That much money could have funded a lot of basic research and training in labs throughout the US had it been given to NIH or NSF which seems to me a better way to spend the money.
But, if as is probably the case, that the money was only available to science in the form of the Hubble due to defense tie-ins, NASA PR, or some other political factors, then I agree that the money was better spent than being sunk into corporate welfare programs...
More likely, the money would have been spent by NIH to develop the technology, and then have it patented by Pfizer, and cost 5 times as much as the old method.
The Hubble no more gave us CCD's than the Apollo program gave us Tang...
There was a definite need for CCD imaging whether or not the Hobbled was built. If there was a $9.35 billion value for live imaging of breast tumors then it would have been researched and developed regardless, and more efficiently than by putting up a huge mirror into space. It's not like no one thought of the technology besides space telescope supporters
Mind you, I'm not necessarily knocking the Rubble telescope - that I leave for the astronomers to argue - but let's not kid ourselves with science spinoffs and hidden efficiencies.
It isn't always about the salary. Believe it or not, many people remain in academia because they *like* doing research instead of pumping out lines of code, or being forced into following a corporate agenda not because they have no choices or because they are not the best minds. Mind you, with the cutbacks in funding and the increased politicization of science, this may no longer be the case...
Well, the problem with the article is not with the mathematical abstraction or playing around with these ideas.
The problem is not with whether such investigations and their elegant and pretty solutions ever need to have application to reality.
The problem is that *this* particular article tries very hard to imply that the mathematical abstraction and that the elegant properties of the diamond abstract crystal might somehow explain the real observed properties of the diamond. To be fair, that may not be the thrust of the actual paper, but there is no doubt that it is the thrust of the summary that describes it and it is this linkage to reality that is hogwash.
The reaction of the OP may seem a bit strong but you need to remember that many people spend a lot of time working on mathematical models that *do* link to reality and this is difficult and usually not pretty at all and it is a bit disrespectful to make such a facile assertion without doing any research.
IMDB uses range voting for its movies and it's been taken over by special interests. New movies get hyped cheaply by the studios and producers paying blocs of professional voters and commenters so that every new film winds up with sky-high ratings. Newly opened Sweeney Todd is 146th all-time. Christian voters hype up non-controversial feel-good family values (how do you think Shawshank Redemption is number 1 or 2 film). Film school fanboys vote up the latest director they learned about in class and since they are the only ones that actually watch obscure Orson Welles movies - these are also top 250 material.
And these abuses are there despite some mechanisms designed to reduce the effect of extreme votes. Think of what this bloc/special interest voting would be like in a political system that mattered...
It might be that with the right digital mikes and mixers that the extra bits and sampling of the DVD-A might be useful in preserving the original performance but the actual master is made with a CD standard in mind. So the OP is absolutely correct - CD's are lossless - an exact copy of the intended product, or best released product. If they were made with a 256 kb/s AAC in mind and all the manipulations done in that format (which I doubt) and the CD just an upsampled version then I would agree with you.
I haven't listened carefully to 256 kb/s AAC but I easily hear the distortion in 192 kb/s mp3 on good equipment and I suspect for decently mastered material (classical, good live performances) I could hear the difference on 256 kb/s. Even if that were not the case, I would want a perfect copy to archive (for whatever manipulations I might want to do with later), especially now that the archive costs (cheap TB drives) are nominal and bandwidth so cheap these days (I have 10 MB/s down...)
I'm glad that I'm not alone in thinking of Anselm's ontological arguments. That's the first thing that popped into my head, that this is just a modern variant of "since God is the greatest and existing is greater than not existing God must exist". Most of the students (including many CS and physics types as this course satisfied their Arts requirements) in my intro philosophy course many years ago, bit and tried to argue the "existing is greater than not existing" clause rather than the problem with defining into existence.
So maybe there was some merit in forcing science majors to take other courses...
TFA is appealing to the networks to understand and adapt its news to an audience which TFA doesn't realize stopped watching decades ago.
Broadcast news is dead - no one watches it. Print media is close behind. Seems to me that the only people that care enough to really moan about traditional news sources are other traditional news sources. In terms of irrelevant self-indulgence this reminds of the debate whether Bert Parks should be replaced by Ron Eli as the host of the Miss America Pageant (yeah I'm that old...) or BBS flamewars about Kirk vs Picard (yeah I'm that old..)
Heck, even the mainstream politicians are starting to realize this - Michael Geist's Facebook campaign was much more effective than any traditional petition plus print and TV news conference press release.
But I think the WTO is sending a warning to US legislators of what might happen if they try something similar in larger markets. There is a reason the US signed the WTO - overall it was to their advantage . However, if they are not going to respect the disadvantageous parts of the agreement then there is no reason to expect anyone else to. The ability to grant a complainant the right to partially ignore the treaty (especially for something the US values so much like IP) allows this to happen without a complete abrogation of the agreements which noone wants. The US is not big enough (nor has it ever been) not to feel the effects of an all-out trade war.
So it seems that the general rules are well understood but their application leads to an explosion of complexity in their permutations, right?
I think it's more accurate to say that the problem can be, in theory, reduced to something understood by known physics but that such a brute force solution is completely impractical due to the complexity. Essentially we have the ability to write some equations without the ability to solve them to an accuracy that is useful. In a broader practical sense, general rules are not understood - until some form of these equations can be written down and solved...
Are there any efforts underway to instead of relying on pure abstract computation to use in its place a combination of a physical device and an analysing computer to circumvent the need for reliable enough models
This, in fact is the area of my research, combining limited experimental data to supplement prediction methods and vice versa. The prediction methods have recently become good enough for this and the experimental methods difficult enough to warrant this approach. Structure prediction is also good enough to be used to predict structures that are related to structures that have been previously solved so that once the structure of one member of a family is known, the rest need not be solved. The accuracy of the predicted structures still leaves much to be desired and improving these structures is a very active area of research.
The understanding of physics is not poor but the problem is incredibly complex.
Although quantum mechanics provides a very accurate description of the way things work, you can't actually solve the equations exactly for a system with more than 3 bodies. The simple approximations which give good answers (Hartree-Foch) do work well for small organic molecules. For proteins, the problem is that the stability comes from interactions with the solvent, and not just simple ones but from higher order effects involving partial ordering of solvent molecules. This also complicates the electrostatic interactions since a simple dielectric or variations of models involving simple dielectrics aren't adequate. You can try to model the numerous solvent molecules directly but again, the interactions between solvent molecules are subtle ones (a ball and stick approach probably is not good enough) and this requires a great deal of computational power. Currently what works are black box type of approaches (statistical propensities for molecular distances for example) and the present physics based approaches just really glorified curve fitting forms of the same since so many approximations need to be made and parameters fit.
People are working on better solvent models but it's going to take a lot of computer power before good enough ones can be found to actually give a real answer. The complexity and scale of the biological problems and the difficulties that entails in terms of methodologies is something that seems to surprise CS and physics and even chemistry trained people that come into the field. Biology, at this level, really is hard...
I am not sure that the OP is out of date. What he means is that people that actually have to deal with real data don't think much of these models which if you look at the published papers given at the site seems to be true. There is nothing in a non-specialized computational neurology journal and I can't find anything on their site which clarifies what they mean by the model behaving exactly like a real set of neurons in terms of what observations are being predicted. If it did predict something verifiable and non-trivial, I guarantee that it would be in Nature and Science and not Journal of Computational Neurosciences.
I wish them the best of luck, and this sounds like a good project and I understand the need to self-promote and overstate but we need a sense of perspective here. In the computational protein folding field which I work, despite the increase in computational power and the decades in molecular dynamics simulations and the use of supercomputers (including IBM), the results of molecular dynamics simulation still do not predict protein structure. The only semi-useful methods of modeling proteins come from the use of higher order relationships (use of homologs and statistical potentials) and not from modeling the underlying physics and my guess is that this is true for modeling the human brain.
is directly proportional to the perceived knowledge required to post.
You must be new around here. When it comes to biology, everyone seems to think they are experts. Because there are so many computer people here, at least when it comes to math, more of them know that they know nothing...
Man, this happens every generation. If we only taught the multiplication tables, banned calculators, go back to the one room school house with the 3 R's led by teachers armed with leather straps and school prayer, the world would be a better place.
I for one welcome our new information overlords. Maybe it'll finally force people to learn a truly useful skill - how to filter out the information and decide what are good sources and bad sources. Learn how to think critically, skeptically rather than blindly following the words of encyclopaedias, textbooks, dictionaries, Walter Cronkite and the translators of the Vulgate.
If a court finds her rights were violated - then we agree that no matter what she agreed to or what her opinion is makes absolutely no difference. Since we also agree that she can't waive her constitutional rights by agreeing to the instructions - all we are left with by her implicit acknowledgement is an *opinion* that her rights were not violated. Since she is not a constitutional expert nor has she given any arguments for why she believes her rights were not violated, this opinion carries no weight.
If the employee can sue you for wrongful termination then not giving him a reason doesn't mean that he can't still sue you though it's much harder than if you had given him a *bad* reason. In some cases, not giving a reason could actually make it easier. For example, he could claim that you fired him because of his race when you really fired him because he was lazy. When you later raise your defense that you fired him because he was lazy, it is a lot weaker since you initially gave him no reason. He could also use your history of firing people who happen to be of like race for no reason to support his case. So whether you give a reason or not, it is best to document the real (presumably valid) reasons somewhere and this is where your real protection lies.
IANAL, but am right now in the midst of a discrimination case where the employer documented their bad behavior in writing and has very little written documentation to support their defense and will likely lose (knock on wood...)
Death rate refers to the percentage of people in the sample who died in a given period of time - the rate of death (i.e. the number of deaths per year per 100,000 people). You *can* of course lower this number by different treatments and behaviors.
However, I share your utter contempt for articles that describe reductions in death rate from disease x due to treatment or behavior y because these same articles almost never give the context in terms of the overall death rate (or expected lifespan which can be calculated from death rates). A 30% reduction in deaths from heart attacks in patients treated with drug x is not so impressive if there is no overall decrease in death rate. The overall death rate is also by far the more accurate number (larger sample size and whereas you can never be 100% sure whether someone died of a heart attack, you *can* be 100% certain that he died...). This actually happened with the very first large scale study on the effects of lowering cholesterol using drugs where there was a significant decrease in heart attacks but a slight increase in overall mortality. Similar questions can be raised about estrogen and breast cancer (death rates are offset by lower incidences of ovarian cancer). When you give the overall numbers, then one can judge whether an extra 1-2 years life expectancy is worth giving up a pack a day smokes or that bowl of Hagen-Daaz, or driving that Porsche.
Unfortunately, this type of adult discussion seems impossible, especially in the US there is a thinly hidden Puritanism mixed with the idea that everything can be conquered by effort and good intentions - including death.
Well, the main points of the article is that her conduct in the last 35 years suggests that she is not guilty of the crime and has been a good person since she has escaped. I don't quite buy this - there is too much of the "she goes to church and pays her rent on time and must be a good person" type of logic. However, the victim's family's opinion is completely irrelevant to either of these points, weak as they may be. I do agree that a judgment about whether she is innocent should needs to based primarily upon the details of the evidence and the trial. Again, for this determination the victims families feelings and opinions are completely and absolutely irrelevant. If we find that she did do the deed, then yes, the victim's family's opinion should be considered, along with her moral conduct and danger to society when deciding whether she should go back to jail. But even in this case, I believe that the larger interests of society in the administration of justice should be accorded greater weight than either of those considerations.
I agree that the article was one-sided and manipulative. But telling the family's feelings would have been doubly manipulative and wouldn't tell the other side of the story which is not the impact on the victims but the evidence for her guilt. What was missing were the facts of the case and whether the judgment was fair in light of what we know now. I believe if she is guilty of the crime (and we don't know how "horrible" the crime was either), she should go back to prison. Whether she is a church going grandma or a skid row crack whore, or whether the family forgives her or wants her to fry in the electric chair, should be of minor import. Justice, as much as tabloid journalism would have us believe otherwise, is not all about the perpetrator, nor is it all about victim, but about fairness.
He's talking about compression schemes that compress on the time dimension (which are essentially all video compression schemes). Think of it as a jpeg cube with time as the depth dimension. Compression schemes *cheat* in this dimension by not encoding the complete information - taking advantage of the fact that most of the time only small parts of the picture change with time. So if the picture is static (constant in time) or close to static there is very little information lost this way. You see distortion in places where the picture changes and this is the worst in a pan of a complex scene because the entire picture changes *and* the eye knows what it *should* be seeing. In these cases what you notice is a stutter or blur due to a delays and distortions in updating the picture because the codec is displaying something based on the average picture within a time period which in this particular case is a poor approximation. It's most noticeable in highly compressed low bit rate formats but you can see it even in DVDs if you look for it.
This entire thread is a demonstration of why we have things such as peer reviewed journals and why people don't (or shouldn't) take results seriously until they have been published.
At least then we are sure that some (somewhat) impartial experts in the field have looked at it and deemed it sound. At least then we have a starting point for discussions. Now all we have is some guy from Wolfram telling us that their definition is the right one and that they spent a lot of time on this and don't talk to us about it unless you understand the thread.
Publish it somewhere reputable and then this discussion is worthwhile - but until then no one has the time, even on/. to waste on evaluating press releases.
There were valid theoretical reasons for vinyl to sound better than CDs in 1985. More importantly if you listened to recordings back then, even on my old barely middle end turntable, many vinyl recordings *DID* sound better than the remastered garbage on CDs. This was largely due to poor digital analog conversion from the analog masters to the digital copy and to a lesser extent from the digital form back to analog form from the CD player. Back in 1985, the conversion from digital back to analog was done by a single 16 bit chip and the last two bits were very inaccurately rendered causing distortion in the wave forms. Also, harsh analog filters were applied to eliminate digitization noise which also cut out some of the top frequencies before oversampling and digital filters became popular. However, most of the problems were in the mastering process (probably mostly due to inexperience), because the CDs made from digital masters, which were only newer classical recordings in 1985, always sounded better on CD than on vinyl even on cheap CD players. Some of my old CDs *still* probably sound like crap.
None of these considerations are valid with today's technology - and it amazes me that these issues are still misunderstood over two decades later. Then again - tubes sound better than transistors too...
Municipalities have the right to control traffic and prevent jaywalking which is justified in principle since it potentially can cause harm on a busy street. However one would still argue that a fine of $212,000 is excessive and use facts like "no one was hurt" or "it occurred at 3 am when no cars were around", to bolster their case.
Similarly even if what you say is true about copyright violation, one could still argue that the fine is excessive and that the damage due to the improper behavior should be a factor in the determination of whether this is the case. Though, I see what you mean - the damage should calculated on how the violation affects the purpose of copyrights ie. "promoting useful sciences and arts", which is only weakly(?) related to the financial loss of the copyright holder. An appeal might force an admission of the subtle difference which would be a good thing(tm).
No one opposes stem cell research - they just essentially stop such research by changing federal funding rules. I would WELCOME an honest assertion that the US government opposes embryonic stem cell research because embryonic cells are humans (because they are totipotent or have a soul or the bible says so...). If, the majority went along with that then I'd be fine with it as an informed moral choice made by the society we live in.
However, the reason we can't have that discussion is that the "NO MEDDLIN' WITH GOD'S WORK" crowd thinks that they would lose if they were honest and so wisely prefer to obfuscate - a strategy that, since we've already gone Godwin, some supporters would say was similar to that used by the Nazis (in particular Goebbels...)
Anyway, this prize was not about ES cells but about gene knockouts in a mammalian system (since this was already easy to do in bacteria, yeast and fruit flies).
Slashdot Mirror
That much money could have funded a lot of basic research and training in labs throughout the US had it been given to NIH or NSF which seems to me a better way to spend the money.
But, if as is probably the case, that the money was only available to science in the form of the Hubble due to defense tie-ins, NASA PR, or some other political factors, then I agree that the money was better spent than being sunk into corporate welfare programs...
More likely, the money would have been spent by NIH to develop the technology, and then have it patented by Pfizer, and cost 5 times as much as the old method.
The Hubble no more gave us CCD's than the Apollo program gave us Tang...
There was a definite need for CCD imaging whether or not the Hobbled was built. If there was a $9.35 billion value for live imaging of breast tumors then it would have been researched and developed regardless, and more efficiently than by putting up a huge mirror into space. It's not like no one thought of the technology besides space telescope supporters
Mind you, I'm not necessarily knocking the Rubble telescope - that I leave for the astronomers to argue - but let's not kid ourselves with science spinoffs and hidden efficiencies.
It isn't always about the salary. Believe it or not, many people remain in academia because they *like* doing research instead of pumping out lines of code, or being forced into following a corporate agenda not because they have no choices or because they are not the best minds. Mind you, with the cutbacks in funding and the increased politicization of science, this may no longer be the case...
Well, the problem with the article is not with the mathematical abstraction or playing around with these ideas.
The problem is not with whether such investigations and their elegant and pretty solutions ever need to have application to reality.
The problem is that *this* particular article tries very hard to imply that the mathematical abstraction and that the elegant properties of the diamond abstract crystal might somehow explain the real observed properties of the diamond. To be fair, that may not be the thrust of the actual paper, but there is no doubt that it is the thrust of the summary that describes it and it is this linkage to reality that is hogwash.
The reaction of the OP may seem a bit strong but you need to remember that many people spend a lot of time working on mathematical models that *do* link to reality and this is difficult and usually not pretty at all and it is a bit disrespectful to make such a facile assertion without doing any research.
IMDB uses range voting for its movies and it's been taken over by special interests. New movies get hyped cheaply by the studios and producers paying blocs of professional voters and commenters so that every new film winds up with sky-high ratings. Newly opened Sweeney Todd is 146th all-time. Christian voters hype up non-controversial feel-good family values (how do you think Shawshank Redemption is number 1 or 2 film). Film school fanboys vote up the latest director they learned about in class and since they are the only ones that actually watch obscure Orson Welles movies - these are also top 250 material.
And these abuses are there despite some mechanisms designed to reduce the effect of extreme votes. Think of what this bloc/special interest voting would be like in a political system that mattered...
It might be that with the right digital mikes and mixers that the extra bits and sampling of the DVD-A might be useful in preserving the original performance but the actual master is made with a CD standard in mind. So the OP is absolutely correct - CD's are lossless - an exact copy of the intended product, or best released product. If they were made with a 256 kb/s AAC in mind and all the manipulations done in that format (which I doubt) and the CD just an upsampled version then I would agree with you.
I haven't listened carefully to 256 kb/s AAC but I easily hear the distortion in 192 kb/s mp3 on good equipment and I suspect for decently mastered material (classical, good live performances) I could hear the difference on 256 kb/s. Even if that were not the case, I would want a perfect copy to archive (for whatever manipulations I might want to do with later), especially now that the archive costs (cheap TB drives) are nominal and bandwidth so cheap these days (I have 10 MB/s down...)
They used to do the same type of crap with vinyl too especially on 45's but no one remembers this.
Hell, an educated, well-informed, 20-something friend had no idea what an LP was and thought that 45 referred to the size of the record...
I'm glad that I'm not alone in thinking of Anselm's ontological arguments. That's the first thing that popped into my head, that this is just a modern variant of "since God is the greatest and existing is greater than not existing God must exist". Most of the students (including many CS and physics types as this course satisfied their Arts requirements) in my intro philosophy course many years ago, bit and tried to argue the "existing is greater than not existing" clause rather than the problem with defining into existence.
So maybe there was some merit in forcing science majors to take other courses...
This is so ironic.
TFA is appealing to the networks to understand and adapt its news to an audience which TFA doesn't realize stopped watching decades ago. Broadcast news is dead - no one watches it. Print media is close behind. Seems to me that the only people that care enough to really moan about traditional news sources are other traditional news sources. In terms of irrelevant self-indulgence this reminds of the debate whether Bert Parks should be replaced by Ron Eli as the host of the Miss America Pageant (yeah I'm that old...) or BBS flamewars about Kirk vs Picard (yeah I'm that old..)
Heck, even the mainstream politicians are starting to realize this - Michael Geist's Facebook campaign was much more effective than any traditional petition plus print and TV news conference press release.
In terms of Antigua - you're right who cares.
But I think the WTO is sending a warning to US legislators of what might happen if they try something similar in larger markets. There is a reason the US signed the WTO - overall it was to their advantage . However, if they are not going to respect the disadvantageous parts of the agreement then there is no reason to expect anyone else to. The ability to grant a complainant the right to partially ignore the treaty (especially for something the US values so much like IP) allows this to happen without a complete abrogation of the agreements which noone wants. The US is not big enough (nor has it ever been) not to feel the effects of an all-out trade war.
I think it's more accurate to say that the problem can be, in theory, reduced to something understood by known physics but that such a brute force solution is completely impractical due to the complexity. Essentially we have the ability to write some equations without the ability to solve them to an accuracy that is useful. In a broader practical sense, general rules are not understood - until some form of these equations can be written down and solved...
Are there any efforts underway to instead of relying on pure abstract computation to use in its place a combination of a physical device and an analysing computer to circumvent the need for reliable enough models
This, in fact is the area of my research, combining limited experimental data to supplement prediction methods and vice versa. The prediction methods have recently become good enough for this and the experimental methods difficult enough to warrant this approach. Structure prediction is also good enough to be used to predict structures that are related to structures that have been previously solved so that once the structure of one member of a family is known, the rest need not be solved. The accuracy of the predicted structures still leaves much to be desired and improving these structures is a very active area of research.
The understanding of physics is not poor but the problem is incredibly complex.
Although quantum mechanics provides a very accurate description of the way things work, you can't actually solve the equations exactly for a system with more than 3 bodies. The simple approximations which give good answers (Hartree-Foch) do work well for small organic molecules. For proteins, the problem is that the stability comes from interactions with the solvent, and not just simple ones but from higher order effects involving partial ordering of solvent molecules. This also complicates the electrostatic interactions since a simple dielectric or variations of models involving simple dielectrics aren't adequate. You can try to model the numerous solvent molecules directly but again, the interactions between solvent molecules are subtle ones (a ball and stick approach probably is not good enough) and this requires a great deal of computational power. Currently what works are black box type of approaches (statistical propensities for molecular distances for example) and the present physics based approaches just really glorified curve fitting forms of the same since so many approximations need to be made and parameters fit.
People are working on better solvent models but it's going to take a lot of computer power before good enough ones can be found to actually give a real answer. The complexity and scale of the biological problems and the difficulties that entails in terms of methodologies is something that seems to surprise CS and physics and even chemistry trained people that come into the field. Biology, at this level, really is hard...
I am not sure that the OP is out of date. What he means is that people that actually have to deal with real data don't think much of these models which if you look at the published papers given at the site seems to be true. There is nothing in a non-specialized computational neurology journal and I can't find anything on their site which clarifies what they mean by the model behaving exactly like a real set of neurons in terms of what observations are being predicted. If it did predict something verifiable and non-trivial, I guarantee that it would be in Nature and Science and not Journal of Computational Neurosciences.
I wish them the best of luck, and this sounds like a good project and I understand the need to self-promote and overstate but we need a sense of perspective here. In the computational protein folding field which I work, despite the increase in computational power and the decades in molecular dynamics simulations and the use of supercomputers (including IBM), the results of molecular dynamics simulation still do not predict protein structure. The only semi-useful methods of modeling proteins come from the use of higher order relationships (use of homologs and statistical potentials) and not from modeling the underlying physics and my guess is that this is true for modeling the human brain.
is directly proportional to the perceived knowledge required to post.
You must be new around here. When it comes to biology, everyone seems to think they are experts. Because there are so many computer people here, at least when it comes to math, more of them know that they know nothing...
Man, this happens every generation. If we only taught the multiplication tables, banned calculators, go back to the one room school house with the 3 R's led by teachers armed with leather straps and school prayer, the world would be a better place.
I for one welcome our new information overlords. Maybe it'll finally force people to learn a truly useful skill - how to filter out the information and decide what are good sources and bad sources. Learn how to think critically, skeptically rather than blindly following the words of encyclopaedias, textbooks, dictionaries, Walter Cronkite and the translators of the Vulgate.
Or would that be too dangerous...?
You should admit you're wrong here I think.
If a court finds her rights were violated - then we agree that no matter what she agreed to or what her opinion is makes absolutely no difference. Since we also agree that she can't waive her constitutional rights by agreeing to the instructions - all we are left with by her implicit acknowledgement is an *opinion* that her rights were not violated. Since she is not a constitutional expert nor has she given any arguments for why she believes her rights were not violated, this opinion carries no weight.
If the employee can sue you for wrongful termination then not giving him a reason doesn't mean that he can't still sue you though it's much harder than if you had given him a *bad* reason. In some cases, not giving a reason could actually make it easier. For example, he could claim that you fired him because of his race when you really fired him because he was lazy. When you later raise your defense that you fired him because he was lazy, it is a lot weaker since you initially gave him no reason. He could also use your history of firing people who happen to be of like race for no reason to support his case. So whether you give a reason or not, it is best to document the real (presumably valid) reasons somewhere and this is where your real protection lies.
IANAL, but am right now in the midst of a discrimination case where the employer documented their bad behavior in writing and has very little written documentation to support their defense and will likely lose (knock on wood...)
Death rate refers to the percentage of people in the sample who died in a given period of time - the rate of death (i.e. the number of deaths per year per 100,000 people). You *can* of course lower this number by different treatments and behaviors.
However, I share your utter contempt for articles that describe reductions in death rate from disease x due to treatment or behavior y because these same articles almost never give the context in terms of the overall death rate (or expected lifespan which can be calculated from death rates). A 30% reduction in deaths from heart attacks in patients treated with drug x is not so impressive if there is no overall decrease in death rate. The overall death rate is also by far the more accurate number (larger sample size and whereas you can never be 100% sure whether someone died of a heart attack, you *can* be 100% certain that he died...). This actually happened with the very first large scale study on the effects of lowering cholesterol using drugs where there was a significant decrease in heart attacks but a slight increase in overall mortality. Similar questions can be raised about estrogen and breast cancer (death rates are offset by lower incidences of ovarian cancer). When you give the overall numbers, then one can judge whether an extra 1-2 years life expectancy is worth giving up a pack a day smokes or that bowl of Hagen-Daaz, or driving that Porsche.
Unfortunately, this type of adult discussion seems impossible, especially in the US there is a thinly hidden Puritanism mixed with the idea that everything can be conquered by effort and good intentions - including death.
Well, the main points of the article is that her conduct in the last 35 years suggests that she is not guilty of the crime and has been a good person since she has escaped. I don't quite buy this - there is too much of the "she goes to church and pays her rent on time and must be a good person" type of logic. However, the victim's family's opinion is completely irrelevant to either of these points, weak as they may be. I do agree that a judgment about whether she is innocent should needs to based primarily upon the details of the evidence and the trial. Again, for this determination the victims families feelings and opinions are completely and absolutely irrelevant. If we find that she did do the deed, then yes, the victim's family's opinion should be considered, along with her moral conduct and danger to society when deciding whether she should go back to jail. But even in this case, I believe that the larger interests of society in the administration of justice should be accorded greater weight than either of those considerations.
I agree that the article was one-sided and manipulative. But telling the family's feelings would have been doubly manipulative and wouldn't tell the other side of the story which is not the impact on the victims but the evidence for her guilt. What was missing were the facts of the case and whether the judgment was fair in light of what we know now. I believe if she is guilty of the crime (and we don't know how "horrible" the crime was either), she should go back to prison. Whether she is a church going grandma or a skid row crack whore, or whether the family forgives her or wants her to fry in the electric chair, should be of minor import. Justice, as much as tabloid journalism would have us believe otherwise, is not all about the perpetrator, nor is it all about victim, but about fairness.
He's talking about compression schemes that compress on the time dimension (which are essentially all video compression schemes). Think of it as a jpeg cube with time as the depth dimension. Compression schemes *cheat* in this dimension by not encoding the complete information - taking advantage of the fact that most of the time only small parts of the picture change with time. So if the picture is static (constant in time) or close to static there is very little information lost this way. You see distortion in places where the picture changes and this is the worst in a pan of a complex scene because the entire picture changes *and* the eye knows what it *should* be seeing. In these cases what you notice is a stutter or blur due to a delays and distortions in updating the picture because the codec is displaying something based on the average picture within a time period which in this particular case is a poor approximation. It's most noticeable in highly compressed low bit rate formats but you can see it even in DVDs if you look for it.
This entire thread is a demonstration of why we have things such as peer reviewed journals and why people don't (or shouldn't) take results seriously until they have been published.
/. to waste on evaluating press releases.
At least then we are sure that some (somewhat) impartial experts in the field have looked at it and deemed it sound. At least then we have a starting point for discussions. Now all we have is some guy from Wolfram telling us that their definition is the right one and that they spent a lot of time on this and don't talk to us about it unless you understand the thread.
Publish it somewhere reputable and then this discussion is worthwhile - but until then no one has the time, even on
There were valid theoretical reasons for vinyl to sound better than CDs in 1985. More importantly if you listened to recordings back then, even on my old barely middle end turntable, many vinyl recordings *DID* sound better than the remastered garbage on CDs. This was largely due to poor digital analog conversion from the analog masters to the digital copy and to a lesser extent from the digital form back to analog form from the CD player. Back in 1985, the conversion from digital back to analog was done by a single 16 bit chip and the last two bits were very inaccurately rendered causing distortion in the wave forms. Also, harsh analog filters were applied to eliminate digitization noise which also cut out some of the top frequencies before oversampling and digital filters became popular. However, most of the problems were in the mastering process (probably mostly due to inexperience), because the CDs made from digital masters, which were only newer classical recordings in 1985, always sounded better on CD than on vinyl even on cheap CD players. Some of my old CDs *still* probably sound like crap.
None of these considerations are valid with today's technology - and it amazes me that these issues are still misunderstood over two decades later. Then again - tubes sound better than transistors too...
Municipalities have the right to control traffic and prevent jaywalking which is justified in principle since it potentially can cause harm on a busy street. However one would still argue that a fine of $212,000 is excessive and use facts like "no one was hurt" or "it occurred at 3 am when no cars were around", to bolster their case.
Similarly even if what you say is true about copyright violation, one could still argue that the fine is excessive and that the damage due to the improper behavior should be a factor in the determination of whether this is the case. Though, I see what you mean - the damage should calculated on how the violation affects the purpose of copyrights ie. "promoting useful sciences and arts", which is only weakly(?) related to the financial loss of the copyright holder. An appeal might force an admission of the subtle difference which would be a good thing(tm).
No one opposes stem cell research - they just essentially stop such research by changing federal funding rules. I would WELCOME an honest assertion that the US government opposes embryonic stem cell research because embryonic cells are humans (because they are totipotent or have a soul or the bible says so...). If, the majority went along with that then I'd be fine with it as an informed moral choice made by the society we live in.
However, the reason we can't have that discussion is that the "NO MEDDLIN' WITH GOD'S WORK" crowd thinks that they would lose if they were honest and so wisely prefer to obfuscate - a strategy that, since we've already gone Godwin, some supporters would say was similar to that used by the Nazis (in particular Goebbels...)
Anyway, this prize was not about ES cells but about gene knockouts in a mammalian system (since this was already easy to do in bacteria, yeast and fruit flies).