I could understand the possibility of a commercial company researching this.... because it has potential commercial applications. However, this was done at a university -- an institution of education. How did convince people to give them money to research this? Am I missing something?
This sort of information can also be useful for sales people. Many people don't know anything about PCs when they purchase a home computer. Many customers have heard of Intel, but the number of people that have heard of AMD is much less and they don't know if their products are any good. If a sales person wants to sell a particular computer that will fit their needs, the customer may be hesitant to buy an AMD based system if they haven't heard of it... even if the sales person says it fits their needs perfectly. However, if the sales person can tell them give them some nice stats, such as "15% of the top super computers in the world use AMD chips" or "the fastest super computer in the US (and 3rd fastest in the world) used AMD CPUs", then the customer will understand they are a legitimate and respected brand.
Also, the fact that AMD's numbers are growing helps indicate that Intel is getting a little bit more competition.... which is usually good for us geeks, in terms of price and performance.
Space exploration or ICBM reasearch? Like another post said, putting a 285+ Kg into space demonstrates that they now have the capability to launch rockets that can reach anywhere on Earth (although maybe not accurately, yet). Furthermore, the fact that they are sending it up into space, controlling its free orbit trajectory, but not planning to recover the capsule suggests they are more interested in the launching and in-flight capabilities of the rocket than any of the other data that may be associated with the 'passenger.' Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but this just screams of ICBM research to me.
Were the researchers at Twitter simply monitoring all of the posts or were they paying attention to who was posting. To say if a country, as a whole, was happier in the morning, they would need to monitor and compare the posts of the same people throughout the day. However if they simply monitor all of the posts, ignoring who is posting, and then find the average level of happiness, then all they can say is the posts sampled in the morning are more positive than those posted other days. They can't say Americans are happier, because not everyone posts will post throughout the day. Will you see most high school students that are home on summer break post at 6 AM? No. He/She will most likely be asleep. However, they will be up later. Similarly the people that get up at 5AM to prepare for work are less likely to post late night because they are asleep. If you aren't tracking individual users throughout the day, then you aren't saying Americans are happier during the day... you are saying people that post at time X have more positive tweets than those that post at time Y.
: Start rant about a rant:
You do realize that as a language and its common terms are spoken over a period of time, the language will evolve and definitions of words change. This is why many scientific classifications are done in Latin, which is more or less a dead language. What do you think will happen when you have a general public that has little, if any, knowledge of a subject (such as high-speed internet connections) trying to quickly pick up a subject when making a purchase? They will try and find the simplest definitions they can to explain the "new" terms they hear and read in the information given by sales people.
Furthermore, the English language has this funny thing called context. This allows words and phrases to have different meanings that will apply to different situations or sentences. So if you are talking with your computer illiterate grandma about how to get switch from her AOL internet connection, you can use the term bitrate (without reference to the actual function of symbol rate) to say that DSL, cable, or FIOS connections will load webpages much faster. On the otherhand, if you are writing a technical paper, you can use the technical terms in their original and not-dumbed-down state without problems.
Definitions of technical words change and words get "dumbed down" by the general public. Get over it.:End rant about a rant
I currently use Firefox for its UI and its plugins. I use relatively few plugins, so that is not a major concern. On the other hand, the UI is of great importance. I like many of the features that Chrome has, but I hate its UI. I really like Firefox's current UI and, because of this, Firefox is my primary browser. If Firefox changes its UI to match Chrome's, I hope they have an option to change it to the old UI. If they don't, I will just find another browser or drop Firefox and switch to Chrome. I suspect Firefox will lose other users if they force this change in the UI.
If this article can pull a number out of thin air and claim that piracy costs America 750,000 jobs, I am going to pull a number out of thin air and say that it creates 750,000 + 1 jobs. Here is how:
If piracy supposedly costs 750,000 American jobs and it is such a huge concern, it must create jobs as well. After all, more people in various government departments must be used to find and track piracy. More people are required to find pirates and people that modify gaming consoles. More people are required to fill the positions of the lawyers that persecute and defend the suspected pirates. More people are required to manage and guard the prisons. More people are required to act as parole officers. When the prisons become too full due to housing all of the pirates, more prisons must be created. This requires a lot of new jobs in construction, planning, and even more prison guards. And with this sudden boom in all of these trades and professions, more teachers, professors, assistants, and instructors are needed to train and teach people in this these fields. I estimate all of this creates 750,001 jobs.
Or maybe not.... but at least I can justify my random numbers better than the article.
The article described these things as small environmentally friendly devices. They may not pollute the water and they may be small, but I cannot help but wonder what type of impact they could potentially have. The article states that one of these devices could power small house. However, a lot of homes and buildings exist in places near the joining of rivers to oceans. This would give reason to place a lot of these devices in these deltas. However, to my admittedly limit knowledge on the subject, some animals and plants live in the deltas and typically avoid other areas. If deltas are overrun with these devices, what will the environmental impact be? Are these devices going to greatly change the methods and ways of life for the delta-dwelling creatures when the devices are placed in great numbers throughout the delta? If so, they may not be as environmentally safe as the researcher wants people to believe. Also, if great numbers of these devices are placed in the mouths of rivers and deltas, is the movement of silt into and through the deltas going to be disrupted? I do not know the answers, but these are the questions I have when he claims to have what seems to be a perfect energy source (for certain areas) and then states it is environmentally safe.
With things like this, I cannot help but wonder how much of the claim is true and how much is just a bogus claim given in an attempt to make themselves appear to be better than they really are. I am not saying that this story is false. I do not know. However, history has shown that when groups invest considerable time and/or money in something (or they simply have something to prove), they want to claim they got the best results possible. Sometimes the claims are spot on. Other times, they either exaggerate their claims of "good results" or fail to mention the problems or failures that occurred along with their positive results.
I find a few examples of this in the article. For example, South Korea claims that the number of dogs that "meet the grade" required for sniffer dogs could rise to 90%. That is great.... but what is it now? The litter they created only had seven puppies. How can they claim that that number will eventually rise to 90%? Also, the article claims that the cloned sniffer dogs had better performance that naturally-born sniffer dogs. I do not know much about cloning, so I may be totally ignorant in this next statement. However, I fail to see how a clone can out-perform the original, unless their is some type of mutation or variation in every one of the offspring. To me, this suggests that either the results are being exaggerated or the puppies are not identical to the parent. If this is the case and the variations are that easy and significant, I want to know if there are negative variations (such as arthritis or other health problems) that they failed to mention.
I find it odd that while the rest of the world seems to think Micheal Jackson's death is very important, Slashdot readers could care less about the death of the person. However, readers think his death's affect on Twitter is critical and actually take time to find statistics and links about this.
$0.02
What you guys can do to help increase your rentals of Blu ray? Put up two tv's that are the exact same tvs. Put up a blu ray player. Put up a regular dvd palyer. Play the same movie (different formats appropriately) and have them play at the same exact time. Now that you convinced your customers which is better (and it is fairly dramatic) enjoy your rentals.
If you do this, do not use a dvd player that "up-scales" the the resolution of the standard DVD.... many new DVD players do that automatically and it does, to some extent, improve the image quality of the DVD on an HDTV. However, not everyone owns an up-scaling DVD player and and showing the DVD video "as is" without enhancements by the DVD player is the best way to allow people to see the difference.
I think they have a somewhat interesting theory, but this data hardly proves anything. They have 3 spikes and only have 2 known known supernovas. They do not know the source of the third spike; they only have guesses. While their explanation seems plausible, I am not going to place a lot of faith in a theory that only has working evidence 2/3 of the time and the researchers must use unscientific guesses 1/3 of the time to maintain their theories.
Some comments on Slashdot argued that scientists don't want to mix the two methods, as it could lead to inconsistencies in the data. Others argued that doing so would only be done so the researchers could match the data to the results they predicted. I cannot help but ask why either of these even matter. If they found that the old methods of measurement were flawed and they are just now discovering this, then their old data may be worthless. If this is the case, then worrying about the researchers finding the conclusions they desire by selecting data to fit their theories or worrying about the inconsistencies of mixing data sources become pointless. Information gathering would have to start from the beginning and wait years before any conclusions could possibly be drawn.
The article says subjects took the towel with the insignia of the team associate with the juice more often than the subjects took the towel with the insignia associated with the bad tasting tea. What order were the towels placed in when presented to the subjects? When two things are directly in front of me, I usually take the item on the right because I am right handed. If both objects are to my right (but still in front), I will often take the one of the left because it is closest. Did the researchers always place the towel associated with the juice on the right side while placing the towels directly in front of the subject, or did they change the order 50% of the time while placing the towels directly in front of the subject? Or, were the towels off to one side or the other in relation to the subject? The article does not give much information in relation to this, but these things could effect which towel is taken more than a subconscious impulse. I am also curious as to what towel would have been grabbed if the subjects were presented with a towel associated with the juice and a 'neutral towel' with an insignia unassociated with a the juice or bad tea. What towel would be grabbed when presented with the towel associated with the bad tea and a 'neutral towel'?
However, I will say that the brain activity in the part of the brain that handles bad taste perception when shown the insignia associated with the bad tea is somewhat interesting. However, I don't really find it any more significant than a bell making Pavlov's dogs to salivate. Also, the article didn't mention anything related to the opposite. What was the brain's response to the insignia associated with the juice?
The findings are somewhat interesting, but the article does not really present anything unexpected. Conditioning doesn't have to be blatantly obvious (ie: showing the subject a large card with a picture followed immediately by a very significant event) to occur. Pavlov decided to start experimenting with conditioning because he noticed his dogs had 'psychic salivation.' This salivation occurred because they consistently heard a sound (such as the door opening) as the person that fed them entered the room. This is no more obvious than being shown an event in a game and then drinking a good juice or a bad tea.
My 1/50 of a dollar.
While I guess that a lot of people may use IE because it comes with their computer, I think you are forgetting how much other software comes pre-installed on computers sold in stores. Some of them have proprietary software that can access the web. Also, I think you are forgetting that most ISPs provide some type of software for people that are not technically inclined. This software almost always includes some sort of browser (although it is often integrated with their other software). While this software may not be high quality by our standards, it works for the average person and would not leave you without a browser, preventing you from downloading Firefox.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but you don't suddenly drop dead from being old.
He was a Tortoise, they don't suddenly do ANYTHING.
Evidently, they do drop dead.... that is something.
I could understand the possibility of a commercial company researching this.... because it has potential commercial applications. However, this was done at a university -- an institution of education. How did convince people to give them money to research this? Am I missing something?
This sort of information can also be useful for sales people. Many people don't know anything about PCs when they purchase a home computer. Many customers have heard of Intel, but the number of people that have heard of AMD is much less and they don't know if their products are any good. If a sales person wants to sell a particular computer that will fit their needs, the customer may be hesitant to buy an AMD based system if they haven't heard of it... even if the sales person says it fits their needs perfectly. However, if the sales person can tell them give them some nice stats, such as "15% of the top super computers in the world use AMD chips" or "the fastest super computer in the US (and 3rd fastest in the world) used AMD CPUs", then the customer will understand they are a legitimate and respected brand.
Also, the fact that AMD's numbers are growing helps indicate that Intel is getting a little bit more competition.... which is usually good for us geeks, in terms of price and performance.
Space exploration or ICBM reasearch? Like another post said, putting a 285+ Kg into space demonstrates that they now have the capability to launch rockets that can reach anywhere on Earth (although maybe not accurately, yet). Furthermore, the fact that they are sending it up into space, controlling its free orbit trajectory, but not planning to recover the capsule suggests they are more interested in the launching and in-flight capabilities of the rocket than any of the other data that may be associated with the 'passenger.' Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but this just screams of ICBM research to me.
IP over Avian Carriers. (IPoAC). With the pigeons, you don't have to worry about EM radiation interrupting the signal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
Were the researchers at Twitter simply monitoring all of the posts or were they paying attention to who was posting. To say if a country, as a whole, was happier in the morning, they would need to monitor and compare the posts of the same people throughout the day. However if they simply monitor all of the posts, ignoring who is posting, and then find the average level of happiness, then all they can say is the posts sampled in the morning are more positive than those posted other days. They can't say Americans are happier, because not everyone posts will post throughout the day. Will you see most high school students that are home on summer break post at 6 AM? No. He/She will most likely be asleep. However, they will be up later. Similarly the people that get up at 5AM to prepare for work are less likely to post late night because they are asleep. If you aren't tracking individual users throughout the day, then you aren't saying Americans are happier during the day... you are saying people that post at time X have more positive tweets than those that post at time Y.
Art museums, for not letting the visually impaired feel the masterpieces.
Porn industry, for not letting the sexually impaired (geeks) feel the masterpieces.
: Start rant about a rant: You do realize that as a language and its common terms are spoken over a period of time, the language will evolve and definitions of words change. This is why many scientific classifications are done in Latin, which is more or less a dead language. What do you think will happen when you have a general public that has little, if any, knowledge of a subject (such as high-speed internet connections) trying to quickly pick up a subject when making a purchase? They will try and find the simplest definitions they can to explain the "new" terms they hear and read in the information given by sales people. Furthermore, the English language has this funny thing called context. This allows words and phrases to have different meanings that will apply to different situations or sentences. So if you are talking with your computer illiterate grandma about how to get switch from her AOL internet connection, you can use the term bitrate (without reference to the actual function of symbol rate) to say that DSL, cable, or FIOS connections will load webpages much faster. On the otherhand, if you are writing a technical paper, you can use the technical terms in their original and not-dumbed-down state without problems. Definitions of technical words change and words get "dumbed down" by the general public. Get over it. :End rant about a rant
I currently use Firefox for its UI and its plugins. I use relatively few plugins, so that is not a major concern. On the other hand, the UI is of great importance. I like many of the features that Chrome has, but I hate its UI. I really like Firefox's current UI and, because of this, Firefox is my primary browser. If Firefox changes its UI to match Chrome's, I hope they have an option to change it to the old UI. If they don't, I will just find another browser or drop Firefox and switch to Chrome. I suspect Firefox will lose other users if they force this change in the UI.
But I don't think anybody on Slashdot wants to compete.
Centmail users pay $0.01 for each message they send...
In an unrelated story, the number of Gmail users has recently sky-rocketed.
Quality journalism is not cheap...
How can something that doesn't exist be expensive?
If this article can pull a number out of thin air and claim that piracy costs America 750,000 jobs, I am going to pull a number out of thin air and say that it creates 750,000 + 1 jobs. Here is how:
If piracy supposedly costs 750,000 American jobs and it is such a huge concern, it must create jobs as well. After all, more people in various government departments must be used to find and track piracy. More people are required to find pirates and people that modify gaming consoles. More people are required to fill the positions of the lawyers that persecute and defend the suspected pirates. More people are required to manage and guard the prisons. More people are required to act as parole officers. When the prisons become too full due to housing all of the pirates, more prisons must be created. This requires a lot of new jobs in construction, planning, and even more prison guards. And with this sudden boom in all of these trades and professions, more teachers, professors, assistants, and instructors are needed to train and teach people in this these fields. I estimate all of this creates 750,001 jobs.
Or maybe not.... but at least I can justify my random numbers better than the article.
"The best part is that in lab rats the subjects given the treatment turn blue."
If they test this on fat people, don't blame me if I have the sudden urge to start singing an Oompa Loompa song.
The article described these things as small environmentally friendly devices. They may not pollute the water and they may be small, but I cannot help but wonder what type of impact they could potentially have. The article states that one of these devices could power small house. However, a lot of homes and buildings exist in places near the joining of rivers to oceans. This would give reason to place a lot of these devices in these deltas. However, to my admittedly limit knowledge on the subject, some animals and plants live in the deltas and typically avoid other areas. If deltas are overrun with these devices, what will the environmental impact be? Are these devices going to greatly change the methods and ways of life for the delta-dwelling creatures when the devices are placed in great numbers throughout the delta? If so, they may not be as environmentally safe as the researcher wants people to believe. Also, if great numbers of these devices are placed in the mouths of rivers and deltas, is the movement of silt into and through the deltas going to be disrupted? I do not know the answers, but these are the questions I have when he claims to have what seems to be a perfect energy source (for certain areas) and then states it is environmentally safe.
I am just glowing with excitement!
With things like this, I cannot help but wonder how much of the claim is true and how much is just a bogus claim given in an attempt to make themselves appear to be better than they really are. I am not saying that this story is false. I do not know. However, history has shown that when groups invest considerable time and/or money in something (or they simply have something to prove), they want to claim they got the best results possible. Sometimes the claims are spot on. Other times, they either exaggerate their claims of "good results" or fail to mention the problems or failures that occurred along with their positive results.
I find a few examples of this in the article. For example, South Korea claims that the number of dogs that "meet the grade" required for sniffer dogs could rise to 90%. That is great.... but what is it now? The litter they created only had seven puppies. How can they claim that that number will eventually rise to 90%? Also, the article claims that the cloned sniffer dogs had better performance that naturally-born sniffer dogs. I do not know much about cloning, so I may be totally ignorant in this next statement. However, I fail to see how a clone can out-perform the original, unless their is some type of mutation or variation in every one of the offspring. To me, this suggests that either the results are being exaggerated or the puppies are not identical to the parent. If this is the case and the variations are that easy and significant, I want to know if there are negative variations (such as arthritis or other health problems) that they failed to mention.
But that is just my $0.02
I find it odd that while the rest of the world seems to think Micheal Jackson's death is very important, Slashdot readers could care less about the death of the person. However, readers think his death's affect on Twitter is critical and actually take time to find statistics and links about this. $0.02
If you do this, do not use a dvd player that "up-scales" the the resolution of the standard DVD.... many new DVD players do that automatically and it does, to some extent, improve the image quality of the DVD on an HDTV. However, not everyone owns an up-scaling DVD player and and showing the DVD video "as is" without enhancements by the DVD player is the best way to allow people to see the difference.
to perching sharks >= )?!
..with lasers.
The furnace and space-heating industries may have new competition.
I think they have a somewhat interesting theory, but this data hardly proves anything. They have 3 spikes and only have 2 known known supernovas. They do not know the source of the third spike; they only have guesses. While their explanation seems plausible, I am not going to place a lot of faith in a theory that only has working evidence 2/3 of the time and the researchers must use unscientific guesses 1/3 of the time to maintain their theories.
I did not rtfa.
Some comments on Slashdot argued that scientists don't want to mix the two methods, as it could lead to inconsistencies in the data. Others argued that doing so would only be done so the researchers could match the data to the results they predicted. I cannot help but ask why either of these even matter. If they found that the old methods of measurement were flawed and they are just now discovering this, then their old data may be worthless. If this is the case, then worrying about the researchers finding the conclusions they desire by selecting data to fit their theories or worrying about the inconsistencies of mixing data sources become pointless. Information gathering would have to start from the beginning and wait years before any conclusions could possibly be drawn.
The article says subjects took the towel with the insignia of the team associate with the juice more often than the subjects took the towel with the insignia associated with the bad tasting tea. What order were the towels placed in when presented to the subjects? When two things are directly in front of me, I usually take the item on the right because I am right handed. If both objects are to my right (but still in front), I will often take the one of the left because it is closest. Did the researchers always place the towel associated with the juice on the right side while placing the towels directly in front of the subject, or did they change the order 50% of the time while placing the towels directly in front of the subject? Or, were the towels off to one side or the other in relation to the subject? The article does not give much information in relation to this, but these things could effect which towel is taken more than a subconscious impulse. I am also curious as to what towel would have been grabbed if the subjects were presented with a towel associated with the juice and a 'neutral towel' with an insignia unassociated with a the juice or bad tea. What towel would be grabbed when presented with the towel associated with the bad tea and a 'neutral towel'? However, I will say that the brain activity in the part of the brain that handles bad taste perception when shown the insignia associated with the bad tea is somewhat interesting. However, I don't really find it any more significant than a bell making Pavlov's dogs to salivate. Also, the article didn't mention anything related to the opposite. What was the brain's response to the insignia associated with the juice? The findings are somewhat interesting, but the article does not really present anything unexpected. Conditioning doesn't have to be blatantly obvious (ie: showing the subject a large card with a picture followed immediately by a very significant event) to occur. Pavlov decided to start experimenting with conditioning because he noticed his dogs had 'psychic salivation.' This salivation occurred because they consistently heard a sound (such as the door opening) as the person that fed them entered the room. This is no more obvious than being shown an event in a game and then drinking a good juice or a bad tea. My 1/50 of a dollar.
While I guess that a lot of people may use IE because it comes with their computer, I think you are forgetting how much other software comes pre-installed on computers sold in stores. Some of them have proprietary software that can access the web. Also, I think you are forgetting that most ISPs provide some type of software for people that are not technically inclined. This software almost always includes some sort of browser (although it is often integrated with their other software). While this software may not be high quality by our standards, it works for the average person and would not leave you without a browser, preventing you from downloading Firefox.