I don't know of any standard scale for "expectancy of succeeding with a given task" or any of the other variables.
That's because you didn't RTFA! Of course he had to come up with or borrow standardized tests to give a score for each of the variables, and statistically test their construct validity and reliability, to boot
1. Children can hurt themselves with all manner of household objects. Why should guns be any more regulated than swimming pools in this regard?
Swimming pools are heavily regulated in most jurisdictions
2. Shootings are only one part of the spectrum in domestic violence. Like point one, why should guns be any more regulated than say, hammers, in this regard?
Are tens of thousands of people murdered with hammers every year?
I guess with both these arguments you're saying something like hammer = dangerous, and gun = dangerous, therefore hammers and guns are dangerous so we should treat them the same. That's like saying the 7-11 is far away, and the moon is far away, so therefore the we should not treat getting to the 7-11 or the moon differently. In other words, it's equivocation.
Benemar Benatta was arrested in September, 2001 after the 9/11 dragnet. The government determined he was innocent in November, 2001. He was held in solitary confinement for 6 months anyway.
He was released... yesterday. July 22, 2006. That's right, held without charges even though he was known to be innocent for almost 5 years.
Let's take a scientific approach to this hypothesis: people have more children because they know the taxpayers will pick up the bill! Doesn't this predict that people will have more children in countries that have more welfare?
So, testing what do we find? The exact opposite relationship exists. People in countries with less welfare have far more children. Europeans have fewer children that Americans, Israelis have fewer children than Palestinians. The average German couple has one child -- it has to rely on immigration to maintain its population, which it imports from countries with booming populations that have no welfare.
Do people sue each other more because of the nanny state? That is, the "nanny state" induces a kind of psychological condition that makes people sue each other more? An alternative hypothesis might be that there are more lawsuits in the United States because the legal system left much more to civil enforcement than to what would be prosecuted by the government in other countries. Ignoring that alternative for the moment, what testable prediction does the nanny state hypothesis make? Doesn't it predict that countries with more nannyish systems have more lawsuits? Doesn't it pretty clearly predict that?
But of course, we all know that the United States has far more lawsuits than more nannyish states in Europe.
This is why, I think, it makes a lot of sense to apply scientific priciples to political theories like this.
The really amazing thing is that if you read the entire article you'll see that the Administration has been going to great lengths to protect privacy with additional audits and the requirement of preparing internal subpoenas (yes, they're not vetted by a court) before making any request for data.
And what are these additional audits? They've hired a commercial company to audit them. Which they've hired. This is certainly a novel approach to the protection of our rights. Why can a commercial firm review these requests for information when a judge can't?
This incident shows again that the Bush administration has this weird obsession with prosecuting the war on terror entirely without any oversight from the other two branches of government. This administration wants to write its own laws, review its own conduct even in its own courts.
When the president signs a law, he now adds a "signing statement" that basically says he will disregard or interpret it beyond the language that was actually written into the law. Existing laws are "reinterpretted." Warrants have been replaced by "administrative subpoenas" and "national security letters" -- totally controlled by that executive branch. And the natural place for terror suspects to be held is not in our existing court system but in special military prisons created especially for the task, and they should be tried in special military courts.
Terror suspects, incidentally, are "unlawful combatants" which is a new legal status that the Bush administration has invented itself and which the Bush administation has the sole, arbitrary disgresion in deciding who is and isn't one. Jose Padilla was an American citizen, but the Bush administration had him held incommunicado on a Navy frigate because it, by itself, declared him an "unlawful combatant", once again, a legal status that the Bush administration invented.
The phone tapping program is a case where the Bush adminstration rejected even the most minimal oversight. The law says that in order to conduct that kind of surveillance, the executive branch must consult the FISA court -- which is totally secret, which has virtually never rejected a request, and which can even, legally, be asked for a request up to 72 hours after the fact. Even this level of oversight was too onerous for the Bush administration, which merely conducted its program anyway.
In this banking case, the law says that the executive branch can conduct this kind of surveillance in a temporary, emergency situation after which it must receive additional authorization from Congress. Helpfully, the president has "re-interpretted" the law. And, this program has been going on for almost five years now, and we're told that as oversight 8 congressmen were informed of its existence.
Maybe these programs have helped capture terrorists. Maybe they are necessary. But why, why, why does the Bush insist on doing everything extra-legally? Within its own legal frameworks that it has no Constitutional power to create? Even when they could very easily act within existing Constitutional separation of powers?
I've often heard the argument that, sure, maybe this program is illegal but I trust that the President is helping protect us from terrorists!
My response is always: So, you trust this presient. Will you trust all future presidents? If your answer is no, maybe there should be some checks and balances so that this system can't be abused by future presidents that you don't trust?
Apparently some people are willing to sail along only on the fact that they trust the government's word, but the whole point of our system of government is checks and balances so that power is not concentrated in any one place and we don't have to rely on mere assurances that our rights are being protected.
No, you're wrong. The problem is ultimately that the people don't know and don't care what the government is doing, and vote (if they vote) based on personal charisma, catchy slogans and appeals to fear.
If the people collectively awarded power only to those that provided responsible policies, then the politicians would be tripping over each other to provide responsible policies. Instead the people vote for those whom, based on their television persona, they'd most like to have a beer with. So, we get used car salesman as leaders.
I'm sure it uses that information, but what's the actual math? I really doubt google would do something so pedestrian as to pick simple threshold values. It has to involve entropy or logarithmic scoring or something interesting.
Please do not use the term "junk science." It was invented by tobacco companies to characterize research that showed that second-hand smoking causes cancer, and is still a favorite of industry-funded pundits.
According to consumer reports: "as far as we have been able to trace, the phrase "junk science" has been coined by those practicing public relations and lobbying activities on behalf of some companies in certain industries--particularly the plastics, chemical, biotechnology, and pesticide industries. While its coiners may have legitimate grounds for debate on some issues, the phrase has been used far too often to discredit honest public interest organizations and legitimate scientists who express concerns about consumer safety and environmental risks."
The hallmarks of dishonet argument on DDT are as follows:
1. Accuse DDT regulation of being motivated to protect birds for their own sake. Do not mention that birds are the primary preditors of malaria-carrying insects.
2. Assume that the effects of DDT use are stable; do not assume that insects will become resistant.
3. Assume that the number of infections prevented similarly follows a constant rate ad infinitum.
The argument FOR banning DDT that I've always heard was the the benefits of DDT are strong at first but are quickly reversed due to its effect on and the differing adaption rate of birds and insects. While the initial number of insects killed and human lives saved from DDT application is very high, the insects which are affected by DDT adapt in short order and become resistant while bird species (their primary preditors) die off, resulting in far, far more malaria-carrying insects and human lives lost to malaria infection than before DDT was introducted.
I suppose that there are portions of this argument that could be debated, but rarely do I see it addressed other than a bunch of malarky about how it makes birds egg shells thinner (remember, kills off insects' primary preditor) and that egg shell thinness was the sole reason why DDT was banned across the world.
You see, the war on terror is a "new paradigm" (donchya love that phrase?) that "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." But not stopping porn! Take FBI agents off terrorism duty and into porn duty. Fighting the war on terrorism is so important that it trumps the Geneva conventions, but stopping porn is so damned important it trumps even fighting the war on terror.
Don't worry, I'm sure Gonzalez will be able to do a lot less harm as an associate Supreme Court justice.
ATM machines print out all of their transactions on an internal paper roll as they are being used. You can usually hear the printer Bzzt!ing away whenever you use one.
When someone died in an accident in the '60s we the American people dusted ourselves off and got back on the horse. After the Apollo I accident, an investigation was performed and a report was presented in only three months. And then NASA went back to work going to the Moon. After Challenger, "OMFG! We should just cancel the space program! OMFG! OMFG!" And then years later we finally started flying again and years after that another, completely unrelated accident and, "OMFG THESE THINGS ARE DEATH TRAPS!"
The 60's accident had nothing to do with the verhicle's launch or flight. It happened because of a simple electrical short plus a stuck door. The problem was so simple that anyone could have figured it out. And all the evidence was right there for the taking on the launch pad. A fire inspector with no knowledge of the kind of engineering needed to built a space vehicle could have figured it out.
The Shuttle accidents took longer cause the evidence was much more difficult, because the whole vehicle disintegrated high up in the atmosphere. They literally had to figure out what happened from the little tiny pieces of the shuttle that they could recover from the ground. And since it happened because of something in the flight it took a lot of physics and engineering to figure out what happened.
The Shuttle as a launch vehicle sucks. This is not because society is too wimpy. Pretty much everyone agrees that it needs to be replaced, pronto.
it's got to be 99.999% safe this time because we can't accept any risk at all
Coincidentally this is the exact failure rate that NASA promised for the Shuttle: 1 in 10,000 launches. Experience has shown the number is actually 2 in 117.
And again, the culture is really whimpy now. The space program was a point of national pride back then. These days people are embarrassed to show any pride in their country - it's not fair that we have a space program and Zimbabwe doesn't. Plus, if you dare to spend $1 on science there will always be a crowd of idiots screaming, "OMFG some kid is poor* we can't spend this money on science until after every other problem on earth is solved!!!"
Got anything else you'd like to exaggerate?
*poor in this case means that his family only has one TV and doesn't even have Tivo and somehow they managed to buy enough food to become morbidly obese but we still call them poor because otherwise we'd have to ask if maybe their lifestyle is influenced more by behaviors than by money or opportunity.
Hey, some people actually try to quantify poverty in terms that they didn't just make up off the top of their head.
This country is ranked something like 43rd in rate of infant mortality. That's bad. If you want national pride, how about pushing that infant mortality rate up? Seriously, the idea that national pride == space program is actually totally arbitrary. Why can't we be better than other countries by having a lower infant mortality rate?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the poster doth protest a bit much.
g e/homepage.html
Here's his resume:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~steel/procrastinus/homepa
I don't know of any standard scale for "expectancy of succeeding with a given task" or any of the other variables.
That's because you didn't RTFA! Of course he had to come up with or borrow standardized tests to give a score for each of the variables, and statistically test their construct validity and reliability, to boot
How the hell did he convince her to marry him?
1. Children can hurt themselves with all manner of household objects. Why should guns be any more regulated than swimming pools in this regard?
Swimming pools are heavily regulated in most jurisdictions
2. Shootings are only one part of the spectrum in domestic violence. Like point one, why should guns be any more regulated than say, hammers, in this regard?
Are tens of thousands of people murdered with hammers every year?
I guess with both these arguments you're saying something like hammer = dangerous, and gun = dangerous, therefore hammers and guns are dangerous so we should treat them the same. That's like saying the 7-11 is far away, and the moon is far away, so therefore the we should not treat getting to the 7-11 or the moon differently. In other words, it's equivocation.
the human body isn't a big truck, it's a series of tubes!
Here's another example:
Benemar Benatta was arrested in September, 2001 after the 9/11 dragnet. The government determined he was innocent in November, 2001. He was held in solitary confinement for 6 months anyway.
He was released... yesterday. July 22, 2006. That's right, held without charges even though he was known to be innocent for almost 5 years.
I'm not making this up, here's the link
Let's take a scientific approach to this hypothesis: people have more children because they know the taxpayers will pick up the bill! Doesn't this predict that people will have more children in countries that have more welfare?
So, testing what do we find? The exact opposite relationship exists. People in countries with less welfare have far more children. Europeans have fewer children that Americans, Israelis have fewer children than Palestinians. The average German couple has one child -- it has to rely on immigration to maintain its population, which it imports from countries with booming populations that have no welfare.
Do people sue each other more because of the nanny state? That is, the "nanny state" induces a kind of psychological condition that makes people sue each other more? An alternative hypothesis might be that there are more lawsuits in the United States because the legal system left much more to civil enforcement than to what would be prosecuted by the government in other countries. Ignoring that alternative for the moment, what testable prediction does the nanny state hypothesis make? Doesn't it predict that countries with more nannyish systems have more lawsuits? Doesn't it pretty clearly predict that?
But of course, we all know that the United States has far more lawsuits than more nannyish states in Europe.
This is why, I think, it makes a lot of sense to apply scientific priciples to political theories like this.
The really amazing thing is that if you read the entire article you'll see that the Administration has been going to great lengths to protect privacy with additional audits and the requirement of preparing internal subpoenas (yes, they're not vetted by a court) before making any request for data.
And what are these additional audits? They've hired a commercial company to audit them. Which they've hired. This is certainly a novel approach to the protection of our rights. Why can a commercial firm review these requests for information when a judge can't?
This incident shows again that the Bush administration has this weird obsession with prosecuting the war on terror entirely without any oversight from the other two branches of government. This administration wants to write its own laws, review its own conduct even in its own courts.
When the president signs a law, he now adds a "signing statement" that basically says he will disregard or interpret it beyond the language that was actually written into the law. Existing laws are "reinterpretted." Warrants have been replaced by "administrative subpoenas" and "national security letters" -- totally controlled by that executive branch. And the natural place for terror suspects to be held is not in our existing court system but in special military prisons created especially for the task, and they should be tried in special military courts.
Terror suspects, incidentally, are "unlawful combatants" which is a new legal status that the Bush administration has invented itself and which the Bush administation has the sole, arbitrary disgresion in deciding who is and isn't one. Jose Padilla was an American citizen, but the Bush administration had him held incommunicado on a Navy frigate because it, by itself, declared him an "unlawful combatant", once again, a legal status that the Bush administration invented.
The phone tapping program is a case where the Bush adminstration rejected even the most minimal oversight. The law says that in order to conduct that kind of surveillance, the executive branch must consult the FISA court -- which is totally secret, which has virtually never rejected a request, and which can even, legally, be asked for a request up to 72 hours after the fact. Even this level of oversight was too onerous for the Bush administration, which merely conducted its program anyway.
In this banking case, the law says that the executive branch can conduct this kind of surveillance in a temporary, emergency situation after which it must receive additional authorization from Congress. Helpfully, the president has "re-interpretted" the law. And, this program has been going on for almost five years now, and we're told that as oversight 8 congressmen were informed of its existence.
Maybe these programs have helped capture terrorists. Maybe they are necessary. But why, why, why does the Bush insist on doing everything extra-legally? Within its own legal frameworks that it has no Constitutional power to create? Even when they could very easily act within existing Constitutional separation of powers?
I've often heard the argument that, sure, maybe this program is illegal but I trust that the President is helping protect us from terrorists!
My response is always: So, you trust this presient. Will you trust all future presidents? If your answer is no, maybe there should be some checks and balances so that this system can't be abused by future presidents that you don't trust?
Apparently some people are willing to sail along only on the fact that they trust the government's word, but the whole point of our system of government is checks and balances so that power is not concentrated in any one place and we don't have to rely on mere assurances that our rights are being protected.
No, you're wrong. The problem is ultimately that the people don't know and don't care what the government is doing, and vote (if they vote) based on personal charisma, catchy slogans and appeals to fear.
If the people collectively awarded power only to those that provided responsible policies, then the politicians would be tripping over each other to provide responsible policies. Instead the people vote for those whom, based on their television persona, they'd most like to have a beer with. So, we get used car salesman as leaders.
The author of that national review article has called for terrorist attacks on Canada because it would make them more "manly".
I'm not making this up
I'm sure it uses that information, but what's the actual math? I really doubt google would do something so pedestrian as to pick simple threshold values. It has to involve entropy or logarithmic scoring or something interesting.
The article says they use "algorithms" to tell when a video is becoming popular. Anyone have any guesses as to what these algorithms might be?
I'm serious, I would really like to be able to use algorithms like that
Please do not use the term "junk science." It was invented by tobacco companies to characterize research that showed that second-hand smoking causes cancer, and is still a favorite of industry-funded pundits.
According to consumer reports: "as far as we have been able to trace, the phrase "junk science" has been coined by those practicing public relations and lobbying activities on behalf of some companies in certain industries--particularly the plastics, chemical, biotechnology, and pesticide industries. While its coiners may have legitimate grounds for debate on some issues, the phrase has been used far too often to discredit honest public interest organizations and legitimate scientists who express concerns about consumer safety and environmental risks."
The hallmarks of dishonet argument on DDT are as follows:
1. Accuse DDT regulation of being motivated to protect birds for their own sake. Do not mention that birds are the primary preditors of malaria-carrying insects.
2. Assume that the effects of DDT use are stable; do not assume that insects will become resistant.
3. Assume that the number of infections prevented similarly follows a constant rate ad infinitum.
The argument FOR banning DDT that I've always heard was the the benefits of DDT are strong at first but are quickly reversed due to its effect on and the differing adaption rate of birds and insects. While the initial number of insects killed and human lives saved from DDT application is very high, the insects which are affected by DDT adapt in short order and become resistant while bird species (their primary preditors) die off, resulting in far, far more malaria-carrying insects and human lives lost to malaria infection than before DDT was introducted.
I suppose that there are portions of this argument that could be debated, but rarely do I see it addressed other than a bunch of malarky about how it makes birds egg shells thinner (remember, kills off insects' primary preditor) and that egg shell thinness was the sole reason why DDT was banned across the world.
so I guess the guy is a genius really
The secret is this: make consistently high-quality books with recognizable brand marks.
It also seems to be higher among Democrats.
Pssht. Everyone knows that in order to work better, it has to be newer and more expensive.
Wasn't it Gonzalez who attempted to justify the use of torture while he was a Bush advisor?
Yes. Here's the memo (warning: PDF)
You see, the war on terror is a "new paradigm" (donchya love that phrase?) that "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." But not stopping porn! Take FBI agents off terrorism duty and into porn duty. Fighting the war on terrorism is so important that it trumps the Geneva conventions, but stopping porn is so damned important it trumps even fighting the war on terror.
Don't worry, I'm sure Gonzalez will be able to do a lot less harm as an associate Supreme Court justice.
You can't delete paper with rm -rf *
ATM machines print out all of their transactions on an internal paper roll as they are being used. You can usually hear the printer Bzzt!ing away whenever you use one.
actually it makes sense that the people who write law also know how to read it
Let me extend this by saying that we should not hire lobbyists to be regulators.
When someone died in an accident in the '60s we the American people dusted ourselves off and got back on the horse. After the Apollo I accident, an investigation was performed and a report was presented in only three months. And then NASA went back to work going to the Moon. After Challenger, "OMFG! We should just cancel the space program! OMFG! OMFG!" And then years later we finally started flying again and years after that another, completely unrelated accident and, "OMFG THESE THINGS ARE DEATH TRAPS!"
The 60's accident had nothing to do with the verhicle's launch or flight. It happened because of a simple electrical short plus a stuck door. The problem was so simple that anyone could have figured it out. And all the evidence was right there for the taking on the launch pad. A fire inspector with no knowledge of the kind of engineering needed to built a space vehicle could have figured it out.
The Shuttle accidents took longer cause the evidence was much more difficult, because the whole vehicle disintegrated high up in the atmosphere. They literally had to figure out what happened from the little tiny pieces of the shuttle that they could recover from the ground. And since it happened because of something in the flight it took a lot of physics and engineering to figure out what happened.
The Shuttle as a launch vehicle sucks. This is not because society is too wimpy. Pretty much everyone agrees that it needs to be replaced, pronto.
it's got to be 99.999% safe this time because we can't accept any risk at all
Coincidentally this is the exact failure rate that NASA promised for the Shuttle: 1 in 10,000 launches. Experience has shown the number is actually 2 in 117.
And again, the culture is really whimpy now. The space program was a point of national pride back then. These days people are embarrassed to show any pride in their country - it's not fair that we have a space program and Zimbabwe doesn't. Plus, if you dare to spend $1 on science there will always be a crowd of idiots screaming, "OMFG some kid is poor* we can't spend this money on science until after every other problem on earth is solved!!!"
Got anything else you'd like to exaggerate?
*poor in this case means that his family only has one TV and doesn't even have Tivo and somehow they managed to buy enough food to become morbidly obese but we still call them poor because otherwise we'd have to ask if maybe their lifestyle is influenced more by behaviors than by money or opportunity.
Hey, some people actually try to quantify poverty in terms that they didn't just make up off the top of their head.
This country is ranked something like 43rd in rate of infant mortality. That's bad. If you want national pride, how about pushing that infant mortality rate up? Seriously, the idea that national pride == space program is actually totally arbitrary. Why can't we be better than other countries by having a lower infant mortality rate?
You've forgotten how much lobbying has gotten better
National Security?
We must make the Moon safe for democracy!
New satellite photos indicate a clear presence of W.M.D. on the Moon.
SecDef thinks we can liberate the Moon with only 30,000 troops.
Regime change on the Moon now!