice that people who say "abortion on demand" ignore the risks and costs of illegal abortions, and don't adopt many children they claim to care so much about
If one has a moral belief that abortion is the murder of a defenseless child, then the "risks and costs" to the murderer are probably not of great concern. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with this belief, it is at the very least a principled and logically consistent position to take.
I also think it's a little unfair to suggest that people don't care about the unborn if they haven't adopted children. One person or family can only do so much on their own. That's why we support government and other social institutions through tax dollars and charitable contributions. You can care about domestic violence without running a safehouse. You can care about hunger without running your own soup kitchen. We fund institutions to address these problems, which hopefully have more expertise and economies of scale than individuals could manage themselves.
The difference between DC Republicans and Democrats is as stark as that between Bush and Gore, who others also said were no different. Iraq, Greenhouse pollution, Social Security lockbox - an endless list of critical differences. That are still different.
I agree there are differences. But I would argue that on the issue of Social Security, Democrats have essentially taken the same position as Republicans, which is to do nothing about the problem, and to continue to spend funds intended for Social Security on other government programs. Gore may have talked up the lockbox idea during his campaign, but the rest of his party has done nothing more than the Republicans have to actually implement it.
I happen to believe that the reason people talk about there being "no difference" between the parties is that both parties have long since ceased to be problem solvers. They're more concerned with playing political games and getting their respective "bases" riled up than in finding compromises that most Americans could live with. A lot of these hot-button issues have a majority of Americans holding a middle-ground view. We could settle a lot of these issues tomorrow if politicians decided it was in their best interests to do so.
Thanks - I appreciate the info. When work settles down in a few weeks, if Gutsy's been released I'll give it a try. (last pre-release of Gutsy had the same issue, but it was still an unofficial build after all).
I do understand there's a release cycle; though since I bought the hardware in January I'd hoped August would have been enough time. But it's not a big deal, and my aim wasn't to pick on Ubuntu (which by all accounts is a great distro). Just brought it up to illustrate that even good distros can cost you a little more time than expected.
Which one is cheaper depends on A) how much you value your time versus your money, and B) whether the OS installer supports your hardware properly.
For example, I recently tried Ubuntu. It doesn't appear to support a GeForce 8800GTX (all-black screen when it tries to display the login screen). New hardware, yes, but not exactly obscure. It's entirely possible that if I were to fiddle with XOrg settings some more, or install the Nvidia binary-only driver, or some other step, that this might work. Or it might not. Regardless, after a bit of fiddling I decided the cost to my free time wasn't worth it.
Eventually I'm sure Ubuntu will fix their issue, and then the cost equation may switch back the other way. But at least for now, Windows is cheaper for me.
I'd rather have a doctor who embraced healthiness, thus helping me obtain a better quality of life and reduced chance of disease, than one who was so focused on fighting a specific disease after it occurs that he forgot about prevention. Or whose cure was worse than the disease itself.
Of course if there is a disease in the community you need to fight it. If you view proprietary software as a disease, by all means fight the good fight for free software. But I think the point of the post was that you'll achieve more by showing people the benefits of freedom, and improving free software, than by bashing Microsoft. The latter is unlikely to persuade anyone and just makes the speaker sound like a religious zealot. Religious zealots are rarely viewed as credible by anyone other than religious zealots.
Does not Linus have the right to decide which tool best fits his needs? Oftentimes different people have different ideas of what tool is "best" (which is why some of us drive a Prius, some drive a F-150 truck, and most drive something in between). Software is no different in this sense.
If people want him to use a given tool, ask him why he uses his current tool and then improve your tool to meet those needs better. If it's a sufficient improvement over his current tool, then he'll probably switch. But complaining that somehow he "set back" revision control systems by deciding Tool X didn't meet his needs seems rather unfair to me. Linus's responsibility is to the projects he oversees, not to arbitrary other projects that would enjoy having him use their software.
It's a good and valid point that any testing involves some overhead costs, which otherwise could be spent on other things.
There's also a valid argument to be made about whether the current frequency of testing strikes the right balance between fostering quick reaction times and the cost (in money and students' time) of test-taking.
I also agree with several of your suggestions on how to help the system. But suppose we decide to spend the money to implement some of those suggestions - how do we know if they're working to improve student's learning if we aren't somehow testing the students? I guess I just see some level of testing overhead as inevitable if we want any objective standard by which to measure success.
Actually, it's not backwards, it's correct. And in fact, that's how we behave all the time. If a store has lousy customer service, people tend to stop going there and instead go somewhere else (all other aspects being equal). Thus poor service leads to less money until service improves. Stores that cannot provide good service go out of business. And for most industries, this competition works pretty well.
The corollary would seem to be that if we expect schools to serve their students well, we should provide a similar sort of environment. Some advocate privatized schooling, but you don't need to do that to apply the principle. Even public schools could be run in a system where parents get to pick their kid's school, and schools that lose too many students get shut down.
As always, the devil will be in the details, but it seems like a solid approach to me.
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Actually you can do the same sort of operation to unblur a license plate. In fact that was a lab exercise in one of my college signal processing courses :-) The main concern I'd see with the license plate problem would be ensuring your camera sampled the data fast enough to meet the Nyquist criterion. But if you did, you'd have all the information content in the image you'd need.
The degree of blurring isn't really the issue, unless you start to lose information due to quantization losses. Short of that, it's a matter of A) being able to guess or approximate the original blur operation, and B) the fact that "blur" operations are generally reversible (they're simple linear shift-invariant filters, and you're not losing information in that process). So you just apply the inverse filter to the image (or subset of the image). If you don't know the exact original blur, you can attack the problem by brute force and just try inverses of many different blurs until one looks fairly good.
If you really want to obscure something in a non-reversible way, remove the data from the image (overwrite it with a black box or something). That's far more reliable than applying even the heaviest of blurring filters.
You may be right that the fear of outsourcing is why Americans are staying away. The media certainly make it seem like all the computer jobs are disappearing. But the actual data show an increasing demand for Americans in software engineering.
That's been borne out by my own experience interviewing software engineering applicants. We have a lot of demand, but there just aren't that many good engineers looking to switch jobs. Thus the competition for those few engineers is pretty intense, and companies in our area work hard to retain the people they have.
I don't think it's necessarily as simple as finding something more interesting than sex in absolute terms. I suspect it's more of a marginal-utility effect.
I've seen previous studies that claimed people often have sex because they are bored, rather than out of a specific desire for sex at that moment. Obviously sometimes you really just want sex, and in those cases I doubt you'll see anyone skipping it in favor of the Internet. But if the internet is just making people less bored, thus causing a reduction in sex-as-default-boredom-reliever, that's not necessarily a sign of anything bad. Nor that sex is somehow less valued than before.
This sort of effect could probably be teased out by asking people how satisfied they are with the amount of sex they have. For those unsatisified, they're probably not likely to skip out on sex for the internet. But those who are getting "enough" may well be willing to spend more of time online. That seems perfectly healthy to me.
As with many things in life, this is a case where greater risks yield greater returns. But clearly you need to pick your investment carefully.
Allowing in another group of people who can't get in on their merits wouldn't make the system better, it would make it worse.
And affirmative action in college admissions isn't doing anyone any favors. Recent research shows that those who get in someplace because of affirmative action are actually worse off than if they'd have gone to a school matching their abilities. It seems to be because they tend to fall behind their classmates who got in on merit, when if they'd gone to a slightly less selective school they would have had classes at an appropriate pace, and thus learned more. (The study was with respect to law students and odds of passing the bar exam, but it seems likely that this would apply to general college admissions as well).
The real solution is to make admission purely merit-based.
Obviously that balance is going to vary depending on the user community. For example, where I work IT has gradually come around to the idea of allowing the users (generally software engineers) administrative rights on their PC when desired. To their credit they don't ask you to "absolve the IT department of responsibility" - but they do ask you to sign something that basically says you'll be responsible. This works out to the benefit of both sides - simple individual needs can be often taken care of by the user immediately, which makes users happier and frees up IT to handle the more complex tasks. If someone abuses their administrative rights they could be revoked, but that's generally not necessary.
The IT person is presumably a technical expert, but the user is the expert about their needs.
The 95% accuracy number typically represents the probability that the test result matches the real-world situation. For example:
.95, and Probability(not-B GIVEN non-A) = .95. But this isn't really the piece of information you want if you're someone who just got a positive result on the test. You really want to know Probability(A GIVEN B), the probability that you have the disease given the positive test result you just got back.
.95 * .001 / ( .95*.001 + (1-.95)*(1-.001) )
.95, P(not-B GIVEN not-A) = .95.
Suppose you have a test for a disease that is 95% accurate. Say the disease occurs in 0.1% of the population. Let:
A = person has the disease
B = test result says they have the disease
Then Probability(B GIVEN A) =
To calculate that, you need to use Bayes' Rule, and the Probability(A), which we defined above to be 0.1%, or 0.001.
P(A GIVEN B) = ( P(B GIVEN A) * P(A) ) / P(B)
P(A GIVEN B) = ( P(B GIVEN A) * P(A) ) / ( P(B GIVEN A)*P(A) + P(B GIVEN not-A)*P(not-A) )
=
= 0.0187
So receiving a positive result on a 95% accurate test means you have less than a 2% chance of actually having the disease, basically because the disease is rare. It's one of the classic examples of having to be careful about which probabilities you're discussing - the results aren't always intuitive. The scary part is when they test doctors on this and most of them get it wrong.
Coming back to our discussion of the DarkWeb, they claim a 95% accuracy too. Presumably this means:
A = poster of terrorist message was Mr. X
B = DarkWeb identified the poster of the message as Mr. X
P(B GIVEN A) =
So the question is, what is Probability(A)? Because that's what's going to drive the item of real interest, which is Probability(A GIVEN B). If the authorities can narrow the field of candidates enough before performing the test, such that Probability(A) is fairly high, then the test is probably pretty useful. You can distinguish between a few terrorist authors fairly well. But if it's low (say they put in *everyone*, of which probably even fewer than our 0.1% number are terrorists), then the test will not really tell you anything at all useful.
The next question is, will the people using this test understand enough statistics to know when it's probably telling them something useful, versus when it's not? That's where I would be concerned.
This is why ISPs are in the best position to deal with this issue. They can detect the vulnerable machine at a local level, upon accessing the ISP, rather than requiring scans that span (and flood) the network.
Now, with the caveat that I've only given this a moment's thought, and I'm sure there are plenty of devils in the details, possible approaches:
The ISP could periodically scan your PC, and could do it frequently because it's at a local level, such that the ISP is far more likely to be the first to detect the vulnerability (versus a worm that also patches the hole to protect the worm). If the ISP detects a serious vulnerability for which a patch exists, it could block all traffic inbound to that PC except from the patch servers (and maybe place you an automated voice call or voicemail letting you know this has occurred).
Alternatively a subscriber could agree in advance that the ISP is allowed to exploit any such vulnerability for the sole purpose of installing the vendor-approved patch. (I suspect this may make some folks uncomfortable, and with some good reason, but those folks probably are already keeping their machines patched).
ISPs could even sell this as a consumer-protection feature (you don't want your identity/credit cards/etc stolen off your PC, do you?). And it is, even though much of the benefit would come once enough ISPs starting doing this to create herd immunity. And the ISP would benefit from reduced bandwidth usage, now that fewer machines are infected.
Of course, all of the above assumes that it's economically worthwhile for the ISP to do this. It's not clear that would be the case. You would essentially be creating an immune system for the Internet, which could be costly to maintain, and for best effect you'd want all ISPs in on the action. So you've got a competition problem: all would benefit if all implement it, but if the cost is sufficiently high to outweigh the marketing benefits, then individual ISPs may see it as a competitive disadvantage to implement if others aren't doing it too.
I disagree that knowledge of data structure performance characteristics is "specific knowledge". It's fundamentals. You'll need that knowledge for just about any performance-sensitive application. Heck, even if the application isn't that performance sensitive, you should be using an appropriate data structure, especially if you have a standard library implementation that's made it easy to do.
I wouldn't expect someone to reinvent the standard library in an interview. But I *would* expect they can give a logical explanation for which of the standard library data structures they would select for a given problem. An array, a list, a tree, a hash table? Not all are suitable for all problems. If someone can't explain to me why using a linked list to store 2 gazillion elements of data that need speedy random access is a bad idea... that's not good. This kind of consideration comes up all the time in real world programming scenarios.
I went to a small-town school that was by no means bad. And I've done well for myself, largely a result of good upbringing and support by my parents, so no complaints really. But having lived in some different places after graduating college, particularly some high-population, well-to-do districts, the opportunities kids in these schools have blow me away. I would've have loved to have that available at my school. Having seen what's not just possible but being done in other places, it's something I'll look for in a town when I have kids.
To abuse the old saying, one man's McMansion is another's comfortably-sized house. Different people will have different views on just how big is living "responsibly" - having a large but well-built/insulated home is not necessarily a negative impact to future generations, the environment, etc.
From what I can tell, the people unhappy about "McMansions" (however one may define that) are usually unhappy about the character of their neighborhood being changed from underneath them, rather than the house size per se. When someone puts down a house three times larger than all its neighbors, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And people willing to stick out like a sore thumb may not be the type of neighbors you want.
I suspect if these owners built their houses in neighborhoods where they would fit in, nobody would be talking about McMansions.
Don't need the internet for that. For some surgeries, it's actually cheaper to fly to India, have the surgery and recovery period there, and fly back, than to have the same surgery in the US. This has been getting much more popular - Google "medical tourism". Popular among those without health insurance, not just the low-income.
There can be quality-of-care advantages too (i.e. because costs are lower, there's not a rush to get you out of the hospital prematurely).
You make a lot of valid points, and I agree we shouldn't knock reporters too much. I'm sure most are genuinely trying to do the best job they can with the increasingly limited time and resources they have. And it's certainly not possible for them to be experts in everything, so some mistakes will be made.
But the GP's larger point is still valid, namely that we have a system in which the organizations responsible for informing and educating the populace about current events are doing a generally poor job. For every excellent organization like the Washington Post, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal, we've got dozens of embarrassingly poor newspapers in smaller markets. And even those are better than the 24-hour news networks. Despite being free of the space constraints of physical publishers, they manage to produce even less detailed stories, which they then simply repeat ad infinitum throughout the day. I've almost given up on watching them at all.
I happen to think that reporters are more concerned with this problem than most people. I've often heard them lament the shrinking budgets for serious news reporting, versus coverage of celebrity misbehaviors and other classic tabloid fare. But how do we address the problem? Would media consolidation allow economies of scale to support better reporting, or would it just turn new outlets into the equivalent of Clear Channel?
There's a neat trick you can play with Markov chains to generate this sort of text. It may not be as good as your handcrafted version, but it makes it easier to generate larger texts.
The algorithm basically works by feeding in a sample text, from which you generate a statistical model of what words are likely to follow any given N-word sequence. Then you select at random which of the possible suffix words to output given the previous N output words. (Obviously you need to provide the initial conditions, i.e. the first N words of output, to the algorithm). If you allow punctuation to be considered part of a word, it seems to produce reasonably grammatical sentences too.
Picking N=2 seems to work pretty well. I imagine if we fed in a bunch of buzzword-laded management texts we'd get some great results.
Your post ignores what I actually said. If you go back a few posts, you'll see that I stated that I *agreed* that there are differences between the parties. What I said was that the policy of doing nothing about the problem has been common to both parties. If we ever get around to actually doing something about Social Security, then I'm sure the other differences will show themselves again.
To suggest that failing to fix the impending Social Security crisis is somehow "saving" Social Security is completely ridiculous. Without a fix the system will eventually run out of funds and be unable to pay its promised benefits. "Saving" the system would mean putting it back on sound financial footing. Saving it would be implementing the lockbox that Al Gore suggested. Saving it could be any number of possible reforms to the system. But NOTHING has been done, by either party, to fix it. Hell, for all of Bush's countless leadership flaws, and the flaws in his proposed solution, at least he TRIED to get Congress to face up to the problem. But Republicans and Democrats alike insisted on doing absolutely nothing. They may have done so for different reasons (Democrats for fear of a privatized system, and Republicans for fear of changing anything with a popular entitlement program), but the end result was the same.
Personal attacks such as the ones you made, accusing someone who disagrees with you of being dishonest, is exactly the sort of foolishness that has produced an inept and paralyzed federal government. When disagreements are turned into personal hatreds, it's awfully difficult to come to honest and respectful discussions, much less compromises that both sides could accept.
I find it incredibly amusing that you assume I'm a Republican (I'm not, and tend to vote for candidates of both parties). I try to understand the positions and concerns of both sides, in the hopes that maybe I'll learn something, and so that I can give both sides a fair shake. Maybe if you laid off the assumption that everyone who voices a different opinion must be a dishonest and radical person, you'd realize there's a huge number of independents out there who just want government to do its damn job. The fact that the government has not been doing its job is exactly why Republicans have been losing the support you mentioned. They've been running the show, and badly, and independents (even some Republicans) are pissed off about it.
I'm not trying to move the goalposts. Merely to note that the Democrats, like Republicans, have done their fair share to make the Social Security problem worse than it needed to be.
While some Republicans do favor privatizing Social Security, others don't. After all, Social Security is arguably the most popular federal government program in existence.
Regardless, we need to do something about the fact that:
1) The program is structured idiotically, given that our population is inevitably getting older. The ratio of workers paying in to workers taking out keeps getting smaller and smaller, which is not sustainable.
2) The current system encourages politicians to rob Social Security to pay for whatever else they like, so the deficit doesn't seem as large as it really is. So instead we have a whole bunch of IOUs to ourselves sitting in the Social Security trust funds, instead of actual cash or investments.
3) By spending the money as soon as we take it in, we fail to use the power of compound interest to our advantage.
IMO, we need a system whereby each generation's Social Security taxes go towards paying for its own retirement. Maybe every year the government sets up a new account where the folks born in that year will have their Social Security taxes invested. That way the money from those taxes is in a "lockbox" that can't tempt Congress to spend it on other things, and the funds could be invested using a smart strategy to get decent returns rather than sitting around and losing ground to inflation (it could work like those lifecycle funds you can get in 401k plans, where the mix becomes more and more conservative as retirement gets closer). And then an aging population is no longer a big problem, because each generation has already paid for itself, rather than relying on a relatively smaller and smaller pool of young workers.
Secondly, adoption only helps those children who were fortunate enough not to be aborted. Thus if your goal is to stop abortions, helping existing kids find adoptive families, while noble and worthy, does nothing to further that goal. Most people aren't getting abortions because they're worried the kid won't be adopted. Especially given the demand for babies to adopt in this country (the waiting time to get an American baby is so long that many couples end up going abroad to adopt).
Many of the hardcore anti-abortion types really are "up in arms" about embryos discarded by medical clinics, or used for medical research. Hence the controversy over embryonic stem cells.
I can't speak for those supporting "abstinence-only" education, as I fail to see how keeping kids ignorant helps them make wise choices, and since every scientific study seems to show such "education" is completely ineffective at its stated goal. But not everyone opposed to abortion agrees with hiding contraceptive information from teens. It's all a quite convenient for you to demand that women who cannot afford, whether financially or socially, to bear and raise a child should destroy their life, and the life of that child Anti-abortion advocates aren't saying the woman should raise the child, with the associated costs. They're saying she should let it live to be adopted. Especially since except in cases of rape, it was her (and her partner's) decision to take that risk of creating a child in the first place. Based on your unproveable assertion that the new embryo is a person who can be murdered, and not a medically problematic appendage like a amputatable leg. I assume that you would be willing to concede that a baby that was just born is indeed a person, rather than a problematic appendage. So what about the day before it's born - is it a person then? Physically it's virtually identical, the only difference is where it's located. If you go back in time one day at a time, at what point does it stop being a person?
I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of a ball of cells smaller than I can see being considered a full person. But I also struggle with the question I just asked you. The religious conservatives who answer "it doesn't stop being a person" at least have a solid answer. It's also convenient for you to find that Democrats have not protected Social Security or other Gore policies, when Republicans have not only held the power monopoly trifecta since Gore's election, but have abused it to extremes, like offering the "nuclear option" to destroy minority protections. Even as Democratic resistance in Congress is the only reason Social Security is still intact, right as the rest of the Republican economy collapses under the counterproductive debt that created the illusion of even minimal growth. Prior to the "Republican revolution" the Democrats had control of Congress for decades. During that whole time they spent Social Security money on other things. The Republicans have been doing the same. Now that the Democrats are in control again, I doubt we'll see them suddenly start deciding to start actually taking the "lockbox" approach. If they did, then they'd either have to raise taxes, cut other government programs, or increase the deficit, none of which is politically popular.
"Abortion on demand" is a propaganda term.
Of course it is. So is "woman's right to choose", as if the choice being made were of no more consequence than what to have for dinner tonight. Political discussions tend to use politically loaded terms, especially since framing the debate gives an edge on how people will view it. Liberals and conservatives alike do this all the time, and usually even the most biased terms capture some element of what really matters to each side.
I notice that people who say "abortion on demand" ignore the risks and costs of illegal abortions, and don't adopt many children they claim to care so much about
If one has a moral belief that abortion is the murder of a defenseless child, then the "risks and costs" to the murderer are probably not of great concern. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with this belief, it is at the very least a principled and logically consistent position to take.
I also think it's a little unfair to suggest that people don't care about the unborn if they haven't adopted children. One person or family can only do so much on their own. That's why we support government and other social institutions through tax dollars and charitable contributions. You can care about domestic violence without running a safehouse. You can care about hunger without running your own soup kitchen. We fund institutions to address these problems, which hopefully have more expertise and economies of scale than individuals could manage themselves.
The difference between DC Republicans and Democrats is as stark as that between Bush and Gore, who others also said were no different. Iraq, Greenhouse pollution, Social Security lockbox - an endless list of critical differences. That are still different.
I agree there are differences. But I would argue that on the issue of Social Security, Democrats have essentially taken the same position as Republicans, which is to do nothing about the problem, and to continue to spend funds intended for Social Security on other government programs. Gore may have talked up the lockbox idea during his campaign, but the rest of his party has done nothing more than the Republicans have to actually implement it.
I happen to believe that the reason people talk about there being "no difference" between the parties is that both parties have long since ceased to be problem solvers. They're more concerned with playing political games and getting their respective "bases" riled up than in finding compromises that most Americans could live with. A lot of these hot-button issues have a majority of Americans holding a middle-ground view. We could settle a lot of these issues tomorrow if politicians decided it was in their best interests to do so.
Thanks - I appreciate the info. When work settles down in a few weeks, if Gutsy's been released I'll give it a try. (last pre-release of Gutsy had the same issue, but it was still an unofficial build after all).
I do understand there's a release cycle; though since I bought the hardware in January I'd hoped August would have been enough time. But it's not a big deal, and my aim wasn't to pick on Ubuntu (which by all accounts is a great distro). Just brought it up to illustrate that even good distros can cost you a little more time than expected.
Which one is cheaper depends on A) how much you value your time versus your money, and B) whether the OS installer supports your hardware properly.
For example, I recently tried Ubuntu. It doesn't appear to support a GeForce 8800GTX (all-black screen when it tries to display the login screen). New hardware, yes, but not exactly obscure. It's entirely possible that if I were to fiddle with XOrg settings some more, or install the Nvidia binary-only driver, or some other step, that this might work. Or it might not. Regardless, after a bit of fiddling I decided the cost to my free time wasn't worth it.
Eventually I'm sure Ubuntu will fix their issue, and then the cost equation may switch back the other way. But at least for now, Windows is cheaper for me.
I'd rather have a doctor who embraced healthiness, thus helping me obtain a better quality of life and reduced chance of disease, than one who was so focused on fighting a specific disease after it occurs that he forgot about prevention. Or whose cure was worse than the disease itself.
Of course if there is a disease in the community you need to fight it. If you view proprietary software as a disease, by all means fight the good fight for free software. But I think the point of the post was that you'll achieve more by showing people the benefits of freedom, and improving free software, than by bashing Microsoft. The latter is unlikely to persuade anyone and just makes the speaker sound like a religious zealot. Religious zealots are rarely viewed as credible by anyone other than religious zealots.
Does not Linus have the right to decide which tool best fits his needs? Oftentimes different people have different ideas of what tool is "best" (which is why some of us drive a Prius, some drive a F-150 truck, and most drive something in between). Software is no different in this sense.
If people want him to use a given tool, ask him why he uses his current tool and then improve your tool to meet those needs better. If it's a sufficient improvement over his current tool, then he'll probably switch. But complaining that somehow he "set back" revision control systems by deciding Tool X didn't meet his needs seems rather unfair to me. Linus's responsibility is to the projects he oversees, not to arbitrary other projects that would enjoy having him use their software.
It's a good and valid point that any testing involves some overhead costs, which otherwise could be spent on other things.
There's also a valid argument to be made about whether the current frequency of testing strikes the right balance between fostering quick reaction times and the cost (in money and students' time) of test-taking.
I also agree with several of your suggestions on how to help the system. But suppose we decide to spend the money to implement some of those suggestions - how do we know if they're working to improve student's learning if we aren't somehow testing the students? I guess I just see some level of testing overhead as inevitable if we want any objective standard by which to measure success.
Actually, it's not backwards, it's correct. And in fact, that's how we behave all the time. If a store has lousy customer service, people tend to stop going there and instead go somewhere else (all other aspects being equal). Thus poor service leads to less money until service improves. Stores that cannot provide good service go out of business. And for most industries, this competition works pretty well.
The corollary would seem to be that if we expect schools to serve their students well, we should provide a similar sort of environment. Some advocate privatized schooling, but you don't need to do that to apply the principle. Even public schools could be run in a system where parents get to pick their kid's school, and schools that lose too many students get shut down.
As always, the devil will be in the details, but it seems like a solid approach to me.