Oh, I'm sure the govn't won't fall for it either. I just wish that people would apply that horseshit standard to the govn't as well as individuals, if we are going to have that standard to begin with...
that this action by the fed pretty much confirms the EFF's claims here.
Then the GGP wrote:
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence or in other words what you are saying is only supposition and is not supported by the evidence. Remember don't look for the absence of evidence to prove something and now all this case is about is absence of evidence as THERE IS NO EVIDENCE for what you're implying.
I shouldn't have said "logically-true", I should have said "logically-valid". It is certainly true that "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". An example is a murder case in which the police have no evidence on the person who committed the crime, even though that person is the actual killer. Just because something cannot be proven does not mean it is not true.
But the argument the GGP makes *is* one of an irrational actor. It would be entirely-irrational for the government to interfere with a case if it has no reason to. If there is no reason to for a behavior, then that behavior is, by definition, irrational.
Thus, if the government interferes with the EFF v. AT&T case, and the government has no reason to do so, then the government is behaving irrationally. But it *is* interfering. Thus, if we assume the government behaves rationally (and for as anti-government as I am, I will say that it tries!), then we must conclude that it has a reason for this interference.
While your argument is logically-true, it is not reasonable or rational. You are ignoring incentive.
What incentive is there for the FedGov to issue the State Secrets Act -- or become involved in any way with any case -- unless it involves them somehow? Unless the Federal Government has something to hide, why would it become involved?
If our government has nothing to hide, then it wouldn't use this act. But it does, and it did...
No, the bar for computing is too low and distracti
on
Do Kids Still Program?
·
· Score: 1
...distractions are too plentiful.
How can you write code when you're busy IM'ing 5 of your favorite friends, surfing MySpace, and watching pr0n when the parents aren't around?
Look, using a computer doesn't require knowing how to write code anymore. The lack of apps in the 1980s made it a requirement for anybody wanting to do something even remotely unusual (e.g. genealogy work). But today, there are multiple pre-packaged apps for just about any obscure software problem you can think of.
We're all obviously better-off for it. But that fact also removes the incentive for kids to learn to program, after all -- why reinvent the wheel?
I'm in my mid-20s. I code professionally, and I didn't start programming until high school. And there have been MANY times over the years when I couldn't think of something to work on, because a little bit of googling (or using AltaVista, way back in the mid-90s before Google) almost always reveals an app that has been written for what I want to do. Not so 25 years ago.
(b) It was kept around for safety, because there was a drop in highway deaths after the limit was lowered. Correlation not causation, perhaps, but that was the rationale.
That was the belief that evolved a few years afterwards, true.
However, you're right that it was a correlation/causation error.:-) It's worth noting for others that -- contrary to the wild-eyed claims of Ralph Nader and his followers -- after the 1995 repeal of the national speed limit and subsequent increases in many states of the top speed limits, the automobile death rate continued to decline in the U.S..
In fact, the only developed nation I know of in which the rate rose significantly at any point in the last 30 years was South Korea, around the late 1970s to the early/mid 1990s, when lots of people were starting to drive for the first time. Everywhere else though -- including in Germany, where the autobahn has an unlimited speed limit for long stretches (which are wonderful to drive, IMO) -- the death rate has declined over the last 36 years. It proves that reduced speed is actually far from the primary factor in reducing traffic fatalities; other factors are (such as improved safety technology and engineering and probably increased usage of seat belts, I would guess).
How about the fact that Iraq, prior to the second U.S. invasion, used national ID cards to track Saddam's political opponents, and torture and kill them as a result?
Their faces stared up at me in black and white, snap shots of individual lives frozen in time.
Dozens and dozens of Iraqi national identity cards were spread across the chief of police's abandoned large oak desk.
All of them were men, aged between around 20 and 50 - people's sons, husbands, brothers, or fathers.
In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, it is a crime not to carry these identity cards wherever you go, a crime punishable by imprisonment.
We stopped to think why these dozens of men did not need their ID cards anymore.
A young Royal Marine found them in a large bundle tied roughly with string during a search of Abu al Khasib's police station on Tuesday afternoon, in one of the police chief's bottom draws gathering dust.
China and Russia have been known to do the same things, as did Nazi Germany (remember the Stasi?).
Is the fact that governments around the world have used national IDs to track and murder their own citizens a good enough reason to oppose national IDs?
Too bad the Dudley Hiibel case and the PATRIOT Act have rendered the 4th Amendment more of an historical novelty in academic texts than a right of American citizens to be free from government intrusion...
I used to be the biggest privacy-rights advocate I know. Heck, I *still* am, and my closest friends who tell me they care about privacy on one day will on other days prove to me, less-explicitly, that they do not actually care.
Today, I'm so disillusioned about the state of privacy in the U.S. and the world as a whole that I'm seriously considering switching over to the "Transparent Society" camp, from the camp of Bruce Schneier, the EFF, EPIC, etc., just because it's an argument more-compatible with the direction of privacy in the world than advocacy of individual privacy rights is...
Wrong. The whole point of the Dudley Hiibel case the GP cited is that law enforcement officers can, at any time and for any reason, stop you and ask you "papers please".
Quite right. Mark Twain put it another way: "common sense ain't so common"...
Those of us who recognize the obviousness of broad statements of wisdom like Hatsumi's often forget that a lot of people don't understand these things -- that is, they don't live their lives based upon these simple understandings of the world. (Economics is much the same way -- it's pretty much common sense, but people try hard to refuse to believe or apply it.)
What, and forcing people to be in the military -- via a draft/conscription, as has occurred in every major war in U.S. history (I don't consider the Iraq wars as "major") -- isn't invasive and invocative of a deep visceral negative reaction?
There doesn't need to be a precedent of human implants for there to be a precedent of apathy and laziness towards government abuse. The whole reason we have such a messy pile of idiotic laws in the U.S. is precisely because of this.
Our tax code? If the public would stop leaning-over and taking government dick up the keister, we wouldn't have 60,000 pages of tax code (10k of which is due to our current tax-cutting President, no less!). Our criminal laws? The drug war has been losing popularity for years, but it remains because nobody cares enough to make it go away. The DMCA? Ask 10 people on the street what it is -- I will bet money that at least 9 out of the 10 have never even heard of the law, much less know what it's about or why it's stupid.
If people really knew anything, and if people really cared about anything, this country wouldn't be going up shit creek without a paddle. But neither of those are true...
If we do not have at least defacto mandatory microchip implanation (defacto in that implantation can only be avoided by living far outside societal norms, i.e., living like the Unabomber making a menial income performing small jobs) -- and perhaps statutory implantation -- within my lifetime, I will be *extremely* surprised. I'm in my mid-20s.
I don't think it'll happen in the next 5 years (but it might). 10 years? Quite possibly. 20 years? Very likely. 50 years? Without a doubt in my mind...
After all, prior to the Social Security Act of 1935, nobody thought Americans would have a national ID number, right? Yet, within 50 years of that socialist program's implementation, that is exactly what the SSN had become. Today, we see it used everywhere.
100 years ago, people would've been aghast to think that they had a government-trackable number attached to their identity; today, it's not only widely-accepted, it has *strong* support from most people.
Or look at encryption backdooring. In the mid 1990s, the EFF, EPIC, etc. put up a successful defense against the government's desire to have British-style FBI backdoors into every private crypto key in the country. People got worried about this, and cried foul.
Today, most people would gladly trade encryption security for more terrorist surveillance, particularly since nobody outside of technical fields tend to understand when they are using encryption to begin with (and then, it's only browser-based encryption. No "normal" or even "semi-normal" person uses email crypto, which is why law enforcement considers PGP/GPG to be probable cause for criminal activity). Hell, most people are willing to trade the 1st Amendment for more terrorist protections.
If even the first, and best-known constitutional protection is under siege, WTF kind of hope do you think privacy -- whether medical (as relating to implantable chips), informational (that which we encrypt), or otherwise -- has? Yeah, none worth speaking of.
Call it a slippery-slope if you like, but tell me with a straight face that the historical trend of privacy has always been in favor of *more* privacy and *less* government intrusion. I don't think anybody who is familiar with the subject of privacy can do it... (The privacy advocate's side of the argument these days is so weak that I'm increasingly tempted to start advocating the "Transparent Society" side instead, since -- speaking from experience -- privacy advocates have a rather steep uphill battle in the battle of ideas. Government distrust is a hard sell in most parts of the world -- too bad, because governments have murdered hundreds of millions more people in the last 100 years than any individual or corporation has.)
2) The time of year makes a big difference and has a huge impact on traffic - during the summer, you can leave later, but during the school year, you have to beat the school buses, because they determine when parents leave for work (mom/dad can't leave until the bus picks up the kids)
School days vs. non-school days were noted in TFA.
3) Traffic will vary based on things that are hard to determine because the system of traffic is so complex as to defy simply analysis
And those things will happen all year round, with varying, yet largely-predictable rates of frequency (think car accidents in winter vs. summer). So what? The point here isn't to deterministically know what traffic will be like; the point is to get a sense of the change in conditions of traffic over time.
It's a time-series analysis performed on a year's worth of sample data from 1 man's perspective...
4) Your speed has a huge impact. If traffic moving, you can cut/thrust in and out of traffic and probably save 5-10 minutes over times when traffic is creeping along
True, and I wish the author had considered "raise speed limits to reduce time spent congested" as an element of his conclusion...
5) Things vary tremendously during the week, month, year.
Noted in TFA.
But this guy driving into work and timing it for a few weeks and then trying to come up with a general model for everybody? Might as well use a Ouija board, because it's going to be just as accurate as this analysis.
Where in TFA does the author state he is creating a model for everybody?
Where it's possible and available to take mass-transit, I agree completely. The only reasons I take mass-transit are because it saves me money (if I take it often enough), but more-importantly, it allows me to spend my 10 hours/week commuting doing something I *want* to do -- reading a book, reading cached articles, hitting on attractive women, etc. -- rather than staring at somebody's bumper.
If only mass-transit weren't so inflexible and were more widely-available... (of course, its low use (relative to Europe and elsewhere) is partly due to our relatively-low population density. That, and gasoline prices aren't through the roof yet...)
People care because it's an actual study with a year's worth of data to be analyzed -- not just some guy's educated guesswork while standing around at the office water cooler.
It's a chance to look at his methodology and see if and how it applies to other people. It's a more-rigorous study than is usually done of one of life's many daily annoyances...
The headline makes this sound like a retarded article. Although the article is light on details, this isn't the "no shit?!" article some slashdotters are painting it as based on the headline. The neuroscience discovered here could have a huge impact on the entire field of social studies, and particularly economics.
Rename the/. headline to something like "Scientists Find The Brain Cells That Are Linked to Choice"...
While the old saying "do what you love and love what you do" is true to some extent, it needs a couple qualifiers:
1) be better than most others at what you do 2) know the market for what you do, and if that market says you don't have a job, find something else you like to do
Alan Krueger may have improved his economics since 1992 (when that infamous study was generated, then published 2 years later) -- 14 years is a lot of time for improvement. And I didn't see anything in this article I found unsound (except for my personal opinion that there isn't any creativity in pop music to begin with, which, it's assumed by Krueger won't be going away anytime soon), but there may be more to his findings than meets the eye. "Trust, but verify" as Ronald Reagan would've said...
Exactly. I did a BSCS with a minor in Econ., (so I got a mix of the two camps of math -- deterministic (in which a conclusion has one right answer) and non-deterministic (in which a conclusion is based on a bunch of data from which a probability is found)), and as a working junior software engineer writing generally platform-specific middleware, I have never used any math beyond algebra.
Geometry? Trig? Nope: I'm not writing the GUI libs, I'm building off of them in C++, C#, and Java.
Logarithms? Natural logs? e? Those are for natural scientists and people analyzing real-world, chaotic data. I don't do that; I write dorky business apps.
How about Calculus... Derivatives? Integrals? Forget it: my business apps aren't analyzing rates-of-change or finding the area in a non-linear graph.
How about statistics? Mostly no: like another poster commented, the most-advanced statistics I do are to slice up data into the right sets, then take a mean of the values in it. It's a lot of pointer manipulation, but math it is not. (Now, in my personal life, it's a totally different story. I use every bit of statistics I can remember and competently understand: I run regression analyses on my personal finances and correlations between all the various data I keep about myself, for instance. I frankly don't know enough statistical techniques to do everything I'd like.)
In that sense, mathematically-speaking, my Econ. minor has been more useful than my CS major...
The *ONLY* good reason I see for teaching CS majors math at the same level as undergrad engineers and scientists and graduate-level Economics/Finance students is that it does develop a rigorous, specific manner of thought, even if the subject matter is irrelevant outside the realm of analysis of naturally-generated data. But then, lots and lots of work in programming will achieve the same effect and be more relevant. So why, beyond the argument of teaching rigorous thought, should somebody waste the time on the math if they don't intend to do software development for these fields?
The only reason I see is the argument of future-prediction; the argument that "you never know when you might need it." But that's an argument based on nothing more rigorous than pure guesswork -- hardly an argument that is in character with the rigor usually associated with mathematics.
Collecting SSNs is completely different from using SSNs for identification/authentication.
What? That's nonsense.
That's like saying "collecting nuclear weapons is completely different from using nuclear weapons for intimidation purposes." If Iran or North Korea were "merely" collecting nuclear weapons, would that be a problem? I think so, and obviously *using* them is a problem anywhere, anytime.
Does the CC company, or does the CC company not, have your SSN? It is a binary question. Either they do or do not; there is no try.
If they have your SSN, then they can use it for whatever purposes they want (defined in the contract you sign).
And yes, CC companies *do* store SSNs in their databases.
Don't attack the wrong people, the blame lies squarely with the credit card companies for using your SSN as identification and trusted authentication.
You *do* realize that credit card companies are required by law, since the 9/11 attacks (I think it was a provision in the PATRIOT Act), to collect peoples' SSNs for "anti-terrorism" purposes?
Of course, they were doing credit checks long before then, and SSNs are useful for that too. I'm not certain, but I think the FDIC may impose regulations which require SSN collection as well.
Regardless, in post-9/11 America, the CC companies can no longer be the root of the blame for SSN and other personal info collection. As is so often the case, the blame traces back to the government...
Dude, it's Florida. There are enough religious zealots there to make the original writing of the statement "in mass" to be likely. Especially at a Catholic church (where the damned souls buy their way out of their sins; as if God accepts Visa, MasterCard, or a personal check... Is there any more corrupt form of Christianity? Seriously - I mean, these are the same people who molest and fuck little boys because their religion says they can't marry and can't have pre-marital sex... *ducks*)
Otherwise, they would realize that their short-run goal of making money now will run them into the ground in future decades by this process:
1) Student drops out to pay RIAA legal fees 2) Student gets low-wage job 3) Student affords less music than the student would have with a greater education
But what entity pushed the student into that lower-wage job which affords them less music? The RIAA...
Foot, meet shotgun. Double-barrel.
Were the RIAA just a tad smarter, they would negotiate a deferment of the legal costs until after the student has graduated and found a job, then garnish the graduated former student's wages... That way, the student gets their education, and as a more-productive citizen, can more-easily afford to purchase (rather than illegally download) future music the RIAA pumps out, and the RIAA gets their protection kickback for prior offenses. Everybody wins (within the bounds of the argument that says the student should be punished for illegally downloading, anyway)...
Oh well, this is the RIAA we're talking about. They probably got together in a meeting and made this decision, in a classic case of "Meetings: Because none of us is as dumb as all of us."
With any luck, the RIAA will shoot themselves in the foot so many times that they bleed to death...
I agree.:-) I find myself writing Perl scripts all the time to do text processing that would be stupidly-difficult with almost any GUI app (unless messages are sent via the windowing system from one app to another and the messaging API to do so is dirt-simple and convenient, and even then, it doesn't compare to the simplicity of the cmd-line). Text-piping is a wonderful thing...
I'm currently using Firefox to type this, Thunderbird for email, XMMS for music, Gaim for IM, Kate for my coding -- and about a dozen terminals for VIM, SSH, running top on a remote host, running my code, etc...:-)
I occasionally use lynx/links when I have no other option (e.g. I'm having problems getting XOrg configured on a box), but avoid it whenever possible...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I'm sure the govn't won't fall for it either. I just wish that people would apply that horseshit standard to the govn't as well as individuals, if we are going to have that standard to begin with...
Then the GGP wrote:
I shouldn't have said "logically-true", I should have said "logically-valid". It is certainly true that "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". An example is a murder case in which the police have no evidence on the person who committed the crime, even though that person is the actual killer. Just because something cannot be proven does not mean it is not true.
But the argument the GGP makes *is* one of an irrational actor. It would be entirely-irrational for the government to interfere with a case if it has no reason to. If there is no reason to for a behavior, then that behavior is, by definition, irrational.
Thus, if the government interferes with the EFF v. AT&T case, and the government has no reason to do so, then the government is behaving irrationally. But it *is* interfering. Thus, if we assume the government behaves rationally (and for as anti-government as I am, I will say that it tries!), then we must conclude that it has a reason for this interference.
Hence, the GGP's argument is irrational.
While your argument is logically-true, it is not reasonable or rational. You are ignoring incentive.
What incentive is there for the FedGov to issue the State Secrets Act -- or become involved in any way with any case -- unless it involves them somehow? Unless the Federal Government has something to hide, why would it become involved?
If our government has nothing to hide, then it wouldn't use this act. But it does, and it did...
...distractions are too plentiful.
How can you write code when you're busy IM'ing 5 of your favorite friends, surfing MySpace, and watching pr0n when the parents aren't around?
Look, using a computer doesn't require knowing how to write code anymore. The lack of apps in the 1980s made it a requirement for anybody wanting to do something even remotely unusual (e.g. genealogy work). But today, there are multiple pre-packaged apps for just about any obscure software problem you can think of.
We're all obviously better-off for it. But that fact also removes the incentive for kids to learn to program, after all -- why reinvent the wheel?
I'm in my mid-20s. I code professionally, and I didn't start programming until high school. And there have been MANY times over the years when I couldn't think of something to work on, because a little bit of googling (or using AltaVista, way back in the mid-90s before Google) almost always reveals an app that has been written for what I want to do. Not so 25 years ago.
That was the belief that evolved a few years afterwards, true.
However, you're right that it was a correlation/causation error.
In fact, the only developed nation I know of in which the rate rose significantly at any point in the last 30 years was South Korea, around the late 1970s to the early/mid 1990s, when lots of people were starting to drive for the first time. Everywhere else though -- including in Germany, where the autobahn has an unlimited speed limit for long stretches (which are wonderful to drive, IMO) -- the death rate has declined over the last 36 years. It proves that reduced speed is actually far from the primary factor in reducing traffic fatalities; other factors are (such as improved safety technology and engineering and probably increased usage of seat belts, I would guess).
Source: http://www.bast.de/htdocs/fachthemen/irtad/utilit
See:
* "Grim clues to police station's past" -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2908827.st
* ID cards relating to children murdered by Saddam ("allegedly"...) -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4878340.st
China and Russia have been known to do the same things, as did Nazi Germany (remember the Stasi?).
Is the fact that governments around the world have used national IDs to track and murder their own citizens a good enough reason to oppose national IDs?
Too bad the Dudley Hiibel case and the PATRIOT Act have rendered the 4th Amendment more of an historical novelty in academic texts than a right of American citizens to be free from government intrusion...
Even worse, that laziness is contagious.
I used to be the biggest privacy-rights advocate I know. Heck, I *still* am, and my closest friends who tell me they care about privacy on one day will on other days prove to me, less-explicitly, that they do not actually care.
Today, I'm so disillusioned about the state of privacy in the U.S. and the world as a whole that I'm seriously considering switching over to the "Transparent Society" camp, from the camp of Bruce Schneier, the EFF, EPIC, etc., just because it's an argument more-compatible with the direction of privacy in the world than advocacy of individual privacy rights is...
Wrong. The whole point of the Dudley Hiibel case the GP cited is that law enforcement officers can, at any time and for any reason, stop you and ask you "papers please".
Quite right. Mark Twain put it another way: "common sense ain't so common"...
Those of us who recognize the obviousness of broad statements of wisdom like Hatsumi's often forget that a lot of people don't understand these things -- that is, they don't live their lives based upon these simple understandings of the world. (Economics is much the same way -- it's pretty much common sense, but people try hard to refuse to believe or apply it.)
For them, obvious wisdom bears repetition...
What, and forcing people to be in the military -- via a draft/conscription, as has occurred in every major war in U.S. history (I don't consider the Iraq wars as "major") -- isn't invasive and invocative of a deep visceral negative reaction?
There doesn't need to be a precedent of human implants for there to be a precedent of apathy and laziness towards government abuse. The whole reason we have such a messy pile of idiotic laws in the U.S. is precisely because of this.
Our tax code? If the public would stop leaning-over and taking government dick up the keister, we wouldn't have 60,000 pages of tax code (10k of which is due to our current tax-cutting President, no less!). Our criminal laws? The drug war has been losing popularity for years, but it remains because nobody cares enough to make it go away. The DMCA? Ask 10 people on the street what it is -- I will bet money that at least 9 out of the 10 have never even heard of the law, much less know what it's about or why it's stupid.
If people really knew anything, and if people really cared about anything, this country wouldn't be going up shit creek without a paddle. But neither of those are true...
If we do not have at least defacto mandatory microchip implanation (defacto in that implantation can only be avoided by living far outside societal norms, i.e., living like the Unabomber making a menial income performing small jobs) -- and perhaps statutory implantation -- within my lifetime, I will be *extremely* surprised. I'm in my mid-20s.
I don't think it'll happen in the next 5 years (but it might). 10 years? Quite possibly. 20 years? Very likely. 50 years? Without a doubt in my mind...
After all, prior to the Social Security Act of 1935, nobody thought Americans would have a national ID number, right? Yet, within 50 years of that socialist program's implementation, that is exactly what the SSN had become. Today, we see it used everywhere.
100 years ago, people would've been aghast to think that they had a government-trackable number attached to their identity; today, it's not only widely-accepted, it has *strong* support from most people.
Or look at encryption backdooring. In the mid 1990s, the EFF, EPIC, etc. put up a successful defense against the government's desire to have British-style FBI backdoors into every private crypto key in the country. People got worried about this, and cried foul.
Today, most people would gladly trade encryption security for more terrorist surveillance, particularly since nobody outside of technical fields tend to understand when they are using encryption to begin with (and then, it's only browser-based encryption. No "normal" or even "semi-normal" person uses email crypto, which is why law enforcement considers PGP/GPG to be probable cause for criminal activity). Hell, most people are willing to trade the 1st Amendment for more terrorist protections.
If even the first, and best-known constitutional protection is under siege, WTF kind of hope do you think privacy -- whether medical (as relating to implantable chips), informational (that which we encrypt), or otherwise -- has? Yeah, none worth speaking of.
Call it a slippery-slope if you like, but tell me with a straight face that the historical trend of privacy has always been in favor of *more* privacy and *less* government intrusion. I don't think anybody who is familiar with the subject of privacy can do it... (The privacy advocate's side of the argument these days is so weak that I'm increasingly tempted to start advocating the "Transparent Society" side instead, since -- speaking from experience -- privacy advocates have a rather steep uphill battle in the battle of ideas. Government distrust is a hard sell in most parts of the world -- too bad, because governments have murdered hundreds of millions more people in the last 100 years than any individual or corporation has.)
Quiet citizen #930596! You're making the merely pseudo-freedom of America too clear by being realistic!
School days vs. non-school days were noted in TFA.
And those things will happen all year round, with varying, yet largely-predictable rates of frequency (think car accidents in winter vs. summer). So what? The point here isn't to deterministically know what traffic will be like; the point is to get a sense of the change in conditions of traffic over time.
It's a time-series analysis performed on a year's worth of sample data from 1 man's perspective...
True, and I wish the author had considered "raise speed limits to reduce time spent congested" as an element of his conclusion...
Noted in TFA.
Where in TFA does the author state he is creating a model for everybody?
Where it's possible and available to take mass-transit, I agree completely. The only reasons I take mass-transit are because it saves me money (if I take it often enough), but more-importantly, it allows me to spend my 10 hours/week commuting doing something I *want* to do -- reading a book, reading cached articles, hitting on attractive women, etc. -- rather than staring at somebody's bumper.
If only mass-transit weren't so inflexible and were more widely-available... (of course, its low use (relative to Europe and elsewhere) is partly due to our relatively-low population density. That, and gasoline prices aren't through the roof yet...)
People care because it's an actual study with a year's worth of data to be analyzed -- not just some guy's educated guesswork while standing around at the office water cooler.
It's a chance to look at his methodology and see if and how it applies to other people. It's a more-rigorous study than is usually done of one of life's many daily annoyances...
The headline makes this sound like a retarded article. Although the article is light on details, this isn't the "no shit?!" article some slashdotters are painting it as based on the headline. The neuroscience discovered here could have a huge impact on the entire field of social studies, and particularly economics.
/. headline to something like "Scientists Find The Brain Cells That Are Linked to Choice"...
Rename the
While the old saying "do what you love and love what you do" is true to some extent, it needs a couple qualifiers:
o ld=1&commentsort=0&tid=163&mode=thread&cid=1155889 4
1) be better than most others at what you do
2) know the market for what you do, and if that market says you don't have a job, find something else you like to do
It also needs to be tempered by the fact that we can't all be best-in-class at some particular function. See my previous post on the subject of "careers: passion vs. money": http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138166&thresh
Helped author one of the only studies suggesting that minimum wage laws are somehow *good* for the economy, against all economic common-sense and various observations of the effects of price-controls on any given market. That particular study, however, turned out to be unusual in how poorly it was performed.
Alan Krueger may have improved his economics since 1992 (when that infamous study was generated, then published 2 years later) -- 14 years is a lot of time for improvement. And I didn't see anything in this article I found unsound (except for my personal opinion that there isn't any creativity in pop music to begin with, which, it's assumed by Krueger won't be going away anytime soon), but there may be more to his findings than meets the eye. "Trust, but verify" as Ronald Reagan would've said...
This has to be the funniest post I've seen in a long time. Thanks for the laugh. :-)
Exactly. I did a BSCS with a minor in Econ., (so I got a mix of the two camps of math -- deterministic (in which a conclusion has one right answer) and non-deterministic (in which a conclusion is based on a bunch of data from which a probability is found)), and as a working junior software engineer writing generally platform-specific middleware, I have never used any math beyond algebra.
Geometry? Trig? Nope: I'm not writing the GUI libs, I'm building off of them in C++, C#, and Java.
Logarithms? Natural logs? e? Those are for natural scientists and people analyzing real-world, chaotic data. I don't do that; I write dorky business apps.
How about Calculus... Derivatives? Integrals? Forget it: my business apps aren't analyzing rates-of-change or finding the area in a non-linear graph.
How about statistics? Mostly no: like another poster commented, the most-advanced statistics I do are to slice up data into the right sets, then take a mean of the values in it. It's a lot of pointer manipulation, but math it is not. (Now, in my personal life, it's a totally different story. I use every bit of statistics I can remember and competently understand: I run regression analyses on my personal finances and correlations between all the various data I keep about myself, for instance. I frankly don't know enough statistical techniques to do everything I'd like.)
In that sense, mathematically-speaking, my Econ. minor has been more useful than my CS major...
The *ONLY* good reason I see for teaching CS majors math at the same level as undergrad engineers and scientists and graduate-level Economics/Finance students is that it does develop a rigorous, specific manner of thought, even if the subject matter is irrelevant outside the realm of analysis of naturally-generated data. But then, lots and lots of work in programming will achieve the same effect and be more relevant. So why, beyond the argument of teaching rigorous thought, should somebody waste the time on the math if they don't intend to do software development for these fields?
The only reason I see is the argument of future-prediction; the argument that "you never know when you might need it." But that's an argument based on nothing more rigorous than pure guesswork -- hardly an argument that is in character with the rigor usually associated with mathematics.
What? That's nonsense.
That's like saying "collecting nuclear weapons is completely different from using nuclear weapons for intimidation purposes." If Iran or North Korea were "merely" collecting nuclear weapons, would that be a problem? I think so, and obviously *using* them is a problem anywhere, anytime.
Does the CC company, or does the CC company not, have your SSN? It is a binary question. Either they do or do not; there is no try.
If they have your SSN, then they can use it for whatever purposes they want (defined in the contract you sign).
And yes, CC companies *do* store SSNs in their databases.
You *do* realize that credit card companies are required by law, since the 9/11 attacks (I think it was a provision in the PATRIOT Act), to collect peoples' SSNs for "anti-terrorism" purposes?
Of course, they were doing credit checks long before then, and SSNs are useful for that too. I'm not certain, but I think the FDIC may impose regulations which require SSN collection as well.
Regardless, in post-9/11 America, the CC companies can no longer be the root of the blame for SSN and other personal info collection. As is so often the case, the blame traces back to the government...
Dude, it's Florida. There are enough religious zealots there to make the original writing of the statement "in mass" to be likely. Especially at a Catholic church (where the damned souls buy their way out of their sins; as if God accepts Visa, MasterCard, or a personal check... Is there any more corrupt form of Christianity? Seriously - I mean, these are the same people who molest and fuck little boys because their religion says they can't marry and can't have pre-marital sex... *ducks*)
Otherwise, they would realize that their short-run goal of making money now will run them into the ground in future decades by this process:
1) Student drops out to pay RIAA legal fees
2) Student gets low-wage job
3) Student affords less music than the student would have with a greater education
But what entity pushed the student into that lower-wage job which affords them less music? The RIAA...
Foot, meet shotgun. Double-barrel.
Were the RIAA just a tad smarter, they would negotiate a deferment of the legal costs until after the student has graduated and found a job, then garnish the graduated former student's wages... That way, the student gets their education, and as a more-productive citizen, can more-easily afford to purchase (rather than illegally download) future music the RIAA pumps out, and the RIAA gets their protection kickback for prior offenses. Everybody wins (within the bounds of the argument that says the student should be punished for illegally downloading, anyway)...
Oh well, this is the RIAA we're talking about. They probably got together in a meeting and made this decision, in a classic case of "Meetings: Because none of us is as dumb as all of us."
With any luck, the RIAA will shoot themselves in the foot so many times that they bleed to death...
I agree. :-) I find myself writing Perl scripts all the time to do text processing that would be stupidly-difficult with almost any GUI app (unless messages are sent via the windowing system from one app to another and the messaging API to do so is dirt-simple and convenient, and even then, it doesn't compare to the simplicity of the cmd-line). Text-piping is a wonderful thing...
:-)
I'm currently using Firefox to type this, Thunderbird for email, XMMS for music, Gaim for IM, Kate for my coding -- and about a dozen terminals for VIM, SSH, running top on a remote host, running my code, etc...
I occasionally use lynx/links when I have no other option (e.g. I'm having problems getting XOrg configured on a box), but avoid it whenever possible...