"Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime- related details," Rosenfeld said. "The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity."
(Emphasis mine)
In fairness to Timothy, the linked story does have the "100 percent accuracy" soundbyte in it. I'm guessing the journalist took something the researcher said out of context.
If Maryland only required one party involved in a conversation to be aware for a recording to be legal, this bullshit charge would never fly. Such is the case in Canada, and the majority of US states.
Uh, they actually did that. The G8 is up in Huntsville, and new buildings were constructed for that purpose.
IIRC, I read that the G20 was originally supposed to be up there as well, but Huntsville isn't large enough to house all the delegations.
BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that [President's daily briefing]?
RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."
It's sad that Google is getting punished for "doing the right thing" and being honest about their screw-up.
Google: Oops! We accidentally collected all this data we weren't supposed to. Sorry, but we thought you should know. We'll just be deleting* that now...
Germany: NO! You don't respect EU laws! Turn that data over!
If Google had just kept quiet and didn't admit their wrongdoing, nobody would have known about the issue, and there wouldn't be any of the wrangling we see now. But should a company keep quiet whenever it fucks up? A culture of denial is worse. It's sad, because it's exactly this sort of persecution which creates a culture where companies never admit anything, ever.
* Except the legal department probably advised them against deleting the data right after the confession, just in case something like this happened.
About the GALA solution, I saw that mentioned on this page -- an unrelated story, but it mentioned Helmant Thatte. Apparently GALA is also his work. You could probably find a link to a research paper from his profile page about it.
Something most Slashdotters probably know is that science journalism is very derivative. Since a lot of journalists don't know squat about science, most of them just end up regurgitating stuff. Sometimes random irrelevant facts are added, sometimes important information is stripped out. Mentioning that both hearts are from sows without mentioning why seems strange. There could be a reason why, or it could have just been an extraneous fact that was included..
Now, the sentence from TFA ("Thatte and his group harvested two female pig hearts and placed them in two different containers.") is very similar to a sentence in a cited source here ("The researchers harvested hearts from female pigs, stored them in one of the two solutions, then biopsied them at several points over the next four hours.") Was there an original story somewhere that said why sow hearts were preferable, or was it just a random detail that someone added without context? Unfortunately, I can't access what appears to be the original paper at the moment to find out either way.
I have been paid to work in a research lab. I have also been paid to work for a newspaper. The interaction between science and the media fascinates me. And in my experience, there's a lot of truth to this comic.
Why would the gender of the heart donors matter?
The question is, why wouldn't it? Do you know? I don't.
Yeah, I'm hoping for a response from someone who does know. Thanks for making gross, incorrect assumptions about me, though.
Maybe I fail at reading this late, but TFA didn't say what was in the stuff. Is this cocktail made of proteins? Inorganic compounds? "21 chemicals" sounds like "11 herbs and spices": marketing speak which doesn't actually say very much.
Also, I couldn't help but notice this:
o better understand if and how Somah preserved a heart, Thatte and his group harvested two female pig hearts and placed them in two different containers.
If you want to complain about having crappy students taking space, complain about grade inflation, and the propensity of graders to "curve." Why should everyone's grade go up because there were a lot of mediocre grades? Either you think your evaluation was unfair, in which case you need to give them a fair one, or your evaluation was fair and everyone sucked, in which case they need to get the grades they deserve.
Okay. A professor starts marking final exams and realizes that their exam was too difficult because the entire class failed*. When will this second, "fair" evaluation of the class take place? In the interim between terms? When the new semester starts? Either way, I doubt students will enjoy being called back into a class that should be over and done with because the prof made the exam too difficult, and is now obligated to give a "fair" one.
I don't know what field you TA'd in, but in physics it's bloody hard for a prof to create a "fair" exam. To make a long diatribe short, usually a prof has to either err on the side of making the exam too easy or too difficult, and they always choose "too difficult" because low marks still yield meaningful data about student capabilities. (i.e., it's hard to grade students fairly when everyone scores 100% on the final.)
So, regardless of how you feel about the matter, there's a good reason why grade curves exist.
* Not a hypothetical situation. This has happened at my university.
Here's what I want to know: who took the video? That's a huge part of the story here, and that detail is omitted. My knee-jerk reaction is that it's someone from the opposing party, trying to make the next election in Florida easier for them.
Personally, I'm more disgusted by the censorship (the black bar) than the original photo.
The article states that 25 percent of students failed the English Language Proficiency Exam (ELPE) at Waterloo 5 years ago, and that now the number is 30 percent.
Here's my question: have those numbers been normalized to the increasing numbers of students in university?
Some schools (including UW) are letting more and more students in. It's an easy way to keep the budget balanced. It stands to reason that the "extra" students who are admitted to university aren't going to be at the top of the heap, but rather students who were only on the cusp of getting in.
I think the problem isn't with Twitter or the internet. Rather, the problem is universities are letting in students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise.
Most of the comments I've read are in the context of using cheques to pay for retail purchases. Yeah, that's bad.
I don't use cheques to pay for anything, except one item: my rent. Cheques actually solve that problem pretty well.
See, my landlord (essentially just a guy I live with) doesn't have the infrastructure set up for electronic money transfer, nor should he. So I can't pay by debit, and it would strain my withdrawal limit to hand him $425 cash every month. What to do then?
I can just leave a cheque on the fridge, and he can cash it whenever. Debit and credit are suited to retail (cashier and customer are together, money needs to be transferred now) but cheques are well suited to money transfers where both parties aren't at the same place at the same time.
Chromium?
A year from now, when I do an apt-get expecting to download a Raptor-style shooter, I'll be downloading a browser instead.
Why didn't they pick a name which wasn't already taken?
I am aware that the statement was preceded by the. None the less, the statement still reads as ambiguous with article or without. One can only draw the correct meaning from the statement if you already know "antimatter" and "positrons" aren't equivalent terms.
As press releases are supposed to be written for audiences who lack a scientific background (and aren't as picky with grammar as either of us) it's still a journalism fail. A better way to write the sentence would have been "Positrons, a type of antimatter..."
I never took particle, so I can't go into the same depth as some of my friends could. But basically, there's this whole zoo of particles most of which you've heard of. Electrons, protons, etc. Most* of these particles have a corresponding antiparticle. The proton has the antiproton. The neutron has the antineutron. And the electron has the positron. If it helps, you can think of it as the "mirror universe" of the particle zoo -- the antiproton is a proton with an evil streak and a goatee.
Matter is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, among other things. By the same token, antimatter is made up of antiprotons, antineutrons, and positrons. The statement "Anti-matter, also known as positrons..." is as ridiculous as the statement "Matter, also known as electrons...". It's either a scientific or grammatical error, and I can't figure out which would bother me more.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
* AFAIK, bosons don't have antiparticle equivalents, only fermions do. But unless you're a physicist or really interested in the subject, don't worry about the distinction between bosons and fermions. I won't help you get laid, that's for sure.
I guess the PR agent who wrote the story didn't even read the Wikipedia page on antimatter. Either that, or he/she just isn't a good writer -- that statement implies that all positrons are anti-matter and all anti-matter is positrons. Only the first statement is true.
The best way to fight a derogatory term is to take it back. A group trying to run away from a word with negative connotations is simply running on a treadmill, each new euphemism becoming an insult in a few years.
(e.g. Retarded -> Mentally Disabled -> Differently Abled etc.)
If you did have it in your office, there's not much danger of it blowing up, but the vacuum pumps would be pretty loud.
Intergalactic space is about 2 or 3 Kelvin. Getting down to 100 times colder than that - 20 or 30 millikelvin - requires a Helium 3 dilution fridge. Helium 3 is a rare (and expensive) helium isotope. Physics labs can afford this sort of equipment, but we're not going to be using the setup for gaming anytime soon.
Not to mention, the vacuum pumps, the cold trap and the helium storage system would probably take up most of the space in your cubicle anyway.
I bought Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Ring of Fates and had the same "WTF is THIS?" reaction.
The real-time combat isn't entirely unprecedented, Final Fantasy Adventure for the original Game Boy was like that. But FFA didn't have three companions with piss-poor AI, a broken magic system, bad voice acting, and an expectation that I use the stylus and control pad at the same time.
I wish someone would port Final Fantasy 7 to the DS, rather than making another crappy FF:CC game.
I was reading about this story this morning. The BBC has more pictures here.
What I found funny is that the caption for the first photo warns, "SOME MAY FIND THE FOLLOWING IMAGES DISTURBING." Personally, I found the first photo - the photo to which that warning is attached - the most disturbing. Yes, more disturbing than the tumor-face.
There's also a photo in there which reminded me of Two-face from The Dark Knight, but it's too blurry to be scary.
Slashdot Mirror
(Emphasis mine)
In fairness to Timothy, the linked story does have the "100 percent accuracy" soundbyte in it. I'm guessing the journalist took something the researcher said out of context.
If Maryland only required one party involved in a conversation to be aware for a recording to be legal, this bullshit charge would never fly. Such is the case in Canada, and the majority of US states.
Uh, they actually did that. The G8 is up in Huntsville, and new buildings were constructed for that purpose. IIRC, I read that the G20 was originally supposed to be up there as well, but Huntsville isn't large enough to house all the delegations.
From here:
Was anyone else reminded of that little gem?
It's sad that Google is getting punished for "doing the right thing" and being honest about their screw-up.
Google: Oops! We accidentally collected all this data we weren't supposed to. Sorry, but we thought you should know. We'll just be deleting* that now... Germany: NO! You don't respect EU laws! Turn that data over!
If Google had just kept quiet and didn't admit their wrongdoing, nobody would have known about the issue, and there wouldn't be any of the wrangling we see now. But should a company keep quiet whenever it fucks up? A culture of denial is worse. It's sad, because it's exactly this sort of persecution which creates a culture where companies never admit anything, ever.
* Except the legal department probably advised them against deleting the data right after the confession, just in case something like this happened.
Thanks! That was exactly what I was looking for.
About the GALA solution, I saw that mentioned on this page -- an unrelated story, but it mentioned Helmant Thatte. Apparently GALA is also his work. You could probably find a link to a research paper from his profile page about it.
Wow, way to read into my post, dude.
Something most Slashdotters probably know is that science journalism is very derivative. Since a lot of journalists don't know squat about science, most of them just end up regurgitating stuff. Sometimes random irrelevant facts are added, sometimes important information is stripped out. Mentioning that both hearts are from sows without mentioning why seems strange. There could be a reason why, or it could have just been an extraneous fact that was included..
Now, the sentence from TFA ("Thatte and his group harvested two female pig hearts and placed them in two different containers.") is very similar to a sentence in a cited source here ("The researchers harvested hearts from female pigs, stored them in one of the two solutions, then biopsied them at several points over the next four hours.") Was there an original story somewhere that said why sow hearts were preferable, or was it just a random detail that someone added without context? Unfortunately, I can't access what appears to be the original paper at the moment to find out either way.
I have been paid to work in a research lab. I have also been paid to work for a newspaper. The interaction between science and the media fascinates me. And in my experience, there's a lot of truth to this comic.
Yeah, I'm hoping for a response from someone who does know. Thanks for making gross, incorrect assumptions about me, though.
Maybe I fail at reading this late, but TFA didn't say what was in the stuff. Is this cocktail made of proteins? Inorganic compounds? "21 chemicals" sounds like "11 herbs and spices": marketing speak which doesn't actually say very much.
Also, I couldn't help but notice this:
Why would the gender of the heart donors matter?
Okay. A professor starts marking final exams and realizes that their exam was too difficult because the entire class failed*. When will this second, "fair" evaluation of the class take place? In the interim between terms? When the new semester starts? Either way, I doubt students will enjoy being called back into a class that should be over and done with because the prof made the exam too difficult, and is now obligated to give a "fair" one.
I don't know what field you TA'd in, but in physics it's bloody hard for a prof to create a "fair" exam. To make a long diatribe short, usually a prof has to either err on the side of making the exam too easy or too difficult, and they always choose "too difficult" because low marks still yield meaningful data about student capabilities. (i.e., it's hard to grade students fairly when everyone scores 100% on the final.)
So, regardless of how you feel about the matter, there's a good reason why grade curves exist.
* Not a hypothetical situation. This has happened at my university.
Here's what I want to know: who took the video? That's a huge part of the story here, and that detail is omitted. My knee-jerk reaction is that it's someone from the opposing party, trying to make the next election in Florida easier for them.
Personally, I'm more disgusted by the censorship (the black bar) than the original photo.
The article states that 25 percent of students failed the English Language Proficiency Exam (ELPE) at Waterloo 5 years ago, and that now the number is 30 percent.
Here's my question: have those numbers been normalized to the increasing numbers of students in university?
Some schools (including UW) are letting more and more students in. It's an easy way to keep the budget balanced. It stands to reason that the "extra" students who are admitted to university aren't going to be at the top of the heap, but rather students who were only on the cusp of getting in.
I think the problem isn't with Twitter or the internet. Rather, the problem is universities are letting in students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise.
Most of the comments I've read are in the context of using cheques to pay for retail purchases. Yeah, that's bad.
I don't use cheques to pay for anything, except one item: my rent. Cheques actually solve that problem pretty well.
See, my landlord (essentially just a guy I live with) doesn't have the infrastructure set up for electronic money transfer, nor should he. So I can't pay by debit, and it would strain my withdrawal limit to hand him $425 cash every month. What to do then?
I can just leave a cheque on the fridge, and he can cash it whenever. Debit and credit are suited to retail (cashier and customer are together, money needs to be transferred now) but cheques are well suited to money transfers where both parties aren't at the same place at the same time.
Chromium? A year from now, when I do an apt-get expecting to download a Raptor-style shooter, I'll be downloading a browser instead. Why didn't they pick a name which wasn't already taken?
Wow. I hope my Facebook girlfriend doesn't find out about my MySpace girlfriend.
That video link doesn't work outside of the United States. Do you have another?
I am aware that the statement was preceded by the. None the less, the statement still reads as ambiguous with article or without. One can only draw the correct meaning from the statement if you already know "antimatter" and "positrons" aren't equivalent terms.
As press releases are supposed to be written for audiences who lack a scientific background (and aren't as picky with grammar as either of us) it's still a journalism fail. A better way to write the sentence would have been "Positrons, a type of antimatter..."
I never took particle, so I can't go into the same depth as some of my friends could. But basically, there's this whole zoo of particles most of which you've heard of. Electrons, protons, etc. Most* of these particles have a corresponding antiparticle. The proton has the antiproton. The neutron has the antineutron. And the electron has the positron. If it helps, you can think of it as the "mirror universe" of the particle zoo -- the antiproton is a proton with an evil streak and a goatee.
Matter is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, among other things. By the same token, antimatter is made up of antiprotons, antineutrons, and positrons. The statement "Anti-matter, also known as positrons..." is as ridiculous as the statement "Matter, also known as electrons...". It's either a scientific or grammatical error, and I can't figure out which would bother me more.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
* AFAIK, bosons don't have antiparticle equivalents, only fermions do. But unless you're a physicist or really interested in the subject, don't worry about the distinction between bosons and fermions. I won't help you get laid, that's for sure.
You didn't detect the sarcasm in the GP post. I guess your Ultron is broken. (Or, for another hint, you could have read the sig.)
*Sigh*
I guess the PR agent who wrote the story didn't even read the Wikipedia page on antimatter. Either that, or he/she just isn't a good writer -- that statement implies that all positrons are anti-matter and all anti-matter is positrons. Only the first statement is true.
"This duck was lost by a Nigerian prince. Email this address to claim your reward."
The best way to fight a derogatory term is to take it back. A group trying to run away from a word with negative connotations is simply running on a treadmill, each new euphemism becoming an insult in a few years. (e.g. Retarded -> Mentally Disabled -> Differently Abled etc.)
If you did have it in your office, there's not much danger of it blowing up, but the vacuum pumps would be pretty loud.
Intergalactic space is about 2 or 3 Kelvin. Getting down to 100 times colder than that - 20 or 30 millikelvin - requires a Helium 3 dilution fridge. Helium 3 is a rare (and expensive) helium isotope. Physics labs can afford this sort of equipment, but we're not going to be using the setup for gaming anytime soon.
Not to mention, the vacuum pumps, the cold trap and the helium storage system would probably take up most of the space in your cubicle anyway.
I'm glad I'm not alone.
I bought Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Ring of Fates and had the same "WTF is THIS?" reaction.
The real-time combat isn't entirely unprecedented, Final Fantasy Adventure for the original Game Boy was like that. But FFA didn't have three companions with piss-poor AI, a broken magic system, bad voice acting, and an expectation that I use the stylus and control pad at the same time.
I wish someone would port Final Fantasy 7 to the DS, rather than making another crappy FF:CC game.
I was reading about this story this morning. The BBC has more pictures here.
What I found funny is that the caption for the first photo warns, "SOME MAY FIND THE FOLLOWING IMAGES DISTURBING." Personally, I found the first photo - the photo to which that warning is attached - the most disturbing. Yes, more disturbing than the tumor-face.
There's also a photo in there which reminded me of Two-face from The Dark Knight, but it's too blurry to be scary.
Judging from the number and tone of Diebold-related stories on Slashdot, I wouldn't be so sure.