From parent post:
The critical point for Greenland is whether the increased rate of glacier motion more than compensates for the greater accumulation on the surface. While the broad picture of what is happening is consistent between these papers, the bottom-line value for Greenland's mass balance is different in all three cases. Looking just at the dynamical changes observed by Rignot & Kanagaratnam, there is an increased discharge of about 0.28 mm/year SLE from 1996 to 2005, well outside the range of error bars. This is substantially more than the opposing changes in accumulation estimated by Johannessen et al and Zwally et al, and is unlikely to have been included in their assessments. Thus, the probability is that Greenland has been losing ice in the last decade. We should be careful to point out though that this is only for one decade, and doesn't prove anything about the longer term. As many of the studies make clear, there is a significant degree of interannual variability (related to the North Atlantic Oscillation, or the response to the cooling associated with Mt. Pinatubo) such that discerning longer term trends is hard.
Emphasis added by me.
I don't know if anybody caught this, but in the article it said the temperature in the Candaian Arctic this past October were 9.3 degrees C warmer than the October average between 1951-1980. Interesting. Why use those years? Why not 1981-2005? Or 1921-1950? It should be noted that the earth was actually COOLING from 1940-1970. I have a suspicion the author of the study is picking a baseline favorable to his conclusions.
I'm not the global warming denial zealot you speak of, but I am certainly suspicious of any group that regards consensus as truth, and ridicules anyone that tries to present scientific contrary arguments. (Note that I do not regard Intelligent Design as a rational, scientific counter argument to evolution).
Coincidentally, I was reading a few speeches my Michael Crichton earlier today on his website http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speeches/index.html, and whether or not you agree with his conclusions about global warming and environmentalism in general, his message is important to keep in mind no matter what your conclusions are: Sloppy and/or biased science is bad science. And there's lots of it on either side of the global warming issue.
You are basing your definition of Web 2.0 around technology. There is another camp that bases the definition around community, i.e. sites that are based on user-supplied content, vs. than content that is posted by the site and consumed by users.
Most experienced Scrabble players aren't just playing the two letter words. They're playing 5,6 and 7 letter words that also have to make two letter words in order to fit on the board. Plus they're playing these in the endgame, which might make the difference in winning or losing.
Not knowing the 2 letter words for a Scrabble player is like not knowing how to code Hello World.
Notice that this guy started playing back in March, but they only evaluate over a 5 week period. How did he do the rest of the year before then? How are his picks since he was deemed "expert" doing by themselves? How long does he stay an expert once his personal picks start approaching the mean?
I'm not saying these guys aren't better than the general population. And the consensus picks might be better than any one individual. But take any one of these guys, and have them pick every game, and I think you would be doing VERY well to be successful 56% of the time over, say, 5 years.
Yes, but retaliating against bullies is often cited as a primary reason for many real school shootings. The Bully game specifically relates to that, and they don't want to seem like they're condoning that behavior.
Here, retaliating against bullies is the central focus of gameplay in the Bully game. In the GTA games, yes you can kill prostitutes, but then again you can kill everybody, and while killing people takes a central role in the GTA series, killing prostitutes specifically does not. Now it could be argued that killing gang members and drug dealers is no better than killing prostitutes, but that is another argument.
Yeah, except "name-calling", as you put it, is called libel, and it's illegal. Texas isn't exactly the most enlightened place in the country, and being tagged a lesbian might do some serious harm to one's reputation. Furthermore, IANAL, but I believe private citizens do not need to prove actual damages to have a libel case.
How appropriate. The Law of Fives states that all things happen in fives, or multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly related to the number five.
If you add up the digits in the name (2003 UB313, u=21 and b = 2), it adds up to 32, and then if you add up those digits in 32, 3 + 2 = 5. Also, there are 5 non-zero digits in the name of the planet.
It's interesting to note that the purpose of the Wire Act was to target organized crime, and not gambling per se. Racketeering is generally associated with organized crime and/or public officials intimidating or coercing someone into providing payment under dubious pretenses. These offshore sportsbooks, however, are legitimate businesses where they are incorporated, and most people wager of their own free will. So, racketeering charges might not hold up.
Also, there is still a lot of ambiguity around what a "wire" transaction is. I think the way the law is worded it speficially targets telephone wires. Because of this ambiguity, I think there is a strong possibility of a defense based on both the intent of the law as well as technical aspects of the Wire Act.
Whether you like it or not, Google, as powerful as they are, must abide by the rule of law. Furthermore, this was by most accounts a specific criminal investigation into violent acts by certain groups. I think it would be morally reprehensible (evil, even) for Google to ignore a lawful order in order to protect the "privacy" of said groups.
Wikipedia's greatest strength AND flaw is that anyone can edit a page.
So what about a pseudo-Slashdot meta-moderation solution: Have a team of moderators that cover a broad subject area (e.g. History, Mathematics, Science, Politics - these can be defined as broad or narrow as one likes). Their job is to reject any edit that is obviously malicious, incorrect, or politically motivated. This does not require in-depth expertise about every possible topic under that subject area. Then, users can meta-moderate the moderators. Moderators with low karma ratings could be replaced.
It would depend on what type of heat is being used to heat your home, replacing the lost heat from lightbulbs. I have a high-efficiency natural gas furnace, which presumably is more efficient heat than incandescent lightbulbs. So while the total amount of heat might not be different, the amount of resources used to produce the heat is probably less.
Pick one data point. Make sure it's outdated and unrepresentative. Base it on subjective criteria.
Seriously the article could have been summarized like this: "There's this one real-time strategy game, except it's a turn based game, and it requires too many clicks per turn once the game is sufficiently advanced. Except this problem was mitigated in the next version. Therefore, RTS games require too many clicks."
This is difficult mainly because it's illegal. If just anybody could set up a camera and a stopwatch, it wouldn't be so impressive. With these you can find the speed of the ball, the speed of the wheel, and where the ball is in relation to the wheel, which can then be used to predict which quadrant of the wheel the ball is most likely to land in. Of course, using devices to change the fundamental nature of a casino game is illegal, so you have to be sneaky about it.
Check out http://presentationzen.blogs.com/. The main focus of this great blog is to get presentations to tell a story, and to use highly visual images to enhance that story. The focus remains on the presenter, however, and not the slides. Handouts are still cool, and in fact recommended, so you don't have to create a "slideument" that fails as both a presentation aid and hardcopy documentation, but they should be able to completely stand alone from the presentation (a.k.a something like a white paper).
Tufte's main area of concern seems to be in technical, scientific, and academic presentations. This blog focuses more on business presentations, and while they advocate different styles, I don't think they're necessarily contradictory.
this is an example of a whole field where someone becomes acknolwedged as a demigod based on nothing but his opinions,
Yes, it's called 'winning on merit'. He is respected because he is brilliant, articulate, and uncompromising, not because he got his books into Oprah's club.
I believe he is referencing Tufte's book "Visual Explanations", which gave case studies of the London Cholera epidemic and the Challenger explosion. In the case of hte former, innovative graphical displays led to the discovery of the source of the epidemic, thereby saving lives. In the case of the Challenger explosion, the engineers at the rocket manufacturer were unadept at compiling their data, and were unable to "sell" top NASA officials on canceling the launch.
The best slideware in the world is not going to make your presentations better if you fill it with endless lists of bullet points and innapropriate graphs.
If all your power point is going to be is an outline, then why even have it up there in the first place? So you can read it to your audience? The slides should not be a tele-prompter for the presenter.
No respectable presenter should be handing out slides with outlines or bullet points, for any reason, ever. Tufte and many others would argue that if you are going to hand anything out, it should be something written in complete sentences and paragraphs, and contain visual aids that are high in data density and low in chartjunk.
First of all, there's different types of poker, fixed limit, pot limit, and table stakes (which is what is generally referred to as no-limit).
In fixed limit, I think it's been shown that AI can win, at least at lower levels where the play is less skilled and pot odds are relatively easy to compute. At the higher limits (10-20 and up) players are better and vary their play a lot more. Couple that with the fact that a good player might only show down 5 out of 100 hands, and you need to play a LOT of hands (thousands) before a computer can establish any rules about any particular person's play.
Humans, on the other hand, are much better at reading people with data that is much less quantitative and much more qualitative. It's the Blink phenomenon. I can usually sit down at a table at a casino (I play lower limits, 3-6 to 5-10) and tell within one round, or even a few hands sometimes who the fish are and what their playing style is like. Give me an hour (about 20-25 hands) and I pretty much know where I stand relative to every player. The problem with humans is we are prone to both miscalculating odds, or succumbing to emotion. I still give the advantage to humans in limit games.
No limit, on the other hand, is no contest. I think any average winning human player would be licking their chops if they ever sat down with a known computer. No limit is as much about reading people than it is about the cards. I have no doubt that some of the top pros could do pretty well against a random amateur player without even looking at their cards.
Wake me up when they turn a profit. Page views are absolutely meaningless. I mean, I'm happy for them and all, and I think MySpace is a good thing, but unless they eventually start making money it ain't gonna last.
Mr. Stevens, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Slashdot Mirror
From parent post: The critical point for Greenland is whether the increased rate of glacier motion more than compensates for the greater accumulation on the surface. While the broad picture of what is happening is consistent between these papers, the bottom-line value for Greenland's mass balance is different in all three cases. Looking just at the dynamical changes observed by Rignot & Kanagaratnam, there is an increased discharge of about 0.28 mm/year SLE from 1996 to 2005, well outside the range of error bars. This is substantially more than the opposing changes in accumulation estimated by Johannessen et al and Zwally et al, and is unlikely to have been included in their assessments. Thus, the probability is that Greenland has been losing ice in the last decade. We should be careful to point out though that this is only for one decade, and doesn't prove anything about the longer term. As many of the studies make clear, there is a significant degree of interannual variability (related to the North Atlantic Oscillation, or the response to the cooling associated with Mt. Pinatubo) such that discerning longer term trends is hard.
Emphasis added by me.
I don't know if anybody caught this, but in the article it said the temperature in the Candaian Arctic this past October were 9.3 degrees C warmer than the October average between 1951-1980. Interesting. Why use those years? Why not 1981-2005? Or 1921-1950? It should be noted that the earth was actually COOLING from 1940-1970. I have a suspicion the author of the study is picking a baseline favorable to his conclusions.
I'm not the global warming denial zealot you speak of, but I am certainly suspicious of any group that regards consensus as truth, and ridicules anyone that tries to present scientific contrary arguments. (Note that I do not regard Intelligent Design as a rational, scientific counter argument to evolution).
l , and whether or not you agree with his conclusions about global warming and environmentalism in general, his message is important to keep in mind no matter what your conclusions are: Sloppy and/or biased science is bad science. And there's lots of it on either side of the global warming issue.
Coincidentally, I was reading a few speeches my Michael Crichton earlier today on his website http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speeches/index.htm
You are basing your definition of Web 2.0 around technology. There is another camp that bases the definition around community, i.e. sites that are based on user-supplied content, vs. than content that is posted by the site and consumed by users.
Most experienced Scrabble players aren't just playing the two letter words. They're playing 5,6 and 7 letter words that also have to make two letter words in order to fit on the board. Plus they're playing these in the endgame, which might make the difference in winning or losing.
Not knowing the 2 letter words for a Scrabble player is like not knowing how to code Hello World.
Indeed. It's exactly the same.
Notice that this guy started playing back in March, but they only evaluate over a 5 week period. How did he do the rest of the year before then? How are his picks since he was deemed "expert" doing by themselves? How long does he stay an expert once his personal picks start approaching the mean?
I'm not saying these guys aren't better than the general population. And the consensus picks might be better than any one individual. But take any one of these guys, and have them pick every game, and I think you would be doing VERY well to be successful 56% of the time over, say, 5 years.
Yes, but retaliating against bullies is often cited as a primary reason for many real school shootings. The Bully game specifically relates to that, and they don't want to seem like they're condoning that behavior.
Here, retaliating against bullies is the central focus of gameplay in the Bully game. In the GTA games, yes you can kill prostitutes, but then again you can kill everybody, and while killing people takes a central role in the GTA series, killing prostitutes specifically does not. Now it could be argued that killing gang members and drug dealers is no better than killing prostitutes, but that is another argument.
It's pretty apparent, they come right out and say it - they object to school violence specifically, rather than violence in general.
Yeah, except "name-calling", as you put it, is called libel, and it's illegal. Texas isn't exactly the most enlightened place in the country, and being tagged a lesbian might do some serious harm to one's reputation. Furthermore, IANAL, but I believe private citizens do not need to prove actual damages to have a libel case.
The text of the law explicitly excludes transactions covered by securities law.
How appropriate. The Law of Fives states that all things happen in fives, or multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly related to the number five.
If you add up the digits in the name (2003 UB313, u=21 and b = 2), it adds up to 32, and then if you add up those digits in 32, 3 + 2 = 5. Also, there are 5 non-zero digits in the name of the planet.
Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!
It's interesting to note that the purpose of the Wire Act was to target organized crime, and not gambling per se. Racketeering is generally associated with organized crime and/or public officials intimidating or coercing someone into providing payment under dubious pretenses. These offshore sportsbooks, however, are legitimate businesses where they are incorporated, and most people wager of their own free will. So, racketeering charges might not hold up.
Also, there is still a lot of ambiguity around what a "wire" transaction is. I think the way the law is worded it speficially targets telephone wires. Because of this ambiguity, I think there is a strong possibility of a defense based on both the intent of the law as well as technical aspects of the Wire Act.
IANAL
Whether you like it or not, Google, as powerful as they are, must abide by the rule of law. Furthermore, this was by most accounts a specific criminal investigation into violent acts by certain groups. I think it would be morally reprehensible (evil, even) for Google to ignore a lawful order in order to protect the "privacy" of said groups.
Wikipedia's greatest strength AND flaw is that anyone can edit a page.
So what about a pseudo-Slashdot meta-moderation solution: Have a team of moderators that cover a broad subject area (e.g. History, Mathematics, Science, Politics - these can be defined as broad or narrow as one likes). Their job is to reject any edit that is obviously malicious, incorrect, or politically motivated. This does not require in-depth expertise about every possible topic under that subject area. Then, users can meta-moderate the moderators. Moderators with low karma ratings could be replaced.
It would depend on what type of heat is being used to heat your home, replacing the lost heat from lightbulbs. I have a high-efficiency natural gas furnace, which presumably is more efficient heat than incandescent lightbulbs. So while the total amount of heat might not be different, the amount of resources used to produce the heat is probably less.
It's a meta-announcement.
I wonder if we can get slashdot to come up with a topic icon for "slow news day"
Pick one data point. Make sure it's outdated and unrepresentative. Base it on subjective criteria.
Seriously the article could have been summarized like this:
"There's this one real-time strategy game, except it's a turn based game, and it requires too many clicks per turn once the game is sufficiently advanced. Except this problem was mitigated in the next version. Therefore, RTS games require too many clicks."
This is difficult mainly because it's illegal. If just anybody could set up a camera and a stopwatch, it wouldn't be so impressive. With these you can find the speed of the ball, the speed of the wheel, and where the ball is in relation to the wheel, which can then be used to predict which quadrant of the wheel the ball is most likely to land in. Of course, using devices to change the fundamental nature of a casino game is illegal, so you have to be sneaky about it.
Check out http://presentationzen.blogs.com/. The main focus of this great blog is to get presentations to tell a story, and to use highly visual images to enhance that story. The focus remains on the presenter, however, and not the slides. Handouts are still cool, and in fact recommended, so you don't have to create a "slideument" that fails as both a presentation aid and hardcopy documentation, but they should be able to completely stand alone from the presentation (a.k.a something like a white paper).
Tufte's main area of concern seems to be in technical, scientific, and academic presentations. This blog focuses more on business presentations, and while they advocate different styles, I don't think they're necessarily contradictory.
Yes, it's called 'winning on merit'. He is respected because he is brilliant, articulate, and uncompromising, not because he got his books into Oprah's club.
I believe he is referencing Tufte's book "Visual Explanations", which gave case studies of the London Cholera epidemic and the Challenger explosion. In the case of hte former, innovative graphical displays led to the discovery of the source of the epidemic, thereby saving lives. In the case of the Challenger explosion, the engineers at the rocket manufacturer were unadept at compiling their data, and were unable to "sell" top NASA officials on canceling the launch.
The best slideware in the world is not going to make your presentations better if you fill it with endless lists of bullet points and innapropriate graphs.
If all your power point is going to be is an outline, then why even have it up there in the first place? So you can read it to your audience? The slides should not be a tele-prompter for the presenter.
No respectable presenter should be handing out slides with outlines or bullet points, for any reason, ever. Tufte and many others would argue that if you are going to hand anything out, it should be something written in complete sentences and paragraphs, and contain visual aids that are high in data density and low in chartjunk.
First of all, there's different types of poker, fixed limit, pot limit, and table stakes (which is what is generally referred to as no-limit).
In fixed limit, I think it's been shown that AI can win, at least at lower levels where the play is less skilled and pot odds are relatively easy to compute. At the higher limits (10-20 and up) players are better and vary their play a lot more. Couple that with the fact that a good player might only show down 5 out of 100 hands, and you need to play a LOT of hands (thousands) before a computer can establish any rules about any particular person's play.
Humans, on the other hand, are much better at reading people with data that is much less quantitative and much more qualitative. It's the Blink phenomenon. I can usually sit down at a table at a casino (I play lower limits, 3-6 to 5-10) and tell within one round, or even a few hands sometimes who the fish are and what their playing style is like. Give me an hour (about 20-25 hands) and I pretty much know where I stand relative to every player. The problem with humans is we are prone to both miscalculating odds, or succumbing to emotion. I still give the advantage to humans in limit games.
No limit, on the other hand, is no contest. I think any average winning human player would be licking their chops if they ever sat down with a known computer. No limit is as much about reading people than it is about the cards. I have no doubt that some of the top pros could do pretty well against a random amateur player without even looking at their cards.
Wake me up when they turn a profit. Page views are absolutely meaningless. I mean, I'm happy for them and all, and I think MySpace is a good thing, but unless they eventually start making money it ain't gonna last.
Mr. Stevens, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.